The aim of this article is to survey which 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 their selection. 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.

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 41, 2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.21.001.13583); a shorter version of the article is available in French as: M. Kaźmierczak, “Une théorie itinérante? La pensée traductologique occidentale dans la traduction russe (réception éditoriale)”, trans. D. Karczewska, Romanica Wratislaviensia 68, 2021, pp. 101–118.

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.

Translated by Jessica Jensen Mitchell.

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 41, 2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.21.007.13589).

The article presents the vision of economy as husbandry inscribed in Adam Mickiewicz’s narrative poem Pan Tadeusz. This vision opposes the modern liberal economy, which shaped capitalism in the first half of the 19^th 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 19^th 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 the colonial expansion); in the former – with an attempt to transpose traditional economy to the level of myth and with eschewing development towards capitalism.

Translated by Jess Jensen Mitchell. 

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 41, 2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.21.008.13590).

Bruno Jasieński wrote his novel I Burn Paris after translating Ilya Erenburg’s Life and Death of Nikolay Kurbov. This article analyses the complex relationships between these two works and investigates how their artistic and ideological facets intertwine in both positive and negative ways.

Translated by Piotr Plichta.

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 41, 2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.21.002.13584).

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.

* The research prestented in this article has been financed by the Estonian Research Council under the research grant PRG1206: “Translation in History, Estonia 1850–2010: Texts, Agents, Institutions and Practices”.

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 41, 2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.21.004.13586).

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.

 Translated by Gabriela Dudek.

*The article was written as part of the project “Translation of theoretical discourses in the Polish humanities at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries” (no. 2017/25/N/HS2/01585) financed by the National Science Centre, Poland. The author also obtained funding for a doctoral scholarship from the National Science Centre (no. 2018/28/T/HS2/00514).

* Originally published in Polish in Przekładaniec vol. 41, 2020  (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.21.006.13588).