Memories Lost in Polish Translation. Works by Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Yutkevich

This paper is an attempt at explaining difficulties encountered by Polish readers of selected translations of memoirs by Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vsevolod Meyerhold andSergei Yutkevich. Three translations of memoirs were analyzed, all translated by Andrzej Drawicz, Polish literary scholar. The paper presents results of translator’s decisions as well as free translation of titles and content of those books. In Polish translations, significant changes were studied, both on the level of structure/composition and on the level of selective translation of their content. Moreover, systematically applied solutions, his tendency for omission of words, sentences, paragraphs, even entire chapters, were indicated. The author analyzes the result of those omissions, i.e. the choice not to convey some of the important information to the reader. On the basis of Yutkevich’s work, the author shows that the translation becomes an entirely new text, different from the original, as the Polish translation is made from different texts by the same author. The paper also presents Drawicz’s tendency to omit “less appealing” (in his opinion) passages, delete all political connotations, arbitrarily choose fragments important enough to be translated and “disposable” ones that are insignificant and can be reduced. Renouncement of politics in his translation of memoirs sometimes partially, and sometimes entirely distorts the cultural and historical background of the period. Polish readers will read memoirs of cultural activists, but shall be denied many important facts concerning the country those activists lived in.
 

Helen Barolini’s Reflections on Rejected Identity

One of the key topics of Helen Barolini’s essays is the problem of rejected identity in migratory context which the American author analyses from a double perspective: from the point of view of Italian immigrants facing difficulties imposed by the new reality, and from the point of view of
immigrant writers obliged to censor themselves because of the stereotypes existing in the local culture. Barolini examines the situation of the Italian community in the 20th century USA, but her reflections are valuable also in other (the present-day European/Italian) contexts.
 

Knife and Fork Wars: a Description of Contemporary Serbian and Croatian Gastronationalism

The aim of the text is to demonstrate the unusual vitality of the nationalist discourse of today’s Croatia and Serbia, which explicitly draws on the nationalism of the 1990s that marked the beginning of the new nation states established after the collapse of Yugoslavia. Despite the passage of time, the trite nationalism, i.e. the one visible in the pop-culture, remains a major element of the political life and a guarantor of the state which can be called after Danilo Kiš a state of deep nationalist paranoia. The reflection has been inspired by the current political events, concentrated around the seemingly innocent elements of the pop culture (cuisine), which constitute a telling litmus paper of both the transitions that took place in the face of intensification of the war-induced identity-related discourse, as part of which the various canons of national cultures were reinterpreted, and of the contemporary Serbian and Croatian acts of “pop-cultural knife and fork wars”. The text constitutes an attempt to describe the post-Yugoslav “nationalist menu”, it contains various cultural texts, the selection of which shows the complexity of the problem.
 

Identity, the Self and the Levinasian Other in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim

The aim of the paper is to analyse the concepts of identity and the self in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim in relation to the thought of Emanuel Levinas. In the novel, comprehension of the other appears elusive while the search for a fixed standard of conduct, the need of which seems so burning, is often frustrated. Moreover, the external world seems malevolent, while self-knowledge is virtually unattainable. It could be claimed that only thanks to a confrontation with the Other, be it another man, the universe, or one’s own self, can man establish a sense of identity. Especially the confrontation and relation with another man, the Other who, in Levinasian terms, is never fully knowable, but for whom one is primordially responsible, helps render existence meaningful and one’s own nature more acceptable. This relation is charged with important ethical resonance, since the marine ethos proves misleading when deprived of any relation to the Other.
 

“Märchen aus Malula” by Rafik Schami, first published in 1997, is a collection of retold Syrian folk fairy tales. The mentioned work is used by the Syrian-born author as an expression of both direct (based on the open criticism of the typical elements of a fairy tale) and indirect (built on numerous modifications of the source text) polemic against original fairy tales. Therefore, the objective of this article is to identify, categorize and finally evaluate the passages of polemical character. The terminology introduced in the phenomenological research of fairy tales by Max Lüthi was used to determine the correlation between the original tales and Schami’s retellings.