Six Months of Schulz: On the First Phase of the Brazilian Reception of His Collected Prose

This article provides a detailed analysis of the earliest reception of the fi rst Brazilian edition of Bruno Schulz’s collected prose (Ficção completa, trans. by Henryk Siewierski, São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2012). By analysing the circumstances of its publication and its fi rst critical repercussions, this study aims to highlight some of the important properties of a translated author’s image-building process in the host culture, with a particular regard to the already existing contexts as receptive frameworks. It also underlines the translator’s role as an expert and a guide, seen as an active agent in the reception process.

A Heretical and Sinful Experiment on the Authentic or a Praiseworthy Grassroot Promotional Initiative? John Curran Davis’s Online

This article presents a recent English translation of Bruno Schulz’s stories, which is almost entirely unknown within Polish academia. John Curran Davis has published his version on his website schulzian.net without the permission of the copyright holder. The infringement of copyright has doomed Davis’s translation to non-existence in the offi cial circulation system. Referring to Theo Hermans’s concept of equivalence, I argue that the lack of institutional sanctioning may lead to the questioning of the ontological status of Davis’s text. Davis’s version is not challenged on intratextual grounds, but rather due to contextual factors: laws regulating the circulation of texts and their place in culture. This fact is best illustrated by comparing the status of Davis’s illegal translation with that of the yet unpublished version by prof. Madeline Levine, backed up by her position, institutional patronage and the support of academic circles. Although Davis’s independent translation, not subject to the publisher’s control, can be treated as a wayward threat to the “truth” of Schulz’s original, one should also consider the role of his initiative in the promotion of the Polish writer’s output among readers who would not reach for Celina Wieniewska’s canonical translation or Levine’s new version. Available for free on the Internet, Davis’s texts colonise on behalf of Schulz areas of popular culture inaccessible to the offi cial translations. Regardless of ethical evaluations, Davis’s enterprise certainly constitutes an interesting cultural phenomenon and as such deserves the attention of both translation scholars and academics researching the foreign reception of Schulz’s oeuvre.

Translator’s Stylometric Invisibility

In a corpus of the writings of several authors, each author being represented by several texts, it is usually enough to compare the similarities between the frequencies of some 100 most frequent words (obviously, these usually include various function words rather than content words) in these texts to group the texts correctly by the authors. This paper investigates the phenomenon that translated texts also tend to be grouped by the original author rather than by the translator despite the fact that the most frequent words in a corpus of translations in no way maintain a one-to-one relationship with those in the original corpus. This is illustrated with examples of experiments performed on a variety of parallel sets of literary texts in English, French and Polish.

Polish Adaptations of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffmann

This article discusses adaptation of children’s literature as illustrated by the Polish translation series of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s world-famous story The Nutcracker. The fi rst part is a review of the eight Polish versions of the German original. The second part identifi es “vulnerable” places of the original text, that is, dimensions which undergo changes in the process of adaptation because of translators’ perceptions of children’s abilities and emotional needs. In conclusions the author claims that various adaptation strategies reveal assumptions of (adult) translators about (young) readers (presented here in the form of ten commandments how [not] to translate for children).

Scheherazade’s Metamorphoses: English Translations of The Thousand and One Nights – A Comparative Study

This article constitutes a comparative study of three nineteenth-century translations of The Thousand and One Nights, by John Payne (1882), Edward William Lane (1883) and Richard Francis Burton (1885). The Thousand and One Nights has not only been translated into many European languages, but it has also appeared in contemporary prose, music, art and, last but not least, fi lm. The article argues that the polyphony and diversity of the English translations of The Nights result from numerous literary and cultural metamorphoses of the book. Moreover, the article discusses the trajectories of interrelations between the source text/ the Eastern culture/ the Other and the target text/ Western culture/ the Same. The comparative analysis of the English translations indicates that The Thousand and One Nights has undergone a process of mythologization, which is also noticeable in Polish culture, since readers of Polish translations or adaptations of the book as well as some of translators and academics erroneously perceive this collection of various stories as “The Fairy Tales” of The Thousand and One Nights.

Between the Verses: Translation of Salman Rushdie’s Prose in the Context of Post-colonial Translation Theories

Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses is perceived by many critics as the writer’s masterpiece, one of the most representative texts of post-colonial literature which narrates the hybridity of languages, identities and cultures. This article analyses the fi rst Polish translation of the novel (an anonymous edition from 1992) with the help of post-colonial translation theories. It focuses on the uniqueness and relative untranslatability of the oriental and post-colonial Other, either simply reproduced by the use of borrowing (on the lexical level) or – which is more often the case in the analysed translation – blurred and neutralized by the use of hypernymic techniques. A critical commentary to the novel by Paul Brians helps to identify its cultural elements which have been lost. The analysis suggests that the elements easily lost are intertextual references to literary texts, songs, metaphors or fi lms, subject to syntagmatic rendering. In view of post-colonial theories, which emphasise the specifi city and uniqueness of the Other, the article concludes that only the introduction of the paratext in the form of a literary commentary could help to preserve the essential intellectual and artistic value of the novel.

