This article considers the methodological issues of research in Translator Studies, that is, concerning translators themselves and their biographies. Above all in the perspective of the cultural turn of the 1990s, which led to a new understanding of both the translators themselves and their role in intercultural communication, undertaking and clarifying the principles of such research seems to be a consistent step in the theoretical development of the discipline of Translation Studies. The article lists and defines the most important aims and objectives of biographical research on translators. Also presented are specific research models and paradigms, which can be used to reconstruct and describe so-called translator biographies. Finally, the author considers to what extent it is advisable to combine facts about the life and activities of translators into larger and coherent biographical narratives. In this respect Translation Studies could benefit from the conclusions of Biographical Studies, particularly regarding the reliable and adequate use of data collected in biographical research.

The article attempts to reconstruct the translator biography of Heinrich Nitschmann (1826– 1905) and explain the role he played in Polish-German literary contacts. Nitschmann made German readers familiar with Polish literature firstly through his translations of Polish poetry, and secondly through his popular compendium “History of Polish Literature,” aimed at the German Bildungsbürgertum. Although his translations are not outstanding in quality, they suited the literary tastes of the era and contributed to shaping the German discourse on Poland in the second half of the 19th century. The article traces Nitschmann’s linguistic biography and topobiography, characterizes and situates his translation work against the background of his other activities as a writer, publicist and composer; it attempts to reconstruct his aesthetics and worldview, his translation poetics and self-awareness as a translator. Nitschmann’s modus operandi in his network of literary contacts is shown, exemplified by his relationships with the Danzig publisher Karl Theodor Bertling and with the Lemberg-based Germanist Albert Zipper.

The paper presents the activity of Waleria Marrené-Morżkowska as that typical of women who aspired to be present in literary circles at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. She was a novelist, publicist, literary critic and women’s activist who also devoted herself to translation. She translated from English, French, Italian and German, bringing to the Polish reader’s market some authors who were important but not yet widely known. She published several hundred papers on literary subjects in the most important Polish periodicals. She herself attempted to create a women’s magazine and to build a network of female authors around it. By presenting some facts from her biography and analysing her critical and literary works, we try to show the connection between her translations and her literary studies and the poetics she adhered to. This allows us to define Morżkowska as a a cultural transmitter who promoted foreign literatures through translations and journalism, who was characterised by her knowledge of recent European literature, her progressive mindset, her tolerance and independence of judgement, and who paid a great deal of attention to the social and cultural situation of women.

The purpose of this article is to complete the portrait of Zofia Jachimecka, who went down in history as an entertainer in one of the most important salons of Interwar Kraków and a model for the great portraitists, with her professional profile, most often presented either in residual form, or all together omitted from works focusing on the translator. The article presents an analysis of Zofia Jachimecka’s professional correspondence with Professor of Romance Studies Mieczysław Brahmer, who worked closely together from 1950 on the publication of the Polish translation of Goldoni’s comedies in the Ossolineum National Library series (Goldoni 1951, 1951, 1971), and later maintained social and professional contact for many years. The collaboration between the editor of the Goldoni editions and the translator, very well documented in the surviving correspondence (found in the Scientific Library of the PAAS and the PAS in Kraków archives and Jagiellonian Library manuscript collection), goes beyond the project and develops into a long-standing exchange of reading experiences, workshop and repertoire choices, comments on works sent to each other, as well as information on literary and repertoire news, which clearly show that in many fields it was Jachimecka, and not Brahmer, who assumed the role of the expert on Italian and French literature. According to the letters, Brahmer tries to help the translator to, among other things, find a publisher for the Pirandello dramas she translated, while Jachimecka repeatedly suggests Italian readings to the professor, and helps him find his way through the maze of contemporary literature. The article draws attention to the considerable issue of cooperation in resolving financial matters and Brahmer’s intermediation not only in the negotiations of remuneration for the translator for the volumes prepared jointly, but also when the professor was not directly involved in the project. The article is supplemented by an appendix presenting a compilation of Jachimecka’s theatrical translations.

The main aim of the paper is to present the private and professional biography of Bolesława Kopelówna – a female translator from English active in the interwar period (1918–1939) in Poland. Unusually prolific as a translator, criticized by her contemporaries and then forgotten, Kopelówna authored dozens of translations from various genres: including fiction, children’s literature, and romance novels. She was also an interpreter and worked in the field of specialized translation. She traveled often and was engaged in the socialist movement in Poland.

As an official archive of Kopelówna does not exist, I would like to re/deconstruct her biography through Zygmunt Żuławski’s – her friend and colleague – personal papers: letters to Kopelówna, diaries and some enigmatic traces of her own presence in his archive. By applying tools from translation history, especially contemporary findings on archives of female writers, I attempt to answer the question why Kopelówna was so intensely criticized. Microhistorical study on female translator, through the extension of the notion of an archive takes part in the discussion on the potential of translation history in literary history and cultural studies.

Janusz Minkiewicz was an excellent poet, satirist, translator, contributor to many important periodicals, friend of Tuwim and Brzechwa, author of famous satires and political cribs, but also of numerous works for children and translator. His first translation published in book form appeared after the war, quickly gaining a circle of enthusiasts, both among children and adults. To date, more than a dozen titles intended for a young audience have been published, the vast majority of which have been reprinted many times. Minkiewicz translated mainly from Russian, but his translation output also included English poetry, German or Italian. The paper – the result of a search conducted at the Polish Writers Donation Library, at the State Archive in Warsaw, at the Nasza Księgarnia and at the Adam Mickiewicz Museum in Warsaw – is the first attempt to look at Janusz Minkiewicz’s translation output addressed to young readers.

Translators and interpreters have always played a key role as intercultural mediators, however, their biographies and functions as active agents of cultural change have only recently started to be studied. Following the sociological and material turn in translation studies, there has been a growing interest in the figure of the literary translator, not as a category of the translation process, but as a living human being who not „only” produces texts, but influences cultural transfer, introduces new poetics and shapes literary canons. Nowadays, researchers point to the necessity of describing the place and role of translators not only within Translation Studies, but above all, in the network of social contacts and relationships. The sociology of translators includes such issues as the status of translators in different cultures, pay rates, place and conditions of work, the public discourse of translation, i.e. the manifestations of the public image of the translating profession, which is visible, for example, in the press or in literary works. This area also encompasses research on translators’ attitudes towards their work, as revealed in essays, interviews, prefaces and translators’ archives. The paper focuses on the biography of the translator, placed in a broad historical and social context and thus, in the cultural and sociological dimensions of translator studies. In examining the biography of the Polish translator Bronisław Zieliński, the methodology of microhistory (adapted for translation studies by Jeremy Munday) will be used and combined with Anthony Chesterman’s theoretical proposal of translator studies.

The subject of this article is the translation work of the Italian writer Cristina Campo (born Vittoria Guerrini), one of the most prominent Italian writers of the 20th century, poet, translator, and essayist, analysed in a biographical key. The aim is to look more closely at Cristina Campo’s biography – described so far in the only biography book (De Stefano 2002), but also recorded in the voluminous correspondence the writer left behind – through the framework of her translation activity. Of interest from this point of view become both her translation choices and reading choices (“the lovely kinsmen of the shelf,” as the writer called her favourite books) – related to a large extent to Campo’s literary temperament, her experiences in her private life, and her friends – as well as her choice of translation activity itself, largely conditioned by the need to spend a large part of her life in seclusion due to the incurable heart disease that Campo suffered from since her birth. An attempt will be made to answer the question of how illness and other life circumstances influenced her choice of translation activity, the selection of texts to be translated and the translator’s actual working conditions.

The author identifies interrelations between certain elements of Maryla Laurent’s biography and her professional activities, paying special attention to her views of translation. The starting point is the perception of the translator as an entity able to be reflexive about his or her translation choices.

At the current stage of translation research, the translator’s status as a subjective element in the translation process does not need any additional recognition. The previous theories have sought to maximise the objectivity of the evaluation of the translator’s decisions by describing them in terms of linguistics or translation reception. This presumed ‘neutrality’ fails to account for the reasons behind translation decisions. Their completion is only guaranteed by viewing the translator from a humanistic perspective: not as an abstract conceptual category, but as an individual personality. Various factors (life experience, acquired knowledge) help build up the translator’s linguistic and cultural sensitivity. Consequently, they shape the translator’s interpretation of the original and the way in which they themselves write a foreign text in the act of translation.

The objective of the article is to establish the status of translators in relation to the canon of Japanese literature translated in Poland. The author performs a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a big amount of data pertaining to book translations in post-war Poland and juxtaposes it with details of the translators’ biographies in order to ascertain, which elements of those biographies have the biggest correlation with the canon-making power of the translators.

The paper is focused on the problem of translating the difficult fragment of Ex P. IV 12 where the name of the addressee Tuticanus gives the obstacles because of the form of his name. The paper proposes three trials of showing the sense and humor inserted in the text.

Interpreting of Children and for Children in the Actual Migration Situation in Poland

The paper describes the actual scene of public service interpreting and translation in Poland since the beginning of the war in Ukraine and the influx of a vast number of Ukrainian refugees into Poland. In particular it is focused on the role played by volunteer interpreters and translators who offer linguistic and cultural assistance to Ukrainian children in medical and psychotherapeutic contexts. It also deals with the activities of non-governmental organizations offering linguistic and translational support for immigrants in Poland.

Liquidation of the Target: Between doxa and episteme

The author of the paper argues that Translation Studies and translation pedagogy might profit from the implementation of the theory of 4EA Cognition. The assumption that cognition is embodied, embedded, enacted, extended and affective might help to explain how people think about the world: cognition is a process whereby the relation between the cognizant subject and the (intentional) object of cognition is constantly modified by dynamic changes of factors pertaining to human body, brain and environment. As illustration, the author analyses a sequence of Polish media reports of a much publicized incident that occurred at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Translation as a Tool for Reconciliation? Translation of Canadian Indigenous Literatures into French in the era of Decolonization

The common assumption is that translation helps to share ideas and build bridges between societies, cultures and languages. Nevertheless, in Canadian history translation has been a tool of colonial domination and oppression of indigenous communities as well as francophone minorities scattered across Canada after 1763. In view of the above, this paper aims to show from a translational point of view the attempts to redress decades of persecution and assimilation that are currently taking place, particularly in light of the findings and recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released in June 2015. The analysis covers a unique context, involving the translation of works of Indigenous Literature into a minority language such as French in Canada. After presenting current trends in this area, the paper will discuss an autobiographical novel Halfbreed by Metis author Maria Campbell, which appeared in French translation in 2021 almost half a century after the original was published.

Literary Translation during World War 2 – A Reconnaissance

On the basis of studies by literary historians (especially the monumental Polish Literature and Theatre in the Years of World War II) and memoirs of initiators, creators and recipients of translations in the years 1939–1945, I present examples of translators who died during the war and those who managed to survive and work. I show the place of translations in the underground publishing movement and theatre; I discuss different ways translations made before the war as well as new ones, undertaken within structures such as the Secret Theatre Council or on private initiative, were present in occupational cultural life.

Poetry and Translation Against Violence (W.H. Auden – Józef Wittlin – Stanisław Barańczak)

The article examines W.H. Auden’s poem “Refugee Blues” and its two Polish translations, by Józef Wittlin (“To miasto…”, dated ?, published 1958) and Stanisław Barańczak (“Blues uchodźców”, 1992). The poem has taken on a new relevance in the face of contemporary refugee crises, and the Polish translations – in view of the influx of refugees from war-ravaged Ukraine. Confronted with the two renditions, a group of young recipients agreed that Barańczak’s variant had a greater emotional impact, and therefore a greater capacity for persuading those whose empathy needs to be stimulated. This prompts the author of the article to try to identify the elements and qualities that give the more recent translation an advantage over Wittlin’s translation, which was held not only excellent, but also probably more poignant than the original by translator and insightful critic Zygmunt Kubiak. It is demonstrated how Barańczak enhances the drama of the text while at the same time inscribing in it a full awareness of the escalation of violence that followed Auden’s poem. Wittlin, on the other hand, although he generally takes the motifs of the original more literally and does not impose elements dictated retrospectively by historical knowledge, creates certain spaces of ambiguity which offer a potentially no less moving reading experience than that of Barańczak, who uses a more direct diction. Biblical echoes that appear in Wittlin’s rendition serve, it is argued, to point to hidden verbal violence underpinning the physical violence. Finally, a scarcity of reception facts connected to either Polish rendition is noted.

Rape on Stage (the Case of Terence)

In four of his six comedies the Roman playwright Terence uses rape as the key element of intrigue which in the plot of his plays leads to marriage and a happy ending. This poses a major problem to translators, not only because such a drastic act is incompatible with the genre of comedy but above all because it is always committed by the main protagonist – a young man, romantically infatuated, a character the audience or the readers are supposed to like. What is worse, the act of violence, often graphically depicted, which is assessed unequivocally according to our standards, within the convention of ancient comedy is relativized depending on the status of the victim. The harm done to slaves, courtesans and foreign women who cannot count on legal protection is considered humanum (‘human thing’) in comedy. Rape is considered criminal only after the victim is discovered to be a daughter of a noble family and therefore capable of legal marriage, which in turn gives the play a happy end. The challenge for the translator is not to turn the protagonist into a villain.

The term stuprum (rape/seducement) does not help the translator either, as it is very wide and denotes any extramarital sexual contact with a freeborn girl of a noble family, including consensual one. If the text fails to provide clear signals of the use of force, the translator faces the temptation to soften the nature of the act.

The article discusses the various strategies used by translators in order to present complex socio-legal realities of the ancient text which are incongruous with our standards, and to avoid anachronism in rendering the image of the main character – the perpetrator.

Violent Verses. Transformations of Horror Fiction and Translational Strategies of Polish Popularizers of Gothic Poetry – the Case Study of Anthologies by Robert Stiller and Leszek Lachowiecki

The article discusses strategies used in translation of horror poetry in Polish anthologies of this genre in late 1980s and early 1990s when, thanks to political and social transformation, Western popculture with some of its characteristic features became available and popular in Poland. Comparative analysis of the selected translations collected in the volume Danse macabre (1993) by Leszek Lachowiecki, compared to their English, French or German originals (by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, Vachel Lindsay, Charles Baudelaire and Georg Heym) and earlier Polish versions by Robert Stiller (published in 1986), proves that the later variants amplify and/or introduce numerous lexical items denoting or connotating violence, fear and disgust. Thus, the techniques used by Lachowiecki – aimed at a brutalization of language and emphasising the themes of cruelty, terror and dread – can be perceived as an application of old-fashion style and means (typical for modernist or “Young Poland” literature) in order to adjust aesthetic standards used in poetry to broader cultural trends dominating in contemporary horror fiction.

Anamorphosis. From Kafka Translator’s Workshop

Based on my own translations of Franz Kafka’s texts (first of all The Diaries), I analyze past and contemporary translation trends, especially with regard to translations of works published in critical editions. The texts left by Kafka were repeatedly subject of far- reaching editorial modifications before their first publication. From the point of view of modern editorial standards, these modifications should be considered too big. That is why the critical edition of Kafka’s works, initiated in Germany in the 1980s, aimed at cleaning the texts of later retouches and returning to the “original” Kafka. This also presented translators with previously unknown tasks – many of Kafka’s works had to be translated anew in practice.

Translation as Interpretation: How Translation Criticism Organizes Literary Studies Scholars’ Interpretations

The article discusses the concept of translation as interpretation. I propose an analysis of translation techniques used by two Polish literary scholars and translators, Tadeusz Komendant and Michał Paweł Markowski. I compare their translations and divide them into two categories: “critical” and “unnatural” (in the case of Komendant) and “vulnerable” and “existential” (Markowski). I argue that a critical analysis of translation is necessary to justify the adopted strategy of interpretation which occupies a privileged position in these texts. I also use translation criticism as a “structuring” criterion to establish a certain hierarchy which exists, more or less explicitly, in the field of literary scholars’ translations. In order to do so, I juxtapose Markowski’s views with the those of Tomasz Swoboda in his Repetition and Difference (2014). I attempt to demonstrate that translation criticism allows not only for the articulation of the underlying pattern behind a translation, but also problematizes some issues related to the translator’s and author’s subjective scope of responsibility. In this way, I come to the conclusion that translation criticism reveals important qualities of a text, usually overlooked by strictly literary approaches. I acknowledge and confirm an important role it plays in building self-awareness and participating in self-knowledge within literary studies.

Javier Franco Aixelá, Christian Olalla-Soler (red.). 2022. 50 Years Later: What Have We Learnt after Holmes (1972) and Where Are We Now?, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Uni- versidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Servicio de Publicaciones y Difusión Científica.

“The Great Cambrian Explosion”, or the True Origin of Translation Studies Diversity

The article discusses the collective book 50 Years Later: What Have We Learnt after Holmes (1972) and Where Are We Now? edited by Javier Franco Aixelá, Christian Olalla- Soler (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Servicio de Publicaciones y Difusión Científica 2022). The author of the review draws attention to the challenges and difficulties associated with writing the history of Translation Studies.

The aim of the article is to introduce a new series of studies on theoretical, methodological, analytical, and interpretive issues concerning “translation anomalies”. Functioning as a medium of artistic innovation and creative cognition, experimental literary translation can be compared to a laboratory, both for translators as well as literary and cultural scholars. It enables us to highlight the fundamental problems of artistic creation, the theory of literature, the theory of artistic translation and the theory of intercultural communication. On the one hand, experiments in translation confirm the necessity of using interdisciplinary research instruments; on the other hand, they show translation as a fundamental metaphor that describes the innovative and dynamic nature of technology.

The article focuses on (Nie)panowanie, the Polish translation of Loss of Grasp by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert. The main part of the study consists of a detailed report of translator’s work made in 2019 and her experience is compared with the experiences of translators of ten other language versions of the work. This study is accompanied by some more general reflection on problems of e-literature translation, especially in the context of experimental translation theory. Two main questions the author deals with are: should e-lit translation always be seen as an experimental one, and what does it, in practice, mean to translate interactive and multimedia work? The last part of the article offers a broader perspective on the field: reflections on trans-platform translation as a kind of digital literature preservation and on the problems of platform liability or programming obsolescence.

* This article was written as a part of research fellowship under the Bekker NAWA Programme (agreement no. PPN/BEK/2019/1/00264/U/00001).

This article discusses the challenges of translating poetry generators in multi-authorial, creative collaborations and within the context of understanding text as a process. Stephanie Strickland’s and Nick Montfort’s Sea and Spar Between is in many respects a translational challenge that in some languages might be considered an impossible task. Polish, our target language, imposes some serious constraints: one-syllable words become disyllabic or multisyllabic, kennings have different morphological, lexical, and grammatical arrangements, and most of the generative rhetoric of the original (like anaphors) must take into consideration the grammatical gender of Polish words. As a result, the JavaScript code, instructions that accompany the JavaScript file, and arrays of words that this poetry generator draws from, needed to be expanded and rewritten. Moreover, in several crucial points of this rule-driven work, natural language forced us to modify the code.

In translating Sea and Spar Between, the process of negotiation between the source language and the target language involves more factors than in the case of traditional translation. Strickland and Montfort read Dickinson and Melville and parse their readings into a computer program (in itself a translation, or port, from Python to JavaScript), which combines them in almost countless ways. Such a collision of cultures, languages, and tools becomes amplified when transposed into a different language. This transposition involves the original authors of Sea and Spar Between, the four original translators of Dickinson and Melville into Polish, and ourselves, turning into a multilayered translational challenge, something we propose to call a distributed translation. While testing the language and the potential of poetry translation in the digital age, the experiment – we hope – has produced some fascinating and thought-provoking poetry.

Translated by the Authors

The author explores the possibilities of parody translation, based on a 1933 Polish literary example. Poet Julian Tuwim imitates with a vengeance the highly idiosyncratic diction of Bolesław Leśmian, including the latter’s signature trait, neologisms, while styling the piece as a supposed rewriting of a familiar children’s rhyme (folk song) about a kitten. This second hypotext is diagnosed as ancillary and it is argued that a translation of the ‘X as would have been written by Y’ parody should harness a replacement of X which will be functional for the target culture. As an experiment, possible substitutes are suggested for two cultures: Russian and Anglo-Saxon, corresponding to the languages into which Leśmian, the parodied poet, has been most extensively rendered. The author discusses factors conditioning the translatability of parody, including reception in the target context. The analysis concludes with a call for translations. Two such responses to the challenge are appended.

