Translation Epistemology: Implied and Expressed

The starting point for determining the nature of translation epistemology, which develops in parallel to the philosophical theory of cognition, is to distinguish an internal epistemology that permeates the field of translation communication – one of the varieties of verbal textual communication. Its goals are cognitive and exploratory. Cognition refers to the essence of translational communication, exploration refers to the forms differentiating this type of communication. I define translation as the interlingual re-editing of a ready text; and in the space of textual communication it generates seven fundamental components: 1. foreign-language originals or foreign-language translations, 2. mental translations (paratexts), 3. complete translations, 4. fragmentary translations, 5. translation-like structures, 6. translational reflections, and 7. translational fantasies. In this area the epistemology of translation is equivalent to the documentalist’s epistemology. For the translator, any textual structure, subjected to interlingual re-editing, becomes a document as well as a task. In the process of translation, cognitive activity is intertwined with praxeological one, the acquisition of knowledge is combined with the improvement of the craft of translation, the concurrence of cognition and skill prevails. The whole epistemological activity of translators and translation scholars, implicit and explicit, consists in the fact that the translator repeats the hypothetical path of the original author, while the translation scholar repeats bot the hypothetical path of the translator and the hypothetical path of the original author.

Singer-Songwriters’ Song Poems and Translation: A Literature Review of English and Polish Sources

The article presents a review of English and Polish sources on the translation of song poems, with a special focus on the studies featuring at least basic methodological and theoretical proposals. The selection of sources serves two goals. Firstly, to enable readers interested in researching song translation access to the key texts. Secondly, given the rapidly growing interest in studies on song translation and the institutional recognition of the topic in the last two decades (see the Introduction), the article provides an accessible overview to other readers, interested in a general state of the art in a relatively new sub- domain of translation studies. The structure of the article follows two principles. The texts are discussed chronologically, starting with the earliest, short studies looking into song translation (1915–1921), then investigating the developments in academic thinking on the subject in the latter half of the 20th century, and concluding with an overview of the book-length publications and complete theoretical models proliferating in the 21st century. Secondly, the main part of the article follows a comparative approach. Polish sources are discussed in the context of their Anglophone counterparts. The article points to ideas shared by texts published decades apart and those whose authors, surprisingly, did not seem to have read the earlier works. Short summaries of the subsequent sections of the article and its concluding part strive also to shed some light on the position of the aforementioned texts and models within general translation studies. The reviewed sources are shown in the context of their explicit and implicit theoretical assumptions and consequences, such as untranslatability, shifting criteria of equivalence, the semantic dominant, the creative role of the translator, the ambiguous distinctions between translation and adaptation or travesty, and even translational “losses,” “semantic fidelity,” or instrumentalisation of the subject of translation cum music as a useful metaphor enabling studies in the spirit of New Humanities, outside the paradigms of translation, literary, and linguistic studies.

Between Heaven and Hell: Roman Kołakowski’s Poetry and His Translations of The Tiger Lillies

Songs of The Tiger Lillies, a “punk cabaret” group from London, entered the Polish- speaking culture mostly through the translations by Roman Kołakowski. Translation formed just one of many fields of artistic activity of Kołakowski, who was also a poet, a songwriter, a performer, and a theatre director. There exists, however, a striking contrast between the style of the Kołakowski’s own oeuvre and his translation choices. His poetry is mostly religious, patriotic, marked by a solemn tone and elevated register, while The Tiger Lillies delight in ridicule, irony, and perversion, mocking religion in an almost blasphemous way. The paper is an attempt at analysing this contrast and searching for its assumed sources. The target texts are found to be marked by significant semantic and stylistic modifications when compared to the original songs. Amplification of religious tropes and of negative views on modern society is identified as the main form of the translator’s interventions. Based on the comparison of Kołakowski’s translations with his own poetry, it is posited that their ostensible discrepancy may be explained by perceiving the translations as a subsidiary field of artistic expression, where the translator pursues his interests in grimmer aspects of morality and society, expressing them in a form that would not be coherent with his own poetry. Consequently, Kołakowski’s translations of The Tiger Lillies’ songs are considered appropriations in a sense that the translational choices are directed by the translator’s own interests, ideological stance, and sensibilities, rather than by any attempted equivalence with the source texts. It is to be hoped that the paper will form an in itation to further investigations of translational agency in the field of song translation.

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.