Translating Foreignness and Unconventionality in Fiction: Arno Schmidt and Reinhard Jirgl

This article discusses alienation and unconventionality in contemporary prose. It identifi es various dimensions of alienation and unconventionality as well as strategies adopted by translators to deal with these two aesthetic aspects. The examples are drawn from two novels in German: Die Gelehrtenrepublik by Arno Schmidt and Die Unvollendeten by Reinhard Jirgl, as well as from their Polish translations.

Translator and Taboo: Polish Versions of Leonid Andreyev’s The Abyss

This article presents a comparative analysis of three Polish translations of The Abyss by the Russian modernist Leonid Andreyev, prepared by Idalia Badowska, Henryk and Jan Zbierzchowski as well as Józef Mondschein. The analysis focuses on manipulation in translation, both cultural and socio-political. The Polish paratext – either in the form of translator’s preface or letters by main characters – reveals the translators’ intentions and strategies; moreover, it informs about the reception of Andreyev’s short story with its shocking topic and inventive form. These comments suggest also why the story had been chosen for translation in the fi rst place. It seems that the questions of taboo were important to the translators, who approached them differently. For instance, the female subject is ignored (Zbierzchowscy), objectifi ed (Mondschein) or sublimed (Badowska). In Andreyev’s short story, woman’s body is described in pre-expressionist terms, whereas the protagonists’ feelings are presented in an impressionist way. The article argues that the translation of such styles is also an important aspect of manipulation. What is more, the translators’ confrontation with the new-born aesthetics refl ects (in micro-scale) changes in the literary language of the Young Poland, where expressionism was hardly noticeable.

Józef Wittlin’s Salt of the Earth: Reception of the “Non-Polish” Novel

This article discusses the reception of Wittlin’s Salt of the Earth among its fi rst Polish and English-language readers. It compares the interpretations of the fi rst reviewers and points out differences in their readings. It argues that the discrepancies in the Polish and English-language interpretations can be attributed to the complex narrative structure of the text. Socio-political circumstances in which the interpretations originated may have had a substantial infl uence on the way in which the reviewers read the tension present in the narrative structure of the book. Hence, one could argue that the act of translation into English, a transplantation of the text into a new cultural and socio-political context, opened up the possibility to read anew the novel’s semantic structures, thus shifting the critical focus to the areas which had not been explored in the Polish context.

Uneasy Dialogue. The Correspondence of Karl Dedecius and Czesław Miłosz

This article comments on the correspondence of Karl Dedecius and Czesław Miłosz which started in 1958 and lasted for over 40 years. The letters were collected and published in 2011 by Przemysław Chojnowski. They constitute an interesting material for translation researchers. The article shows the history of a diffi cult dialogue between the Polish writer and his German translator, in particular their divergent interpretations of the German literary fi eld within which Dedecius tried to place Miłosz’s work.

Translation of Terminology in Popular Prose: David Lodge’s Small World in Polish

This article emphasizes translation diffi culties caused by terminology which appears in such a campus novel as David Lodge’s Small World. It points out the most problematic terms (for instance, literary criticism) and explains the crucial differences between the Polish and English terminology. It also presents the most popular strategies used in translation of such terms and describes the ways in which they affect the reader. It argues that academic language requires different strategies than those employed in translation of colloquial speech. Lodge usually juxtaposes the two types of language, which requires a specifi c translation competence. Thus, translators of his work should not only be specialized in literary translation but they also need to possess a certain knowledge of literary criticism. This knowledge is especially vital to achieve the humour typical of the campus novel, addressed both to specialized and general readers.

An Interpreter by the Side of a Conquistador

Marzena Chrobak’s book Między światami. Tłumacz ustny oraz komunikacja międzykulturowa w literaturze odkrycia i konkwisty Ameryki is an interesting and bold attempt of reconstructing fi gures of interpreters who – willingly or not – accompanied conquistadors and explorers of the Americas. The book consists of three parts. In the first one the author presents practices of translating and interpreting in the antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Then, thanks to a detailed analysis of various sources, she manages to recreate several portraits of interpreters who worked for conquerors and their successors. Eventually, she examines fi gures of interpreters who appear in literary works of different times. Chrobak’s book is one of very few works in Poland discussing history of translation. The author reveals her erudition, recalling numerous data and details. However, this abundance of facts and information makes reading diffi cult, especially for a reader who is not an expert on the history of the discovery and the conquest of the Americas.

This review of the Polish translation of Mieke Bal’s Narratology includes a brief delineation of the author’s narratological model of text description and analysis based on three levels: text, story and fabula. The structuralist background of Bal’s theory is
also discussed at some length as well as the author’s arguments for the evolution of her model beyond pure structuralism. The complexity of Bal’s conceptual apparatus and its didactic applications are given a brief overview, following which the focus is shifted to the relevance of narratological models for translation research. Based on existing translation scholarship where narratological models were successfully employed (such as Legeżyńska 1999 and O’Sullivan 2003), it is argued that although no single comprehensive narratological model of translation analysis has been created so far, descriptions of translated texts which employ conceptual tools like those suggested by Bal and other scholars could be viewed as a useful and effective instrument in translation research.