Weronika Szwebs

The article analyzes the paratextual activity of Witold Kalinowski, the author of the first Polish translation of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1991), paying special attention to his polemical remarks and their relation to the vision of scientific, theoretical discourse. The translator does not strive for invisibility. On the contrary, he uses footnotes and brackets inserted in the main text to comment on different aspects of Said’s work. He signals problems ensuing from the differences between languages and cultures, explains the nature of linguistic difficulties and justifies his own solutions. He also takes on the role of editor and commentator, explaining Said’s allusions, supplementing the discussion with additional information, anticipating readers’ doubts about certain facts that might sound suspicious, and even inserting bracketed additions and clarifications which suggest that the original is unclear or imprecise. Finally, Kalinowski overtly expresses his polemical attitude: he provides certain parts of Said’s discussion with sic! annotation (thus suggesting that the author is wrong) and adds footnotes where he argues with what he sees as the author’s dubious and far-fetched interpretations. The Translator’s Note gives certain insight into the nature of the disagreement between the author and the translator. Explaining why Orientalism is a difficult book to translate, Kalinowski enumerates its troubling features: the combination of different types of discourse and the large number of polemical accents, due to which the book is not fully scientific. The moment of the book’s publication might suggest that such a qualification could have been a result of the then scarce presence of poststructuralist thought and cultural studies in the Polish humanities. However, the analysis of Witold Kalinowski’s articles as well as his doctoral thesis from the 1980s shows both his awareness of the theoretical currents that influenced Orientalism and his critical attitude towards Marxist thought. It is the aversion to the Marxist-inspired interpretations – both Kalinowski’s personal methodological conviction and a widespread attitude in the early post-communist Poland – that seems to be the reason of the clash in the first Polish translation of Said’s work.

 Translated by Gabriela Dudek.

*The article was written as part of the project “Translation of theoretical discourses in the Polish humanities at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries” (no. 2017/25/N/HS2/01585) financed by the National Science Centre, Poland. The author also obtained funding for a doctoral scholarship from the National Science Centre (no. 2018/28/T/HS2/00514).

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 41, 2020  (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.21.006.13588).

Barthes in Japan, Poststructuralism in Poland. Remarks on the Polish Translation of L’Empire des signes

The aim of the paper is to present the vital differences in the level of intelligibility and cohesion between L’Empire des signes and its Polish translation Imperium znaków (1999). The excerpts discussed in the article represent the key features and phenomena characteristic of Japan or more precisely the contrast that Barthes draws between Japan and France, the East and the West. The analysis of the examples concerning i.e. the rules of ideographic writing, the nature of haiku and cuisine proves that – as a result of grammatical misreadings on the part of the translator – the Polish translation often blurs Barthes’s precise descriptions, misrepresents the image of East and West emerging from the book and distorts the author’s subtle theoretical project. The paper also outlines the relationship between the mistakes present in Imperium znaków and the stereotype of poststructuralist writing in Poland around the time the translation was made.

* Artykuł powstał w ramach projektu „Tłumaczenie dyskursów teoretycznych w humanistyce polskiej przełomu XX I XXI wieku” (numer 2017/25/N/HS2/01585) finansowanego przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki. Autorka uzyskała również środki finansowe w ramach finansowania stypendium doktorskiego z Narodowego Centrum Nauki (numer 2018/28/T/HS2/00514).

The article seeks the meeting ground between Walter Benjamin’s essay The task of the translator and Joseph Brodsky’s practice of self-translation into English.

Benjamin’s 1923 essay, written initially as a translator’s justification of the methods used in a concrete translation, has become a seminal text in translation theory. It raises questions about the role of form in poetic translation, suggests a new theory of translation as being the afterlife of the original, and indicates differences between translation and original composition as a mode of writing.

Brodsky’s experience of translation was distinct. He came to America as an exile and his reputation in his adoptive country depended on his English translations. Brodsky insisted on preserving the metrical structure of his originals and set out to correct the translations done by English native speakers. He became involved in translating his poems into English, because he believed in the principles of the Russian school of formal equimetrical translation. Benjamin had criticized the validity of these traditional translating principles in his essay, contending that reproducing the form of the original requires one to neglect its meaning. Yet, I point to several surprising parallels between Brodsky and Benjamin on the theoretical level.

