Aleksandra Kamińska

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.

The article presents the challenges of dramatic adaptation through a case study: the translation of English surtitles for a Polish production based on Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. The play in question, 2008: Macbeth, was a highly stylized, bigbudget adaptation written and directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna. It is set in the modern day and contains text and scenes added by Jarzyna to comment on contemporary politics and military culture. The Polish he uses and that found in Barańczak’s translation that served as the source text for 2008: Macbeth feel more contemporary than Elizabethan English; therefore, the material written by Jarzyna is much closer to Barańczak’s “original” text than to Shakespeare’s. An additional challenge in writing the surtitles was the canonical status of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the audiences’ familiarity with this text. A translation focused on conveying Jarzyna’s artistic messages could thus alienate viewers who approach 2008: Macbeth as a foreign-language reworking of Shakespeare, rather than an original work. Applying common theoretical concepts, such as adaptation/translation, source/target, and textual/performative, the article examines the process and strategies employed in producing the English supertitles for 2008: Macbeth and the play’s reception in the U.S. and U.K.

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.

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.

Adaptation (hon’an) and translation (hon’yaku) of Shakespeare’s plays in Japan in the age of Modernization (the Meiji and Taishō periods, 1868–1912 and 1912–26, respectively) both constitute complex objects of study. A careful analysis of this apparently ambiguous cultural entity offers a glimpse into the wide-ranging interests that the Meiji literati displayed in inheriting and interpreting Shakespeare’s cultural heritage. In their recent review of Shakespeare’s reception and performance in Asia, Kennedy and Young (2010) distinguish the kinds of reception that Shakespearean canon received in Asian countries by means of three main strategies whose cultural significance varies greatly depending on the social and cultural context. These are: nationalist appropriation (specifically referring to China), colonial instigation (India), and intercultural revision. The authors seem to imply that, of these three, intercultural revision – the most innovative, referring to productions that adapt the text to foreign modes of performance – is not associated with any specific geographical space. Using this theoretical framework, aim to demonstrate how the kind of performances originating from this intercultural adaptation, and often giving the most impressive results in terms of visual inventions as well, defy time as well as location, and, in the case of Japan, may be traced back to the time when Shakespeare’s canon was first introduced, i.e. the Meiji Era (1868–1912). This would help to understand the conceptual and cultural basis for the constant efforts of Japanese directors involved in recent production of Shakespeare’s plays in the theatre and as well as films, or other more pop-culture oriented media; efforts, in fact, increasingly appreciated worldwide. In the works of Shakespeare’s first Japanese translators and critics, there is a shift from adaptation of western dramas (including Shakespeare), which was the most popular mode of staging Shakespeare’s works from the 1880s, to verbatim translations of his plays, which had virtually substituted any other means of adaptation by the first two decades of the 20th century. This shift clearly reflects the increasing awareness of Japanese intellectuals of the need to acknowledge the greatness of Shakespeare as a playwright as well as the importance of creating a new concept of modern Japanese drama upon the premise of giving relevance to the text and the author in more general terms. Adapting or translating Shakespeare’s plays in Japanese in the 19th and 20th century is an occasion for Meiji intellectuals to rethink completely the theatrical genre, redefining its borders and the overall value. In this respect a closer examination of critical essays by the renowned translators of Shakespeare, such as Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935) and Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) is a key strategy in order to assess Shakespeare’s pivotal role in the development of Japanese drama. We shall present, therefore, excerpts from diverse essays in order to tackle the fundamental question of the overall significance of Shakespeare’s reception in the cultural context of Modern Japan.

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 aim of this paper is to investigate diachronically the development of the notion of performability, one of the priorities of the stage dimension of translation, and the notions of time and place, which establish the relationship between a source text and its translation. It is in the dual perspective of the dramatic text as an element of both the literary and theatrical that performability and the notions of time and space acquire relevance in drama translation. Performability is a controversial term whose definition is elusive and changing according to specific historical times, although it subsumes unavoidable questions in drama translation, as many translation theorists have shown over the last thirty years (Bassnett-McGuire 1978, Bassnett 1998; Espasa 2000; Johnston 2004; Che Suh 2001; Espasa 2013). Thus, for Bassnett, performability cannot be “universally applied” (Bassnett1998: 98) as it is culturally determined. For Lefevere, performability is partly determined by what conforms with the theatrical and production systems (1992: 14–15). For Espasa, performability especially means ‘marketability’ (2000: 56). My contention is that, if performability has become an increasingly undefined notion, time and space, on the other hand, have played a crucial role in the reflections brought forward by many recent translation theorists and are the underlying notions of some of the most accomplished systematisations of drama translation. Pavis, in his semiotic approach, shows how time and place inevitably change in drama translation at each step of the translation process. From an intercultural perspective, Aaltonen similarly states that “the choice of a translation strategy… is linked with the spatially and temporally confined codes which through these strategies become represented in the discourse of the completed translations” (Aaltonen 2000: 45). Robert Lepage and Jatinder Verma use theterm ‘tradaptation’ to indicate a new form of re-writing from a non-Western perspective, in which time and place are totally transformed (Cameron 2000: 17). More recently, Perteghella in her descriptive-anthropological model of theatre translation implicitly refers to time and place when she sees some linguistic and performance practices as the ideology guiding the translator, who is influenced by “the historical period and its social and cultural milieu” (2004: 11) (emphasis mine).

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.

Challenges of translating cultural embeddedness in crime fiction: a picture from Croatia

The aim of the present study is to examine the specific features of translating crime fiction genre in Croatia in the 2000s. Frederic Jameson (qtd. in Rolls, Vuaille-Barcan & West-Sooby 2016) foregrounded the notion of crime fiction’s role as the new Realism due to the importance it places on historical and geographical specificity, and the social fabric of our daily lives. In line with this, an assumption could be made that the overvaluation of place in crime fiction may present a particular challenge in translation, not only in terms of translation strategies chosen by translators, but also in terms of preferable marketing strategies pursued by publishers and editors and the correspondence between them. The focus of this study is on the patterns of handling source-culture embeddedness, typical of this genre, in translation. The study examines how diverse agents (editors, translators and language revisers) involved in the production of translations of this genre interact and how their interaction influences the decisions on handling the genre’s embeddedness in a particular, source-culture, reality. As crime fiction novels are a highly popular translated genre in Croatia, crime fiction novels make a substantial portion of the production of the publishing sector. For the purposes of this study we have selected a number of crime fiction novels by several frequently translated authors (P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Michael Connelly) that have been published by Croatian publishers of diverse profiles, ranging from well-established publishers with long presence on the market to start-ups with a relatively short market life. The data analyzed include interviews with the agents involved (translators, editors and language revisers), peritext of these editions and analysis of selected textual segments.

* przełożyła Aleksandra Kamińska

The article focuses on the stageability of dramatic texts as a potential source of problems in translation. The problem is discussed using the example of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine – a play based on changeability and performability of gender identities. In her play, Churchill uses cross-casting to inscribe the gender of potential actors on the text, which needs to be considered by the translator of the play. In the article, Sophia Totzeva’s concept of theatrical potential is used to identify potential shifts conditioned by the play’s stageability.

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.