Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik

Bacon, Shakespeare and the Utopia of Justice

The article describes the functioning of “justice to come” in the English early modern culture in the light of Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Revenge” and the analysis of Act I of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. It demonstrates that reflection on the utopia of justice is not limited to one literary genre only, but permeates other texts created in the era when the questions about perfect state and ideal ruler were especially pertinent.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

To Liberate Charybdis, to Fall in Love with Scylla. On the Monstrosity of Translation

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.

What’s past is prologue: the Age of Caliban

The article provides a brief comparative study of the reception history of Shakespeare’s Caliban in the early modern period and in the contemporary literary criticism. The analysis aims to delineate a fundamental difference in the reception of the character of Caliban throughout the ages which I attribute to a historical shift in the understanding of the notions of humanity and monstrosity.
The first part of the article concentrates on the description of the historical and social circumstances of the Elizabethan discourse of monstrosity and draws a link between them and the literary and political context of the time, while engaging into a close reading of The Tempest that brings to the fore the origin and nature of the “servant-monster”. The second part of the paper focuses on the gradual change in the interpretations of Caliban who ceased to be seen as a monstrosity and with time acquired undeniably human characteristics. That shift has been observable since the 19th century and has found its culmination in the postcolonial strain of Caliban’s contemporary interpretations, in which Prospero’s slave becomes a native trying to find a language for himself in a colonial regime his body and mind are subjugated to. The postcolonial project of the unfinished monstrous humanity of Sycorax’s son is congruous with the postmodern condition that can be dubbed, to use Harold Bloom’s phrase, “the Age of Caliban”. It is exactly that liminal and paradoxical notion of monstrous humanity that resides at the core of the contemporary fascination with “Monsieur Monster”.

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.

This paper discusses the definition of the forest as a space regulated by the repetitive act of appropriation on the part of the royal authority as well as the correspondences between the rhetoric of forest possession and the construction of another locus communis for the political use of nature, i.e. female body. Spatialization/naturalization of the female body in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is introduced with the use of the interlocking imaginary topographies of “feminized” topography of Rome and that of the forest as a whore. It is between these two that the politicized female bodies of Lavinia and Tamora oscillate, mapped in language as bodyscapes, onto which violence of “lawes of the forrest” is inscribed.
 

Research for this article was financed by the Polish National Science Centre grant no DEC-2012/05/N/HS2/00331.