Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights is the first instalment of his award-winning trilogy His Dark Materials. In this alternate-worlds fantasy and children’s literature classic, Lyra and her daemon Pan are catapulted from the relative stability of Oxford to negotiate an increasingly threatening world in a quest to protect free will from cataclysmic adult zealotry. According to prophecy, Lyra is the chosen one; she conforms to the tropes of the fantasy quest performing the paradigmatic steps of the saviour hero. Pullman’s protagonist transgresses and subverts the stereotypical expectations of the fantasy heroine whose generic destiny is coded in enclosure, passivity and endurance. Lyra is also a coming of age story and here again Pullman’s conceptualisation does not conform to the female pattern in both fantasy and children’s literature where marriage functions as the marker for maturity. Character is one of the two defining traits of fantasy (Attebery 1992) and it performs a didactic function in children’s literature. Characterisation is created through the reader’s interpretation of textual cues: narratorial description, direct and free-indirect speech. Lyra’s character subverts fantasy stereotypes and depicts a transgressive child who does not conform to gender role expectations.

Genre translation tends to adapt the text to target culture norms and the didactic and socialising impetus of children’s literature has been shown to prompt translation strategies which comply with the receiving culture’s linguistic and behavioural norms. In this paper, we analyse the rendering of character cues in the French, German and Italian translations of Northern Lights:

1. Is the transgressive trope of a) the heroine following the male hero paradigm and b) the coming of age pattern maintained or normalised to conform to genre expectations?

2. Is Lyra’s transgressive character rendered in translation or is it adapted to comply with didactic expectations of behaviour?

3. Are there different notions of the role and function of children’s literature in the target environments and do these impact on translation strategies?

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 40/2020. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.
See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.002.13165.

The article discusses authorial neologisms coined by Stanislaw Lem and their translation into English on the example of 37 plant and animal names excerpted from the short story entitled “Let Us Save the Universe (An Open Letter from Ijon Tichy)”, which, together with their English equivalents, were subject to comparative analysis. Since these names may create translation problems, the purpose of the analysis was primarily to determine the problem-solving techniques used by the translators, Maria Święcicka-Ziemianek and Joel Stern. Another goal was to make an attempt at explaining their translation choices and to determine the impact of these choices on the way in which the equivalents expressed with neologisms perform their naming function and the function through which they create the narrative world in the target text. Therefore, the article lists the possible causes of translation problems evoked by neologisms and presents the characteristics of the analysed names in terms of translation difficulties they may pose. The analytical material is presented taking into account the relationship between neologisms and their equivalents with the accompanying context and/or illustration. The article provides conclusions on the impact of the techniques used and the elements that determined the final shape of equivalents on the way the naming and creative function of authorial neologisms are reflected in the target text. It also shows the methods of overcoming problems related to translating neologisms into a foreign language.

trans. by Monika Czarnecka

Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 40/2020. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University. 

See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.003.13166

Crime novel is considered one of the most important innovations of the twentieth century in the field of fiction. Together with cinema, television and “elite” literature which often take over some of its features (themes and plots), it plays a significant role in creating the representation of reality proposed to the readers. The investigation described in the novels is set in a context which refers to the real world, in its social, political or historical aspects. The realistic dimension of the crime story makes it a kind of “social document”, which attracts the attention of researchers, including non-literary scholars. Reading crime novels allows them to acquire strictly literary information, but also some knowledge about communities, which leads them to an interpretation of relationships between literature and society. In this paper, the translated crime novel is seen as a special means of enriching the reader’s knowledge of the source culture. The realistic character of the work, which is supposed to fulfil a primarily ludic function, implies a certain tension in the work of the translator, who is led to ask himself: “shall I entertain or shall I entertain and teach”? If realism becomes a constitutive feature of crime fiction, if, as stated by Maryse Petit and Gilles Menegaldo, “under the pretext of attracting a crime novel client, the intention is to give him a history lesson or to make him think about a certain state of society”, the translator may be bound to include in the translation some elements that supplement the “encyclopaedic” knowledge of the target reader. The analysis is based on two novels by Marek Krajewski – his first novel, Death in Breslau (1999), set in the inter-war period, featuring the German policeman Eberhard Mock, and The Minotaur’s Head, published a decade later, which action takes Mock to Lwów in the time when it was a Polish city and makes him befriend a Polish commissioner, Popielski. A comparison of some of their translations (eight for the first book, three for the second) shows differences in the treatment of the historical component of the novels, both in the treatment of selected text elements, as a result of the translator’s project, and in the peritexts, which, however, usually do not depend on the translator, but on the publisher.

