Bartosz Sowiński

The paper sets out to examine the dialectical concept of memory as forgetting presented in Bloom’s Poetry and Repression. In his speculative investigations, Bloom draws heavily on two of his predecessors: Freud and Kierkegaard. He borrows the notions of trauma and repression from the former and develops them into the concept of the Scene of Instruction, which is a story of the initiation into the realm of poetry. From the latter, he borrows the concept of crop rotation, which deals with the art of remembering through forgetting, and vice versa. Bloom misreads both these concepts to create a theoretical construct of his own. Bloom follows Freud in that he shows how the poetic ego emerges through a reaction to the traumatic event of the Scene of Instruction. However, while Freud claims that it is by recollection that people can work through their traumas and return to sanity, Bloom says that both recollection and sanity are detrimental to human creative capabilities and that it is only through repression that a poet as poet can misread his predecessors and create poetry of his own. Bloom follows Kierkegaard in that he says that repression involves a dialectic of remembering and forgetting that, when put together, create an active faculty that shapes one’s individual experience. While Kierkegaard uses his concept to create an aesthetic or contemplative existence that is always new and devoid of any excessive pleasure or pain, Bloom claims that conflict is an inherent part of human existence and that this very conflict is in fact a chance for a poet to individuate from tradition understood as the eternal return of the same.
 

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.

The paper sets out to examine the dialectical concept of memory as forgetting presented in Bloom’s Poetry and Repression. In his speculative investigations, Bloom draws heavily on two of his predecessors: Freud and Kierkegaard. He borrows the notions of trauma and repression from the former and develops them into the concept of the Scene of Instruction, which is a story of the initiation into the realm of poetry. From the latter, he borrows the concept of crop rotation that deals with the art of remembering through forgetting and vice versa. Bloom misreads both these concepts to create a theoretical construct of his own. Bloom follows Freud in that he shows how the poetic ego emerges through a reaction to the traumatic event of the Scene of Instruction. However, while Freud claims that it is by recollection that people can work through their traumas and return to sanity, Bloom says that both recollection and sanity are detrimental to human creative capabilities and that it is only through repression that a poet as poet can misread his predecessors and create poetry of his own. Bloom follows Kierkegaard in that he says that repression involves a dialectic of remembering and forgetting that, when put together, create an active faculty that shapes one’s individual experience. While Kierkegaard uses his concept to create an aesthetic or contemplative existence that is always new and devoid of any excessive pleasure or pain, Bloom claims that conflict is an inherent part of human existence and that this very conflict is in fact a chance for a poet to individuate from tradition understood as the eternal return of the same.
 

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.

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.

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.

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.