“The Task of the Translator” in the Anthropocene. Today’s Role of Translation in the Light of Ecopoetics and Speculative Realism

According to the 2014 UCL report on communicating climate change, a new social contract is necessary to save the biosphere, challenging us not only to provide commentary on scientific data, but also to rethink the categories framing the relationship between humanity and the natural environment. The former is related to translation insofar as it regards the development of accounts that convey conclusions from natural sciences in rhetorically impactful ways. The latter defines “the task of the translator” in the Anthropocene – to draw from Walter Benjamin – as the effort to develop, in processes of translation, more self-conscious metaphors of inhabiting the Earth. A special role would be played in this area by literature, especially the kind that foregrounds environmentally-aware linguistic invention capable of overcoming the persisting dualism of nature and culture. The aim of this article is to sketch a theoretical framework for such an understanding of translation on the basis of ground-breaking research in the fields of translation studies (Michael Cronin, Kobus Marais), ecopoetics (Julia Fiedorczuk, Gerardo Beltrán), and philosophical criticisms of anthropocentricism formulated within the post-humanities and speculative realism (Bruno Latour, Catherine Malabou). To illustrate these claims, the article invokes poems by Alice Oswald, Sinéad Morrissey (translated by Magda Heydel) and Forrest Gander (translated by Julia Fiedorczuk). These translators are tasked with reconstructing – to borrow Benjamin’s idea – a “pure language” understood here as an expressive absolute that defies anthropocentric limitations. Accommodation of various languages, including non-human ones (as biosemiotics suggests), could thus streamline the development of a new social contract or “constitution” (as Latour terms it) that would redefine (or re-translate) the social and the natural.

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).

Odżytek – A Forgotten Term of Polish Cultural Sciences

Edward Burnett Tylor’s (1832–1917) Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, one of the most important books in the history of anthropology, was published in two volumes in 1871. The Polish translation, published between 1896 and 1898 (t. 1–2) was based on the third, revised English version (vol. 1–2: 1891). It was made by Zofia Antonina Kowerska (1871–1946) and published under the title Cywilizacja pierwotna; badania rozwoju mitologji, filozofji, wiary, mowy, sztuki i zwyczajów. Jan Aleksander Karłowicz (1836–1903) was responsible for the realisation of the project.

Actualising in the linguistic and cultural context, Tylor’s terminology became one of the fundaments of cultural theory reflection. In this paper I explore the problem of translation of chosen terms introduced by Tylor, namely survival and revival. The former (Polish: przeżytek) proved crucial for the evolutionistic thought and it is directly associated with it. As for the latter, however, modern Polish readers of Tylor’s writings, as well as the authors of textbooks on the history of cultural sciences, fail to notice its terminological character. On the basis of a comparative analysis of excerpts from Primitive Culture and Cywilizacja pierwotna, I argue that the word revival has only been terminologized on the English academic ground (being complementary to the term survival), while in Polish tradition/Polish ground it has failed to become part of specialist language and has ultimately fallen into oblivion.

A Translation Critic Thinks about Paintings (Selected Parallels Between Bolesław Leśmian’s Poetry and Visual Arts)

The paper is intended as an example of translation criticism that accounts for intersemiotic aspects of translation. The author presents parallels – understood as associative potential (non-obligatory for translation) – between texts of the Polish modernist poet Bolesław Leśmian and certain works of art, and gauges the presence of analogical potential in translations of the poems into English, Russian and Czech. Three visual analogies to the poems are explored: the motif of a window open into the world in German Romantic painting, C.D. Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains and images of Ophelia in Pre- Raphaelite art. In the course of the analysis the author attempts to show the advantages of the proposed approach in terms of it being conducive to realising functions ascribed to translation criticism.

Author as Translator’s Property? Frank O’Hara, Piotr Sommer and the (Translational) Criticism

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between the author of an original work and the translator (and the target culture) not in a ‘traditional’ valuation that places the signatory of the work in the original language higher, but precisely from a reversed perspective. A case in point is the translation relationship between Frank O’Hara and Piotr Sommer, which has so far been analysed not from a translationist or philological perspective, but on the basis of the specificity of the reception of translations in the literary life of the 1980s and 1990s. The text therefore aims to examine the character that Sommer gave to O’Hara and the image of this character in the Polish reception, which will allow us to answer the question – can an author become “property” of a translator?

On the Translation of Press Texts from the Critical Perspective

Researchers concentrating on the media discourse observe the need to approach translated press texts from the critical perspective, also taking into consideration their status and criteria of reliable evaluation. From the point of view of the specificity and degree of translation difficulty, these texts seem interesting and difficult due to linguistic factors. Besides, they are generally diverse and, in the translation process, they may undergo significant changes (not necessarily because of the translator’s interpretation). However, they are infrequently subjected to critical evaluation, being placed on the peripheries of translation studies.

The difficulties which researchers investigating the press discourse must (or would have to) face are therefore considerable. Like translators, researchers encounter problems of message condensation (imposed by editors), the media reality presented in the text and the points of view. Researchers must also analyze the function of the translated text, taking into consideration the reader’s perspective, which, as a rule, governs the translator’s decisions. Researchers should also assess the aesthetic values of the text, taking into account its multimodality. All these issues are discussed on the basis of Polish translations of Russian press texts.

The case study of selected texts and their translations illustrates problems resulting from the lack of clearly established criteria for translation criticism and the rapid ageing of information contained in press texts. Translation criticism facilitates reflection on the quality and value of translated press texts and appreciation of rendering meanings.

Peter (Peter) Lachmann’s Life in the Space of Translation

The article discusses Przemysław Chojnowski’s research on the work of Peter (Piotr) Lachmann, a German-Polish author born in pre-war Gliwice (Gleiwitz). Lachmann consistently thematizes the experience of the borderland, describing his existence between two languages and cultures, that is, a “life in translation”. The culmination of Chojecki’s long-time research is the monograph Liminalność i bycie „pomiędzy” w twórczości Petera (Piotra) Lachmanna. Studium literacko-kulturowe (Kraków, 2020), which is the main subject of analysis in this article. This work situates itself in the domain of modern anthropological-cultural comparative studies, clearly and convincingly demonstrating the heuristic potential of such approach. Chojnowski’s book is not only a mine of information about the work of Peter (Piotr) Lachmann, but also an invitation to discuss the broader issues of borderland and cultural bivalence, usually associated with ambiguous national identification.