The Tower of Babel or Ivory Tower? The Reception of Western Translation Research in Russian-language Translation Studies – a Reconnaissance

The aim of this paper is to survey what texts and authors representing Western translation studies have been translated into Russian over the last seven decades and to describe the dynamics of the emergence of these translations as well as possible agendas behind the choices. It also traces, on a partial corpus, to what extent Russian translation scholars tend to cite and quote Western ones. The findings lead to a tentative conclusion that so far TS knowledge has been transferred mainly by unfrequent references to original publications and by way of mediated accounts (reviews, textbook summaries), while translations of particular studies have only recently begun appearing on a wider scale, their impact as yet uncertain.

On the Contexts of One Translation (Ilya Erenburg and Bruno Jasieński)

Bruno Jasieński wrote his novel I Burn Paris after translating Ilya Erenburg’s Life and Death of Nikolay Kurbov. The paper analyses relationships between these two novels – their ideological and artistic parallels and polemics.

From Translator to Poet and Back: Adam Ważyk’s Translation Output as Part of Polish Literature

The article offers an analysis of Adam Ważyk’s translation work, particularly in the context of its influence on the shaping of contemporary Polish poetry. The author aims to showcase the impact of Ważyk’s translations on some of the recent developments within Polish literature; to this end, she employs the distinction between translatoras-envoy and translator-as-lawmaker, as proposed by Jerzy Jarniewicz. Ważyk is here seen as an example of a “lawmaker”, and compared to Piotr Sommer – another author influential within a similar audience. The author argues that in his original choice of what to translate, Ważyk was driven by a desire to project onto the Polish context – to reproduce in his native language – a set of poetic and social circumstances associated with the French avant-garde movement; finally it served the goal of making Ważyk’s own work more comprehensible to his Polish readers. At the turn of the 21st century a group of Polish poets who had expressed interest in Ważyk were also attracted to the work of poets translated by Ważyk; the influence of these foreign authors was thus mediated by Ważyk’s own work.

Performance of Exile: Poet-Translators in the Leningrad Underground

Literary translation during the Soviet period has been mostly analysed in terms of conforming to or resisting the dominant ideology. However, there were spaces where translation practices were to a certain extent free from this dichotomy, though excluded from the official literary field. The focus of the article is the particular condition of displacement or exile experienced by the underground poets who lived in Leningrad during the 1980s. The samizdat poet-translator plays the role of an exile, living on the fringes of the society and creating a network in the underground. The outcomes of this “performance of exile” are the translated texts, which show the handprints of the translator’s conditions. The article responds to Anthony Pym’s call for humanizing Translation History, and using the sociological tools developed in Translation Studies by Daniel Simeoni and Moira Inghilleri, it investigates the role of context, agent and text in the poetry translation practice of late samizdat.

* Artykuł powstał przy wsparciu Estońskiej Rady Badań Naukowych (grant PRG1206: “Translation in History, Estonia 1850–2010: Texts, Agents, Institutions and Practices”).

“Non-lieu, Trace, and Memory: Olga Tokarczuk’s Short Story “Numery” in Ksenia Starosielska’s Translation

The article offers an analysis of the Russian translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s 1989 short story “Numery” [Numbers]. Published in 2000 in the journal Innostrannaya Literatura, Ksenia Starosielska’s translation presented the future Nobel prize winner to Russian readers for the first time. The translation analysis is based on the categories of “non-lieu”, trace, and memory, which, within the interpretive paradigm adopted in the article, constitute a crucial meaning-making element of Tokarczuk’s short story.

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).

The Unstable Text of Pan Tadeusz

The article discusses the changes introduced by the successive editors of Adam Mickiewicz’s narrative poem to the text version published by the poet himself. The most important one is undoubtedly the addition of the poem considered the “epilogue” to Pan Tadeusz, allegedly lost by Mickiewicz. No less radical are the interventions consisting in supplementing the text with fragments from the autograph or with the poet’s later additions made to the already printed text, as well as in corrective conjectures in instances regarded by the publisher as slips of the pen. The article compares the surviving authorial versions of the text, demonstrating that Mickiewicz himself treated his work as a continual process and tested new solutions on various occasions; however, there is no evidence that he intended to introduce them into the printed text.

Two Economies: Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

The article presents the vision of economy as husbandry inscribed in Adam Mickiewicz’s narrative poem Pan Tadeusz. This vision opposes modern liberal economy which shaped capitalism in the first half of the 19th century. The issue is discussed in the context of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as well as Mickiewicz’s own economic views, as presented in his journalistic writing and his Paris lectures. Both literary texts depict landed estates at the beginning of the 19th century: in a historically Polish territory and in England. In the latter case, we are dealing with an outline of the perspective of transitioning from traditional economy to the modern bourgeois model (connected with colonial expansion); in the former – with an attempt to transpose traditional economy to the level of myth and with eschewing development towards capitalism.