Most importantly, Brodsky’s practice of self-translation into English seems to realize one of the crucial theoretical tenets put forth by Benjamin: the translator should foreignise his translation, i.e. transplant the elements of the original into the target language, thus expanding the boundaries of that language. Brodsky did not intentionally set out to foreignise his translations. The foreignisation came about because Brodsky actively tried to preserve those elements that he felt reflected his uncommon poetic voice. Thus, despite the disparity in time periods and theoretical standpoints, Brodsky’s translating practices could be said to fulfil the translator’s task as it was understood and formulated by Benjamin.

In this article I read Joseph Brodsky’s travel essay Flight from Byzantium against Edward Said’s Orientalism, which, as I argue, was the point of departure for Brodsky’s essay. Brodsky’s ironic detachment from what he sees and experiences on his journey is juxtaposed with his polemical engagement with the tradition of Russian and Western accounts of the Orient as well as with debates about Russia’s place on the Orient – Occident axis. His appropriation of the Orientalist myth brings forth his own identity construction on what emerges as an imaginative “contact zone” of two metropolitan cultures, Eastern and Western. Aware of the fact that Russia challenges the East – West dichotomy, the author of Brodsky’s essay uses the liminality of his own Russian identity to validate his opinions about both East and West and to invalidate the critique of this dichotomy as expressed by Said and others.

Jan Kochanowski’s Treny in English Translations

This article compares English translations of Jan Kochanowski’s Laments as well as discusses possible reasons and consequences of translatory choices. Dorothea Prall Radin, Stanisław Barańczak and Seamus Heaney, Michał Mikoś and Adam Czerniawski differ considerably in their attitude towards the formal features of the original. While the fi rst three versions preserve the original meter and rhyme schemes more or less successfully, Czerniawski abandons the strict patterns of the original. The article also examines the ways in which the translators deal with such stylistic features of Laments as the apostrophes and diminutives, classical simplicity and references to Psalms. The analysis of specifi c instances reveals the translators’ achievements as well as their failures that occasionally disturb the consistent vision created in Kochanowski’s cycle. Moreover, the analysis refers to selected reviews to illustrate the reception of old Polish literature in English-speaking countries.

Translator as Polemicist: The Clash of Paradigms in the First Polish Edition of Said’s Orientalism

The article analyzes the paratextual activity of Witold Kalinowski, the author of the first Polish translation of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1991), paying special attention to his polemical remarks and their relation to the vision of scientific, theoretical discourse. The translator does not strive for invisibility. On the contrary, he uses footnotes and brackets inserted in the main text to comment on different aspects of Said’s work. He signals problems ensuing from the differences between languages and cultures, explains the nature of linguistic difficulties and justifies his own solutions. He also takes on the role of editor and commentator, explaining Said’s allusions, supplementing the discussion with additional information, anticipating readers’ doubts about certain facts that might sound suspicious, and even inserting bracketed additions and clarifications which suggest that the original is unclear or imprecise. Finally, Kalinowski overtly expresses his polemical attitude: he provides certain parts of Said’s discussion with sic! annotation (thus suggesting that the author is wrong) and adds footnotes where he argues with what he sees as the author’s dubious and far-fetched interpretations. The Translator’s Note gives certain insight into the nature of the disagreement between the author and the translator. Explaining why Orientalism is a difficult book to translate, Kalinowski enumerates its troubling features: the combination of different types of discourse and the large number of polemical accents, due to which the book is not fully scientific. The moment of the book’s publication might suggest that such a qualification could have been a result of the then scarce presence of poststructuralist thought and cultural studies in the Polish humanities. However, the analysis of Witold Kalinowski’s articles as well as his doctoral thesis from the 1980s shows both his awareness of the theoretical currents that influenced Orientalism and his critical attitude towards Marxist thought. It is the aversion to the Marxist-inspired interpretations – both Kalinowski’s personal methodological conviction and a widespread attitude in the early post-communist Poland – that seems to be the reason of the clash in the first Polish translation of Said’s work.

* Artykuł powstał w ramach projektu „Tłumaczenie dyskursów teoretycznych w humanistyce polskiej przełomu XX i XXI wieku” (numer 2017/25/N/HS2/01585) finansowanego przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki. Autorka uzyskała również środki finansowe w ramach finansowania stypendium doktorskiego z Narodowego Centrum Nauki (numer 2018/28/T/HS2/00514).