The religious intensity and the condensed concrete imagery of Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska’s originals are discussed in order to demonstrate how the English versions have coped with the originals. Just as original authors have their recognisable styles, so do translators. Therefore possible answers to the perennial question: who owns the translation, should perhaps take that observation into account.

(przełożyła Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese)

The hypallage – a figure of speech based on syntactic and semantic displacement –
was persistently used by Federico García Lorca in his rhetorical intent to approach
and fuse different elements of the universe. The paper demonstrates the relevance of
this poetic technique in Lorca’s Romancero gitano and it analyses the reasons and
consequences of modifications that the hypallage undergoes in translation process.
Several Polish versions of the volume make possible comparative research on the
subject.

przełożyła Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese

The essay offers a close reading of the cultural and linguistic aspects of 71,200
Megalitres, published first in the Spring 2006 issue of Poetry Wales (41.4) and due to
appear in Not In These Shoes, forthcoming from Picador Pan MacMillan in 2008. As
the poem is loosely based on the drowning of the village of Capel Celyn between
1957–1965, the essay gives the historical background to the poem, as detailed in
documents held at the National Library of Wales. It also looks at some aspects of the
creative process, including the original inspiration behind the poem and the rhyme
scheme.

Rendering into Polish the Welsh verse form called englynion, which had been already
„translated” into English, creates particular formal challenges. This essay demonstrates
how they have been faced; it also investigates the emotional context of both the
original, which reflects on a controversial event from recent Welsh history, and of the
translation. The personal experience as well as the archival material concerning the
flooded Tryweryn Valley create a kind of hypertext which sends its readers in search
of references. Translation testifies to this search.

It is useful, when analysing the processes related to transferring poetry from one culture to another, to take into account extratextual factors such as the identities, reputations, and personal agendas of the people involved. The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert is a case in point, as he seems to have been successfully cast as a socially engaged poet by editor Al Alvarez and translators Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott, who introduced his poems to English-speaking audiences in 1968. So successfully,
in fact, that from the seventies to this day some anglophone readers and critics have found it difficult to value his work for reasons other than their connection with current affairs. The tendency to read Herbert’s poetry as strictly political has endured despite the passing of time and the dramatic changes on the political map of Europe. 

This article outlines some of the translation decisions encountered in the process of translating into English a single poem by Tadeusz Różewicz: “14 lipca 2004 – w nocy,” from the poet’s 2004 collection wyjście. I describe some of the major issues of word choice and syntax that the translation involved. Furthermore, I compare the esthetics of Polish versus English-language poetry, and consider the difficulties of rendering Różewicz’s voice in English. Lastly, I set the translation of this poem in the broader context of Różewicz’s recent poetry–the translation in question is part of a forthcoming English-language collection of Różewicz’s three most recent books, wyjście, szara strefa (2002) and nożyk profesora (2001).

przełożyła Anna Skucińska

(tekst przełożyła Agnieszka Kotarba)

Cultural references and meaning constructed through playing with idioms make Dariusz
Sośnicki’s poem untranslatable into English, even if the translator were to take
any number of liberties. One of the main culprits here is the word rzecz, or thing in
Polish, and the adjective rzeczowy, derived from thing, yet meaning matter-of-fact.
The reference to szkiełko i oko – the eye and the glass – comes from a poem by the Romatic poet Adam Mickiewicz and has functioned as an idiom in Polish nearly
two centuries. Trying to find an English equivalent could turn into a wild goose chase.
Adam Wiedemann’s poem, while quite challenging to the translator, can be rendered
fairly accurately and with a minimum of loss. From a translator’s perspective, the
word games in this poem are more clement than in Sośnicki’s, although once again
the word rzeczy causes problems. The Polish idiom oddać rzeczy do pralni literally
means to take things to the cleaners, while it’s understood that things means clothes.
In the poem, however, it’s not merely clothes that are to be cleaned, and this polysemy
is crucial to its meaning.

This paper, by the translator into English of novels by Paweł Huelle and Olga Tokarczuk,
discusses general ideas about the art of bridging cultural gaps through translation,
in particular that translation inevitably involves a compromise between the
author and the reader. It discusses some translation techniques, such as the advantages
of reading the text aloud. For illustration it focuses on Mercedes-Benz by Paweł
Huelle, explaining how the translator attempted to retain the pace and style in English.
It mentions problems involved in translating a book with almost no punctuation, ideas
for translating dialect, slang and nicknames, and how to avoid footnotes. It moves on
to the experience of translating Olga Tokarczuk’s Dom dzienny, dom nocny into
English, and offers some ideas on translating neologisms, culturally exclusive details
and contrasting writing styles.

