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A Polish History of Grimms’ Fairy Tales

Przekładaniec, Issue 22-23/2009-2010 – Translating Fairy Tales, Issues in English, pp. 57-75

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.003.0857

The article discusses difficulties with translating Grimms’ fairy tales into Polish. The first part describes the specific features of the original text and presents Bruno Bettelheim’s conclusions about “the meaning and importance of fairy tales.” The second part reviews the existing Polish translations. The third part discusses the main goals of a new Polish translation. The conclusion stresses that the new Polish translation should be addressed to a double audience (both children and adults), as is the case with the original Kinder- und Hausmärchen.

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Borders of Children’s Literature: The Reception of Picture Books in Italy and the Question of Reading Aloud

Przekładaniec, Issue 22-23/2009-2010 – Translating Fairy Tales, Issues in English, pp. 195-211

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.010.0864

The article opens with the concept of the “world republic of childhood” without geographical and political borders, as conceived by Hazard and promoted after the Second World War. According to O’Sullivan (2004, 2005), this concept of childhood, and consequently of children’s literature, is idealistic and does not address real problems connected with the process of translation. As a matter of fact, translating a book for children from one language into another is not as easy as it might seem: frontiers and custom houses do exist (Bertea 2000: 94). A peculiar cas limite is the reception of the picture book in Italy. Introduced thanks to the pioneering work of the Emme Edizioni publishing house and its translators, the genre was later rejected. Italy had to wait a decade to see the same and similar picture books republished, but it is still paying the price for having initially closed its borders, despite the fact that the translators had paid customs- and import duties. These were determined not only by the child image dominant in the Italian society, but also by the different image of the adult, who was meant to read picture books aloud and who was ready to put on a performance for the child recipient (Oittinen 2000). In particular, the article investigates examples of the discrepancy between the adult and child images of the source and target texts selected from American and English picture books and their Italian translations.

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For a Tin Ingot: The Archaeology of Oral Interpretation

Przekładaniec, Special Issue 2013 – Selection from the Archives, Issues in English, pp. 87-101

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.039.1456

This paper, based on research conducted by the pioneers of the history of oral interpreting (A. Hermann, I. Kurz) in the 1950s and on modern archaeological evidence, presents the earliest references to interpreters in the Bronze Age, in the Near East and the Mediterranean area (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, Carthage). It discusses a Sumerian Early Dynastic List, a Sumerian-Eblaic glossary from Ebla, the Shu-ilishu’s Cylinder Seal, the inscriptions and reliefs from the Tombs of the Princes of Elephantine and of Horemheb, the mention of one-third of a mina of tin dispensed at Ugarit to the interpreter of Minoan merchants and the Hanno’s stele, as well as terms used by these early civilisations to denote an interpreter: eme-bal, targumannu, jmy-r(A) aw, and mls.

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Songs of Ecstatic Despair. Miłosz and the Counterculture

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 147-157

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.021.1210

This article discusses the relationship between the American counterculture of the 1960s and Miłosz’s poetry created during that time in Berkeley. The poet observes the student revolt through his own experience with history, including his leftist sympathies. He is critical both of the naïve hippie postulates and Herbert Marcuse’s new version of Marxism. However, he treats counterculture as a symptomatic response to vital problems of the Western civilization in the second half of the twentieth century. He reflects upon the influence of art on power, totalitarian as well as democratic. He sees the necessity of commitment, though he asks about its form and effects. Countercultural experiments coincide also with Miłosz’s own search for “a more capacious form” and with the epiphanies described in his poems.

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The Woman Translator in the Middle Ages. Selected Examples of Female Translation Activity

Przekładaniec, Issue 24/2010 – Feminism and translation, Issues in English, pp. 19-30

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.12.002.0564

Translatory achievements of medieval women are rarely discussed. In antiquity, Greek and Roman writings were practically all composed in either of the two languages. Greek dominated, since Latin women’s writing did not reach sophistication, or at least we do not possess proof of it. In the early Middle Ages the situation changed: Latin became dominant, and writing in the vernacular, which included women’s writing, started to be recognized. While scholarly research tended to focus on high-brow, original literature, female literary endeavours were largely disregarded. Translation, a low-brow activity, was not considered original. Comments about it are rather infrequent in early compendia of medieval literature. This absence may be partly explained by the fact that originality itself was not held in high regard in the Middle Ages. Only recently has the growing research into social and legal conditions of early women as well as into their varied cultural and literary expressions brought them a deserved recognition.

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Magdalena Buchta