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 43, 2021, DOI 10.4467/16891864PC.21.031.15145. The Appendix is extended as compared with the Polish version.

This article discusses the volume of essays Prismatic Translation, edited by Matthew Reynolds (Cambridge: Legenda, 2019) in light of the history of optical metaphors for translation and recent modernist studies. Tracing the conceptual genealogy of the term and the subtleties of its theoretical usage, the author argues that “prismatic translation” remains an impressive though still excessively ambiguous translation studies metaphor that has not yet solidified into a precise and operative theoretical tool. Notwithstanding these objections, Prismatic Translation can be considered an excellent reference volume for professionals and students engaged in literary and cultural translation studies, as well as comparative modernist studies.

In their attempt to provide formal accounts of the concepts of truth and meaning, Tarski and Davidson did not completely purify their theories of cumbersome terms that retain a ‘semantic’ link to the physical reality. However, it can be argued that this burden was not located where the authors and their subsequent commentators generally claimed. The following article aims to demonstrate that a common semantic concept at the heart of their analyses was the idea of translation process. Firstly then, both theories will be briefly reconstructed on the basis of texts by the philosophers themselves. Subsequently, the place of a translative element will be pointed out. Its recognition will provide an interesting answer to several objections against the accounts, also shedding a new light on the outcome of their venture. Yet most importantly, the study shows that Tarski’s and Davidson’s definitions ultimately clinch an inextricable connection between translation and truth – a bond which should be acknowledged in any proper enquiry into the meaning of verity.

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 42/2021. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.

In this article, I reflect on the productivity of hermeneutic translation criticism, focusing on literary translation. I pose the question whether the hermeneutic mode of translation analysis and evaluation – largely based on the premises of Romantic art criticism – has the potential to make a significant contribution to contemporary discussions on the functional model of translation criticism. My argument is that the source of the productivity (and functionality) of translation criticism is dialogicity – a feature that can be considered fundamental in the case of hermeneutics. Following the dialogical hermeneutics of F. Schlegel, F. Schleiermacher and H.-G. Gadamer, as well as H.R. Jauß’s aesthetics of reception, I formulate some general postulates regarding a hermeneutic critique of literary translations. This critical mode is interrogative: it locates and poses questions that are answered by the examined texts. The critic’s questions include those about the original and for the original, about the translator and for the translator, as well as about the reader and for the reader. Finally, I demonstrate cases in which a critical dialogue crystallizes around literary translations. It is a dialogue that can be shaped and interpreted by the postulated hermeneutic translation criticism.

Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 42/2021. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.

Translated by: Zofia Ziemann.

In contemporary discussions on the condition and further perspectives of World Literature the moods of disappointment and disillusionment seem to dominate. Reservations concern World Literature in its complexity – its canon, potential multilingualism, existing hierarchies and often contradictory conceptualizations. The crisis of World Literature is not, however, the result of any given scandal, but rather of many years of progressive petrification resulting in actual monolingualism, formulaic narrative patterns, consolidation of the center-periphery hierarchy and abandonment of the real pluralism of interpretation. One of the areas that seems to meet the challenge of World Literature is undoubtedly translation criticism. Therefore, the aim of the article is to reflect on how contemporary theories and conceptualizations of World Literature as well as its farfetched utopia can benefit from translation criticism’s input. The article also argues that translation criticism may become a field that dynamizes contemporary World Literature and restores its reordering or even revolutionary potential.

The article focuses on my translation of Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno, published recently in a volume entitled Nowele i opowiadania (PIW, 2020), the work of eight translators into Polish. The volume contains new attempts at texts translated forty years earlier by Krystyna Korwin-Mikke; also featured is her own, newly revised translation of Melville’s classic – Bartleby, the Scrivener. Finding myself authoring a retranslation for the first time, I became intrigued by the affect accompanying such a ‘belated’ arrival at the text – not within a long, eminent ‘series’ (in Edward Balcerzan’s understanding of the term), but where only one previous, more or less canonical translation exists. Taking as my starting point Balcerzan’s terminology as well as Anna Legeżyńska’s notion of the ‘shared word’, I employ the concept of the translators’ agon, developed from Harold Bloom’s ideas by Kaisa Koskinen and Outi Paloposki (2015). On the basis of several examples from the field of Polish translations, and concentrating on the rhetorics of paratextual material, I briefly examine the positions that a second translator – fated to participate in an agonistic relation – may take with regard to his precursor; my examples here are three renowned practitioners: Michał Kłobukowski, Krystyna Rodowska and Maciej Świerkocki. Because my own experience is bound up with translation practice to a considerably larger degree than with its theoretical aspects, the heart of the article is an analysis of particular strategies in both of the Polish translations of Benito Cereno. I focus on issues such as nomenclature, narrative perspective, grammatical gender, as well as conventional and idiosyncratic metaphors. Exploring my own agonistic relations with Krystyna Korwin-Mikke, I attempt to determine the extent to which I have managed to avoid getting caught up in the affect produced by the uncomfortable yet inspiring consciousness of the first translator’s voice. The article is an extension of the critical gesture which I consider my retranslation, in itself, to be. Emphasizing the differences in our approach, I a so try to embrace what is shared, and to acknowledge my indebtedness to the precursor.

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 42/2021. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.

The ongoing digitization of our literary heritage, together with growing competition between publishing houses has led to a situation where the retranslations of works considered canonical have changed their form of extending from diachronic, linear development in time to a synchronic “explosion” of parallel texts, whose task is to win over readers/consumers with their individual novelty, distinctiveness and “inventiveness.” In fact, such translations gain a new function – they become a marketing tool for publishing houses. In my opinion the newest retranslations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is one of the most interesting examples of the process described above. In recent years, new Polish versions of this novel have been published at a dizzying pace (five new translations between 2015 and 2018) and in overwhelming numbers (five editions were published in four different translations in 2018 alone). These new translations of Bulgakov’s novel have evoked a lively response from readers. All sorts of analysis, comparisons and opinions have been published not only in scholarly journals, but also in daily newspapers, internet forums and in comments on online bookstores. On the internet, professional translation criticism coexists with the personal opinions of internet users (often based on non-literary factors) and with marketing content, advertisements, and blurbs deliberately made to look like reviews. In this article I would like to discuss the new roles of professional translation criticism under the circumstances described above, analyse its presence on the internet and try to define its new objectives. On the one hand, its voice should be loud and clear enough to be heard within the virtual chaos of texts, whilst on the other hand it should be persuasive and lucid enough to assist readers with their decision-making regarding a particular translation and to perceive the literary value of texts hidden behind attractive covers of new editions.

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 42/2021. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.

Only eighty years after the original publication of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood was the Polish literary market enriched by a translation of one of the strangest novels of Euro- American modernism. Marcin Szuster’s translation, with the Polish title Ostępy nocy, has already garnered praise as well as prizes, leading to the first Polish discussion concerning the work of the eccentric American writer. The focus of this article is to analyze the Polish translation of Nightwood with a special interest in Barnes’s style, which itself becomes a central character in the novel and which connects, according to feminist critics (K. Kaivola, S. Benstock), to its emancipatory potential. In this article I discuss the claim that the complex style of such prose is the (conscious) manifestation of a woman’s voice (as an affect), behind which one can discover a body – one that experiences and is experienced (J. Taylor). The body, both a structural and a rhetorical category in feminist criticism, can be seen in Barnes’s prose as an element which organizes both time and space – therefore, the ambiguity of her terms and the complexity of style make for a real translation challenge. Marcin Szuster as a translator needs to follow Barnes’s “distinctive point of view,” which is a “feminine” one, distanced by gender, experience and time.

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 42/2021. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.

Translated by: Kamil Petryk

The aim of this article is to survey which texts and authors representing Western translation studies have been translated into Russian over the last seven decades and to describe the dynamics of the emergence of these translations as well as possible agendas behind their selection. It also traces, on a partial corpus, to what extent Russian translation scholars tend to cite and quote Western ones. The findings lead to a tentative conclusion that so far TS knowledge has been transferred mainly by unfrequent references to original publications and by way of mediated accounts (reviews, textbook summaries), while translations of particular studies have only recently begun appearing on a wider scale, their impact as yet uncertain.

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 41, 2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.21.001.13583); a shorter version of the article is available in French as: M. Kaźmierczak, “Une théorie itinérante? La pensée traductologique occidentale dans la traduction russe (réception éditoriale)”, trans. D. Karczewska, Romanica Wratislaviensia 68, 2021, pp. 101–118.

The article discusses the changes introduced by the successive editors of Adam Mickiewicz’s narrative poem to the text version published by the poet himself. The most important one is undoubtedly the addition of the poem considered the “epilogue” to Pan Tadeusz, allegedly lost by Mickiewicz. No less radical are the interventions consisting in supplementing the text with fragments from the autograph or with the poet’s later additions made to the already printed text, as well as in corrective conjectures in instances regarded by the publisher as slips of the pen. The article compares the surviving authorial versions of the text, demonstrating that Mickiewicz himself treated his work as a continual process and tested new solutions on various occasions however, there is no evidence that he intended to introduce them into the printed text.

Translated by Jessica Jensen Mitchell.

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 41, 2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.21.007.13589).

The article presents the vision of economy as husbandry inscribed in Adam Mickiewicz’s narrative poem Pan Tadeusz. This vision opposes the modern liberal economy, which shaped capitalism in the first half of the 19^th century. The issue is discussed in the context of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, as well as Mickiewicz’s own economic views, as presented in his journalistic writing and his Paris lectures. Both literary texts depict landed estates at the beginning of the 19^th century: in a historically Polish territory and in England. In the latter case, we are dealing with an outline of the perspective of transitioning from traditional economy to the modern bourgeois model (connected with the colonial expansion); in the former – with an attempt to transpose traditional economy to the level of myth and with eschewing development towards capitalism.

Translated by Jess Jensen Mitchell. 

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 41, 2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.21.008.13590).

Bruno Jasieński wrote his novel I Burn Paris after translating Ilya Erenburg’s Life and Death of Nikolay Kurbov. This article analyses the complex relationships between these two works and investigates how their artistic and ideological facets intertwine in both positive and negative ways.

Translated by Piotr Plichta.

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 41, 2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.21.002.13584).

Literary translation during the Soviet period has been mostly analysed in terms of conforming to or resisting the dominant ideology. However, there were spaces where translation practices were to a certain extent free from this dichotomy, though excluded from the official literary field. The focus of the article is the particular condition of displacement or exile experienced by the underground poets who lived in Leningrad during the 1980s. The samizdat poet-translator plays the role of an exile, living on the fringes of the society and creating a network in the underground. The outcomes of this “performance of exile” are the translated texts, which show the handprints of the translator’s conditions. The article responds to Anthony Pym’s call for humanizing Translation History, and, using the sociological tools developed in Translation Studies by Daniel Simeoni and Moira Inghilleri, it investigates the role of context, agent and text in the poetry translation practice of late samizdat.

* The research prestented in this article has been financed by the Estonian Research Council under the research grant PRG1206: “Translation in History, Estonia 1850–2010: Texts, Agents, Institutions and Practices”.

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 41, 2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.21.004.13586).

The article analyzes the paratextual activity of Witold Kalinowski, the author of the first Polish translation of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1991), paying special attention to his polemical remarks and their relation to the vision of scientific, theoretical discourse. The translator does not strive for invisibility. On the contrary, he uses footnotes and brackets inserted in the main text to comment on different aspects of Said’s work. He signals problems ensuing from the differences between languages and cultures, explains the nature of linguistic difficulties and justifies his own solutions. He also takes on the role of editor and commentator, explaining Said’s allusions, supplementing the discussion with additional information, anticipating readers’ doubts about certain facts that might sound suspicious, and even inserting bracketed additions and clarifications which suggest that the original is unclear or imprecise. Finally, Kalinowski overtly expresses his polemical attitude: he provides certain parts of Said’s discussion with sic! annotation (thus suggesting that the author is wrong) and adds footnotes where he argues with what he sees as the author’s dubious and far-fetched interpretations. The Translator’s Note gives certain insight into the nature of the disagreement between the author and the translator. Explaining why Orientalism is a difficult book to translate, Kalinowski enumerates its troubling features: the combination of different types of discourse and the large number of polemical accents, due to which the book is not fully scientific. The moment of the book’s publication might suggest that such a qualification could have been a result of the then scarce presence of poststructuralist thought and cultural studies in the Polish humanities. However, the analysis of Witold Kalinowski’s articles as well as his doctoral thesis from the 1980s shows both his awareness of the theoretical currents that influenced Orientalism and his critical attitude towards Marxist thought. It is the aversion to the Marxist-inspired interpretations – both Kalinowski’s personal methodological conviction and a widespread attitude in the early post-communist Poland – that seems to be the reason of the clash in the first Polish translation of Said’s work.

 Translated by Gabriela Dudek.

*The article was written as part of the project “Translation of theoretical discourses in the Polish humanities at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries” (no. 2017/25/N/HS2/01585) financed by the National Science Centre, Poland. The author also obtained funding for a doctoral scholarship from the National Science Centre (no. 2018/28/T/HS2/00514).

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 41, 2020  (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.21.006.13588).

Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights is the first instalment of his award-winning trilogy His Dark Materials. In this alternate-worlds fantasy and children’s literature classic, Lyra and her daemon Pan are catapulted from the relative stability of Oxford to negotiate an increasingly threatening world in a quest to protect free will from cataclysmic adult zealotry. According to prophecy, Lyra is the chosen one; she conforms to the tropes of the fantasy quest performing the paradigmatic steps of the saviour hero. Pullman’s protagonist transgresses and subverts the stereotypical expectations of the fantasy heroine whose generic destiny is coded in enclosure, passivity and endurance. Lyra is also a coming of age story and here again Pullman’s conceptualisation does not conform to the female pattern in both fantasy and children’s literature where marriage functions as the marker for maturity. Character is one of the two defining traits of fantasy (Attebery 1992) and it performs a didactic function in children’s literature. Characterisation is created through the reader’s interpretation of textual cues: narratorial description, direct and free-indirect speech. Lyra’s character subverts fantasy stereotypes and depicts a transgressive child who does not conform to gender role expectations.

Genre translation tends to adapt the text to target culture norms and the didactic and socialising impetus of children’s literature has been shown to prompt translation strategies which comply with the receiving culture’s linguistic and behavioural norms. In this paper, we analyse the rendering of character cues in the French, German and Italian translations of Northern Lights:

1. Is the transgressive trope of a) the heroine following the male hero paradigm and b) the coming of age pattern maintained or normalised to conform to genre expectations?

2. Is Lyra’s transgressive character rendered in translation or is it adapted to comply with didactic expectations of behaviour?

3. Are there different notions of the role and function of children’s literature in the target environments and do these impact on translation strategies?

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 40/2020. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.
See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.002.13165.

The article discusses authorial neologisms coined by Stanislaw Lem and their translation into English on the example of 37 plant and animal names excerpted from the short story entitled “Let Us Save the Universe (An Open Letter from Ijon Tichy)”, which, together with their English equivalents, were subject to comparative analysis. Since these names may create translation problems, the purpose of the analysis was primarily to determine the problem-solving techniques used by the translators, Maria Święcicka-Ziemianek and Joel Stern. Another goal was to make an attempt at explaining their translation choices and to determine the impact of these choices on the way in which the equivalents expressed with neologisms perform their naming function and the function through which they create the narrative world in the target text. Therefore, the article lists the possible causes of translation problems evoked by neologisms and presents the characteristics of the analysed names in terms of translation difficulties they may pose. The analytical material is presented taking into account the relationship between neologisms and their equivalents with the accompanying context and/or illustration. The article provides conclusions on the impact of the techniques used and the elements that determined the final shape of equivalents on the way the naming and creative function of authorial neologisms are reflected in the target text. It also shows the methods of overcoming problems related to translating neologisms into a foreign language.

trans. by Monika Czarnecka

Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 40/2020. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University. 

See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.003.13166

Crime novel is considered one of the most important innovations of the twentieth century in the field of fiction. Together with cinema, television and “elite” literature which often take over some of its features (themes and plots), it plays a significant role in creating the representation of reality proposed to the readers. The investigation described in the novels is set in a context which refers to the real world, in its social, political or historical aspects. The realistic dimension of the crime story makes it a kind of “social document”, which attracts the attention of researchers, including non-literary scholars. Reading crime novels allows them to acquire strictly literary information, but also some knowledge about communities, which leads them to an interpretation of relationships between literature and society. In this paper, the translated crime novel is seen as a special means of enriching the reader’s knowledge of the source culture. The realistic character of the work, which is supposed to fulfil a primarily ludic function, implies a certain tension in the work of the translator, who is led to ask himself: “shall I entertain or shall I entertain and teach”? If realism becomes a constitutive feature of crime fiction, if, as stated by Maryse Petit and Gilles Menegaldo, “under the pretext of attracting a crime novel client, the intention is to give him a history lesson or to make him think about a certain state of society”, the translator may be bound to include in the translation some elements that supplement the “encyclopaedic” knowledge of the target reader. The analysis is based on two novels by Marek Krajewski – his first novel, Death in Breslau (1999), set in the inter-war period, featuring the German policeman Eberhard Mock, and The Minotaur’s Head, published a decade later, which action takes Mock to Lwów in the time when it was a Polish city and makes him befriend a Polish commissioner, Popielski. A comparison of some of their translations (eight for the first book, three for the second) shows differences in the treatment of the historical component of the novels, both in the treatment of selected text elements, as a result of the translator’s project, and in the peritexts, which, however, usually do not depend on the translator, but on the publisher.

Trans. by Xavier Chantry

Fictional texts containing specialized terms pose a challenge for literary translators. Rooted in raw factual accuracy, such terms can nevertheless be used in very expressive ways. Raymond Chandler, for example, used oil industry terminology (bull wheel, derrick, oil field, scum, walking-beam, and especially the term sump), in his first novel The Big Sleep (1939) within intentionally artistic phraseology, involving alliteration, parallel structuring and repetition. The novel was (re)translated into Spanish a number of times (El sueño eterno 1947, 1948?, 1958, 1972 and 2001), enabling an analysis into how different translators met this challenge. Though the published translations reveal a lower frequency of repetition in all cases, as well as inconsistent co-textual use of the terminology and usage of non-terms, omissions and errors, these instances are often qualitatively compensated for with creatively reproduced alliterative elements and added literary devices. This study of a seldomly explored aspect of literary translation shows how professionals are aware of the importance of language for specific purposes in literature and how effective balances between technical accuracy and literary expressiveness can be attained. For theorists who consider that literary and technical translation are separate fields, the results show that literary translators tend to bridge this gap proficiently with both accuracy and literary flair.

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 40/2020. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.
See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.006.13169.

See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.007.13170.

This article discusses sex education books for children and young adults published in Poland between 1945 and 2018. After defining the ideological profile of 111 examined publications as either conservative, moderately conservative, neutral, moderately liberal or liberal, the authors compare the whole set of translated books (translations) with the whole set of books by Polish authors (non-translations), taking into account the date of publication and the age of the intended reader. The analysis shows that translations differ from texts written originally in Polish, because they promote other values. Polish books, especially those published before 1989, are usually neutral or moderately conservative, while translations mostly propagate moderately liberal or liberal ideologies. There is also a close correlation between those ideological categories and the age of the reader: books for the youngest audience are ideologically charged to only a small degree, and the ideological content increases with the age of the reader. This seems to be related to the larger number of translations in the older age groups. Translations, which usually reflect a liberal ideology, fill a gap in Polish culture by complementing or replacing the conservative sex education available in Polish schools, and by encouraging Polish authors to write sex education books expressing similar views.

Trans. by Xavier Chantry

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 40/2020. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.
See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.009.13172.

