Confluenţe literare: Studii de literatură comparată româno-maghiară, and: Ego, Alter, Alter Ego (review)

BOOK NOTES reaUy two constantly interacting texts: the original (the source text or "father") and "the interpretative layers which, over the years have been and continue to be grafted onto [it]" (124). Vittoz, mindful of both past and present, uses pseudo seventeenth-century vocabulary and syntax alongside modern slang, borrowings from earUer translators, quotations from modern authors, and Lacanian word-play. He thus offers "both an imaginary French version of Shakespearian language and, simultaneously , our own perception ofit" (127). Vittoz is "aware of the absence of the father" but wants "to expose the father as a cultural object"; and his translation does "not attempt to define Shakespeare's meaning but to multiply it" (131). Despite a tendency toward the restatement of already weUestabUshed points, Heylen's book is carefuUy researched, rich in detaUed analyses, well-written, and eminently readable. It amply demonstrates and Ulustrates its socio-cultural thesis and worthüy takes its place as the third volume in a new series, "Translation Studies," edited by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere. This new field assumes that translation is "rewriting and manipulation" in the service ofpower, with results potentiaUy either positive or negative in the evolution ofa Uterature or society. Philip Cranston University of North Carolina, Asheville KÁROLY KOLLÓ. Confluenfe literare: Studii de literatura comparatä romäno-maghiarä. Bucharest: Kriterion, 1993. ANDREI CORBEA. Ego, Alter, Alter Ego. Iasi: Omnia, 1993. Despite the enormous economic and existential difficulties of a transitional period that turns out to have been much tougher than anticipated, comparative Uterature is thriving in Romania. Placed at the margins of the European realm, ever uncertain of its identity, the country has generated, by way of response (one among many, to be sure) a spate of inteUectuals versed in many languages, literatures, and cultures. An older generation, including Paul Cornea, Adrian Marino, Alexandru Du{u, or Dan Grigorescu is still active. Somewhat younger scholars, including Mihai Zamfir, Mircea Martin, Monica Spiridon, or Liviu Petrescu are quickly overcoming the handicaps of several decades' isolation. The two books here reviewed Alústrate the potential of comparatism in Romania. Andrei Corbea, chair ofthe German department at the University of Iasi and pubUsher of the Iasi University Press, is a speciaUst in the multi-ethnic culture ofthe Bucovina, the province at the confines ofthe Ukraine and ofRomania where Romanians, Jews, Germans, Ruthenians, and stiU other groups had managed to create during two hundred years or more a flourishing and (given the mixture) a surprisingly harmonious cosmopoUtan culture under benign Hapsburg administrative auspices. Vol. 19 (1995): 160 THE COMPAKATIST Károly Köllö, a Transylvanian researcher of Hungarian ethnic background writing in Romanian, concentrates his book on an area that is still outrageously under-researched—the interactions of Romanian and of Magyar cultures over the centuries. Both books are collections of separate essays; they are solid and manage to bring a wealth of new information and new suggestions. KoUo covers a wide historical range. He begins with some fascinating information about Transylvanian students (Hungarian and Romanian alike) at the universities of Leyden and Oxford in the late seventeenth centuries: numbers, courses taken, and so forth. He continues with materials about the surprisingly strong attraction exerted by theories of Jansenist source on the Catholics of Transylvania. He discusses in some detaü how the apocryphal (or pseudo-Homeric) comic epic Batrachomyomachia was provided a late eighteenth-century imitative variant by Csokonay Vitez Mihály and promptly enjoyed a further imitation by a Romanian author. Short, but interesting pieces deal with the concerts ofFranz Liszt in Bucharest in 1847, the favorable response to I. L. Caragiale (Romania's leading comic dramatist in the late nineteenth century) among Hungarian intellectuals, the impact of Machiavelli 's theories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the interfacing of Hungarian-Romanian avant-garde poets in 1922-23. Corbea deals (in a more theoretical vein) with Adorno, Lukács, and Habermas; he relates a personal meeting with Ernst Jünger; he includes in his volume good short reviews on recent Romanian poets and German novelists. Longer essays are devoted to the leading figures of the critical school of Konstanz, as well as to some issues of the "Goethezeit." Still, as noted earlier...