Difficulties in Translating Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz into Arabic on the Basis of my Translation of Book One

My task of translating Pan Tadeusz was accompanied by various complications which concerned not only the form (metrics, rhythm, and rhymes), but also the proper rendering of the meaning of individual words and intricate idioms. Book One of Pan Tadeusz in my translation has not yet been published, as I am working on subsequent books. Due to various difficulties, the translation of this work is a very complex process that requires much care and a huge investment of time. Polish and Arabic are separate crucibles of very different cultures and social environments. There is no doubt that the language of poetry has specific rhythmic and morphological features. This increases the complexity of translation, since apart from mastering the language and understanding precisely the meaning of phrases and expressions, the translator needs to grasp the sense of metaphors and preserve the form of a poem to a lesser or greater extent. As for the form, I initially used eight feet in each verse. However, this method turned out to be imperfect, because the use of eight-foot verse significantly lengthens the text compared to the original. That is why I finally used the format of a thirteen-syllable poem, as in the work of Mickiewicz. However, this is a very difficult task and a huge challenge because Arabic words very often contain more syllables than their Polish counterparts, and unfortunately in most cases they cannot be translated into words with fewer syllables. Despite the difficulties of searching for rhymes and at the same time rendering the content of the verse, the rhymes have been kept in the same order as in the original, i.e. even rhymes (aabb). The abundance of synonyms in the Arabic language made this matter much easier.

Translation as a Test of Assent: Stanisław Barańczak’s Poem Five Postcards from and to Emily Dickinson

Stanisław Barańczak is well known not only as a poet, but also as an extremely prolific translator who became famous for translating the works of Shakespeare and British and American poets. In the 1980s, just before and immediately after his forced political emigration to the United States, he extensively translated religious poets (e.g. ‘metaphysical poets’, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson). This was a rather surprising choice, given the fact that Barańczak was an agnostic, distrustful of the world of religion. On the other hand, however, it was at that time that he introduced in his own poetry (“Atlantis”, “A Postcard from this World”) phrases testing the possibility of religious “real assent” (John Henry Newman’s term). It seems that for Barańczak translation of some poets becomes not only an opportunity to broaden the scope of the Polish language and improve his own technique, but also an attempt to “assent” to the religious vision of the world, which is evoked by the lyric of the poets he admired. The poem Five Postcards from and to Emily Dickinson seems to support such an interpretation. My analyses are inspired by scholars of Barańczak’s work, as well as by those who study literature and religion: Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor.

Translator as the Problem of Concrete Poetry

Among various forms of concrete poetry, I have identified two main types. The first one, which was born as an attempt to transgress national languages and create a universal code, by its very definition questions the sense of translation. Yet it does not nullify it, concrete poetry of this type still needs translators as “conveyers”, who select poems and anchor them into new cultural contexts. Since the shape of the poem remains mostly intact, translation is no longer an interlingual activity, but an intercultural one. In the case of the second type of concrete poetry, which I call paronomatic and which due to its metalinguistic complexity renders the poems untranslatable, translators can be redefined as “exegetes”, offering descriptions and interpretations of the poems. The article discusses in detail selected examples of the two types of concrete poetry in translation, demonstrating the variety of the translator’s tasks.

Polish Subtitling in the 1930s

This article presents the results of an archival study on Polish subtitling of pre-WWII films (until 1939). The main focus will be on the technical aspects of subtitling in Poland in the 1930s, such as the number of lines, number of characters per line, and subtitle display times. We will show the development of Polish film translation in its initial phase. In our article, we will present previously unpublished pictures of early film subtitles, which come from original archival research. Contrary to some previous claims, film translation did not start with the introduction of sound in films – which occurred in Poland in the 1929/30 cinema season. Prior to that, in the silent cinema period, intertitles were a tested way of delivering content to the viewer. And these silent movies’ intertitles were translated. Copies of various foreign films have even been preserved with Polish intertitle translation rather than the original intertitles. Imitating intertitles in silent films, subtitles began to appear in films with sound and dialogue. These were “inserted subtitles” – between scene edits. Only later were subtitles burnt into the image, which began modern film subtitling.

Братья Карамазовы in the Power of Polish (Re)translations

The article discusses Kinga Rozwadowska’s monograph book Przekład i władza. Polskie tłumaczenia Braci Karamazow Fiodora Dostojewskiego [Translation and Power: Polish Translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov] (Kraków 2018). Before presenting the book, the reviewer refers to translation series as a research problem and discusses elements of retranslation theory. The merit of Rozwadowska’s book lies primarily in its methodological innovativeness: the author combines contemporary cultural discourse on translation with the discourse on power and with Mihail Bakhtin’s concepts of novelistic polyphony and the dialogic word. Moreover, the Rozwadowska discusses and evaluates not only the translation series, but also the current situation of the examined translations on Polish publishing market. The adoption of a cultural perspective does not entail abandoning traditional translation analysis based on philological examination and comparison of textual material. This procedure is successfully applied in the second part of the monograph, devoted to ten selected elements of Dostoyevsky’s novel, which illustrates specific translation problems. The comparative analyses and interpretations of individual elements of the translation series are also evaluated highly by the reviewer, although not without minor polemical remarks.

The Agonistic Nature of Translation. Notes on Traduction et violence by Tiphaine Samoyault

The article discusses the ideas from the book Traduction et violence by Tiphaine Samoyault, professor of literary and comparative studies at the Sorbonne, literary critic and translator. Samoyault’s book is part of a current of reflection on translation showing that translation is used not only to facilitate human communication and contact, but also appears in situations of tension and conflict. The author refers to theoretical works in translation research and to testimonies (including literary ones) showing the use of translation when an element of domination or violence is at stake. Inspired by the political thought of Chantal Mouffe, she borrows the concept of agonism and distinguishes “translation antagonisms”. This term refers to the connections of translation with a struggle between languages, whose manifestations may be external (historical antagonisms, visible, for example, in colonization processes or – in the most extreme form – in extermination camps) or internal (antagonisms, visible in the act of translation as a “war of languages”). The remarks on Samoyault’s book close with a brief indication of the applicability of her perspective to research on the functioning of translation in Polish history.