Trans. by Xavier Chantry

Fictional texts containing specialized terms pose a challenge for literary translators. Rooted in raw factual accuracy, such terms can nevertheless be used in very expressive ways. Raymond Chandler, for example, used oil industry terminology (bull wheel, derrick, oil field, scum, walking-beam, and especially the term sump), in his first novel The Big Sleep (1939) within intentionally artistic phraseology, involving alliteration, parallel structuring and repetition. The novel was (re)translated into Spanish a number of times (El sueño eterno 1947, 1948?, 1958, 1972 and 2001), enabling an analysis into how different translators met this challenge. Though the published translations reveal a lower frequency of repetition in all cases, as well as inconsistent co-textual use of the terminology and usage of non-terms, omissions and errors, these instances are often qualitatively compensated for with creatively reproduced alliterative elements and added literary devices. This study of a seldomly explored aspect of literary translation shows how professionals are aware of the importance of language for specific purposes in literature and how effective balances between technical accuracy and literary expressiveness can be attained. For theorists who consider that literary and technical translation are separate fields, the results show that literary translators tend to bridge this gap proficiently with both accuracy and literary flair.

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 40/2020. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.
See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.006.13169.

See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.007.13170.

This article discusses sex education books for children and young adults published in Poland between 1945 and 2018. After defining the ideological profile of 111 examined publications as either conservative, moderately conservative, neutral, moderately liberal or liberal, the authors compare the whole set of translated books (translations) with the whole set of books by Polish authors (non-translations), taking into account the date of publication and the age of the intended reader. The analysis shows that translations differ from texts written originally in Polish, because they promote other values. Polish books, especially those published before 1989, are usually neutral or moderately conservative, while translations mostly propagate moderately liberal or liberal ideologies. There is also a close correlation between those ideological categories and the age of the reader: books for the youngest audience are ideologically charged to only a small degree, and the ideological content increases with the age of the reader. This seems to be related to the larger number of translations in the older age groups. Translations, which usually reflect a liberal ideology, fill a gap in Polish culture by complementing or replacing the conservative sex education available in Polish schools, and by encouraging Polish authors to write sex education books expressing similar views.

Trans. by Xavier Chantry

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 40/2020. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.
See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.009.13172.

This article discusses selected “rewritings” of Edward Lear’s nonsense poem “The Akond of Swat”, focusing specifically on the translators’, illustrators’, adapters’ and editors’ attitudes towards the allusive nature of the poem – and specifically the reference it makes to the historical figure of the Pashtun religious leader Abdul Ghaffūr, also known as the Akond (or Wali) of Swat or Saidū Bābā, which may be viewed as orientalist or parodistic from a contemporary viewpoint. Recent translated and illustrated versions of the poem inscribe it with new aesthetic and ideological values. Two Polish translations considered in this article, produced by Andrzej Nowicki and Stanisław Barańczak respectively, demonstrate changing approaches to the nonsense genre evidenced in Polish literary circles (revealing a gradual transition from pure to parodistic nonsense). Graphic representations of the poem discussed in the article testify to the artists’ interpretive powers in redefining the genre of Lear’s poem, rebranding it as an infantile fairy tale on the one hand and a disturbing reflection on tyranny and “the war on terrorism” on the other.

Trans. by Agata Hołobut

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 40/2020. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.
See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.010.13173

The article examines the reception of Polish contemporary authors associated with the genre of “literary reportage” among the readers of their French translations. The analysis starts with the assumption taken from the thoughts of Tzvetan Todorov, who claimed that genre – shaping both the author’s writing model and the reader’s horizon of expectations – can be an important mechanism of mediation driving the literary communication. The analysis includes translations of books by Wojciech Tochman, Jacek Hugo- Bader, Mariusz Wilk and Mariusz Szczygieł. In the first part, the publishing peritext is examined, through which French publishers create the perception of Polish authors and the literary genre they can be associated with. The second part of the analysis is devoted to the reception of translations of the above-mentioned authors – both among professional critics and amateur reviewers or readers – with particular emphasis put on the genre classification made by the audience. The summary attempts to determine whether French-speaking readers perceive Polish authors in accordance with the specific rules of “literary reportage” and what role the publishing peritext may play in this process. The issue of marketing potential of the literary genre as an important tool in creating the publisher’s offer is also discussed.

Trans. by Paweł Łapiński

* Originally published in Polish in “Przekładaniec” vol. 40/2020. Open access for this publication has been supported by a grant from the Priority Research Area Heritage under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at Jagiellonian University.
See: https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864PC.20.008.13171