La Chanson de Roland sous la dictature : l’épopée roumaine d’une translatio

Translating a medieval literary text from French into Romanian can be a very challenging experience under a totalitarian régime. Our case study concerns the Romanian verse and prose versions of the Chanson de Roland, and endeavors to illustrate the ideological constraints emerging from the fascist and communist horizons of expectations, as reflected by the prefaces, introductions, dedications and by the epic texts as such. Our traductological perspective embraces the Moldavian space as well, thanks to a verse translation of the Roland mediated by a Russian version, whose comparative analysis may nuance the idea of a cultural continuum of the Eastern Block.