Andrzej Pawelec

Traffi c Problems on the Bridge: Translation Studies, Cognitive Linguistics and Literary Criticism
In her monograph entitled A Cognitive Approach to Equivalence in Literary Translation.
Illustrated by an Analysis of Images of Women in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady and Its
Polish Translation Portret damy, Monika Linke claims that the discipline of translation
studies can be selected to become a bridge between linguistic and literary theories
of translation. Moreover, linguists and literary scholars can profi t from translation
studies as well. Such a claim that emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of research is
admirable; as is the claim that cognitive linguistics should be recommended to tackle
the problems and challenges of translation criticism. However, no interdisciplinary
approach should constitute an excuse for shortages in the knowledge of contributing
disciplines. Unfortunately, Linke’s presentation of the two theories of cognitive
linguistics: Lakoff’s metaphor theory and Langacker’s theory of grammar, abounds
in misunderstandings and mistakes. Moreover, the theoretical part does not prove
very useful in the monograph’s second part, which offers ten case studies focusing
on selected linguistic aspects of the passages chosen from Henry James’s Portrait of
a Lady and its Polish version. Linke’s ambitious aim to “facilitate the application of
cognitive linguistics to translation studies” has not been achieved.

I would like to suggest that the cognitive perspective on language, developed for over half a century, has been challenged in an unparalleled manner by Daniel Dor (2015). He points out that competing schools of linguistics (formalists, functionalists, pragmaticists) all share Chomsky’s original assumption that linguistics is part of Cognitive Science and language is primarily a mental entity. Dor proposes to rethink the status quo in linguistics from an alternative starting point: language is a social communication technology for the instruction of imagination. I believe that this confrontation with mentalism in language study may lead, in time, to a paradigm shift. I also point out – in the context of Charles Taylor’s latest (2016) book – that Dor’s social perspective on language has its limitations too.

Yitzhok Katzenelson’s Dos lid funem oysgehargetn yidishn folk – in Polish

Katzenelson’s Song of the Murdered Jewish People is widely recognized as one of the most significant literary documents of the Shoah. Hence, its very limited reception after WW2 is at first glance baffling. We provide the necessary historical background to explain why Katzenelson’s “Lament” was for several decades unwanted and why it still remains difficult to appropriate in translation. To show this in one particular context, we focus on the Polish translation by Jerzy Ficowski. We analyse selected examples of Ficowski’s justly praised poetic achievement to point out the limitations of his declared goal: “My intention was to make the translation invisible, to allow the murdered poet say again the same – but this time, in Polish” (Ficowski 1982: 11).

This article – based on a larger study (Pawelec 2009) – has two aims. The more limited one is to present network models proposed by Ronald Langacker and George Lakoff. I try to show that both ventures rest on manifestly different assumptions, contrary to the widespread view that they are convergent or complementary. Langacker’s declared aim is “descriptive adequacy”: his model serves as a global representation of linguistic intuitions, rooted in convention. Lakoff, on the other hand, offers a developmental model: a fairly general abstract schema is “imagistically” specified and transformed, while the more specific schemas serve as the basis for metaphorical transfers. My wider aim is to offer a preliminary assessment of theoretical justifications and practical potential of network models in lexical semantics.

Odpominanie języka: Charles Taylor o językowej naturze człowieka (Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016, ss. 352)

In this article, I want to put forward the following argument: Cognitive Linguistics – after a long hegemony of Chomskyan formalist linguistics – has offered models of language as “motivated” by general and prior cognitive abilities; as such it has been able to provide representations of a much wider range of linguistic phenomena (both grammatical and lexical); however, the “human face” of Cognitive Linguistics is that of a generic human being rather than that of actual people: members of particular social communities in which languages develop through “figuration” and “articulation”.

In this essay we offer a preliminary discussion of Biermann’s phenomenally successful rendering of Katsenelson’s elegy. First, we place Biermann’s attempt in a wider historical and biographical context to throw some light on his motivation to grapple with the text written in a language he did not know (Yiddish) and thus was forced to rely on a literal version provided by a native speaker. Second, we provide some examples from the work in question of Biermann’s more general attitude to translation, as epitomized by the Yiddish phrase he likes to quote: ‘fartaytsht un farbesert’ (translated and improved). We conclude that Biermann’s adaptation should be assessed first of all as an act of cross-cultural communication rather than according to the criteria of strictly textual equivalence.