The Dinner Was as Well Dressed as Any I Ever Saw:

Intertextuality in Nine Romanian Versions of Pride and Prejudice

Abstract

The present article investigates intertextuality in the retranslation of food-related culture specific items employed in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice. Such an investigation is important because, as shown in the literature, Jane Austen mentions food stuffs and food-related habits sparingly but meaningfully, in order to characterise her protagonists. The textual-based analysis in the article is couched in Zhang & Ma’s (2018) framework on intertextuality in retranslation and in Klaudy’s (2009) system of translational strategies. The investigation conducted in this article disproves my initial prediction that the second translation, published during communism, is the more influential target text, to the detriment of the first one, published in 1943, and that the subsequent target texts are in a relation of filiation with the second target text.