The article discusses the testimonies of bystanders as presented to the public in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah. It proposes to apply norms and practices developed within Holocaust studies to the analysis of the victims’ testimonies in the emerging field of bystander studies. The Polish bystanders’ utterances in the documentary were edited and simplified through the process of interpretation and re-translation; this inaccurate rendition has been used in Holocaust debates and the lack of sensibility to this aspect of communication in Lanzmann’s film may result in skewed interpretation of the bystanders’ engagement in the scene of violence. The analysis proves that without renewed scrutiny to the bystanders’ speech Holocaust research may lose some important insights. Signs of violence impact, traces of traumatization or brutalization, specificity of cognitive and affective response may be overlooked. The paper calls for an universalizing epistemic approach to all types of the speech emerging from the Holocaust, beyond the (debatable) divisions of its social fabric into victims, perpetrators and bystanders.

Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary Shoah (1985) is a rich source of knowledge on the Nazi extermination of Jews in Central Europe. Its main material consists of interviews with people who witnessed the Holocaust, conducted in the very locations of the wartime events. The present paper analyses an iconic scene from Chełmno on Ner, where between 1940–43 and 1944–45 the first Nazi death camp was located. A group of locals – gathered in front of the parish church, around one of the survivors of the camp – recall the events, sometimes in stunning technical detail. Their Polish utterances are translated into French; English subtitles are based on the French of the interpreter. The Polish linguistic material is not neutral: it is marked with dialectal and sociolectal features; the speakers engage in conversation on the side, comment on the situation of the interview in various ways, verbal and non-verbal. In the translation, both into French and English, sentences are skipped, the plurality of voices is flattened, and differences in memory are smoothed out. The resulting text is rather a summary than a translation. The paper offers close-up analyses of chosen sequences from the interview to show the complexity of the communication situation and the extent of distortion caused by the way translation works in the film. It also offers an alternative translation, which aims at giving voice to the actual people of Chełmno and acknowledging as fully as possible the complication and difficulty of memory construction through language, especially in a highly traumatic context. It hopes to offer insights into the bystander position in Holocaust discourse.

The main problem discussed in the paper is the authenticity of speech of the inhabitants of Chełmno in the sequence filmed outside the parish church in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. The authors analyze a number of characteristic features of the bystanders’ language vis a vis the French translation provided by the interpreter  Barbara Janicka, and the English subtitles. It is argued that the language of the bystanders carries important information on the speakers’ individual and collective identity, and gives clues on the construction of memory, not just on the level of meanings, but also in its materiality. The analysis focuses on four planes which were identified as important for the construction of the implicit messages: the semantic ambiguity of the utterances; the narrative techniques used by the speakers; verb forms, especially the impersonal use of verbs; and syntax. The specific linguistic traits testify to the fact that the speakers lack adequate tools to verbalize their traumatic memories and to reflect the reality that they were part of. The analysis of the linguistic landscape of the scene also leads to conclusions about the instrumentalization of speakers on the part of the film director. The French and English translation in and of the sequence – a summary rather than a rendition – clearly, albeit perhaps not intentionally, contributes to this effect. Through linguistic analysis and wide contextual interpretation, unpacking the way the bystanders speak creates a new, hitherto unacknowledged, source of knowledge on witnessing and trauma.

Based on an analysis of phonetic, lexical and pragmatic (linguistic politeness) aspects of the symbolic sequence outside the church in Chełmno-on-Ner in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, this article offers insights into the communicative situation portrayed in the film, which has not been discussed in existing interpretations. It addresses the relations between the participants of the exchange (the film director, Szymon Srebrnik, the interpreter, the inhabitants of Chełmno), the time and space (a religious service taking place in the church), and historical context: Poland under communist rule, where the Holocaust was not spoken about and/or was subject to manipulation.

Translated by Zofia Ziemann

The article discusses the interpretative and methodological potential inherent in the synergetic application of two categories paradigmatic for cultural studies and cultural literary theory: translatio and memory. It is argued that both categories, viewed as cultural metaphors and combined with each other, may serve as a complex model for the interpretation of cultural phenomena. The starting point for developing such a model is the insight that both concepts have undergone a similar semantic evolution in the discourse of cultural studies, and may now be represented as radial categories with a “prototypical centre” and metaphorical-metonymical extensions, translatio going far beyond interlingual “translation proper”. Next, some further contact zones between translatio and memory are outlined: firstly, their functional analogies, which are reflected in parallel metaphors depicting memory and translation (such as the “palimpsest” and the “devouring of the Other”). Secondly, the metaphor of the “dissemination of memes” is discussed as the most promising idea that brings together the discourse of translation studies with reflection on the mechanisms of collective memory, drawing attention to ethical and political aspects of both translatio and memory. The image of the “dissemination of memes” is also a point of departure for its derivative metaphors of “translation as memory transmission” and “memory as a space of translatio”. The conclusion is that the interactions between memory and translatio that engendered these metaphors could be put to use in comparative investigations. Finally, some representative research  problems are formulated based on various configurations of literal and metaphorical meanings of both terms. It is emphasized that the coming together of divergent yet close pathways of translation and memory studies could be of mutual benefit to both fields of inquiry.

