"The Poem of a Distinguished Spanish Writer and Professor on an Acclaimed Spanish Painting Miguel de Unamuno, Cristul lui Velázquez/ El Cristo de Velázquez (The Christ of Velázquez), translated by Sorin Mărculescu, Humanitas Publishing House, 2015, 320 pages"

The poet, translator and essayist Sorin Mărculescu prefaced and annotated the first complete faithful translation into Romanian of Unamuno’s 1920 masterpiece in verse on Velasquez’s 1632 masterpiece on canvas. The learned edition accompanied by a minute chronological table and its extended preface, consisting of almost ninety pages, is a thorough study of the poem, a book in itself, to celebrate approximately 150 years from the Spanish author’s birth. Considerations on the translation are of interest to any Translation Studies scholar, Mărculescu complaining about the poor quality of various ‘sub-poems’ previously rendered into Romanian in an anthology. Unamuno’s Spanish is considered a difficult one and that of the poem written in ten years makes no exception. Apart from the problems that the translation of poetry raises, be they ‘prosodic, semantic or syntactic’, the Spanish writer’s text, a strong opponent of ‘poetic artifice’, “is enriched by many rhetorical and stylistic devices: a lexis of regionalisms from Salamanca, a syntax arguing for the distortions of the hyperbaton and gains in expression, a prosody in which the hendecasyllabic is freely developed, in enjambments and unexpected phonetic associations (rhymes and interior assonances), a construction which could be labelled as ‘hypertextual’ considering the hundreds of marginal references to biblical texts that are an integrating part to the poem (despite Unamuno’s claim that they were added for ignorant people), hence the multidimensional space of reference that we need to