The First Version of Dimitrie Cantemir’s “Moldavian Geography” in Romanian Language: “Tălmăcire Dintr-o Scriere Geografică Tipărită în Rosia la Anul 1770”

The paper aims to analyze the circulation of a small Moldavian geography text from Russia to Moldavia at the beginning of the 19th century, a text based on Dimitrie Cantemir’s Descriptio Moldaviae (probably available to the Russian academic public in 1770 in its German translation). Jakob von Stählin, a Russian counsellor of German origin from the Court of St. Petersburg, wrote a brief abstract of the geographical description of Moldavia (the first part of the Cantemirean writing) in 1770, an abstract later translated into Romanian and included in a miscellaneous manuscript (kept today in ms. 1667 RAL2 and ms. 348 RAL) containing different documents and correspondence regarding the Russo‑Turkish war of that time. The translation comparison of the German, Russian and Romanian geographical texts confirms the text circulation and highlights some of the translation practices in a time of intense political and cultural transfer from Western to Eastern Europe, with Russia playing a key role as a rising cultural, scientific and political power in Central Europe.