Братья Карамазовы in the Power of Polish (Re)translations

The article discusses Kinga Rozwadowska’s monograph book Przekład i władza. Polskie tłumaczenia Braci Karamazow Fiodora Dostojewskiego [Translation and Power: Polish Translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov] (Kraków 2018). Before presenting the book, the reviewer refers to translation series as a research problem and discusses elements of retranslation theory. The merit of Rozwadowska’s book lies primarily in its methodological innovativeness: the author combines contemporary cultural discourse on translation with the discourse on power and with Mihail Bakhtin’s concepts of novelistic polyphony and the dialogic word. Moreover, the Rozwadowska discusses and evaluates not only the translation series, but also the current situation of the examined translations on Polish publishing market. The adoption of a cultural perspective does not entail abandoning traditional translation analysis based on philological examination and comparison of textual material. This procedure is successfully applied in the second part of the monograph, devoted to ten selected elements of Dostoyevsky’s novel, which illustrates specific translation problems. The comparative analyses and interpretations of individual elements of the translation series are also evaluated highly by the reviewer, although not without minor polemical remarks.

The article discusses Kinga Rozwadowska’s monograph book Przekład i władza. Polskie tłumaczenia Braci Karamazow Fiodora Dostojewskiego [Translation and Power: Polish Translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov] (Kraków 2018). Before presenting the book, the reviewer refers to translation series as a research problem and discusses elements of retranslation theory. The merit of Rozwadowska’s book lies primarily in its methodological innovativeness: the author combines contemporary cultural discourse on translation with the discourse on power and with Mihail Bakhtin’s concepts of novelistic polyphony and the dialogic word. Moreover, the Rozwadowska discusses and evaluates not only the translation series, but also the current situation of the examined translations on Polish publishing market. The adoption of a cultural perspective does not entail abandoning traditional translation analysis based on philological examination and comparison of textual material. This procedure is successfully applied in the second part of the monograph, devoted to ten selected elements of Dostoyevsky’s novel, which illustrates specific translation problems. The comparative analyses and interpretations of individual elements of the translation series are also evaluated highly by the reviewer, although not without minor polemical remarks.