AN OVERVIEW ON DEMETRIUS'S TRANSLATION OF HAMLET ( 1878-1942)

Vasile Demetrius was a remarkable writer of the time, contributor to countless literary journals, poet, novelist and prose writer. Unfortunately, the posterity didn’t pay much attention to him, although he dedicated his whole life to writing. As a translator, his modest knowledge in languages and exaggerated tendency to find a lively manner of expressing the text, based on bold associations, led to the creation of inaccurate translations. On a lexical level, Demetrius’s translation of Hamlet can be identified as a meeting point between the tendency of the previous translations of the XX^th century to finding Romanian equivalents and the trend manifested in the versions before 1900 to finding new vocabulary entries. Analyzing the facts, we can mention two categories: on one hand there are the terms from the familiar register, consisting of archaic words and, on the other hand, we have the neological register, with expressions and terms from the French language, as a consequence of the impact of French literature. This influence offers modernity and actuality to the text. Although the value of Demetrius’s translation is debatable, it managed to follow the Shakespearean version as it was.