Mirosława Kubasiewicz

Katherine Mansfield – the Translator of Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Judges

In 2014 Edinburgh University Press published the third volume of Katherine Mansfield’s “Collected Works” – The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield – which included all her translations, not only those of the works by A. Kuprin, A. Chekhov and F. Dostoyevsky, but for the first time also fragments of The Judges (Sędziowie) by Stanisław Wyspiański. The article explains a possible genesis of this translation, connected with the person of Florian Sobieniowski, who acquainted Mansfield with the work of the Polish playwright. The influence of Wyspiański on Mansfield was considerable at the time and might have been instrumental in her decision to undertake the translation already in 1909, or perhaps later, around 1912, when John Middleton Murry, the editor of Rhythm, decided to devote a whole issue of the magazine to the work of the Polish author. The translation may have also been done in 1917, the year entered on the manuscript by Murry, Mansfield’s husband and the editor of her work after the writer’s death. Mansfield did not know Polish, so she used the German translation of Sędziowie (Gericht) by Kasimir Różycki as a reference. Her translation, however, more faithful to the original, goes beyond the German text, which is a prose summary of the play. To show the quality of Mansfield’s translation, the article compares the solutions adopted by each translator to render the meaning of the same fragments of the play. Mansfield’s version suggests a close collaboration with Sobieniowski to find the rhythm, sound and meaning of the original, a pattern of work which she fully developed in her later translating collaboration with Samuel Koteliansky.

In her new book, Claire Davison, a professor of Modernist Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 and Chair of the French Virginia Woolf Society, analyses the role which the process of translating Russian literature played in the development of Virginia Woolf’s and Katherine Mansfield’s individual literary styles. Both writers were invited to collaborate on the translations by S.S. Koteliansky, a Ukranian Jew, who started the project in order to show the English readers a more complex picture of Russian literature; the invitation came at the time when each of the writers was experimenting with new writing strategies. The collaboration with Koteliansky became a “laboratory” in which the translators explored the questions of consciousness, polyphony, gender or identity, so the problems which both were preoccupied with as writers just then. Davison underlines the writers’ perception of translation as a “liminal” experience of “being between languages and cultures”, contrasted with  Koteliansky’s more literal approach; their collaboration based on negotiation of the meaning and sound of almost every word produced the results which managed to overcome the dichotomy of domestication and foreignization of the translated text, placing their achievement in the avant-garde of the modernist translation project. Davison’s study of Woolf’s and Mansfield’s collaboration with Koteliansky is  shaped by the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin and Heinz Wismann, both of whom perceive translation as an activity performed between languages and cultures. The book based on extensive archival research is amply illustrated with various translations of the same fragment of the Russian text, which allows the readers to see and judge the effects of the translators’ work themselves.