Piotr Szymczak

The author proposes a new critical model for translation analysis. The method is based on translation tropics, an idea presented by Douglas Robinson in The Translator’s Turn, which appears here in a much expanded and modified form. Five tropes (irony, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole and metalepsis) describe five types of translator and the respective affective motivations that inform decision-making in translation: the translator’s affect towards the Other of the source text and culture. One trope in particular (metonymy) is examined in more detail. The analytical part, which presents practical results achieved with this theoretical tool, is based on the alphabetical translations of Charles Bernstein’s poetry by Peter Waterhouse and his VERSATORIUM group.

This article looks at Polish translations of three selected short stories by Rudyard Kipling in order to examine how translation affects the ironic tropes found in those texts. Mateo’s typology of techniques for handling irony in translation (1995) is used to show how this rhetorical device works within the broader cultural and historical context. It appears that the way Polish translators in the early 1900s interpreted irony in contemporary colonial fiction depended on their ability to recognize social problems in the British Empire, to identify the distinctive British sense of humour, and to understand the realities of colonial life. The short stories under discussion are Georgie Porgie, 1888 (translated by Feliks Chwalibóg, 1909), The Limitations of Pambe Serang, 1889 (Feliks Chwalibóg, 1910) and The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes, 1885 (unknown translator, 1900).

The essay focuses on Czesław Miłosz’s translation of Psalm 51, one of the
most celebrated penitential psalms. Unlike the medieval practice of illuminating books
of psalms, where the images offered a vivid and concrete narrative context for the pleas
and lamentations, Miłosz aims to highlight the universal and archetypal dimension of
King David’s prayers. He sets out to create a new hieratic Polish style to reconcile
liturgical use with the evocative qualities and unique prosodies of Hebrew poetry,
without sacrifi cing a coherent theological interpretation. To reproduce the characteristic
repetitions and parallelisms, Miłosz draws lexical and syntactic inspiration from the
earliest Polish translations of the psalms, notably the Psałterz Puławski (Psalter of
Puławy, late fi fteenth century). Ultimately, his translation forms a complex amalgam,
bringing together the religious intuitions of Judaism, the hieratic tradition of the Polish
language and the semantic intensity of Miłosz’s own poetry.