Jules Verne and the Transylvanian Struggle for Independence: Political Appropriation in Victor Onișor’s 1897 Translation of Le château des Carpathes.

Abstract

In 1897, when Great Britain witnessed the release of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Transylvania and Romania saw the publication of two renditions of Jules Verne’s 1892 Le château des Carpathes. Originally printed in France, the novels release coincided with the Transylvanian Memorandum movement, which brought internațional attention to the region’s Romanian population and their struggle for emancipation froin the oppressive measures imposed by the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy. Published in Transylvania, Victor Onișor’s Castelul din Carpafi, the most famous of the two translations, was serialized in the newspaper Tribuna, whose founder, loan Slavici, stood at the forefront of the movement and whose views traditionally aligned with the German cultural model due to their ties with the Romanian literary group “Junimea”. In this chapter, I compare this rendition with Verne’s text and the unsigned rendition published later tliat same year in Romania and show that Tribuna’s politicized translation of Le château des Carpathes removed the German and Hungarian element underlying Verne’s portrayal of the region, yet only denounced the influence of the former