Edward Balcerzan

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.

Wisława Szymborska’s Synecdoches

The apothegms and lyric observations in the poetry of Wisława Szymborska have the nature of literal statements referring to the objective reality existing independently of the subject experiencing it. The literality understood in this way is a condition, and at the same time a consequence, of metaphorical transformation in numerous poems of Szymborska which use metonymy, synecdoche and antonomasia. Synecdoche, understood as part of a whole lending meaning to the whole, or the whole lending meaning to its part (according to Jerzy Ziomek) has the most prominence here – not only as a literary trope among other tropes within a poem, but also as an organizing principle of a poem as a whole, e.g. through frequent enumeration, characteristic of Szymborska. This constitutes a monistic image of the world, being a unity in plurality, in which enmity between different forms of being and territories of the world – people and animals, animals and plants, stones and thoughts, live and dead matter – is arbitrary and ideological, and – if specifically human, then in an ironic way.