Compromise and Resistance in Romanian Scholarly Translation

Abstract

This essay examines the ambivalent dynamics of scholarly translation through the Romanian edition of Katherine Verdery’s National Ideology Under Socialism (1991), published in 1994 as Compromis şi rezistenţă. It argues that translation in this case cannot be understood simply as synchronization with Western theory or as a neutral transfer of knowledge. Rather, it is a conflicted process, caught between epistemological commitments to accuracy and moral impulses shaped by the upheavals of post-1989 Romania. The analysis highlights how translation decisions—ranging from omissions of footnotes and acknowledgments to shifts in tone and vocabulary—reflect broader negotiations of authority, legitimacy, and cultural memory. The translators Mona and Sorin Antohi, deeply embedded in both Romanian and French intellectual contexts, produced a version that is at once literal and interventionist: sometimes shoring up theoretical authority, sometimes resisting Verdery’s “cool” anthropological distance, especially in passages charged by the politics of the transition period. By reading this translation as a site of compromise and resistance, the essay foregrounds the self-disagreement at the heart of comparative scholarship and shows how translation documents, rather than resolves, fractures in knowledge production across languages and political contexts.