The current work aims to create a "mirror" image of the history of the main translations of the Homeric poems Iliad and Odyssey into two modern languages - Romanian and Turkish. Our approach is, above all, one of the history of the literary language, approached from a strictly linguistic perspective, but also from a cultural perspective.
The premise from which we start is that the maturity of a national literary language is verified by confronting the great texts of the masterpieces of universal literature, along with the essential test, that of the ability to generate one's own original creations in the respective cultural-linguistic space. On the other hand, the translation of such works effectively contributes to the development of the beneficiary literary language, under all possible aspects - lexical, semantic, grammatical, stylistic. For a researcher of language structures, it is beyond any doubt that such translations facilitate the process of enrichment, nuance and plasticization of the receiving languages.
Secondly, our paper concerns the field of translation. The parallel analysis of some texts of such importance in the universal history of spirituality can help us to better understand the fundamental mechanisms of the act of translation, in their details, applied to two given languages, and the sources of the reception of masterpieces of ancient literary creation in the modern world, in principle.
I chose the comparative perspective for subjective reasons, first of all, as a person who belongs equally to the two languages and cultures. But, to these personal circumstances was added the idea that objectively there is a historical connection between the two languages, based on the historical-geographical belonging to a common space with great spiritual resources and through the political-economic and administrative-cultural relations that exceed, in time, a millennium and a half of fertile concretizations. On the other hand, although both languages and cultures belong to the Balkans, their evolution was quite different. Turkey developed, over a long period of time, as an empire - which absorbed elements of material and spiritual culture from several other peoples and then redistributed them to all the worlds, synthesized them, etc., after the natural dynamics of the circulation of human values, while Romania coagulated into a relatively small unitary state quite late, in a well-defined space both historically-geographically and spiritually, developing a specific culture. In addition, we are talking about two languages from different genealogical families and with different structural typologies. It is natural to expect great differences in the equivalence of the same Greek text, since one version is made in an inflectional language, and another - in an agglutinative language. We also expected, in principle, that the history of the reception of Homeric poems would be very different in a great empire, with a very old and very heterogeneous cultural evolution, in its structural unity, compared to that in a culture developed in a community relatively small ethno-linguistics, located on the edge of empires, where the syndrome of "insularity" and "loss of the strength of the waves" towards distant shores works in absolutely every field of social life.
However, we found, right from the beginning of our approach, that between the histories of the evolution of translations from Homer in the two modern Balkan languages there are more similarities than one would have thought. In the history of culture, differences in social-administrative status, military and political power do not always set the tone - this is one of the lessons that Homer offers us, in the context we are researching. For example, in both cultures, translations from Homer are attested late - practically, only from the 19th century, if we don't take into account the earlier fragmentary attempts - not even those older than the 18th century. But there is an advance of about half a century of more consistent translations entrusted to the printing press in the Romanian space compared to the Turkish one, which may seem bizarre, considering the material and cultural conditions between the two ethnolinguistic spaces, clearly in favor of the latter . Of course, Romanian's belonging to the Romance language family and, through them, to Western culture worked here, while Turkish culture was preferentially nourished by the rich and ancient Eastern spirituality. We can say, therefore, that the principle of structural compensation that works in the contact between two languages is also applicable in the broader framework of culture, in its entirety. There are always certain detail factors that favor, complement, nuance the specific developments in one culture, to make it compatible with another. Not to mention the universals of human thought, corresponding to their linguistic universals.
Starting from these considerations, we have proposed that in the following pages we will establish some essential data about the evolution of translations performed from the Iliad and the Odyssey in Romanian and Turkish, under various aspects: the historical and cultural context of the appearance of the various versions; the involvement of official institutions in the act of publishing and supporting translations; the translation strategies adopted by the different generations of translators; last but not least, the very special relationship between the evolution of the literary language, on the one hand, and the translations from Homer, on the other hand, in each of the two cultural spaces. In fact, the latter constituted the central, operational objective of our study, along with the general ones, resulting from what I stated above.