Memory has been one of the main topics of universal literature, and nowadays postmemorial prose is an important trend in Polish literature. This leads to the question whether the specific character of this literature poses a distinctive challenge for translators, and consequently, whether its translations should be treated as a separate issue within the field of translation studies. In turn, the latest research on memory shows that contemporary societies are built of numerous social groups, which time and again have conflicting interests and consequently, cultivate different memory practices regarding the same past events. Memory is treated as a dynamic phenomenon, undergoing transformations through time and space, and hence is constantly actualised. There are five factors which determine the movement of memory: carriers, media, contents, practices and forms. Memory can “travel” thanks to various kinds of media, e.g. monuments. Another specific medium of memory is translation: it allows the contents of memory included in the source work to travel to another cultural space. This has allowed us to approach literary translation from a fresh perspective and developed a set of new research directions, which have been listed in this paper.

In this article, I try to lay out clearly and discuss selected issues encountered during the translation (with Eda Nagayama) of Bogdan Bartinkowski’s (born 1932) collection of stories Dzieciństwo w pasiakach (1969) into Brazilian Portuguese. My text combines a scholarly dimension with one of self-commentary in order to offer  some general reflection on the subject of the ethics of translating testimony. It consists of three parts. In the first, I provide a concise overview of the state of research on the connections between translation and studies on cultural memory. Next, I present a series of observations relating to the emotional dimension of the process  of translating Holocaust testimonies. In the final section, I compare solutions adopted in translations of Bartnikowski’s memoir into German, English, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, and Portuguese. In a summing up, I try to define the memory-(re)productive role of translation: reproductive, in that the translation of testimony  demands a respect for the truth of the signs present in the original and their rendering in the target culture; and productive (creative) inasmuch as it demands of the author of the translation a series of procedures with the aim of inscribing a universal theme within the specific field of cultural memory.

Despite a massive amount of archival material on Nazi concentration camps, references to camp translators and interpreters are random, brief, and laconic. They usually consist of dry facts as related in ontological narratives of the Nazi regime victims. In the present paper, these records will be confronted with the portrayal of  Marta Weiss, a fictional camp interpreter presented in the 1948 docudrama Ostatni etap (The Last Stage) by the Polish film director Wanda Jakubowska, herself a former prisoner of the concentration camp in Birkenau.
To this day, The Last Stage remains a “definitive film about Auschwitz, a prototype for future Holocaust cinematic narratives”. The Last Stage is also called “the mother of all Holocaust films”, as it establishes several images easily discernible in later narratives on the Holocaust: realistic images of the camp; passionate moralistic  appeal; and clear divisions between the victims and the oppressors. At the same time, The Last Stage is considered to be an important work from the perspective of feminist studies, as it presents the life and death of female prisoners, femininity, labour and motherhood in the camp, women’s solidarity, and their resistance to the  oppressors. The Last Stage constitutes a unique quasi-documentary source for the analysis of the role of translators and interpreters working in extreme conditions. Moreover, the authenticity of the portrayal of Marta Weiss may not be contested, as it is based on the person of Mala Zimetbaum, a messenger and interpreter at  Auschwitz, killed in 1944 after a failed escape from the camp.
The paper presents the topic of interpreting and translating in a concentration camp from three different angles: film studies, feminist studies, and interpreting studies.

Oskarżona: Vera Gran (Vera Gran: The Accused), a hybrid biographical work relating the life story and testimony of the Warsaw ghetto singer by the Polish second generation author Agata Tuszyńska, was translated to many languages. Yet, all the translations were made on the basis of the French one, which in fact reflects a strongly edited version of the original text. As the author of the article argues, the modifications introduced to Oskarżona: Vera Gran upon its release on the foreign markets go far beyond the standard editing procedures and have to do with the fact that Tuszyńska’s original text openly questions a certain fixed paradigm of representing the Holocaust and some of the socially sanctioned patterns of Shoah remembrance. The comparative analysis of the Polish and the American editions of the book presented in the article traces the most significant changes introduced to the foreign adaptation, identifying three main areas where the misbehaved  testimony to the Shoah – of the survivor and the secondary witness alike – was disciplined to conform to the largely globalised discourse of Holocaust memory, subjected to the regime of conventional representation and culturally reproduced reception patterns.

Nabokov’s novella The Eye is usually read as a story in which the narrator tries to use his failed suicide attempt to announce his own death and assume the role of an observer, who, as it turns out in the end, is merely watching over his own (alienated) figure. The ending seems to project a reintegration of the self. In this essay, the  rocess of Nabokov’s translation of the novella into English is seen as connected with the spectral elements of the story, proposing a new reading embedded into the framework of liminality: the narrating hero keeps on dying, without, however, being able to escape his private inferno, because his obsessive memory continues to  eproduce the same murky world, merely transferring the hero deeper and deeper into its narrowing circles. Each of these circles is an attempt to translate the text of (un)reality to the new language of consciousness, and each of these attempts reduces the hero to the status of a still more spectral voice, while still confining him  o the boundaries of self. It seems quite fitting in this context that Nabokov, speaking of self-translation, described it as an unremitting torment of the body being transfigured into spirit. The essay also compares Nabokov’s translation practice to his own views on translation expressed in essays and interviews, pointing out the  fundamental differences: self-translation demands the death of the original text, out of which the phantom of existence in another language may be born – a ghost, each movement of which is always double, divided into the observer and the observed.