200 years of Romanian Hamlet retlanslation : ghosts of the source text?

In discussing retranslation in his 1990 seminal article, Antoine Berman laid the foundation of what came to be known as the Retranslation Hypothesis. According to this rather controversial hypothesis, no first translation can do full justice to the original. Only a second, a third, or, say, a fifteenth target text might get to that point of grace where what has been lost in the first attempts will be at least partially recovered. In the present paper, we intend to check this hypothesis by looking at Romanian versions of Shakespeare's "poem unlimited" (Kermode, 2001), Hamlet. Our focus is on the translation of the exchange between Old Hamlet and Young Hamlet and on how the lexeme "ghost" and its "synonyms" fare in the target texts that have been produced by Romanian translators. In our comparative textual analysis, we make use of Berman's analytic of translation (Berman, 1984), which will provide the tools with which to evaluate the various target texts in our corpus. Another important goal of our analysis is tracing instances of intertextuality in translation, i.e., traces of "filiation" and/or "dissidence" (Zhang & Huijuan, 2018) between versions, which we take as compelling evidence in favour of the Retranslation Hypothesis.