Jan Rybicki

Translator’s Stylometric Invisibility

In a corpus of the writings of several authors, each author being represented by several texts, it is usually enough to compare the similarities between the frequencies of some 100 most frequent words (obviously, these usually include various function words rather than content words) in these texts to group the texts correctly by the authors. This paper investigates the phenomenon that translated texts also tend to be grouped by the original author rather than by the translator despite the fact that the most frequent words in a corpus of translations in no way maintain a one-to-one relationship with those in the original corpus. This is illustrated with examples of experiments performed on a variety of parallel sets of literary texts in English, French and Polish.

The success rate of authorship attribution by multivariate analysis of most-frequent-word frequencies is studied in a 1000-novel corpus of Polish literary works from the late 18th to the early 21st century. The results are examined for possible influences of the number of authors and/or the number of texts to be attributed. Also, the success rates achieved in this study are compared to those obtained in earlier studies for smaller corpora, too small perhaps to produce regular patterns. This study shows that text sets of this size confirm the intuitive predictions as to those influences: 1) the more authors, the less successful attribution; 2) for the same number of authors, the number of texts to be attributed does not influence success rate.

The author takes a close look at translating ancient texts from the viewpoint
of a historian. He explains why historians of Antiquity are usually against the very
idea of translating Greek and Latin literature. He then proceeds to argue that historical
knowledge is indispensable if a translation is to be rendered. This argument is supported
by a detailed analysis of the standard Polish translation of two biographies by Plutarch,
Life of Aristides and Life of Cimon.

Jeremiah Curtin translated most works by Poland’s first literary Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz. He was helped in this life-long task by his wife Alma Cardell Curtin. It was Alma who, after her husband’s death, produced the lengthy Memoirs she steadfastly ascribed to her husband for his, rather than hers, greater glory. This paper investigates the possible textual influences Alma might have had on other works by her husband, including his travelogues, ethnographic and mythological studies, and the translations themselves. Lacking traditional authorial evidence, this study relies on stylometric methods comparing most frequent word usage by means of cluster analysis of z-scores. There is much in this statistics-based authorial attribution to show how Alma Cardell Curtin affected at least two other original works of her husband and, possibly, at least two of his translations as well..

The paper discusses a translation of the Roman tragedy Historia albo
tragedia Oktawii cesarzówny rzymskiej (History or Tragedy of Octavia the Roman
Emperor’s Daughter) by Józef Jan Woliński, published in 1728 and completed shortly
beforehand. Its author presents himself as a faithful servant of the Wessels and dedicates
his adaptation of the fi rst-century praetexta Octavia to Maria Józefa Wessel, Konstanty
Sobieski’s widow. The translator adapts the Latin text, on the one hand emphasising
Nero’s ferocity and despotism, on the other employing the stereotype of the abandoned
wife. The cruel emperor is charged with all the responsibility for the evil which consumes
Rome and his relatives, while Octavia is depicted as a fragile and passive victim of
his malice. However, the translator does not disregard the protagonist’s intimacy with
her brother and her nurse. Woliński underlines the moral aspect of the drama, hinting
at the imminent collapse of Nero’s power and his violent death by suicide, which
does not feature in the original. By removing Octavia’s fi nal lamentation, the Polish
translator makes her follow her nurse’s advice and desist from expressing her grief.
Given Woliński’s closeness to his benefactors around the time of writing his Historia
albo tragedia, it seems plausible to suggest the drama was privately commissioned, and
conceived as a solace to Wessel’s concerns when handing her beloved estate at Żółkiew
to her odious brother-in-law, Jakub Sobieski.

The culture of Ancient Greek literature is very different from our modern
one. As its medium, the Ancient Greek language is incomprehensible outside the
general context of Greek civilisation. Any translation of an Ancient Greek text is to
some extent false, or at least artifi cial, and it cannot express the special character of the
reality of the original. Selected translations of passages from Homer, Herodotus and
Aeschines illustrate the incompatibility of the ancient and modern styles of narration.
The study of the language of literature in relation to the reality it represents is advocated
as a possible solution to this problem. Readers are also recommended to make the effort
to study the ancient originals instead of reading the texts in translations, which can
never be fl awless.

We owe many aspects of Western culture to the Greeks; yet it was the Romans
who took the fi rst steps in the fi eld of translation. This article presents a selection of
characteristics of translation methods used by the Ancients and, more particularly, their
broad understanding of translation as exemplifi ed by Aulus Gellius, Roman writer of
the second century CE.

Traces of the Translator’s Wife. Alma Cardell Curtin and Jeremiah Curtin

Jeremiah Curtin translated most works by Poland’s first literary Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz. He was helped in this life-long task by his wife Alma Cardell Curtin. It was also Alma, who, after her husband’s death, produced the lengthy Memoirs she steadfastly ascribed to her husband for his, rather than hers, greater glory. This article investigates the possible textual influences Alma might have had on other works by her husband, including his travelogues, ethnographic and mythological studies, and the translations themselves. Lacking traditional authorial evidence, this study relies on stylometric methods comparing most frequent word usage by means of cluster analysis of z-scores. There is much in this statistics-based authorial attribution to show how Alma Cardell Curtin’s significantly affected at least two other original works of her husband and, possibly, at least two of his translations.