The interwar Romanian translation of Dracula A story of lost and found

Abstract

Barbu Cioculescu, co-translator of the 1990 Romanian rendition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula alongside Ileana Verzea, has claimed that their rendition marked the Romanian audience’s first interaction with Stoker’s magnum opus. In 2005 and 2009, however, scholarly articles surfaced positing the existence of an overlooked interwar translation. Nearly a decade later, this lost translation resurfaced through the efforts of a minor publishing house, which published it in book-length form in 2023. Serialized between 1928 and 1929, this newly rediscovered rendition, authored by Romanian poet and prose writer Ion Gorun, stands among the earliest ten translations internationally, predating the novel’s publication in Ireland, Stoker’s homeland, by half a decade. This study explores the rediscovery and peculiarities of Gorun’s rendition, concurrently examining the socio-historical milieu surrounding its original release and elucidating the factors contributing to its century-long elusiveness. Furthermore, the study shows that, despite promoting Stoker’s novel as being set in Transylvania, Gorun’s translation tends to de-exoticize the Irish writer’s portrayal of the region, either for fear of censorship or to circumvent confusion and disapproval among the local audience.