In this excerpt from Podróże z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim. Opowieści trzynastu tłumaczy
(Travels with Ryszard Kapuściński. Stories by Thirteen Translators; Znak, 2007)
Klara Główczewska, his translator into English, argues that translation is an art of
mimicry. The translator imitates the voice of the original author and enjoys the thrill
of such a risky enterprise. She discusses her translation of Podróże z Herodotem
(forthcoming from Knopf as Travels with Herodotus): from the preparation of the
annotated manuscript twice the size of the original, through the conversations with the
author, to the final version which is an autonomous work in the English language.

The main aim of the present paper is to analyse the stylistic and cultural obstacles
encountered in the process of translation into Polish of a modern Romanian play –
Amalia respiră adânc by Alina Nelega – to identify the sources of these obstacles,
suggest strategies for handling them and offer practical translation solutions. The
analysed points include the complexity of text structure and multitude of registers as
well as politeness formulas, specific place names as well as terms and expressions
referring to strictly Romanian realities, both ‘traditional’ and that of the (post-)
communist era.

Starting from the assumption that poetry is a communication between minds, mediated
by its style, I maintain that its translation should take into account both the way
poetic style reflects a cognitive state and also the cognitive effects of style upon the
reader.
Parks (1998) notes that the “divergence” of target from source text in translated
novels gives us access to the “vision” of the original writer. I consider whether such
divergence also applies to translated poetry.
Looking at translations of Wilfred Owen and Michael Hamburger into German, I
argue that the point of greatest divergence from the source text corresponds to what
Riffaterre (1959) called a “convergence”: a point in the text at which a number of
stylistic features come together, and I link these two concepts to the Chinese notion of
the “eye of the poem”. This is the point at which the concentration of stylistic features
such as repetition, ambiguity and metaphor allows access to the cognitive state informing
the poem and also gives rise to a concentration of cognitive effects.
The eye of the poem is not just a metaphor; and it can be located not only by
comparing target text with source text, as Parks does, but also by close stylistic analysis
of the original poem. It is essential to the way poetry communicates and thus, for
the translation to be not only a successful translation but also a successful poem, it
must both recognise the eye of the original and also itself have an eye.

Although Pablo Picasso claimed that people who want to translate painting tend to bark
at the wrong tree, the article is a discussion of one of such translations, E.E. Cummings’
poem xxvi (“Picasso”) from the volume Tulips and Chimneys (1923). The author analyses
Cummings’ text as an instance of intersemiotic translation and its potential renderings
into Polish as “second order” translations, entangled not only in the intricacies of
the original text but also the “original painting” behind it. The outcome is a series of
alternative versions of the poem in Polish, each elaborating on a different meaning of the
word “plane”, referring to visual design, woodwork and aviation respectively.

The article reports on the process of translation of Tamar Yoseloff’s The Aurora
Borealis at Rørvik into Polish. In order to produce a satisfactory rendering, I first
made an attempt at interpreting the poem and investigating all the elements of its
construction, e.g. the sound qualities of the words and phrases that appear in the text.
The Aurora Borealis at Rørvik is built around the contrast between the epistemological
stances of two groups of people that appear in the poem: one represents a rational,
the other a more romanticised outlook on the world. This contrast reminds one of a
Polish Romantic ballad Romantyczność by Adam Mickiewicz, where sight and lenses
and feeling and faith, so well-known in Polish culture, represent a similar antinomy.
 

Rationalising the theoretical concept of strategy in translation studies and presenting
its brief terminological overview, the article focuses on taxonomies of strategies and
also on their applications in the translator's workshop. "Strategic instruction" serves
the didactic purpose of enhancing his/her awareness of potential problems that may
occur in the translation process, thus proving its usefulness and relevance for the
translator.

This article provides a detailed analysis of the Polish translation of a manual of
homiletics against the background of the broader question regarding the translator’s
workshop. The various translational solutions are subsequently discussed in sections
devoted to grammatical and lexical errors, metaphorical and terminological incoherence,
and collocational and stylistic errors. It is suggested that the deficient workshop of the
translator manifested in numerous errors, chiefly attributable to insufficient understanding
of the source language by the translator, may correspond to the quasitheological
conviction according to which the crucial characteristic of the translator is
his or her passion rather than linguistic competence. The article ends with the appeal
to translators of various texts – not just theological ones – to observe the ancient
principle of primum non nocere in order to ensure the acceptable quality of their
works.

‘Hey, cowboy, you got a shit hat,’
and he pulled at the rim, and tore a piece off, and then each of them, each
wearing a real leather hat crept up and plucked another bit, so that at the end of the
party it wasn’t a hat anymore, but some kind of a miner’s cap, in fact I could introduce
myself as a miner. They tore my cardboard hat into pieces and now they knew
what it meant, what you say, what you do to someone who is different when he
pretends to belong.