This article discusses selected “rewritings” of Edward Lear’s nonsense poem “The Akond of Swat”, focusing specifically on the translators’, illustrators’, adapters’ and editors’ attitudes towards the allusive nature of the poem – and specifically the reference it makes to the historical figure of the Pashtun religious leader Abdul Ghaffūr, also known as the Akond (or Wali) of Swat or Saidū Bābā, which may be viewed as orientalist or parodistic from a contemporary viewpoint. Recent translated and illustrated versions of the poem inscribe it with new aesthetic and ideological values. Two Polish translations considered in this article, produced by Andrzej Nowicki and Stanisław Barańczak respectively, demonstrate changing approaches to the nonsense genre evidenced in Polish literary circles (revealing a gradual transition from pure to parodistic nonsense). Graphic representations of the poem discussed in the article testify to the artists’ interpretive powers in redefining the genre of Lear’s poem, rebranding it as an infantile fairy tale on the one hand and a disturbing reflection on tyranny and “the war on terrorism” on the other.

Trans. by Agata Hołobut

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 40/2020. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.
See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.010.13173

The article examines the reception of Polish contemporary authors associated with the genre of “literary reportage” among the readers of their French translations. The analysis starts with the assumption taken from the thoughts of Tzvetan Todorov, who claimed that genre – shaping both the author’s writing model and the reader’s horizon of expectations – can be an important mechanism of mediation driving the literary communication. The analysis includes translations of books by Wojciech Tochman, Jacek Hugo- Bader, Mariusz Wilk and Mariusz Szczygieł. In the first part, the publishing peritext is examined, through which French publishers create the perception of Polish authors and the literary genre they can be associated with. The second part of the analysis is devoted to the reception of translations of the above-mentioned authors – both among professional critics and amateur reviewers or readers – with particular emphasis put on the genre classification made by the audience. The summary attempts to determine whether French-speaking readers perceive Polish authors in accordance with the specific rules of “literary reportage” and what role the publishing peritext may play in this process. The issue of marketing potential of the literary genre as an important tool in creating the publisher’s offer is also discussed.

Trans. by Paweł Łapiński

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 40/2020. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.
See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.008.13171

The article discusses the testimonies of bystanders as presented to the public in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah. It proposes to apply norms and practices developed within Holocaust studies to the analysis of the victims’ testimonies in the emerging field of bystander studies. The Polish bystanders’ utterances in the documentary were edited and simplified through the process of interpretation and re-translation; this inaccurate rendition has been used in Holocaust debates and the lack of sensibility to this aspect of communication in Lanzmann’s film may result in skewed interpretation of the bystanders’ engagement in the scene of violence. The analysis proves that without renewed scrutiny to the bystanders’ speech Holocaust research may lose some important insights. Signs of violence impact, traces of traumatization or brutalization, specificity of cognitive and affective response may be overlooked. The paper calls for an universalizing epistemic approach to all types of the speech emerging from the Holocaust, beyond the (debatable) divisions of its social fabric into victims, perpetrators and bystanders.

Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary Shoah (1985) is a rich source of knowledge on the Nazi extermination of Jews in Central Europe. Its main material consists of interviews with people who witnessed the Holocaust, conducted in the very locations of the wartime events. The present paper analyses an iconic scene from Chełmno on Ner, where between 1940–43 and 1944–45 the first Nazi death camp was located. A group of locals – gathered in front of the parish church, around one of the survivors of the camp – recall the events, sometimes in stunning technical detail. Their Polish utterances are translated into French; English subtitles are based on the French of the interpreter. The Polish linguistic material is not neutral: it is marked with dialectal and sociolectal features; the speakers engage in conversation on the side, comment on the situation of the interview in various ways, verbal and non-verbal. In the translation, both into French and English, sentences are skipped, the plurality of voices is flattened, and differences in memory are smoothed out. The resulting text is rather a summary than a translation. The paper offers close-up analyses of chosen sequences from the interview to show the complexity of the communication situation and the extent of distortion caused by the way translation works in the film. It also offers an alternative translation, which aims at giving voice to the actual people of Chełmno and acknowledging as fully as possible the complication and difficulty of memory construction through language, especially in a highly traumatic context. It hopes to offer insights into the bystander position in Holocaust discourse.

The main problem discussed in the paper is the authenticity of speech of the inhabitants of Chełmno in the sequence filmed outside the parish church in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. The authors analyze a number of characteristic features of the bystanders’ language vis a vis the French translation provided by the interpreter  Barbara Janicka, and the English subtitles. It is argued that the language of the bystanders carries important information on the speakers’ individual and collective identity, and gives clues on the construction of memory, not just on the level of meanings, but also in its materiality. The analysis focuses on four planes which were identified as important for the construction of the implicit messages: the semantic ambiguity of the utterances; the narrative techniques used by the speakers; verb forms, especially the impersonal use of verbs; and syntax. The specific linguistic traits testify to the fact that the speakers lack adequate tools to verbalize their traumatic memories and to reflect the reality that they were part of. The analysis of the linguistic landscape of the scene also leads to conclusions about the instrumentalization of speakers on the part of the film director. The French and English translation in and of the sequence – a summary rather than a rendition – clearly, albeit perhaps not intentionally, contributes to this effect. Through linguistic analysis and wide contextual interpretation, unpacking the way the bystanders speak creates a new, hitherto unacknowledged, source of knowledge on witnessing and trauma.

Based on an analysis of phonetic, lexical and pragmatic (linguistic politeness) aspects of the symbolic sequence outside the church in Chełmno-on-Ner in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, this article offers insights into the communicative situation portrayed in the film, which has not been discussed in existing interpretations. It addresses the relations between the participants of the exchange (the film director, Szymon Srebrnik, the interpreter, the inhabitants of Chełmno), the time and space (a religious service taking place in the church), and historical context: Poland under communist rule, where the Holocaust was not spoken about and/or was subject to manipulation.

Translated by Zofia Ziemann

The article discusses the interpretative and methodological potential inherent in the synergetic application of two categories paradigmatic for cultural studies and cultural literary theory: translatio and memory. It is argued that both categories, viewed as cultural metaphors and combined with each other, may serve as a complex model for the interpretation of cultural phenomena. The starting point for developing such a model is the insight that both concepts have undergone a similar semantic evolution in the discourse of cultural studies, and may now be represented as radial categories with a “prototypical centre” and metaphorical-metonymical extensions, translatio going far beyond interlingual “translation proper”. Next, some further contact zones between translatio and memory are outlined: firstly, their functional analogies, which are reflected in parallel metaphors depicting memory and translation (such as the “palimpsest” and the “devouring of the Other”). Secondly, the metaphor of the “dissemination of memes” is discussed as the most promising idea that brings together the discourse of translation studies with reflection on the mechanisms of collective memory, drawing attention to ethical and political aspects of both translatio and memory. The image of the “dissemination of memes” is also a point of departure for its derivative metaphors of “translation as memory transmission” and “memory as a space of translatio”. The conclusion is that the interactions between memory and translatio that engendered these metaphors could be put to use in comparative investigations. Finally, some representative research  problems are formulated based on various configurations of literal and metaphorical meanings of both terms. It is emphasized that the coming together of divergent yet close pathways of translation and memory studies could be of mutual benefit to both fields of inquiry.

Memory has been one of the main topics of universal literature, and nowadays postmemorial prose is an important trend in Polish literature. This leads to the question whether the specific character of this literature poses a distinctive challenge for translators, and consequently, whether its translations should be treated as a separate issue within the field of translation studies. In turn, the latest research on memory shows that contemporary societies are built of numerous social groups, which time and again have conflicting interests and consequently, cultivate different memory practices regarding the same past events. Memory is treated as a dynamic phenomenon, undergoing transformations through time and space, and hence is constantly actualised. There are five factors which determine the movement of memory: carriers, media, contents, practices and forms. Memory can “travel” thanks to various kinds of media, e.g. monuments. Another specific medium of memory is translation: it allows the contents of memory included in the source work to travel to another cultural space. This has allowed us to approach literary translation from a fresh perspective and developed a set of new research directions, which have been listed in this paper.

In this article, I try to lay out clearly and discuss selected issues encountered during the translation (with Eda Nagayama) of Bogdan Bartinkowski’s (born 1932) collection of stories Dzieciństwo w pasiakach (1969) into Brazilian Portuguese. My text combines a scholarly dimension with one of self-commentary in order to offer  some general reflection on the subject of the ethics of translating testimony. It consists of three parts. In the first, I provide a concise overview of the state of research on the connections between translation and studies on cultural memory. Next, I present a series of observations relating to the emotional dimension of the process  of translating Holocaust testimonies. In the final section, I compare solutions adopted in translations of Bartnikowski’s memoir into German, English, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, and Portuguese. In a summing up, I try to define the memory-(re)productive role of translation: reproductive, in that the translation of testimony  demands a respect for the truth of the signs present in the original and their rendering in the target culture; and productive (creative) inasmuch as it demands of the author of the translation a series of procedures with the aim of inscribing a universal theme within the specific field of cultural memory.

Despite a massive amount of archival material on Nazi concentration camps, references to camp translators and interpreters are random, brief, and laconic. They usually consist of dry facts as related in ontological narratives of the Nazi regime victims. In the present paper, these records will be confronted with the portrayal of  Marta Weiss, a fictional camp interpreter presented in the 1948 docudrama Ostatni etap (The Last Stage) by the Polish film director Wanda Jakubowska, herself a former prisoner of the concentration camp in Birkenau.
To this day, The Last Stage remains a “definitive film about Auschwitz, a prototype for future Holocaust cinematic narratives”. The Last Stage is also called “the mother of all Holocaust films”, as it establishes several images easily discernible in later narratives on the Holocaust: realistic images of the camp; passionate moralistic  appeal; and clear divisions between the victims and the oppressors. At the same time, The Last Stage is considered to be an important work from the perspective of feminist studies, as it presents the life and death of female prisoners, femininity, labour and motherhood in the camp, women’s solidarity, and their resistance to the  oppressors. The Last Stage constitutes a unique quasi-documentary source for the analysis of the role of translators and interpreters working in extreme conditions. Moreover, the authenticity of the portrayal of Marta Weiss may not be contested, as it is based on the person of Mala Zimetbaum, a messenger and interpreter at  Auschwitz, killed in 1944 after a failed escape from the camp.
The paper presents the topic of interpreting and translating in a concentration camp from three different angles: film studies, feminist studies, and interpreting studies.

Oskarżona: Vera Gran (Vera Gran: The Accused), a hybrid biographical work relating the life story and testimony of the Warsaw ghetto singer by the Polish second generation author Agata Tuszyńska, was translated to many languages. Yet, all the translations were made on the basis of the French one, which in fact reflects a strongly edited version of the original text. As the author of the article argues, the modifications introduced to Oskarżona: Vera Gran upon its release on the foreign markets go far beyond the standard editing procedures and have to do with the fact that Tuszyńska’s original text openly questions a certain fixed paradigm of representing the Holocaust and some of the socially sanctioned patterns of Shoah remembrance. The comparative analysis of the Polish and the American editions of the book presented in the article traces the most significant changes introduced to the foreign adaptation, identifying three main areas where the misbehaved  testimony to the Shoah – of the survivor and the secondary witness alike – was disciplined to conform to the largely globalised discourse of Holocaust memory, subjected to the regime of conventional representation and culturally reproduced reception patterns.

Nabokov’s novella The Eye is usually read as a story in which the narrator tries to use his failed suicide attempt to announce his own death and assume the role of an observer, who, as it turns out in the end, is merely watching over his own (alienated) figure. The ending seems to project a reintegration of the self. In this essay, the  rocess of Nabokov’s translation of the novella into English is seen as connected with the spectral elements of the story, proposing a new reading embedded into the framework of liminality: the narrating hero keeps on dying, without, however, being able to escape his private inferno, because his obsessive memory continues to  eproduce the same murky world, merely transferring the hero deeper and deeper into its narrowing circles. Each of these circles is an attempt to translate the text of (un)reality to the new language of consciousness, and each of these attempts reduces the hero to the status of a still more spectral voice, while still confining him  o the boundaries of self. It seems quite fitting in this context that Nabokov, speaking of self-translation, described it as an unremitting torment of the body being transfigured into spirit. The essay also compares Nabokov’s translation practice to his own views on translation expressed in essays and interviews, pointing out the  fundamental differences: self-translation demands the death of the original text, out of which the phantom of existence in another language may be born – a ghost, each movement of which is always double, divided into the observer and the observed.

Right from the beginning of their missionary activity, the Jesuits painstakingly drafted and collected various documents. These accounts were printed in Latin or Italian, and soon translated into other languages. In Poland, in the first three decades of the seventeenth century, more than a dozen reports from China, Japan, Vietnam, and Tibet were printed. They provide first eye-witness accounts from these territories, not only in Poland, but in Europe at large. Polish translations offer material for various kinds of analysis. This article discusses the work of two Polish translators, members of the Society of Jesus, who used different strategies depending on their intended target readership. Szymon Wysocki was interested mainly in religious aspects of the missions to the Far East, and he edited out most of the culture-specific items, as his writing was dedicated to young adepts of the Society. Fryderyk Szembek, on the other hand, paid attention also to cultural aspects of the accounts he translated. However, his attitude towards cultural otherness was less neutral than in the source texts. His translations constituted an important source of knowledge for the seventeenth-century Polish reader. Both translators had to cope with challenges such as proper names or culturally marked vocabulary and with the genre specificity of these texts, which were new to the Polish literary system. In my research, I use the methodological framework of polysystem theory, Lefevere’s theory of rewriting, and Pym’s concepts in the history of translation. I also refer to translation sociology, theory of reportage, history of culture, and history of languages.

The paper focuses on peritexts (Gérard Genette) in Polish Enlightenment translations of three Italian texts: Francesco Algarotti’s novel Il congresso di Citera (1745, 1763; the Polish version ca. 1788), Cesare Beccaria’s treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764; the Polish version 1772) and Giovanni Barberi’s ideological text Compendio della vita, e delle gesta di Giuseppe Balsamo denominato il conte Cagliostro (1791; the Polish version 1793). Their translators: Marianna Maliszewska, Teodor Waga, and Grzegorz Kniażewicz, added a significant amount of their own introductions and notes to the hypertext, which reflected a widespread tendency in  Polish literature, both original and translated, in that period. The information given in the translators’ peritext is analysed here in order to trace manipulation within cultural mediation. The translators take different approaches. Maliszewska’s comments lack the exegetic function, while the observed elements of manipulation may be down to her deficiency in cultural competence and to her low status as a translator. Waga, who uses all kinds of translator’s notes, seems reliable and non-confrontational. His comments are mostly intended to make sure that the text is read according to the author’s intentions and to the Enlightenment outlook. Kniażewicz is the most polemical, partly towards the author of the peritext in the French version of the translated text, which he abuses rather than uses. His peritext definitely indoctrinates the reader and the extent of manipulation in his notes is the largest.

Drawing on the results of research into the scale and distribution of Polish translation activity with regard to the Shakespeare an canon in the 19th century, the article discusses the various roles assumed by both professional and informal editors working with Shakespeare translators over time. Understandably enough, the editorial efforts serve to ensure the quality and reception of the text, and range from publisher’s pressure and copyediting to aesthetic (or societal) patronage and complementary efforts to append the text with critical commentary. The article juxtaposes the intimacy of the  translation process with the inherently intrusive role of an editor, foregrounding the fragile psychological balance which preconditions effective collaboration and longterm commitment. Finally, the article discusses the need for editorial policies attuned to Shakespeare in translation, which would take into account both the literary intricacy of the original(s) and the specificity of retranslation  dialectics, with the necessary positioning of new rewritings against past canon(s).

The paper presents the Polish circulation of Katherine Mansfield’s poem “To Stanislaw Wyspianski” – her only piece of poetry translated into Polish thus far. Written in 1910, the poem was translated three times: by Floryan Sobieniowski in 1910, by Beata Obertyńska in 1958 and by Zbigniew Lisowski in 1968. The analysis of contexts in which the Polish translations were created, published and republished, along with the interpretation of their paratexts, demonstrates that Polish readers and translators were more interested in Wyspiański – the figure presented in the poem – than in Mansfield herself. Throughout decades, very little attention has been paid to the interpretation of the poem. Polish scholars and literary critics rather investigated the circumstances in which Mansfield encountered Polish culture in general and, in particular, learnt about Wyspiański, the great artist from Kraków. Their convictions and beliefs can fruitfully be interpreted by the Translation History scholar as a sign of changes in the cultural and political situation in Poland. Moreover, the translators’ attitude – especially the one presented by Sobieniowski – can successfully be analyzed from the perspective of Translator Studies.

The article focuses on cultural translation and its ethical consequences according to Alicja Iwańska (1918–1996), a Polish sociologist and writer. In her book Świat przetłumaczony [The Translated World] (1968) Iwańska uses the figure of the translator-traitor while trying to translate Mexico conquered by the Spanish to Poland ruined by the Nazis and Stalinists—the book was the literary aftermath of her fieldwork on the culture of the Indian Mazahua of a secluded Mexican village. The scientific aftermath of the same research was her anthropological monograph Purgatory and Utopia. A Mazahua Indian Village of Mexico (1971). The first book, written in Polish, was described by the author as “a fictionalised account”, and a “literary output”; the second, written in English, was designed as “relatively free from the interference of extra-scientific emotional elements”. For Alicja Iwańska, before the Second World War a philosophy student under Władysław Tatarkiewicz, translating a culture is an ethical problem; the complex relations between truth, falsity and fiction in intercultural translation are coupled with the issues of expressibility in a specific narrative (literary versus scientific) and a specific language (Polish versus English). Iwańska’s books, read again 50 years after their creation, seem to be a forgotten link of Polish translation theory.

My aim in this article is to present the life and work of Zofia Ernst, nee Kostanecka (1918–1994), a connoisseur of Italian culture and literature and an accomplished translator of Italian books for adults and children. In my argument, I draw on the ethnographic approach, using a common ethnographic tool: the qualitative interview (structured interview) to address important moments and events in Ernst’s life. The focus on the life-story of one translator will help me depict the environment she lived and worked in as well as identify her embedment in particular familial and professional settings which crucially affected her work. I will also discuss Ernst’s formative contribution to the image of Italian literature in Poland in the years 1953–1979, i.e. in the period of her translation activity.

This biographical paper describes Stanisław Barańczak’s first attempts at translating poetry as a high school student in 1964. The aim of the paper is to present the birth of his philological passion, and to answer the question of how Barańczak emerges a translator. The presentation is based on six unpublished translations of Russian and English language poems found in the correspondence of Barańczak and in the hitherto unknown memories of his school friends.
The analysis focuses on the technique of Barańczak’s translation work, on reconstructing his motivations, selection of texts for translation, self-assessment of the results, opinions on the authors of the original and evaluation of pop-culture. In addition, the paper offers several facts from the private life of the teenage translator,
among others the decision to study Polish philology, as well as his relations with his high school colleagues and teachers.

Around 1949 Maria Kuncewiczowa worked on the project of ‘world citizenship’ – a remedy for those writers whom circumstances made stateless. In her view, the category of ‘world citizenship’ allowed to see one’s country from the perspective of the world. She also argued that knowledge of a foreign language was a promising way  f opening up national, regional and doctrinal ‘ghettos’. Following her ideas, the article presents selftranslation as a phenomenon that exceeds one national context and creates a discursive space in which literature denies clear linguistic and cultural borders. After a brief outline of self-translation in the 20th-century Polish literature, the article analyses Kuncewiczowa’s self-translation of the play Thank You for the Rose (1950–1960) and Janusz Głowacki’s assisted self-translation of the play Antygona w Nowym Jorku (1992). In discussing the two case studies, the article pays particular attention to the idea of ‘world citizenship’ in relation to the concept of national literature.

The article investigates the work of cultural difference in language in the context of translation, specifically as an effect of translation processes within postcolonial literature, and its role in reinforcing postcolonial literature as the world literature in English. Delineating the space of postcolonial literature as that of primary translation, the article investigates how cultural difference travels in interlingual translation of postcolonial literature from English to Polish.

In postcolonial literature, cultural difference, which functions as a specific element of otherness/foreignness in the text, reveals the ethical dimension of translation, because it uncovers the presence of other, prior or side-tracked originals making up the text of postcolonial literature. Cultural difference is, thus, the substance of postcolonial literature and nothing less than translation in progress. It is the process of negotiation between the original form/language and a new form in another language, which is the language of the (former) empire.