(State)holders of Shakespeare: Czesław Miłosz and Roman Brandstaetter as Translators of Shakespeare Dramas in the Polish People’s Republic

The paper aims to shed light on the relationship between Shakespeare, his translators, and the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The case studies of Czesław Miłosz and Roman Brandstaetter will serve to illustrate both the artistic and supportive function of their translation endeavours completed under the patronage of the communist state. By delving into the rich archival material (published as well as unpublished), I would like to focus on the political and social circumstances that determined Miłosz’s and Brandstaetter’s routes towards translating Shakespeare.

* Artykuł powstał w oparciu o wyniki badań przeprowadzonych w ramach finansowanego przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki projektu badawczego Repozytorium polskich przekładów dramatów Williama Shakespeare’a w XX i XXI wieku: zasoby, strategia i recepcja (NCN Opus 14, 2017/27/B/HS2/00853).

Report from the Battlefield: How to Translate Battle Descriptions in the Mahābhārata

This article discusses the problem of scene construal in translation, based on a selected description of the battle scene in the Mahābhārata. It is an old Indian epic (c. 400 BCE–400 CE), the greatest epic of mankind (c. 100,000 stanzas), composed in Sanskrit, most likely orally, and certainly distributed in this way. Its main theme is the war between related families. In Indology, descriptions of battles have been treated as conventional because of their orality, however, a closer analysis shows their well- thought-out structure.

The article discusses examples of zooming-in/out strategy (Langacker 2005) as one of the methods of active scene building. I show how the authors of the Mahābhārata construed doubly dynamic scenes in which both the content of the description (i.e. the fight) and the description itself is dynamic, reflecting the narrator’s movement. I also discuss the difficulties it presents to the Polish translator and consider the extent to which Polish inflection allows for a similar construal, thus meeting the translation requirements proposed by Tabakowska (1993). My hypothesis is that in many cases such doubly dynamic scenes can be successfully reflected in Polish, as opposed to an English translation (Cherniak 2008–9), thus preserving the extraordinary value of the original.

How to Translate“the Great”? Polish Translators and the Masters of French Classicism: A Review of Michał Bajer’s Klasycyzm. Przekład. Prestiż (2020)

Michał Bajer’s book offers an interesting approach to older translations. The author discusses Polish renderings of Corneille’s and Racine’s tragedies in the broadly defined Enlightenment (1740–1830). He looks at the translations from three perspectives: analysing changes at the level of rhetoric, at the level of poetics, and examining the paratextual influences, i.e., the critics’ statements with regard to both original texts and translations. The discourse is set in a historical, literary, and social context, in which the French playwrights appear as models of the classicist perfection of style, an object of imitation, which, however, undergoes constant negotiation on the part of the translators. The book proposes an interesting combination of literary, philological, and sociological tools to create a multi-layered picture of the Polish reception of the two authors.

Jean Ward, 2020. The Between-Space of Translation: Literary Sketches, Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego.

Translation, Literature, and Being “In-between”

The article is a review of the recent book by Jean Ward on Polish-English literary contacts through translation. The book contains several essays describing specific translation situations. The reviewer appreciates particularly the sensitivity with which the author interprets the texts she chooses in their cultural and metaphysical contexts. She also emphasises the accessibility and personal tone of Jean Ward’s academic writing.

Borys Pasternak, 2021. Szkice, wybór i przeł. Seweryn Pollak, red. Katarzyna Gędas, Piotr Mitzner, Żaneta Nalewajk, Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

Thousands of Other Secrets

The article discusses the first critical edition of Seweryn Pollak’s translations of Boris Pasternak’s essays (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2021). The collection prepared by Katarzyna Gędas, Piotr Mitzner, and Żaneta Nalewajk invites its readers to develop a multifocal reading that attends simultaneously to (1) the complex historical, social, political and economic factors involved in the production of translations and its relationship to reading communities (both in Soviet Russia and in the Polish People’s Republic), (2) Pasternak’s personal and creative biography, (3) Pasternak’s views on the tasks of art, literature and artistic translation, (4) the history of the Shakespearean translations in Russian, (5) modernist concepts of literary translation, (6) the essayistic and translational legacy of Seweryn Pollak, and, last but not least, (7) Pollak’s unpublished archives. Particularly the last of the mentioned research areas leaves a sense of insufficiency, incompleteness and regret in the reader’s mind. As sadly reported by the editors of the collection, Pollak’s archives have not yet been duly classified and examined, despite their compelling importance for the history of Polish literary translation and translation studies. The translator’s manuscripts remain scattered across various institutions and still await sustained scholarly attention and coordinated elaboration in a search for their secrets.