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 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.