Basic features of postcolonial literature: resistance (Boehmer 2013: 307), counter-discourse (Ashcroft et al. 2000), imitation, mimicry and sly civility (Bhabha, 1994), abrogation and appropriation of the language of the empire (Ashcroft et al. 1989), the triumphant overcoming of peripherality in the “empire writes back” phenomenon (Rushdie 1982), and, last but not least, the marketing of the margins (Huggan 2001) and cultural brokering between peripheries and world capital (Appiah 1991) are also translational practices both in the cultural and linguistic sense.

The article proposes to study interlingual translation of postcolonial literature in connection with its paradoxical status of a monolingual (English-dominated) literature, in which cultural difference works as a spectral presence of other languages. In this difficult negotiation between multilingualism and monolingualism, postcolonial literature enacts key problems of translation studies.

Many studies of postcolonial translation feature analyses of translational and publishing decisions and their potential influences on the relationships between the colonizers and the colonized (e.g. Jacquemond 1992, Tymoczko 1999, Spivak 2009). This article proposes a different methodology, focusing instead on the presence of translated postcolonial literature in Poland through a systematic, discursive study of its reception. Based on the results of an unpublished doctoral study (Gołuch 2013) – which analysed nearly a thousand reviews of African, Indian, Caribbean and Middle Eastern writing, published in the Polish press between 1970 and 2010 – the article demonstrates that Polish reviewers increasingly often affirm Polish-postcolonial similarities, even if Orientalist, othering discourses remain present in the reviews.

This finding contributes to timely debates about Polish self-perceptions. Emphasising the otherness or exoticism of postcolonial texts and contexts, the reviewers tend to write from the position of Europeans and to identify with Orientalist biases. Yet, the emerging discourse comparing postcolonial experiences of migration, independence struggle, and post-independence complexes with Poland’s own past and present offers an interesting counterbalance to a long-standing tradition of othering perceptions. Focusing on specific similarities, some reviewers seem to think of Poland and themselves in postcolonial terms.

Furthermore, the article contributes to scholarship on Polish postcolonialism. Numerous incisive studies have examined the Partitions of Poland (1795–1918), Nazi occupation (1939–1945) and Soviet domination (1945–1989) in terms of colonisation, at the same time employing postcolonial tools to revisit issues of Polish domination over Belarusians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians, as well as Polish attitudes to non-European colonised peoples (e.g. Thompson 2000, Kłobucka 2001, Cavanagh 2003, Fiut 2003, Bakuła 2006, Janion 2006, Buchholtz 2009, Gosk 2010, Kołodziejczyk 2010, Skórczewski 2013, Wojda 2015). Notably, the themes of Poland’s status as a colonised and colonising country within the immediate region, on the one hand, and Polish perceptions of non-European postcolonial peoples, on the other, tend to be explored separately (cf. Wajda 2015). This article, however, suggests that a Polish postcolonial self-image might be manifesting in response to an encounter with translated postcolonial writing, and generally argues for bringing the two thematic strands together to explore further the interdependencies between Poland’s postcolonialism and Polish attitudes to non-European postcolonials.

This article looks at Polish translations of three selected short stories by Rudyard Kipling in order to examine how translation affects the ironic tropes found in those texts. Mateo’s typology of techniques for handling irony in translation (1995) is used to show how this rhetorical device works within the broader cultural and historical context. It appears that the way Polish translators in the early 1900s interpreted irony in contemporary colonial fiction depended on their ability to recognize social problems in the British Empire, to identify the distinctive British sense of humour, and to understand the realities of colonial life. The short stories under discussion are Georgie Porgie, 1888 (translated by Feliks Chwalibóg, 1909), The Limitations of Pambe Serang, 1889 (Feliks Chwalibóg, 1910) and The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes, 1885 (unknown translator, 1900).

The aim of this article is to take a closer look at Polish press reviews of Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto, in order to study the novel’s reception. The reviews provide information not only about the assessment of translation quality, but also about the attitude of the target culture towards translated literature. In this case, a novel from a former  Portuguese colony, Mozambique, enters the Polish literary system via the ex-metropole, Portugal. The literary systems involved in the transfer are seen as peripheral, which makes the case interesting in the world of postcolonial order. To legitimise the conclusions, a wider context of Mozambican literature will be taken into consideration, as well as  the Polish context. Couto’s novel is accepted by the Polish audience as an example of exotic writing. The novel’s paratexts, its translator’s explanations, and the position of Mia Couto in the Polish literary system before the publication of Lunatyczna kraina will be considered as factors informing its reception.

 

Translated from Polish by Zofia Ziemann

Caribbean literature is still under-represented in Eastern Europe, an error of exclusion that the present paper ventures to discuss. For decades Polish publishers have been understandably replicating metropolitan canons, zig-zagging between European and American bestsellers. It is only when a Caribbean or Caribbean-British writer gains an international distinction (Walcott, Naipaul) or becomes a worldwide publishing sensation (Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy) that their books are translated. Exceptions to this rule, such as the solitary Polish editions of Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore (Muza, 2006), Monique Roffey’s The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Nasza Księgarnia, 2011) and Kei Miller's The Last Warner Woman (Świat Książki, 2012), or single Francophone Caribbean novels, are few and far between.

Arguably, it seems that this politics of translation and publishing stems from the systemic, colonially foisted peripherality of West Indian literature, side-lined by the cultural production of the UK as well as the USA, which dominates the curricula of English departments in more culturally homogeneous countries such as Poland. However, what constitutes a major problem for the dissemination (and popularity) of Caribbean Creole literature in Polish is exactly what makes West Indian writing so engaging, multi-layered, polyphonous and intertextual—it is the cultural component (for instance, the translation of “Creole folkways”) that is often misread, misconstrued and, as a consequence, mis-rendered. For that reason, using a number of literary sources, the present paper will attempt to showcase a selection of translatological strategies for coping with, to quote Benjamin Zephaniah, “decipher[ing]/de dread chant” into Polish.

Katherine Boo’s award-winning non-fiction book (2012) and David Hare’s play Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2014) are set in a Mumbai slum called Annawadi. They tell a story of one family’s struggle with the Indian judiciary system, describing the life in a Mumbai slum in the process. The article purports to analyse the translation element of Boo’s narrative, as well as the book’s translation (Polish translation by Adrianna Sokołowska-Ostapko) and adaptation (Hare’s play). The first part of the article is focused on various shifts occurring in those secondary texts. Special attention is paid to ideological consequences and motivations of various decisions, which, consequently, leads to the question about the oppressive potential of translation (inspired by theories of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak). The second part of the article deals with the fact that although translation remains an essential and obvious component of Behind the Beautiful Forevers for all three authors (Boo, Hare, and Sokołowska-Ostapko), this issue has been largely neglected (or misrepresented) by readers and critics. This, in turn, leads to the question (based on Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory) to what extent the case of Behind Beautiful Forevers can be interpreted as a product of various forces conditioning the scope and future of postcolonial translation.

The article focuses on Kaytek the Wizard, the English translation of Janusz Korczak’s children’s classic Kajtuś czarodziej, originally published in Poland in 1933. Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the book came out in English with the New York-based Penlight Publications in 2012, almost eighty years after the original publication. The article begins with an overview of the theoretical context of translating children’s literature, with regard to issues such as censorship, political correctness, and ideological manipulations. It demonstrates that contentious passages have often been mitigated, in order to create a commercially or ideologically “appropriate” text, for example in the former countries of the Eastern Bloc, in Spain, or in the contemporary United States. It then describes the context of the publication of the English version of Korczak’s novel, shedding light on the roles of the copyright holder and translation commissioner, the publisher and the translator, and also mentioning the English language reviews of the translation in literary journals. Following that, the article examines the translator’s treatment of the original expressions and passages concerning racial issues, which would be considered racist today. These include references to Africans as “savages,” “apes” or “cannibals,” a reflection of the European racial stereotypes of that period. It is demonstrated that, in her treatment of such lexical items, the translator adopted a middle course, retaining some of the contentious passages but also partly omitting and toning down other controversial examples in question. The article also reflects on the role of, and constraints on, the literary translator, who may be confronted with the ethical dilemma of either respecting the integrity of the original, and recreating the collective consciousness of a bygone era, or appropriating the original text, through eliminating passages which negatively portray blacks, so as to better adapt it to the target context of multicultural American society.

When a work of European literature is translated into Arabic, the language of a predominantly Islamic culture, terms referring to Arabs as a people or Muslims as a religious community, the name of Muhammad as the Prophet of Islam, etc., cease to be foreign and exotic, to become local and familiar. The present analysis of contemporary Arabic translations of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, Cervantes’ Don Quijote and Scott’s Ivanhoe, shows that these elements are not always simply returned to their native culture if the original text represents them in a negative, Eurocentric way, which can even be considered blasphemous by Muslims, but are subject to more or less significant ideologically motivated transformations. Instead of straightforward restitution to the native culture, what takes place is a kind of annexation of texts which consists in replacing the negatively portrayed “Other” by a positively, or at least neutrally, represented “We.” Such manipulations may be explicit, i.e. signalled in footnotes, or tacit. In some cases, anti-Islamic passages become even sympathetic towards Islam when translated into Arabic. In this way the authors of Arabic translations liberate the texts from the dominating Western perspective and adapt them to their own vision of the world. What appears as manipulation and censorship from the “Western” point of view may be perceived in an entirely different manner inside the Arabo-Islamic culture, for instance as a correction of obvious factual errors.

The paper outlines a distinction between several allied notions related to intersemioticity, polysemioticity and translation, with examples pertaining to the indicated categories. It begins with an overview of how Roman Jakobson’s concept of intersemiotic translation has been re-interpreted and broadened to account for more types of transformations and for new modes of expression. Secondly, the non-identity of referentiality and transmutation is indicated. Next, the notion of intersemiotic complementation is proposed for instances that involve adding a new code to an existing work, rather than changing its code. A distinction is also drawn between intersemiotic translation and intersemiotic aspects orcontexts of interlingual translation (of a polysemiotic work or a verbal text which refers to non-discursive media). It is emphasized that it is this last category that deserves the attention of translation scholars, and some particular areas of interest are enumerated.

The article examines Catherine Anyango’s and David Zane Mairowitz’s graphic novel Heart of Darkness as an illustration of the differences between the unique possibilities of verbal and visual media. Conrad’s metaphor of Marlow’s story as a misty halo, interpreted here as an autotelic commentary on the text’s elusive meaning, is the starting point for a discussion of visual representations of indeterminacy, which Conrad conceptualizes in visual terms, equating understanding with seeing. Another issue raised is the place of the narrator in visual arts, made problematic by Conrad’s use of two narrators and the story-within-a-story device. It is also argued that the graphic novel, though a sequential medium, makes use of spatial juxtaposition of images, which is not only a source of metaphors, but also creates the effect of simultaneity unavailable to verbal arts.

This case study analyses the process of translation of a popular science (picture)book that originated from the Internet comic strip xkcd. It explores the obstacles resulting from the text-image interplay.

At the macroscale, while such institutions in Poland as the Book Institute or translator associations do develop standards and provide information on the book market and good (or actual) practices, they never explicitly mention comic books—the closest one can find is “illustrated books” or “others”. Additionally, popular science literature—which some might say is uninteresting—is much less discussed than artistic translation (with due allowance for comic books and graphic novels) despite having a tradition of using words and images together. Thing Explainer does seem to use “other” translatory techniques: firstly, because the author decided to use only the one thousand most common English words (a semantic dominant to be retained in Polish); and secondly, because the illustrations—from diagrammatic to extremely detailed—are an indispensable, though variably integrated with the verbal, medium of knowledge transfer. This paper focuses on the second aspect. Specifically, it discusses: the rigorous requirements for text volume and location (exacerbated by the said 1000-word list); technical issues (including choosing typefaces, formatting text, modifying graphics etc.); the overlapping responsibilities of the editors, the translator and the DTP artist; and the unusual text-image relations (e.g. the image helping a translator decode what he actually translates).

The paper deals with the relation between verbal expressions and mental images. As claimed by cognitive linguists, “understanding a verbal message” requires that two kinds of mental imagery be evoked: rich images, which are encoded in individual lexemes, and schematic images, conventionally related to grammatical structures. Based upon this principle, an analysis of a Polish poem and its English translation is carried out, in order to demonstrate that a complicated interplay between the two kinds of mental imagery underlies the texts and accounts for their interpretation.

The article deals with the complex issue of the interrelation of the elements of the linguistic texture with the elements of sense produced thanks to the decoding of the graphic layer. The departure point for the argument will be the concept of conceptual blending, deriving from cognitive linguistics. This concept describes the blending of two semiotic spaces, here the iconic space and the symbolic space, to create a new emergent space, which escapes unequivocal interpretation, especially if a given text intensifies the role of its graphic form. The analysis of such an emergent space will be understood as a typographic analysis of glyphs, their interdependencies, patterns and, ultimately, their relations with the meaning decoded in a given language. The interpretative act will proceed according to poststructuralist premises, based mainly on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, who applies the term dissemination to describe the radically ambivalent character of sense production, not limited to semanticism, but taking into consideration all aspects of the textual tissue (graphic, phonetic, syntactic etc.). To describe the specific interpretative state of a reader/translator, who, faced with the totality of an experimental literary work, cannot prioritise various possible ways of interpretation, the study applies the term apophany, borrowed from the thought of the German psychologist Klaus Conrad, namely, a stage of development of schizophrenia, which entails a specific experience of abnormal meaningfulness. Examples of a translator’s apophany can be found in the analysis of the Polish translation of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (clusters of letters, punctuation) and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (the undecidables of the syntagmatic aspect of sentences).

Despite its title, Invisible Cities (1972) is the most visible book by Italo Calvino. Calvino included visibility in his literary testament, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, as one of the fundamental values of literary creation. He often emphasized the significance of visibility in his writings and pointed out its close connection with exactitude, another value that he felt important for the next millennium. Translated into Polish by Alina Kreisberg, the book was first published in 1975 and republished in 2005 and 2013. The translator, who considers the book a record of an inner journey “around one’s head”, openly admits to having modified various details of Calvino’s images, recognizing that certain terms would sound too exotic, encyclopaedic and elitist in Polish. Her translations of architectural and art historical terms are particularly noteworthy,  leading sometimes to a change in the style of buildings evoked by Calvino’s text. The translator’s decisions make the  images of Invisible Cities even more surrealistic and mythical.

The article focuses on descriptions of works of art in essays. It presents the form of ekphrasis and the method of inter-artistic analysis, and also emphasises the efficiency of the translatological perspective (e.g. intersemiotic translation) in the study of the phenomenon of ekphrasis. As a starting point for the analysis and interpretation of fragments of Herbert’s and Herling-Grudziński’s essays, the article presents Martini’s Guidoriccio da Fogliano at the Siege of Montemassi, from the perspective of art history. Next, it discusses the verbal accounts of the painting presented by Herbert and Herling- Grudziński, examining their contents and poetics and paying attention to the character of the descriptions they propose. The description may focus either on the object or on the viewer, either on the representation itself or on its connotations. Accordingly, it is suggested that the corresponding modes of ekphrasis should be labelled ‘denotative’ and ‘connotative’, respectively. The aim is to present concrete realizations of ekphrasis and characteristic modes of perceiving and writing about a work of art, as well as to show how the subjective perspective of the observer (describing, commenting, interpreting) and an idiomatic style of expression are manifested.

The author proposes a new critical model for translation analysis. The method is based on translation tropics, an idea presented by Douglas Robinson in The Translator’s Turn, which appears here in a much expanded and modified form. Five tropes (irony, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole and metalepsis) describe five types of translator and the respective affective motivations that inform decision-making in translation: the translator’s affect towards the Other of the source text and culture. One trope in particular (metonymy) is examined in more detail. The analytical part, which presents practical results achieved with this theoretical tool, is based on the alphabetical translations of Charles Bernstein’s poetry by Peter Waterhouse and his VERSATORIUM group.

On parle ici non pas d’une culture de traduire, mais d’une telle culture
litteraire qui devait son origine et ses qualites au fait que les traductions litteraires etaient
pratiquees, qu’on traduisait d’une langue a une autre les ouevres litteraires ecrites et
qu’on les traduisait a l’ecrit. Or, telle etait dans l’Antiquite la seule culture litteraire
latine qui, depuis la moitie du IIIe siecle avant J.-C., se composait en grande partie
des traductions du grec. Celles-ci pourtant n’etaient pas ce que sont les traductions
d’aujourd’hui. En traduisant en latin les ouevres grecques, on les transformait plus ou
moins, en en faisant des ouevres nouvelles: on en faisait les traductions qui etaient en
meme temps les imitations et les emulations propres. Rien de tel genre n’etait connu
dans la litterature antique grecque. Les Grecs qui se contentaient d’imiter leur ecrivains
d’antan, Homere en premier lieu, ne faisaient les traductions des autres langues ni
dans l’Antiquite, ni meme a l’ epoque byzantine. La traduction de la Bible hebraique
au IIIe siecle avant J.-C. devait son origine non pas aux Grecs, mais aux Juifs de la
Diaspore qui ne comprenaient plus leur langue maternelle. Pour l’Occident latin, au
contraire, la pratique litteraire des ecrivains romains antiques est restee exemplaire et
obligatoire: du Moyen-Age a travers les siecles de la Renaissance jusqu’a l’epoque
moderne le paradigme antique romain de la traduction-imitation-emulation regnait
non seulement dans les ecrits latins de ces epoques, mais aussi dans ceux composes
en langues vernaculaires. Les ecrivains de la Renaissance, latins et vernaculaires, y
etaient extremement diligents, en traduisant les oeuvres des auteurs anciens grecs en
latin et leurs oeuvres et a la fois les oeuvres des auteurs latins en langues vernaculaires.
De meme que les ecrivains latins antiques, ils pratiquaient eux aussi les taductionsimitations-
emulations.
C’est en analysant, sous l’aspect de cette caracteristique generale, quelques
exemples de la pratique des traducteurs romains – de Live-Andronique et de Catulle
poetes, de Ciceron, traducteur a la fois de la poesie et de la prose grecques et en meme
temps theoricien de la traduction – que l’auteur de l’article essaye de caracteriser les
splendeurs et les ombres de ce qu’il appelle la culture de traduction.

The culture of Ancient Greek literature is very different from our modern
one. As its medium, the Ancient Greek language is incomprehensible outside the
general context of Greek civilisation. Any translation of an Ancient Greek text is to
some extent false, or at least artifi cial, and it cannot express the special character of the
reality of the original. Selected translations of passages from Homer, Herodotus and
Aeschines illustrate the incompatibility of the ancient and modern styles of narration.
The study of the language of literature in relation to the reality it represents is advocated
as a possible solution to this problem. Readers are also recommended to make the effort
to study the ancient originals instead of reading the texts in translations, which can
never be fl awless.

The author takes a close look at translating ancient texts from the viewpoint
of a historian. He explains why historians of Antiquity are usually against the very
idea of translating Greek and Latin literature. He then proceeds to argue that historical
knowledge is indispensable if a translation is to be rendered. This argument is supported
by a detailed analysis of the standard Polish translation of two biographies by Plutarch,
Life of Aristides and Life of Cimon.

Using Plautus’ comedies as an example, the article shows how the translation
of erotica has varied depending on the dominant habits and customs of a given period.
It underlines two opposite trends: one allows an increasing license to evoke fantasy;
the other inhibits the graphic and vulgar side of the texts (especially in the choice of
language). If an erotic pun in the original evokes only sexual associations and allusions,
translators often feel obliged to be bold in their rendering of the text. But there can be
no consenting to the use of vulgar language. On the one hand, translators are hindered
by the conviction that language of the characters in ancient plays should not appear too
modern. On the other hand, dictionaries offer a practically biblical (or merely archaic)
vocabulary when it comes to the obscene. In effect, erotica usually tends to sound more
archaic than the rest of the text.

Before recently, there was no full Polish translation of Apollonius Rhodius’
Argonautica. However, fi ve Polish classical scholars, W. Klinger, Z. Abramowiczówna,
J. Łanowski, W. Steffen and W. Appel, have translated excerpts of this Hellenistic epic
into Polish. A comparative analysis of these excerpts with the relevant passages from
the fi rst complete Polish version of the Argonautica by E. Żybert-Pruchnicka makes it
possible to trace the individual strategies of the translators. The most important decision
which every translator of epic poetry has to take at the beginning of his or her work is
to choose the form in which the poem will be rendered. In Polish there are three main
traditions of translating epics: in thirteen-syllable meter, in prose, and in hexameter.
The last type of versifi cation was chosen by fi ve out of six of the translators mentioned
above; only Świderkówna decided to render the Apollonian poem in thirteen-syllable
verse. There are also stylistic and language differences that occur in the passages, due to
the individual preferences of the translators, as well as the writing style characteristic for
the times in which they lived. Klinger, for instance, prefers modernist stylistics, while
Steffen chooses to archaise the language of the poem. However, the aim of this article
is not to evaluate the translations but to open a discussion on how poems written over
two thousand years ago might be rendered in an adequate and contemporary fashion.

We owe many aspects of Western culture to the Greeks; yet it was the Romans
who took the fi rst steps in the fi eld of translation. This article presents a selection of
characteristics of translation methods used by the Ancients and, more particularly, their
broad understanding of translation as exemplifi ed by Aulus Gellius, Roman writer of
the second century CE.

This paper, based on research conducted by the pioneers of the history of
oral interpreting (A. Hermann, I. Kurz) in the 1950s and on modern archaeological
evidence, presents the earliest references to interpreters in the Bronze Age, in the Near
East and the Mediterranean area (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, Carthage). It discusses
a Sumerian Early Dynastic List, a Sumerian-Eblaic glossary from Ebla, the Shu-ilishu’s
Cylinder Seal, the inscriptions and reliefs from the Tombs of the Princes of Elephantine
and of Horemheb, the mention of one-third of a mina of tin dispensed at Ugarit to the
interpreter of Minoan merchants and the Hanno’s stele, as well as terms used by these
early civilisations to denote an interpreter: eme-bal, targumannu, jmy-r(A) aw, and mls.

The paper discusses a translation of the Roman tragedy Historia albo
tragedia Oktawii cesarzówny rzymskiej (History or Tragedy of Octavia the Roman
Emperor’s Daughter) by Józef Jan Woliński, published in 1728 and completed shortly
beforehand. Its author presents himself as a faithful servant of the Wessels and dedicates
his adaptation of the fi rst-century praetexta Octavia to Maria Józefa Wessel, Konstanty
Sobieski’s widow. The translator adapts the Latin text, on the one hand emphasising
Nero’s ferocity and despotism, on the other employing the stereotype of the abandoned
wife. The cruel emperor is charged with all the responsibility for the evil which consumes
Rome and his relatives, while Octavia is depicted as a fragile and passive victim of
his malice. However, the translator does not disregard the protagonist’s intimacy with
her brother and her nurse. Woliński underlines the moral aspect of the drama, hinting
at the imminent collapse of Nero’s power and his violent death by suicide, which
does not feature in the original. By removing Octavia’s fi nal lamentation, the Polish
translator makes her follow her nurse’s advice and desist from expressing her grief.
Given Woliński’s closeness to his benefactors around the time of writing his Historia
albo tragedia, it seems plausible to suggest the drama was privately commissioned, and
conceived as a solace to Wessel’s concerns when handing her beloved estate at Żółkiew
to her odious brother-in-law, Jakub Sobieski.

Among dozens of new translations of the New Testament published in the
last fi fty years, there are several versions by Jewish scholars which have yet to receive
enough attention. This article offers an analysis of the most characteristic features of
these translations, such as criticism of the existing versions outlined in the introductory
sections, as well as actual techniques by which the Jewish origin and character of the
text is emphasised in three spheres: superfi cial, cultural and religious, and theological.
Each of these is illustrated with numerous examples, juxtaposed with traditional
versions. It is argued that, regardless of the ideological motivation underlying the origin
of the Jewish translations of the New Testament, they offer valuable and otherwise
unavailable insights into the original message of the ancient Christian writings.

The essay focuses on Czesław Miłosz’s translation of Psalm 51, one of the
most celebrated penitential psalms. Unlike the medieval practice of illuminating books
of psalms, where the images offered a vivid and concrete narrative context for the pleas
and lamentations, Miłosz aims to highlight the universal and archetypal dimension of
King David’s prayers. He sets out to create a new hieratic Polish style to reconcile
liturgical use with the evocative qualities and unique prosodies of Hebrew poetry,
without sacrifi cing a coherent theological interpretation. To reproduce the characteristic
repetitions and parallelisms, Miłosz draws lexical and syntactic inspiration from the
earliest Polish translations of the psalms, notably the Psałterz Puławski (Psalter of
Puławy, late fi fteenth century). Ultimately, his translation forms a complex amalgam,
bringing together the religious intuitions of Judaism, the hieratic tradition of the Polish
language and the semantic intensity of Miłosz’s own poetry.

The paper presents the fi rst almost complete edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets
in Polish which, appeared in 1913 and has since been forgotten. The translator, Maria
Sułkowska, chose to appear under the pseudonym Mus. She omitted sonnets 134 and
135 as untranslatable puns, and wrote a preface in verse where she expounded her
views on Shakespeare’s Sonnets and their translation. Her version is shown in the light
of a highly critical 1914 review and in the context of the fi rst Polish monograph on
Shakespeare’s poetry by Roman Dyboski (1914) who quoted Sułkowska’s translation
throughout, although with a few alterations of his own. Even though some of the sonnets
must be a challenge to the Polish reader because of the choice of obsolete vocabulary or
syntax, the whole merits attention for consistency of the translator’s decisions as well
as the attention to detail.

This comparative analysis of two translations of Charles Perrault’s
“Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufl e de verre” shows how the French conte was adapted
for children in England at different moments and refl ects different projects. Robert
Samber’s “Cinderilla: or, The Little Glass Slipper,” published in Histories, or Tales of
Past Times. With Morals (1729), is known as the fi rst English translation of the tale.
More recently, Angela Carter’s retranslation “Cinderella: or, The Little Glass Slipper,”
published in The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977), pays homage to Samber
but also modernises the tale to carry a more emancipatory message. While Samber’s
translation refl ects the working conditions of Grub Street writers and acculturation of
Perrault’s fairy tale in Protestant England, Carter gives it a feminist twist as she turns
it into a “fable of the politics of experience.” She would later rewrite it as “Ashputtle
or The Mother’s Ghost” (1987), this time using Manheim’s English translation of the
Grimms’ “Aschenputtel” as a starting point.

This article presents a selection of Czesław Miłosz’s comments on American
culture, economy and politics during his diplomatic service in the United States in the
years 1946–1950. They were formulated in his postwar correspondence and in a series
of articles entitled “Life in the USA,” which he published in Odrodzenie under the
pseudonym of Jan M. Nowak from 1946 to 1947.

This paper sketches Miłosz’s (non)-existing book on America, consisting
of his numerous articles and columns written during his fi rst stay in the United States
from 1946 to 1950. They were published in the Polish literary press, often under pen
names (such as “Jan M. Nowak” or “Żagarysta”). The book is a signifi cant record of
the period: the political transformations at the beginning of the Cold War and the Anti-
Americanism that was gaining popularity among European intellectuals in the late
1940s.

This article aims to examine selected historical contexts of Miłosz’s
encounters with America. Its purpose is to demonstrate that the poet’s attitude towards
the country where he spent many years of his adulthood and creative life was full of
confl icts, paradoxes and contrasts. Early readings, a boyhood passion for discovering
the laws and secrets of nature, and Romantic and modern literary traditions signifi cantly
infl uenced both Miłosz’s perception of American landscapes and American culture,
shaping new landscapes within him. The transformations of the speaking “I,” which
the reader witnesses through Miłosz’s experiences with the New World, allow for
an understanding of how his unique spatial imagination developed. This article also
attempts to indicate areas where Miłosz searches for a solution to his disintegrated
imagination, particularly in its religious dimension, while tackling the challenges and
crises of modernity.
 

Over the years Visions from San Francisco Bay (1969) has proven to be essential both to Miłosz’s life and to his writings. It was there that he formulated, for the fi rst time with such a force, the theses that would later reappear regularly in his essays and poetry. One vital aspect of the intellectual construction outlined in Visions was the concept of Nature. Miłosz proposed a “presentistic” approach, arguing for the concept of Nature as an indispensable element of contemporary thought. His refl ections were restricted to motifs closely related to his theses about Nature: Nature and beauty, human/animal relations, and the theory of evolution.

This paper investigates the ambiguous process of Czesław Miłosz’s integration
into America (both its nature and culture) in the context of his literary commitments and
“private obligations” to American poetry. It was a long and painful process, a constant
struggle with the state of exile, feelings of homelessness and uprootedness that fi nally
showed the poet the “new identity” of the modern man, bound to recognise his unstable,
tenuous position in space and time. According to Miłosz, America was a testing ground
for all mankind, and the very core of American literature had always been the question:
“Who am I?” Thus, Miłosz’s serious involvement in American history and culture gave
him a new perspective on global civilisation; it helped him to recreate his own identity
and to strike a balance between homelessness and belonging.

This paper undertakes a critical examination of Czesław Miłosz’s negative
responses to contemporary art in general, and American modernist poetry in particular.
It focuses on Miłosz’s interpretations of Cézanne’s statements and Wallace Stevens’s
poems, and concludes that the Polish poet’s inability and unwillingness to appreciate
contemporary art results from his recognition and approval of mimetic representation
as the only strategy which guarantees rationality, certainty, a sense of metaphysical
hierarchy and which is informed by them. Quoted are Miłosz’s somewhat angry
reactions to the concepts of abstract, non-fi gurative art as well as his words of
admiration for the representational moment apparently inherent in both poetry and
painting. Parenthetically, the paper points to Miłosz’s repressed feelings of existential
and epistemological ambivalence, arguably the most valuable aspect of his work.
 

Miłosz was an avant-garde poet who consequently realized his program
of rejuvenating mid-twentieth-century Polish poetry: he wanted to cure the maladies
of Romantic and nationalistic discourses in order to prevent poetry from addressing
important contemporary issues. Although he fi nally became very critical of avantgardes,
his initial, restoring impulse came from the Poundian need to “make it new.”
Miłosz’s great poetry of the 1970s developed Pound’s formal inventions, particularly
the “ideogrammatic method,” thus generating meanings in the poem by setting its
fragments against one another. The Polish poet often criticized the achievements of the
New York School poets, yet he admired their artistic freedom. He realized, however,
that he himself could not contradict the “poetics of rescue” he had been following for
years. The world presented in Miłosz’s late poems is not obvious. Its most astonishing
feature is the perspective from which the narrator addresses the reader: the timeless
space, where the dead meet the living, has nothing to do with a picture of the world
based on mimesis. Miłosz’s “second space” has a lot in common with the “real reality”
designed by surrealists, which John Ashbery evokes in his recent poems. Both poets
reach a similar mystical point where the word touches upon the mystery.

This article discusses Czesław Miłosz’s ambiguous relationship with American beat
and confessional poetry as well as with the counterculture of the 1960s. It focuses
on one of Miłosz’s late poems dedicated to Allen Ginsberg, published in Facing the
River in 1994. The poem, though ostensibly about Ginsberg, is in fact one of the most
confessional poems the Polish poet has ever written, presenting his own life as a failure,
“a discarded tire by the road,” and setting up Ginsberg as an exemplary wiser poet,
“who persisting in folly attained wisdom.” On the one hand, it seems diffi cult not to
see Miłosz and Ginsberg as two very different personalities. On the other hand, Miłosz
saw Ginsberg as the true heir to Whitman, whom he himself had always admired.
The discussion of the poem reveals that Miłosz uses Ginsberg as his own antithesis,
a Yeatsian mask or a Jungian shadow, representing everything that the Polish poet, with
his admitted contempt for any trace of weakness and mental instability, has never been or valued.

This article discusses the relationship between the American counterculture
of the 1960s and Miłosz’s poetry created during that time in Berkeley. The poet
observes the student revolt through his own experience with history, including his leftist
sympathies. He is critical both of the naïve hippie postulates and Herbert Marcuse’s new
version of Marxism. However, he treats counterculture as a symptomatic response to
vital problems of the Western civilization in the second half of the twentieth century. He
refl ects upon the infl uence of art on power, totalitarian as well as democratic. He sees
the necessity of commitment, though he asks about its form and effects. Countercultural
experiments coincide also with Miłosz’s own search for “a more capacious form” and
with the epiphanies described in his poems.
 

This essay sets out to examine Miłosz’s attitude towards confessional poetry,
or rather, to examine his stance on confessionalism as a seemingly inseparable element
of any poetic utterance. By means of such terms as decorum, referentiality of poetic
language and its usefulness, I try to show why Miłosz preferred to stay away from
overtly confessional modes of poetic utterance, which draw too heavily on the poet’s
own experiences and may result in blurring the distinction between biography and
literature. One reason why the poet so intensely disliked excessive confessionalism
is that its main purpose is to describe the emotions of the speaker, whereas he felt that
the main task of poetry is to celebrate the dazzling beauty of the outside world, whose
existence transcends and surpasses the insignifi cantly small inner world of a troubled
psyche. Last but not least, the notion of the usefulness of poetry, in his understanding of
the term, is that it makes it possible for poems written in diverse countries and epochs
to intensify the contemporary reader’s sense of belonging to the great family of the
human race.

This article discusses the decade-long correspondence of Czesław Miłosz
and Thomas Merton, published fi rst in a Polish translation in 1991, and only later, in
1997, in the original English. Though Merton offered to write in French, a language that
Miłosz at the time knew much better than English, Miłosz chose to use the latter. The
article concentrates on Miłosz’s side of the correspondence, comparing the impression
of struggle and incomplete command that his letters evoke in the original version with
the linguistic elegance and control implied by the Polish translation. The article suggests
that Miłosz’s slightly foreign English is a kind of refl ection of the theme implied by
the English title of the correspondence, Striving Towards Being. Moreover, the article
argues that writing in English, despite the constraints that it imposed, enabled the Polish
poet to discover a childlike freedom of expression and to meet his “correspondent,”
a fellow-sufferer from spiritual homelessness, in sympathetic understanding, though
the external experience of the two was very different. Paradoxically, each partner, in his
search for someone who “spoke the same language,” found what he sought in a person
who, in the literal sense, did not.

During his life in America Czesław Miłosz met many people but few of
them were more important than a man whom he saw only twice – Thomas Merton.
Miłosz and Merton corresponded regularly for almost ten years (1959–1960) and their
letters, published in Polish and English, show two great minds involved in a deep and
sincere dialogue, revealing their most intimate thoughts as well as fears and hopes.
Close to each other, they nevertheless remained independent in their thinking. This
article presents their exchanges on political issues such as the Cold War, the Civil Right
Movement or communist Russia. It also describes how each of them perceived the
changes in the Catholic Church initiated by the Second Vatican Council. Interesting
parallels in their biographies are also mentioned.

This article discusses the politics of translation of eleven negro spirituals,
which Czesław Miłosz produced in 1948, while working as a cultural attaché of the
Polish embassy in Washington D.C. Initially, Miłosz intended to publish all of these
translations in the Polish literary weekly Nowiny Literackie. Although only a few of
these translations appeared in the weekly, the article proposes that Miłosz’s project
played a role in opposing the Soviet cultural and political domination of Poland after
World War II. Drawing parallels between research on slavery and the analysis of
power structures in post-war Poland presented in The Captive Mind, the article argues
that Miłosz’s translations were driven by the “ethics of deception” akin to resistance
strategies inscribed in the original contexts of production of negro spirituals. The article
relies on theories of translation developed by deconstruction to question the traditional
hierarchies between “translation” and “the original,” and, consequently, to complicate
Miłosz’s position as “a translator” of spirituals. Since spirituals are improvisational by
origin, specifi c examples of Miłosz’s translation choices demonstrate that his role in
the translation process was participatory and creative rather than imitative. Thus the
article concludes that the translation of spirituals enabled Miłosz both to be and not to
be the author of these texts, a subversive move in the Soviet-dominated system, where
direct expressions of longing for freedom (only implicitly voiced in the spirituals) may
not have been welcome. This interpretation is consistent with Miłosz’s other early
works, which draw parallels between Polish post-war and slavery/colonial experiences,
and adds to current debates on the possible convergences between post-Soviet and
postcolonial conditions.

Examining the ideological underpinnings of the anthology Postwar Polish
Poetry, this article considers the impact of Czesław Miłosz’s translatory choices on the
rise in popularity of Polish poetry in English translation in the 1960s and its infl uence
on contemporary American poetry. Postwar Polish Poetry by and large introduced
Polish literature to the Anglophone audience. The analysis of the paratext (translator’s
preface, author biographies, jacket copy) and the translations foregrounds Miłosz’s
translatorial, poetological, historical, and political concerns. The article focuses on
delineating the anthology’s role in shaping the historiography of Polish poetry for the
Anglophone reader and touches on the political commentary embedded in Miłosz’s
poetological choices. The overwhelmingly positive reception of the anthology reveals,
in turn, the needs of American poets during the political upheaval of the 1960s to seek
poetry outside their own tradition. Finally, the article argues that the subtleties of the
anthology’s framing of Polish poetry cannot be overlooked, for it continues to exert
infl uence on the canon of Polish literature as it develops in English translation.

This article considers Russian themes in Miłosz’s writing, especially
in his work written in the USA. The transoceanic perspective gave the Polish poet
keen observations and insight into Russia; his opinions resulted from systematic and
thorough studies. The article also discusses migration, exile and empires – issues
central to Miłosz – by contrasting and comparing the Polish Nobel Prize winner and the
Russian Joseph Brodsky.

This article discusses Czesław Miłosz as a poet-translator of the poetry of
his younger colleagues: Herbert, Różewicz and Szymborska. The comparative analysis
focuses on features largely neglected in translation studies, such as Polish-English
linguistic asymmetries and the poetics of grammar, that is, the functions of defi nite,
indefi nite and zero articles, verbs and their aspects, personal pronouns as well as the
auxiliary verb jest/is. Whereas some of these items cannot be translated adequately
because they cause aesthetic loss in any translation, others allow for adequate,
sometimes even “optimal” translation.

The fi rst Polish edition of The Land of Ulro appeared in France in Maisons
Laffi tte in 1977, published by Instytut Literacki. The preface to this
edition was written by Father Józef Sadzik, a philosopher specializing in
Heidegger, and the director of the Pallotine Centre for Dialogue in Surcouf
Street, Paris. Following his advice and encouragement, Miłosz, who had
been connected to Father Sadzik through a long-standing friendship and
mutual respect, began to translate the biblical texts which Sadzik had scrupulously
published in Editions du Dialogue (in August 1980 the latter died
suddenly of heart failure, holding photocopies of The Book of Job, never
to witness the Solidarity victory in Gdańsk, nor his friend’s receipt of the
Noble Prize).

This paper discusses a selection of Czesław Miłosz’s poetry published in Slovenia in 2008. First, it briefl y describes the Polish Nobel Prize winner’s works present in Slovenia. Next, it focuses on their most important translations. This evaluation highlights the multigenerational aspect of the selection: it compiles most of the translations of Miłosz’s poetry (made by seven translators) which have appeared
over the last three decades. The various techniques and approaches adopted by the translators defi ne the poet’s current image in Slovenia. Last but not least, the article presents Jana Unuk’s essay, which closes the selection. Unuk perceives Miłosz primarily as a poet of paradoxes and private experience who constantly returns to the questions of God, religion and eroticism. The popularity of the individual and the existential dimensions of Miłosz’s works is a result of the Polish poet’s peculiar  sensibility, which largely derives from his generation. 

translated by Mikołaj Denderski

Pointing to manifold and long-lasting connections between feminism and translation, the article first presents a selection of multilingual writers (Narcyza Żmichowska and Deborah Vogel), translators (Zofi a Żeleńska and Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna) and translation commentators (Joanna Lisek and Karolina Szymaniak) to ask why the work of early Polish feminists is neglected. It seems that one of the causes might be the current colonization of Polish feminist discourse by English. For ethical reasons it would be advisable to recommend a certain sensitivity to locality in feminist translation studies and a recognition of regionalism in cultural studies. The theoretical considerations include two issues: the potential hermaphroditism of the Polish language when its users are women and the “scandal of ‘another’s speech’,” a polyphony and a constitutive lack of autonomy (a feminist discussion of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory). From this vantage point it becomes clear that linguistic choices made by the translator are always individual one-off solutions which resist homogenization, paradigms or (theoretical) generalizations.

Translatory achievements of medieval women are rarely discussed. In antiquity, Greek and Roman writings were practically all composed in either of the two languages. Greek dominated, since Latin women’s writing did not reach sophistication, or at least we do not possess proof of it. In the early Middle Ages the situation changed: Latin became dominant, and writing in the vernacular, which included women’s writing, started to be recognized. While scholarly research tended to focus on high-brow, original literature, female literary endeavours were largely disregarded. Translation, a low-brow activity, was not considered original. Comments about it are rather infrequent in early compendia of medieval literature. This absence may be partly explained by the fact that originality itself was not held in high regard in the Middle Ages. Only recently has the growing research into social and legal conditions of early women as well as into their varied cultural and literary expressions brought them a deserved recognition.

Translatory achievements of medieval women are rarely discussed. In antiquity, Greek and Roman writings were practically all composed in either of the two languages. Greek dominated, since Latin women’s writing did not reach sophistication, or at least we do not possess proof of it. In the early Middle Ages the situation changed: Latin became dominant, and writing in the vernacular, which included women’s writing, started to be recognized. While scholarly research tended to focus on high-brow, original literature, female literary endeavours were largely disregarded. Translation, a low-brow activity, was not considered original. Comments about it are rather infrequent in early compendia of medieval literature. This absence may be partly explained by the fact that originality itself was not held in high regard in the Middle Ages. Only recently has the growing research into social and legal conditions of early women as well as into their varied cultural and literary expressions brought them a deserved recognition.

The article is about the friendship and social activity of two important female representatives of the Polish emancipation movement at the turn of the 19th century: Aleksandra Bąkowska, aristocrat and owner of the Gołotczyzna estate as well as translator of early American anthropological works, and Paulina Kuczalska- Reinschmit, impoverished noblewoman, leader of the suffragist movement in the Polish Kingdom. Both women were inspired by the ideas of Lewis Henry Morgan, the researcher of the Iroquois culture and the author of, among others, Ancient Society (1877), in which he described and compared different systems of kinship in pre- and non-Christian cultures. Bąkowska translated this book into Polish in 1887, which triggered a discussion among early Polish sociologists, anthropologists and cultural philosophers, most importantly about the issue of the historicity of the institution of monogamian marriage and patriarchal family. Bąkowska turned a part of the Gołotczyzna estate into a school for country girls founded on the principles resembling the communist community of rights and obligations as described by L.H. Morgan based on the observation of Indian tribes. Kuczalska-Reinschmit, on the other hand, established the Polish Women Emancipation Association in Warsaw, whose seat – with a reading room, a lending library, a lecture hall – was also organized as a community, mainly for women. Both initiatives led to the dissemination of emancipation ideas in the Polish Kingdom before WWI and contributed to the principle of equality of rights for men and women inscribed in the new Polish constitution of 1918.

Jeremiah Curtin translated most works by Poland’s first literary Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz. He was helped in this life-long task by his wife Alma Cardell Curtin. It was Alma who, after her husband’s death, produced the lengthy Memoirs she steadfastly ascribed to her husband for his, rather than hers, greater glory. This paper investigates the possible textual influences Alma might have had on other works by her husband, including his travelogues, ethnographic and mythological studies, and the translations themselves. Lacking traditional authorial evidence, this study relies on stylometric methods comparing most frequent word usage by means of cluster analysis of z-scores. There is much in this statistics-based authorial attribution to show how Alma Cardell Curtin affected at least two other original works of her husband and, possibly, at least two of his translations as well..

Maria Konopnicka’s translation of Ada Negri’s two early poetry volumes, Fatalità and Tempeste, was published in Warsaw in 1901. The article examines Konopnicka’s translation in its historical and comparative context and presents her principal translation strategies. Since her début in 1890s, Negri’s originals and Konopnicka’s writings have been considered similar because of their social engag ement and sensibility. Konopnicka’s decision to translate Fatalità and Tempeste is usually seen as a result of her social interests. On the basis of Konopnicka’s and Negri’s letters and metaliterary enunciations, it can be assumed that Negri’s vision of creative act as a sudden and unstoppable inspiration of the inner spirit was also highly appreciated by the Polish poet. In her translation Konopnicka tends to naturalize the Italian originals on all the levels of expression, deploying her own favourite rhythmic patterns and figures of speech.

The article examines Polish translations of the Derridian term différance. Polish philosophical discourse uses the following renditions of différance: róż(ni(c) oś)ć by Bogdan Banasiak, różNICa by Tadeusz Sławek, gra-na-zwłokę-o-różnicę by Stanisław Cichowicz and the most popular: różnia by Joanna Skoczylas. Should a mistake be deliberately committed in Polish, as it was done in the original? Or should it be corrected, and if so – how to explain the correction? The suggestion to translate the controversial concept by means of a Polish neologism, the neographism rórznica, may be productive and such a solution may be open to a number of interpretations. Thanks to its ambivalence, rórznica introduces a majority of Derridian motifs and may generate new ideas and concepts. Moreover, it allows a successful critique of logocentrism and phonocentrism of Western philosophy as well as a subversion of binary oppositions, a fixed and solid subject and desire for self-presence. Finally, the misspelled difference may be viewed as an example of grammatical alterity.

Despite the growing interest in women’s writing, women translators and their achievements are rarely discussed. The article focuses on mechanisms behind the exclusion of women’s writing from literary history. It examines the social status of three women translators and demonstrates how their social position contributed to their invisibility. Dora Gabe, Slava Shtiplieva and Anastasia Gancheva were co-workers at The Polish-Bulgarian Review. Each developed a different strategy to cope with the unfavourable intellectual climate of interwar Bulgaria. Their biographies show an interdependence between the marital and social status of a woman writer and the esteem of her literary output. They also confi rm the claim that translating was thought to be a more appropriate artistic occupation for women because of its lower status than that of writing

The essay outlines a “critical genealogy” of the notion of resemblance which structures the hierarchical relationship between the impeccable Original (Man, the source text) and its ultimately imperfect, failed copy (woman, translation). I examine the analogy between translation and the female that has prevailed in modern scholarship, and reveal its other, subversive side. The displacement of meanings in this repetitive analogy clarifies the relationship between the source and the target text in the light of the Butlerian notion of “critical mimesis”: a subversive play of meanings that takes place in the performative continuum of cultural translation.

In 1928, two translations of Dostoevsky’s The Devils were published: one by Tadeusz Zagórski, another by an unknown woman signed as J.B. This article analyses both translations to understand why Zagórski’s version has become canonical. It seems that the main reasons for the privileged status of Zagórski’s translation are, on the one hand, its publisher’s strong position, and on the other – the visual aspect of the J.B. version. The J.B. edition was illustrated: the drawings depict the female characters of the novel. The illustrated plates present also excerpts selected from the novel, which are frequently amorous in tone. Most probably because of its distinctly feminine look, the J.B. translation of The Devils was superseded by Zagórski’s version.

The article outlines the challenges for literatures created in ”small” languages. The only chance for such cultures to emerge from literary obscurity is to be translated into a ”big” language, a lingua franca of an international influence. This phenomenon is well illustrated by the spectacular Bibliography of Books by Female Authors in Yugoslavia, published by the Federation of Women with University Education in 1936 in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The book, a unique and remarkable feminist project of interwar Yugoslavia, was conceived to defy the Slavica non leguntur statement (the Slavic languages are not read [world-wide]). It features the intellectual achievement of women from South-Eastern Europe. This first discussion of Bibliography, which was composed in four languages: Serbian, Slovene, Croatian and French, presents its structure, aims and premises in a wider feminist context of interwar Yugoslavia.
 

The Bible, considered by many a normative and patriarchal text, poses a serious challenge to feminism. Feminist theology offers alternative interpretation and aims to restore female dignity and social prestige to the biblical text through its translation. This article presents selected examples of the feminist interpretation of the Bible. It also analyses English and German translations to comment on inclusive language as the principle of feminist translation, now part of the mainstream biblical studies. Moreover, non-feminist inclusive translations into English and Polish are discussed.

The Lord’s Prayer played an important role in the formation of early Anglo-Saxon Church. The signifi cance of Oratio Dominica was raised in ecclesiastical epistles and refl ected in state charts and laws issued at the time. Poetical paraphrases of the prayer formed part of contemporary religious literature. Their authors continued the long-standing Cædmonian tradition and used the ancient Germanic poetic diction to express Christian values. Translation of these poems requires close reading of the manuscript or its facsimile and working with reliable editions. Scholarly commentary and editorial guidance help to analyse the poems’ thought and grammar. Therefore, the selection of a dependable critical edition is the prerequisite to the esthetically satisfying and adequate translation of these extraordinary Anglo-Latin poetical masterpieces

In the period under consideration 265 Polish titles (poetry, drama, prose fiction, reportage and memoirs) were published in English. Their publishers were mostly academic presses and small independent publishers, often subsidised by the EU or the Polish Book Institute. The analysis of the titles leads to several conclusions. First, the image of Polish literature construed on the basis of the available translations did not reflect the situation on the Polish book market. The percentage of translated poetry volumes and memoirs devoted to the Holocaust and the Second World War was much higher than the percentage of such titles published in Poland. Second, the beginning of the decade concentrated on classics and memoirs, whereas towards the end of the period more and more contemporary prose titles were being published. Third, the increased interest in Polish prose among the British publishers was not reflected among their American counterparts. The article is accompanied by a bibliography of English translations of Polish literature published in the years 1999–2009.

Few stories have been translated so often and into so many languages as the classical fairy tales. As such, they are a true challenge for translation studies. This article proposes a methodology for investigating fairy tales in translation. The suggested method is essentially a comparative textual analysis, inspired by translation studies, literary theory, linguistic criticism and discourse analysis. It can be applied to the synchronic research of fairy tale translations within a restricted period as well as to the diachronic research of translations of one or more fairy tales over a longer period of time. A step-by-step model is presented, which makes it possible to classify and analyse changes in translations as well as adaptations. In order to bridge the gap between content and linguistic levels, a linguistic analysis is linked to focal points, grouped under categories from literary studies. The examples come from six recent Dutch translations of Sleeping Beauty, published between 1995 and 2007. In the final part of this study, a scheme is offered for the interpretation of the changes brought to light by the analysis. It takes into account individual as well as social factors and it is based on the concepts of norms, systems and functions. Such a structured method of analysis is hoped to offer new possibilities for the study of fairy tales in translation.

The article opens with an overview of the Polish reception of fairy tales, Perrault’s in particular, since 1700. The introductory section investigates the long-established preference for adaptation rather than translation of this genre in Poland and provides the framework for an in-depth comparative analysis of the first Polish translation of Mother Goose Tales by Hanna Januszewska, published in 1961, as well as her adaptation of Perrault’s tales ten years later. The examination focuses on two questions: first, the cultural distance between the original French text and Polish fairy-tales, which causes objective translation difficulties; second, the cultural, stylistic and linguistic shifts introduced by Januszewska in the process of transforming her earlier translation into a free adaptation of Perrault’s work. These questions lead not only to comparing the originality or literary value of Januszewska’s two proposals, but also to an examination of the reasons for the enormous popularity of the adapted version. The faithful translation, by all means a good text in itself, did not gain wide recognition and, if not exactly a failure, it was nevertheless an unsuccessful attempt to introduce Polish readers to the original spirit of Mother Goose Tales.

The article discusses difficulties with translating Grimms’ fairy tales into Polish. The first part describes the specific features of the original text and presents Bruno Bettelheim’s conclusions about “the meaning and importance of fairy tales.” The second part reviews the existing Polish translations. The third part discusses the main goals of a new Polish translation. The conclusion stresses that the new Polish translation should be addressed to a double audience (both children and adults), as is the case with the original Kinder- und Hausmärchen.

A positive answer to the above question seems obvious after a critical analysis of the reception of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and stories in Poland in the second part of the 19th century and in the first part of the 20th century. On the one hand, over a hundred years ago the writer was classified as an author of children’s literature due to intended or unintended misinterpretations of his prose. This classification was then inherited by next generations of readers and translators. On the other hand, numerous translatory mistakes depleted Andersen’s unique style. The analysis shows how Andersen’s narration was changed to traditional literary style, especially when it came to dialogues; how humour and irony were overlooked, misunderstood or judged improper for children; how translators miscomprehended Danish grammar and vocabulary; and how little attention was paid to the coherence of the text. The analysis compares the complete edition of 167 fairy tales and stories translated from Danish (Sochańska 2006) and the complete editon of 155 fairy tales and stories translated from German (Beylin and Iwaszkiewicz 1956), which has enjoyed a canonical status. The comparison not only indicates the difficulties in translating Andersen; it also demonstrates how his prose could be restored to its original shape and how it could again address both young and adult readers.

A brief overview of translation within folklore studies and children’s literature studies leads to the focal point of this article: nineteenth-century Croatian versions of German fairy tales. The analysis concentrates on the textual and paratextual features of the Croatian texts, their relationship to the source texts and their involvement in national integration. Moreover, they are examined as part of empirical research in the history of reading: children’s reception of German children’s books in nineteenth-century Croatia. Finally, they are discussed from the book history perspective: adoption of German children’s literature genres and publishing strategies in the field of nineteenth-century Croatian children’s literature. The discussion of these three aspects indicates that the appropriation of German fairy tales in nineteenth-century Croatian society followed various (oral, written, German-language, Croatian-language) routes and had different outcomes. The complexity of these processes reminds us that literature is not only a symbolic (written, textual), but also a material (reading, editing, publishing) enterprise. It also reminds us that children’s literature is entangled not only in concepts of childhood and literature, but also in other cultural concepts such as nation and class.
 

The translation of Maria Konopnicka’s O Krasnoludkach i sierotce Marysi (The Brownie Scouts) into English is an interesting fusion of two translation strategies usually considered mutually exclusive. At first glance, this careful and faithful rendering of passages describing Polish tradition, culture, history, geography and folklore is a good example of foreignisation. Taking the reader who represents a dominant culture on a trip to an unknown peripheral culture, it seems to counter Lefevere’s understanding of how cultural capital and asymmetries between cultures influence the translator’s decision to adapt the source culture’s exotic elements to the target reader’s horizon of expectations. Thus, her decision not to domesticate the original positions Katherine Żuk-Skarszewska (née Hadley) in a group of translators called bridgeheads by Cay Dollerup. They aim at familiarising the target language audience with most interesting and valuable aspects of the source language culture. Yet this assumption is undermined by Żuk-Skarszewska’s frequent use of reduction technique, which helps her to deal with the culture-specific elements she considers less important. The Brownie Scouts uses two strategies: the translator’s efforts to faithfully preserve some items and fragments characteristic of the source language culture are counterbalanced by her decisions to cut other elements and passages in order to make room for what she judges more worthwhile. As a result, reduction controls the intensity of the overall foreignising effect. This unusual strategy becomes even more interesting to observe, as the elements most readily given up are usually those related to the child (characters, subject-matter and folklore). Paradoxically, it is children who lose most in this translation of the book about them.

The article opens with the introduction of Joel Chandler Harris and his literary output. As one of “local colourists,” Harris depicted American plantation life in 19th-century Georgia and included many cultural as well as folk elements in his works. The following analysis of his stories about Uncle Remus focuses on (1) the levels of narration; (2) the linguistic complexity of the text (the stories abound in slang and dialectal expressions); (3) the form; and (4) the folklore value. These four aspects guide the discussion of the only Polish translation of the Uncle Remus stories. Prepared by Władysława Wielińska in 1929, it was addressed to children. Therefore, the article aims to determine the profile of the translation as a children’s book, to consider it in relation to the skopos of the source text and to establish the extent to which it preserved the peculiar character of the Uncle Remus stories.

The existing Polish translations of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, created in the early 20th century, seem faulty nowadays, mainly due to the loss of various stylistic features of the original. One possible explanation may be a generic absence: a lack of comparable prose style in Polish at the time. In my article I attempt to point out the drawbacks of the two Polish translations of Kipling’s “The Cat that Walked by Himself.” I also present my own, alternative, version.

This article investigates the concept of adaptation in the context of globalization and points to the considerable potential of research into contemporary adaptations. It provides an overview of selected theoretical approaches to the adaptation of children’s literature as well as presents adaptation from a historical perspective. Furthermore, it focuses on selected Disney adaptations of Peter Pan published in Poland at the turn of the 21th century. Of special interest in these Disney adaptations are pictures: identical in different editions, although the accompanying texts differ widely. The visual is thus “recycled,” whereas the textual modifies the style, depiction of characters, use of tenses and culture specific items. The article also introduces the category of glocal adaptations, that is, Disney adaptations retold by Polish verbal masters, such as Jeremi Przybora or Jacek Kaczmarski. Though examples of cultural homogenization, these adaptations are partly indigenized by well-known local figures and may be viewed as glocal texts, where the global and the local overlap.
 

The article opens with the concept of the “world republic of childhood” without geographical and political borders, as conceived by Hazard and promoted after the Second World War. According to O’Sullivan (2004, 2005), this concept of childhood, and consequently of children’s literature, is idealistic and does not address real problems connected with the process of translation. As a matter of fact, translating a book for children from one language into another is not as easy as it might seem: frontiers and custom houses do exist (Bertea 2000: 94). A peculiar cas limite is the reception of the picture book in Italy. Introduced thanks to the pioneering work of the Emme Edizioni publishing house and its translators, the genre was later rejected. Italy had to wait a decade to see the same and similar picture books republished, but it is still paying the price for having initially closed its borders, despite the fact that the translators had paid customs- and import duties. These were determined not only by the child image dominant in the Italian society, but also by the different image of the adult, who was meant to read picture books aloud and who was ready to put on a performance for the child recipient (Oittinen 2000). In particular, the article investigates examples of the discrepancy between the adult and child images of the source and target texts selected from American and English picture books and their Italian translations.

The article starts with a short overview of the fundamental role played by food in children’s literature. The motif of food can convey deep psychological as well as philosophical meanings, and Astrid Lindgren made use of it with various purposes in mind: symbolical, comical, anti-didactic or educational. The main analysis is limited to the Polish translation of the name of one dish in the old Swedish cuisine – palt – which appears in different contexts in Astrid Lindgren’s trilogy about Emil of Lönneberga.

No doubt the world without Winnie the Pooh, Pippi Longstocking, Pinocchio or Moomin Trolls would have been less colourful. Characters from fairy tales imperceptibly slip into young readers’ minds and tend to stay there forever. Children accept them unconditionally and do not ask questions about their descent. Children’s response to books is usually very spontaneous: a love at first sight or an immediate dislike. Therefore, it is very important that they receive “the best” – not only beautiful and wise books but also books that are skillfully translated. Discussing the role of the translator of children’s literature, this article focuses on the child – translator relationship and the translator – author dichotomy. It points to different attitudes toward the translator’s creativity and “visibility.” It examines terminological ambiguities of such notions as “adaptation,” “reconstruction,” “rewriting” and “translation.” Finally, it deals with translation challenges that arise from didactic, entertaining and aesthetic functions of children’s books

This comparative analysis of two translations of Charles Perrault’s “Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre” shows how the French conte was adapted for children in England at different moments and reflects different projects. Robert Samber’s “Cinderilla: or, The Little Glass Slipper,” published in Histories, or Tales of Past Times. With Morals (1729), is known as the first English translation of the tale. More recently, Angela Carter’s retranslation “Cinderella: or, The Little Glass Slipper,” published in The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977), pays homage to Samber but also modernises the tale to carry a more emancipatory message. While Samber’s translation reflects the working conditions of Grub Street writers and acculturation of Perrault’s fairy tale in Protestant England, Carter gives it a feminist twist as she turns it into a “fable of the politics of experience”. She would later rewrite it as “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost” (1987), this time using Manheim’s English translation of the Grimms’ “Aschenputtel” as a starting point.

Translation Epistemology: Implied and Expressed

The starting point for determining the nature of translation epistemology, which develops in parallel to the philosophical theory of cognition, is to distinguish an internal epistemology that permeates the field of translation communication – one of the varieties of verbal textual communication. Its goals are cognitive and exploratory. Cognition refers to the essence of translational communication, exploration refers to the forms differentiating this type of communication. I define translation as the interlingual re-editing of a ready text; and in the space of textual communication it generates seven fundamental components: 1. foreign-language originals or foreign-language translations, 2. mental translations (paratexts), 3. complete translations, 4. fragmentary translations, 5. translation-like structures, 6. translational reflections, and 7. translational fantasies. In this area the epistemology of translation is equivalent to the documentalist’s epistemology. For the translator, any textual structure, subjected to interlingual re-editing, becomes a document as well as a task. In the process of translation, cognitive activity is intertwined with praxeological one, the acquisition of knowledge is combined with the improvement of the craft of translation, the concurrence of cognition and skill prevails. The whole epistemological activity of translators and translation scholars, implicit and explicit, consists in the fact that the translator repeats the hypothetical path of the original author, while the translation scholar repeats bot the hypothetical path of the translator and the hypothetical path of the original author.

Singer-Songwriters’ Song Poems and Translation: A Literature Review of English and Polish Sources

The article presents a review of English and Polish sources on the translation of song poems, with a special focus on the studies featuring at least basic methodological and theoretical proposals. The selection of sources serves two goals. Firstly, to enable readers interested in researching song translation access to the key texts. Secondly, given the rapidly growing interest in studies on song translation and the institutional recognition of the topic in the last two decades (see the Introduction), the article provides an accessible overview to other readers, interested in a general state of the art in a relatively new sub- domain of translation studies. The structure of the article follows two principles. The texts are discussed chronologically, starting with the earliest, short studies looking into song translation (1915–1921), then investigating the developments in academic thinking on the subject in the latter half of the 20th century, and concluding with an overview of the book-length publications and complete theoretical models proliferating in the 21st century. Secondly, the main part of the article follows a comparative approach. Polish sources are discussed in the context of their Anglophone counterparts. The article points to ideas shared by texts published decades apart and those whose authors, surprisingly, did not seem to have read the earlier works. Short summaries of the subsequent sections of the article and its concluding part strive also to shed some light on the position of the aforementioned texts and models within general translation studies. The reviewed sources are shown in the context of their explicit and implicit theoretical assumptions and consequences, such as untranslatability, shifting criteria of equivalence, the semantic dominant, the creative role of the translator, the ambiguous distinctions between translation and adaptation or travesty, and even translational “losses,” “semantic fidelity,” or instrumentalisation of the subject of translation cum music as a useful metaphor enabling studies in the spirit of New Humanities, outside the paradigms of translation, literary, and linguistic studies.

Between Heaven and Hell: Roman Kołakowski’s Poetry and His Translations of The Tiger Lillies

Songs of The Tiger Lillies, a “punk cabaret” group from London, entered the Polish- speaking culture mostly through the translations by Roman Kołakowski. Translation formed just one of many fields of artistic activity of Kołakowski, who was also a poet, a songwriter, a performer, and a theatre director. There exists, however, a striking contrast between the style of the Kołakowski’s own oeuvre and his translation choices. His poetry is mostly religious, patriotic, marked by a solemn tone and elevated register, while The Tiger Lillies delight in ridicule, irony, and perversion, mocking religion in an almost blasphemous way. The paper is an attempt at analysing this contrast and searching for its assumed sources. The target texts are found to be marked by significant semantic and stylistic modifications when compared to the original songs. Amplification of religious tropes and of negative views on modern society is identified as the main form of the translator’s interventions. Based on the comparison of Kołakowski’s translations with his own poetry, it is posited that their ostensible discrepancy may be explained by perceiving the translations as a subsidiary field of artistic expression, where the translator pursues his interests in grimmer aspects of morality and society, expressing them in a form that would not be coherent with his own poetry. Consequently, Kołakowski’s translations of The Tiger Lillies’ songs are considered appropriations in a sense that the translational choices are directed by the translator’s own interests, ideological stance, and sensibilities, rather than by any attempted equivalence with the source texts. It is to be hoped that the paper will form an in itation to further investigations of translational agency in the field of song translation.

Katherine Mansfield – the Translator of Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Judges

In 2014 Edinburgh University Press published the third volume of Katherine Mansfield’s “Collected Works” – The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield – which included all her translations, not only those of the works by A. Kuprin, A. Chekhov and F. Dostoyevsky, but for the first time also fragments of The Judges (Sędziowie) by Stanisław Wyspiański. The article explains a possible genesis of this translation, connected with the person of Florian Sobieniowski, who acquainted Mansfield with the work of the Polish playwright. The influence of Wyspiański on Mansfield was considerable at the time and might have been instrumental in her decision to undertake the translation already in 1909, or perhaps later, around 1912, when John Middleton Murry, the editor of Rhythm, decided to devote a whole issue of the magazine to the work of the Polish author. The translation may have also been done in 1917, the year entered on the manuscript by Murry, Mansfield’s husband and the editor of her work after the writer’s death. Mansfield did not know Polish, so she used the German translation of Sędziowie (Gericht) by Kasimir Różycki as a reference. Her translation, however, more faithful to the original, goes beyond the German text, which is a prose summary of the play. To show the quality of Mansfield’s translation, the article compares the solutions adopted by each translator to render the meaning of the same fragments of the play. Mansfield’s version suggests a close collaboration with Sobieniowski to find the rhythm, sound and meaning of the original, a pattern of work which she fully developed in her later translating collaboration with Samuel Koteliansky.

(State)holders of Shakespeare: Czesław Miłosz and Roman Brandstaetter as Translators of Shakespeare Dramas in the Polish People’s Republic

The paper aims to shed light on the relationship between Shakespeare, his translators, and the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The case studies of Czesław Miłosz and Roman Brandstaetter will serve to illustrate both the artistic and supportive function of their translation endeavours completed under the patronage of the communist state. By delving into the rich archival material (published as well as unpublished), I would like to focus on the political and social circumstances that determined Miłosz’s and Brandstaetter’s routes towards translating Shakespeare.

* Artykuł powstał w oparciu o wyniki badań przeprowadzonych w ramach finansowanego przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki projektu badawczego Repozytorium polskich przekładów dramatów Williama Shakespeare’a w XX i XXI wieku: zasoby, strategia i recepcja (NCN Opus 14, 2017/27/B/HS2/00853).

Report from the Battlefield: How to Translate Battle Descriptions in the Mahābhārata

This article discusses the problem of scene construal in translation, based on a selected description of the battle scene in the Mahābhārata. It is an old Indian epic (c. 400 BCE–400 CE), the greatest epic of mankind (c. 100,000 stanzas), composed in Sanskrit, most likely orally, and certainly distributed in this way. Its main theme is the war between related families. In Indology, descriptions of battles have been treated as conventional because of their orality, however, a closer analysis shows their well- thought-out structure.

The article discusses examples of zooming-in/out strategy (Langacker 2005) as one of the methods of active scene building. I show how the authors of the Mahābhārata construed doubly dynamic scenes in which both the content of the description (i.e. the fight) and the description itself is dynamic, reflecting the narrator’s movement. I also discuss the difficulties it presents to the Polish translator and consider the extent to which Polish inflection allows for a similar construal, thus meeting the translation requirements proposed by Tabakowska (1993). My hypothesis is that in many cases such doubly dynamic scenes can be successfully reflected in Polish, as opposed to an English translation (Cherniak 2008–9), thus preserving the extraordinary value of the original.

How to Translate“the Great”? Polish Translators and the Masters of French Classicism: A Review of Michał Bajer’s Klasycyzm. Przekład. Prestiż (2020)

Michał Bajer’s book offers an interesting approach to older translations. The author discusses Polish renderings of Corneille’s and Racine’s tragedies in the broadly defined Enlightenment (1740–1830). He looks at the translations from three perspectives: analysing changes at the level of rhetoric, at the level of poetics, and examining the paratextual influences, i.e., the critics’ statements with regard to both original texts and translations. The discourse is set in a historical, literary, and social context, in which the French playwrights appear as models of the classicist perfection of style, an object of imitation, which, however, undergoes constant negotiation on the part of the translators. The book proposes an interesting combination of literary, philological, and sociological tools to create a multi-layered picture of the Polish reception of the two authors.

Jean Ward, 2020. The Between-Space of Translation: Literary Sketches, Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego.

Translation, Literature, and Being “In-between”

The article is a review of the recent book by Jean Ward on Polish-English literary contacts through translation. The book contains several essays describing specific translation situations. The reviewer appreciates particularly the sensitivity with which the author interprets the texts she chooses in their cultural and metaphysical contexts. She also emphasises the accessibility and personal tone of Jean Ward’s academic writing.

Borys Pasternak, 2021. Szkice, wybór i przeł. Seweryn Pollak, red. Katarzyna Gędas, Piotr Mitzner, Żaneta Nalewajk, Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

Thousands of Other Secrets

The article discusses the first critical edition of Seweryn Pollak’s translations of Boris Pasternak’s essays (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2021). The collection prepared by Katarzyna Gędas, Piotr Mitzner, and Żaneta Nalewajk invites its readers to develop a multifocal reading that attends simultaneously to (1) the complex historical, social, political and economic factors involved in the production of translations and its relationship to reading communities (both in Soviet Russia and in the Polish People’s Republic), (2) Pasternak’s personal and creative biography, (3) Pasternak’s views on the tasks of art, literature and artistic translation, (4) the history of the Shakespearean translations in Russian, (5) modernist concepts of literary translation, (6) the essayistic and translational legacy of Seweryn Pollak, and, last but not least, (7) Pollak’s unpublished archives. Particularly the last of the mentioned research areas leaves a sense of insufficiency, incompleteness and regret in the reader’s mind. As sadly reported by the editors of the collection, Pollak’s archives have not yet been duly classified and examined, despite their compelling importance for the history of Polish literary translation and translation studies. The translator’s manuscripts remain scattered across various institutions and still await sustained scholarly attention and coordinated elaboration in a search for their secrets.

“The Task of the Translator” in the Anthropocene. Today’s Role of Translation in the Light of Ecopoetics and Speculative Realism

According to the 2014 UCL report on communicating climate change, a new social contract is necessary to save the biosphere, challenging us not only to provide commentary on scientific data, but also to rethink the categories framing the relationship between humanity and the natural environment. The former is related to translation insofar as it regards the development of accounts that convey conclusions from natural sciences in rhetorically impactful ways. The latter defines “the task of the translator” in the Anthropocene – to draw from Walter Benjamin – as the effort to develop, in processes of translation, more self-conscious metaphors of inhabiting the Earth. A special role would be played in this area by literature, especially the kind that foregrounds environmentally-aware linguistic invention capable of overcoming the persisting dualism of nature and culture. The aim of this article is to sketch a theoretical framework for such an understanding of translation on the basis of ground-breaking research in the fields of translation studies (Michael Cronin, Kobus Marais), ecopoetics (Julia Fiedorczuk, Gerardo Beltrán), and philosophical criticisms of anthropocentricism formulated within the post-humanities and speculative realism (Bruno Latour, Catherine Malabou). To illustrate these claims, the article invokes poems by Alice Oswald, Sinéad Morrissey (translated by Magda Heydel) and Forrest Gander (translated by Julia Fiedorczuk). These translators are tasked with reconstructing – to borrow Benjamin’s idea – a “pure language” understood here as an expressive absolute that defies anthropocentric limitations. Accommodation of various languages, including non-human ones (as biosemiotics suggests), could thus streamline the development of a new social contract or “constitution” (as Latour terms it) that would redefine (or re-translate) the social and the natural.

Barthes in Japan, Poststructuralism in Poland. Remarks on the Polish Translation of L’Empire des signes

The aim of the paper is to present the vital differences in the level of intelligibility and cohesion between L’Empire des signes and its Polish translation Imperium znaków (1999). The excerpts discussed in the article represent the key features and phenomena characteristic of Japan or more precisely the contrast that Barthes draws between Japan and France, the East and the West. The analysis of the examples concerning i.e. the rules of ideographic writing, the nature of haiku and cuisine proves that – as a result of grammatical misreadings on the part of the translator – the Polish translation often blurs Barthes’s precise descriptions, misrepresents the image of East and West emerging from the book and distorts the author’s subtle theoretical project. The paper also outlines the relationship between the mistakes present in Imperium znaków and the stereotype of poststructuralist writing in Poland around the time the translation was made.

* Artykuł powstał w ramach projektu „Tłumaczenie dyskursów teoretycznych w humanistyce polskiej przełomu XX I XXI wieku” (numer 2017/25/N/HS2/01585) finansowanego przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki. Autorka uzyskała również środki finansowe w ramach finansowania stypendium doktorskiego z Narodowego Centrum Nauki (numer 2018/28/T/HS2/00514).

Odżytek – A Forgotten Term of Polish Cultural Sciences

Edward Burnett Tylor’s (1832–1917) Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, one of the most important books in the history of anthropology, was published in two volumes in 1871. The Polish translation, published between 1896 and 1898 (t. 1–2) was based on the third, revised English version (vol. 1–2: 1891). It was made by Zofia Antonina Kowerska (1871–1946) and published under the title Cywilizacja pierwotna; badania rozwoju mitologji, filozofji, wiary, mowy, sztuki i zwyczajów. Jan Aleksander Karłowicz (1836–1903) was responsible for the realisation of the project.

Actualising in the linguistic and cultural context, Tylor’s terminology became one of the fundaments of cultural theory reflection. In this paper I explore the problem of translation of chosen terms introduced by Tylor, namely survival and revival. The former (Polish: przeżytek) proved crucial for the evolutionistic thought and it is directly associated with it. As for the latter, however, modern Polish readers of Tylor’s writings, as well as the authors of textbooks on the history of cultural sciences, fail to notice its terminological character. On the basis of a comparative analysis of excerpts from Primitive Culture and Cywilizacja pierwotna, I argue that the word revival has only been terminologized on the English academic ground (being complementary to the term survival), while in Polish tradition/Polish ground it has failed to become part of specialist language and has ultimately fallen into oblivion.

A Translation Critic Thinks about Paintings (Selected Parallels Between Bolesław Leśmian’s Poetry and Visual Arts)

The paper is intended as an example of translation criticism that accounts for intersemiotic aspects of translation. The author presents parallels – understood as associative potential (non-obligatory for translation) – between texts of the Polish modernist poet Bolesław Leśmian and certain works of art, and gauges the presence of analogical potential in translations of the poems into English, Russian and Czech. Three visual analogies to the poems are explored: the motif of a window open into the world in German Romantic painting, C.D. Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains and images of Ophelia in Pre- Raphaelite art. In the course of the analysis the author attempts to show the advantages of the proposed approach in terms of it being conducive to realising functions ascribed to translation criticism.

Author as Translator’s Property? Frank O’Hara, Piotr Sommer and the (Translational) Criticism

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between the author of an original work and the translator (and the target culture) not in a ‘traditional’ valuation that places the signatory of the work in the original language higher, but precisely from a reversed perspective. A case in point is the translation relationship between Frank O’Hara and Piotr Sommer, which has so far been analysed not from a translationist or philological perspective, but on the basis of the specificity of the reception of translations in the literary life of the 1980s and 1990s. The text therefore aims to examine the character that Sommer gave to O’Hara and the image of this character in the Polish reception, which will allow us to answer the question – can an author become “property” of a translator?

On the Translation of Press Texts from the Critical Perspective

Researchers concentrating on the media discourse observe the need to approach translated press texts from the critical perspective, also taking into consideration their status and criteria of reliable evaluation. From the point of view of the specificity and degree of translation difficulty, these texts seem interesting and difficult due to linguistic factors. Besides, they are generally diverse and, in the translation process, they may undergo significant changes (not necessarily because of the translator’s interpretation). However, they are infrequently subjected to critical evaluation, being placed on the peripheries of translation studies.

The difficulties which researchers investigating the press discourse must (or would have to) face are therefore considerable. Like translators, researchers encounter problems of message condensation (imposed by editors), the media reality presented in the text and the points of view. Researchers must also analyze the function of the translated text, taking into consideration the reader’s perspective, which, as a rule, governs the translator’s decisions. Researchers should also assess the aesthetic values of the text, taking into account its multimodality. All these issues are discussed on the basis of Polish translations of Russian press texts.

The case study of selected texts and their translations illustrates problems resulting from the lack of clearly established criteria for translation criticism and the rapid ageing of information contained in press texts. Translation criticism facilitates reflection on the quality and value of translated press texts and appreciation of rendering meanings.

Peter (Peter) Lachmann’s Life in the Space of Translation

The article discusses Przemysław Chojnowski’s research on the work of Peter (Piotr) Lachmann, a German-Polish author born in pre-war Gliwice (Gleiwitz). Lachmann consistently thematizes the experience of the borderland, describing his existence between two languages and cultures, that is, a “life in translation”. The culmination of Chojecki’s long-time research is the monograph Liminalność i bycie „pomiędzy” w twórczości Petera (Piotra) Lachmanna. Studium literacko-kulturowe (Kraków, 2020), which is the main subject of analysis in this article. This work situates itself in the domain of modern anthropological-cultural comparative studies, clearly and convincingly demonstrating the heuristic potential of such approach. Chojnowski’s book is not only a mine of information about the work of Peter (Piotr) Lachmann, but also an invitation to discuss the broader issues of borderland and cultural bivalence, usually associated with ambiguous national identification.

Experimental Translation: Techniques, Forms, Metalanguages

The aim of the article is to introduce a new series of studies on theoretical, methodological, analytical, and interpretive problems of “translation anomalies”. Functioning as a medium of artistic innovation and creative cognition, experimental literary translation has a laboratory meaning both for translators and translation, literary and cultural scholars. It allows to highlight the fundamental problems of artistic creation, the theory of literature, the theory of artistic translation and the theory of intercultural communication. On the one hand, translation experiments confirm the necessity of using interdisciplinary research instruments; on the other hand, they show translation as a fundamental metaphor that describes the innovative and dynamic nature of technology.

A (Non)Experimental Translation of Electronic Literature. On (Un)Repeatable Translation of Loss of Grasp

The article focuses on (Nie)panowanie, the Polish translation of Loss of Grasp by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert. The main part of the study consists of a detailed report of translator’s work made in 2019 and her experience is compared with the experiences of translators of ten other language versions of the work. This study is accompanied by some more general reflection on problems of e-literature translation,

especially in the context of experimental translation theory. Two main questions the author deals with are: should e-lit translation always be seen as an experimental one, and what does it, in practice, mean to translate interactive and multimedia work? The last part of the article offers a broader perspective on the field: reflections on trans-platform translation as a kind of digital literature preservation and on the problems of platform liability or programming obsolescence.

Tekst powstał w ramach stypendium NAWA w programie im. Bekkera (numer umowy PPN/BEK/2019/1/00264/U/00001).

Texton Telling. Distributed Translation Based on Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort’s Sea and Spar Between Generator (2010)

The article presents challenges of translating poetry generators in multi-authorial, creative collaboration and within the context of understanding text as process. Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort’s Sea and Spar Between is in many respects a translational challenge that in some languages might seem an impossible task. Polish, our target language, imposes some serious constraints: one-syllable words become disyllabic or multisyllabic; kennings have different morphological, lexical, and grammatical arrangement, and most of the generative rhetoric of the original (like anaphors) must take into consideration the grammatical gender of Polish words. As a result, the JavaScript code, instructions that accompany the JavaScript file, and arrays of words that this poetry generator draws from, needed to be expanded and rewritten. Moreover, in several crucial points of this rule-driven work, natural language forced us to modify the code. In translating Sea and Spar Between, the process of negotiation between the source language and the target language involves more factors than in the case of traditional translation. Strickland and Montfort read Dickinson and Melville and parse their readings into a computer program (in itself a translation, or port, from Python to JavaScript) which combines them in almost countless ways. This collision of cultures, languages, and tools becomes amplified if one wants to transpose it into a different language. This transposition involves the original authors of Sea and Spar Between, the four original translators of Dickinson and Melville into Polish, and us, turning into a multilayered translational challenge, something we propose to call a distributed translation. While testing the language and the potential of poetry translation in the digital age, the experiment – we hope – has produced some fascinating and thought-provoking poetry.

taH pagh taHbe: Shakespearean Experiment in Translation

The article discusses experimental translation on the example of intralingual translation in Play On! Translation project accompanying the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and intersemotic/intermedial translation in OMGShakespeare series and Star Trek-related texts. These are approached as exercises in post-translation as defined by Edwin Gentzler in his volume on the subject.

Translating Parody as a Domain of Experiment

The author explores the possibilities of parody translation, based on a 1933 Polish literary example. Poet Julian Tuwim imitates with a vengeance the highly idiosyncratic diction of Bolesław Leśmian, including the latter’s signature trait, neologisms, while styling the piece as a supposed rewriting of a familiar children’s rhyme (folk song) about a kitten. This second hypotext is diagnosed as ancillary and it is argued that a translation of the ‘X as would have been written by Y’ parody should harness a replacement of X, functional for the target culture. As an experiment, possible substitutes are suggested for the Russian and Anglo-Saxon cultures, correspondent with the languages into which Leśmian, the parodied poet, has been quite extensively rendered. The author discusses factors conditioning the translatability of parody, including reception in the target context. The analysis closes with a call for translations. One such response to the challenge is appended.

Translating Linguistic Poetry: Mario Martín Gijón’s Rendicción in Polish, English, and French

The lyrical work of Spanish poet Mario Martín Gijón is linguistic in the extreme. Not only does he juxtapose similar-sounding words, but he fuses them graphically into one, with parentheses containing a word fragment [me(re)ce, entreg(u)arme] or two fragments separated by a slash [conju(r/nt)os, in(v/f)ierno]; he also uses enjambment within words (cor / reo, tarde / seosa). These techniques result in a multiplication of readings, which constitutes a major challenge for translators.

Terence Dooley, Miguel Ángel Real and the author of this essay (here in the dual role of translator and researcher) translated Martín Gijón’s poetry into English, French and Polish, respectively. Each translator had at their disposal language matter of very distinct properties. The translator into French was able to take advantage of the largely convergent Romance roots, which made it possible to recreate many word games on a one-to-one scale or with only minimal changes. English offered such a possibility much less frequently; Polish – only once. Therefore, the English and Polish translations are re-creations to a much larger extent than the French one. However, the significant differences between each of the versions stem not only from the properties of the target languages, but also from the different approaches of the translators.

From Jądro ciemności via Serce mroku towards Serce ciemności or on Jacek Dukaj’s Translatory Experiments

The article examines two works by Jacek Dukaj Serce mroku and Serce ciemności. The former is Dukaj’s short story inspired by Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness while the latter is an experimental translation of it. The author argues that in both cases Dukaj uses similar methods for experiential transference. The techniques comprise amplification, explication and condensation, among others. Dukaj called his form of translation „transfiguration or transfusion” whereas the author proposes for this the term transcreation. Transcreation is an aesthetic reinterpretation of the original work suited to a new target language audience. In other words, it is an authorial version of Heart of Darkness which leaves no space for interpretative indeterminacy.

Putting Action into Words: Intersemiotic Surtitles in Modernised Opera Productions

Since their debut over operatic stages in the early 1980s, surtitles have become an important part of the audiovisual translation field. It is also, among others, thanks to them that opera is currently regaining its popularity – they make opera productions more accessible and audience-friendly. Surtitles can also considerably shape an opera production, especially when it is modernised. Modernising operatic productions is nowadays one of the most popular trends in major opera houses, though it is not free of many challenges. Libretti are always sung in original, but bringing the action a few centuries ahead may mean that the original text does not correspond to what the viewers can see on the stage. In such cases surtitles may serve as a bridge between the original and stage design. Recently, some opera houses have started treating surtitles as an integral part of their productions and sometimes the whole translation follows the modernised production both semantically and stylistically. The original for such translations is then not just the libretto, but the whole production and surtitles become intersemiotic. This clash between different messages is the source of innovations, and surtitles, which closely follow modernised productions may be considered to be a translational experiment.

Many Voices in Retranslation. A Review of Retranslating Joyce for the 21st Century

This article is a review of Jolanta Wawrzycka and Erika Mihálycsa’s edited volume Retranslating Joyce for the 21st Century (European Joyce Studies 30, Brill/ Rodopi, 2021). It discusses a number of core issues raised in the book, starting from the observation that 21st century translations of Joyce’s work are by necessity retranslations, and that this necessarily makes them qualitatively different from first translations. The chapters discuss many features of retranslation in the context of Ulysses in particular, ranging from the notion of retranslation hypothesis and comparisons between versions to issues of dealing with many voices and the creativity this requires; the necessity of contextualising the different versions; and the roles of the retranslator, reviser and editor. The review also makes some suggestions for future research on retranslating Joyce.

Article translated by: Zofia Ziemann

All Colours of Translation

The article discusses the collective book Prismatic Translation edited by Matthew Reynolds (Cambridge: Legenda, 2019) in the light of the history of optical metaphors for translation and recent modernism studies. Tracing the conceptual genealogy of the term and the subtleties of its theoretical usage, the reviewer argues that “prismatic translation” remains an impressive though still excessively ambiguous translation studies metaphor that has not yet solidified into a precise and operative theoretical tool. Notwithstanding these objections, Prismatic Translation can be considered an excellent reference for professionals and students engaged in literary and cultural translation studies as well as comparative modernism studies.

The Culture of Translation and Criticism. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Translation Models in the Piotr de Bończa Bukowski’s Studies

Friedrich Schleiermacher’s philosophic-philological reflection forms the creative foundation of modern translation science. It creates spaces for constructing more and more inspirations in literature and culture through artistic translation also in the 21st century. In his monograph of the German theologian and translator Friedrich Schleiermacher, Piotr de Bończa Bukowski presents Schleiermacher’s views on the exceptional importance of disseminating world literature through translation, various aspects of the choice of text and translator, translation thoughts and the requirements Schleiermacher set for literary criticism, and translation criticism in particular. The following article focuses on the concept of the thoughts of the German Romanticist and on the selection of research guideposts in the reading of the Polish comparative translator.

Translation Criticism as a Dialogue. The Hermeneutic Model

In this article, I reflect on the productivity of hermeneutic translation criticism, focusing on literary translation. I pose the question whether the hermeneutic mode of translation analysis and evaluation – largely based on the premises of the Romantic art critique – is capable of making a significant contribution to the contemporary discussion on the functional model of translation criticism. According to my argument, the source of the productivity (and functionality) of translation criticism is dialogicity –a feature that can be considered fundamental in the case of hermeneutics. Following the dialogical hermeneutics of F. Schlegel, F. Schleiermacher and H.-G. Gadamer, as well as H.R. Jauß’s aesthetics of reception, I formulate some major postulates of a hermeneutic critique of literary translations. This criticism is of an interrogative nature: it finds and poses questions that are answered by the examined statements. The critic’s questions include those about the original and to the original, about the translator and to the translator, as well as about the reader and to the reader. Finally, I show cases in which a critical dialogue around literary translations crystallizes. It is a dialogue that can be shaped and interpreted by the postulated hermeneutic translation criticism.

Exploring Quicksand. Translation Criticism and Literary Criticism in the Face of the Petrification of Contemporary World Literature

In contemporary discussions on the condition and further perspectives of World Literature, the mood of disappointment and disillusionment seems to dominate. Reservations concern World Literature in its complexity – its canon, potential multilingualism, existing hierarchies and often contradictory conceptualizations. The crisis of World Literature is not, however, the result of a scandal, but rather of many years of progressive petrification resulting in actual monolingualism, formulaic narrative patterns, consolidation of the center-periphery hierarchy and abandonment of the real pluralism of interpretation. One of the areas that seems to meet the challenge of World Literature is undoubtedly translation criticism. Therefore, the aim of the article is to reflect on how contemporary theories and conceptualizations of World Literature as well as its far-fetched utopia can benefit from translation criticism’s input. The article also argues that translation criticism may become a field that dynamizes contemporary World Literature and restores its reordering or even revolutionary potential.

Retranslation as Criticism, or the New Benito Cereno

The article focuses on my translation of Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno, published recently in a volume entitled Nowele i opowiadania (PIW, 2020), the work of eight translators into Polish. The volume contains new attempts at texts translated forty years earlier by Krystyna Korwin-Mikke; also featured is her own, newly revised translation of Melville’s classic – Bartleby, the Scrivener. Finding myself authoring a retranslation for the first time, I became intrigued by the affect accompanying such a ‘belated’ arrival at the text – not within a long, eminent ‘series’ (in Edward Balcerzan’s understanding of the term), but where only one previous, more or less canonical translation exists. Taking as my starting point Balcerzan’s terminology as well as Anna Legeżyńska’s notion of the ‘shared word’ (“słowo wspólne”), I employ the concept of the translators’ agon, developed from Harold Bloom’s ideas by Kaisa Koskinen and Outi Paloposki (2015). On the basis of several examples from the field of Polish translations, and concentrating on the rhetorics of paratextual material, I briefly examine the positions that a second translator – fated to participate in an agonistic relation – may take with regard to his precursor; my examples here are three renowned practitioners: MichałKłobukowski, Krystyna Rodowska and Maciej Świerkocki. Because my own experience is bound up with translation practice to a considerably larger degree than with its theoretical aspects, the heart of the article is an analysis of particular strategies in both of the Polish translations of Benito Cereno. I focus on issues such as nomenclature, narrative perspective, grammatical gender, as well as conventional and idiosyncratic metaphors. Exploring my own agonistic relation with Krystyna Korwin-Mikke, I attempt to determine the extent to which I have managed to avoid getting caught up in the affect produced by the uncomfortable yet inspiring consciousness of the first translator’s voice. The article is an extension of the critical gesture which I consider my retranslation, in itself, to be. Emphasizing the differences in our approach, I also try to embrace what is shared, and to acknowledge my indebtedness to the precursor.

Consolidating the Universe. Translation Criticism among Contexts of Translational Reception of H.P. Lovecraft’s Poetry in Poland

The article discusses the influence of translator’s criticism and other extra-textual factors on the translations of poetry by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Since the very first renditions of his Fungi from Yuggoth sonnets by Jerzy Płudowski and Leszek Lachowiecki included in two anthologies of horror poetry, Polish versions of Lovecraft’s verses have always been modified in the process of interlinguistic transfer according to either sole preferences of the publishing houses and evaluations proposed by critics of the English originals or the translators’ reception of the previous Polish variants. In most cases these modifications resulted from more or less stereotypical visions of the American writer held by the translators and were aimed at establishing links to his other works already published in Poland (short stories, essays, letters). Thus effects of the semantic shifts, detectable also in the latest variants by Krzysztof Azarewicz and Mateusz Kopacz, can be referred to as consolidating the universe of the writer’s biographical legend and literary works which is more coherent in the Polish target texts than in the originals.

The Revenge of Triglav and Svarog? Fan-Generated Translation Criticism of the English Version of the Comic Book Kajko i Kokosz

The article discusses the role of fan communities as critics of translated texts. It shows how fans’ active involvement as prosumers in the production of translational (mock) critical content can affect the promotion and distribution of the official, commercial translation. The case in point is a fan-generated and fan-mediated reception of the English rendition of an album from a classic Polish Kajko i Kokosz comic series. First published in 1975, Szkoła latania (Flying School) is part of Poland’s shared popcultural idiom, since recently also part of the primary school reading canon. Its first English translation (2018) made available in a pre-release to the comic’s fans led to a number of controversies, ranging from humorous internet-mediated discussions of an editing mistake to an open petition to the publisher to preserve in translation the comic’s cultural specificity. The article sets off by discussing the profile of the translation critic emerging from leading models of translation criticism to move on to sketch new developments and the role of fandom and fan-generated criticism. Arguing that currently translations of speculative fiction into and out of English in the Polish context can be considered vulnerable translations, prone to fans’ critical scrutiny, it focuses on Flying School and its fan reception which lead to the prolonged postponement of the publication of the official translation. The article also provides an analysis of the pre-release commercial translation to provide background for the fan criticism. It shows the clash of the translator’s consistent domesticating strategy with fans’ expectations of an exoticizing translation, preserving the Slavic character of the series which raises the question of the translation brief and publisher-translator relationship.

Translation Criticism in Cyberspace – New Opportunities and Challenges (on Polish Translations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita)

The ongoing digitization of the literary heritage together with the growing competition between publishing houses have led to a situation where translation series of works considered as canonical changed their form of extending from diachronic, linear development in time to synchronic “explosion” of parallel texts, which task is to win readers-consumers with advantages of novelty, distinctness, “inventiveness.” Such translations gain a new function – they become a marketing tool for publishing houses. In my opinion the newest retranslations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is one of the most interesting examples of the process described above. In recent years, new Polish versions of this novel have been published at a dizzying pace (five new translations between 2015 and 2018) and in overwhelming welth (five editions were published in four different translations in 2018 alone). The new translations of Bulgakov’s novel evoke a lively response from the audience. All sorts of analysis, comparisons and opinions have been published not only in scientific journals, but also in daily newspapers, internet forums and in comments in online bookstores. In the Internet, professional translation criticism coexists with private opinions of Internet users (often based on non-literary factors) and with marketing content, advertisements, and blurbs deliberately formed as reviews. In this paper I would like to discuss new roles of professional translation criticism in circumstances described above, analyse its presence in the Internet and try to define its new objects. On the one hand, its voice should be loud and clear enough to be heard in the virtual chaos of texts, on the other hand – persuasive and lucid enough to help readers to become aware of decisions they make by choosing a particular translation and perceive the literary value of texts hidden behind attractive covers of new editions.

Backwoods of Language. The Modernist Prose of Djuna Barnes in Polish Translation

No sooner than after eighty years since the moment of the original publication of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood was Polish literary market enriched by a translation of one of the most peculiar novels of the Euro-American modernism. Marcin Szuster’s translation under Polish title Ostępy nocy has already managed to earn much praise and also some prizes and open a first Polish discussion about the work of the eccentric American writer. The paper’s focus is to analyze the Polish translation of Nightwood with a special interest in Barnes’s style as it becomes a central character in the novel which connects, according to feminist critics (K. Kaivola, S. Benstock), to its emancipatory potential. In my paper I follow a claim that the complex style of this prose writing is a (conscious) manifestation of a woman’s voice (as an affect), behind which one can discover a body – one that experiences and is experienced (J. Taylor). The body, both a structural and a rhetorical category in feminist criticism, in Barnes’s prose can be seen as an element organizing time and space – therefore, ambiguity of her terms and complexity of style are forming a true translation challenge. Marcin Szuster as a translator needs to follow Barnes’s “distinctive point of view,” which is a “feminine” one and distanced by the length of gender, experience and time.

Jerzy Święch, 2021. Z historii i poetyki przekładu, Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej.

The article reviews the recent book of Jerzy Święch (Z historii i poetyki przekładu, 2021) as an excellent document of the history of Polish structuralist translation studies. Contrary to what the author modestly suggests, Święch’s theoretical statements and historical readings of artistic translations are of much more than solely archival or museal interest. The book contributes to ongoing debates about the ways of studying and writing the history of literary translation in necessary conjunction with, and at the same time independently of, the history of national literatures. Święch’s studies invariably serve as guidelines for analyses of artistic translations in the light of historical poetics and the sociology of literature. Many of the biographical and sociological issues raised by the Lublin scholar resonate with recent research tendencies in Translator Studies.

On the Polish Translation of Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione by Umberto Eco

The article contains a review of the translation of Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione by Umberto Eco (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2021) into Polish, authored by Jadwiga Miszalska and Monika Surma-Gawłowska. Notwithstanding the significant popularity of Eco’s literary and scholarly work in Poland, his influential volume of essays on translation was published in Polish almost twenty years after the original edition. In the first place, the review focuses on the translators’ approach to multilingualism and Italocentrism of Eco’s source text. It also addresses the issues of validity and actuality of Eco’s semiotic contribution to translation studies, by confronting it with recent trends in translation scholarship, especially with Kobus Marais’s bio-semiotic theory of translation.

Sherry Simon 2020. Miasta w przekładzie. Skrzyżowania języka i pamięci, przeł. Justyna Arabska, Magdalena Brodacka, Melania Chotyńska, Magda Heydel, Ewelina Jurczenia, Karolina Koprowska, Agata Skrzypek, Martyna Szczepaniak i Sylwia Więcek, pod redakcją naukową Magdy Heydel, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego.

 

City Communication Network: Sherry Simon’s Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory

The article reviews Sherry Simon’s seminal book Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (Routledge, 2012) recently rendered into Polish. The Canadian scholar combines urban studies with comparative literature, translation, translator and memory studies to provide insight into linguistic and cultural interactions in the “dual cities” of Calcutta, Trieste, Barcelona and Montreal. An attempt has been made to present Simon’s research against the backdrop of Translational Turn in the study of culture and the Cultural Turn in the study of translation.

The Tower of Babel or Ivory Tower? The Reception of Western Translation Research in Russian-language Translation Studies – a Reconnaissance

The aim of this paper is to survey what texts and authors representing Western translation studies have been translated into Russian over the last seven decades and to describe the dynamics of the emergence of these translations as well as possible agendas behind the choices. It also traces, on a partial corpus, to what extent Russian translation scholars tend to cite and quote Western ones. The findings lead to a tentative conclusion that so far TS knowledge has been transferred mainly by unfrequent references to original publications and by way of mediated accounts (reviews, textbook summaries), while translations of particular studies have only recently begun appearing on a wider scale, their impact as yet uncertain.

On the Contexts of One Translation (Ilya Erenburg and Bruno Jasieński)

Bruno Jasieński wrote his novel I Burn Paris after translating Ilya Erenburg’s Life and Death of Nikolay Kurbov. The paper analyses relationships between these two novels – their ideological and artistic parallels and polemics.

From Translator to Poet and Back: Adam Ważyk’s Translation Output as Part of Polish Literature

The article offers an analysis of Adam Ważyk’s translation work, particularly in the context of its influence on the shaping of contemporary Polish poetry. The author aims to showcase the impact of Ważyk’s translations on some of the recent developments within Polish literature; to this end, she employs the distinction between translatoras-envoy and translator-as-lawmaker, as proposed by Jerzy Jarniewicz. Ważyk is here seen as an example of a “lawmaker”, and compared to Piotr Sommer – another author influential within a similar audience. The author argues that in his original choice of what to translate, Ważyk was driven by a desire to project onto the Polish context – to reproduce in his native language – a set of poetic and social circumstances associated with the French avant-garde movement; finally it served the goal of making Ważyk’s own work more comprehensible to his Polish readers. At the turn of the 21st century a group of Polish poets who had expressed interest in Ważyk were also attracted to the work of poets translated by Ważyk; the influence of these foreign authors was thus mediated by Ważyk’s own work.

Performance of Exile: Poet-Translators in the Leningrad Underground

Literary translation during the Soviet period has been mostly analysed in terms of conforming to or resisting the dominant ideology. However, there were spaces where translation practices were to a certain extent free from this dichotomy, though excluded from the official literary field. The focus of the article is the particular condition of displacement or exile experienced by the underground poets who lived in Leningrad during the 1980s. The samizdat poet-translator plays the role of an exile, living on the fringes of the society and creating a network in the underground. The outcomes of this “performance of exile” are the translated texts, which show the handprints of the translator’s conditions. The article responds to Anthony Pym’s call for humanizing Translation History, and using the sociological tools developed in Translation Studies by Daniel Simeoni and Moira Inghilleri, it investigates the role of context, agent and text in the poetry translation practice of late samizdat.

* Artykuł powstał przy wsparciu Estońskiej Rady Badań Naukowych (grant PRG1206: “Translation in History, Estonia 1850–2010: Texts, Agents, Institutions and Practices”).

“Non-lieu, Trace, and Memory: Olga Tokarczuk’s Short Story “Numery” in Ksenia Starosielska’s Translation

The article offers an analysis of the Russian translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s 1989 short story “Numery” [Numbers]. Published in 2000 in the journal Innostrannaya Literatura, Ksenia Starosielska’s translation presented the future Nobel prize winner to Russian readers for the first time. The translation analysis is based on the categories of “non-lieu”, trace, and memory, which, within the interpretive paradigm adopted in the article, constitute a crucial meaning-making element of Tokarczuk’s short story.