Borys Pasternak, 2021. Szkice, wybór i przeł. Seweryn Pollak, red. Katarzyna Gędas, Piotr Mitzner, Żaneta Nalewajk, Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

Thousands of Other Secrets

The article discusses the first critical edition of Seweryn Pollak’s translations of Boris Pasternak’s essays (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2021). The collection prepared by Katarzyna Gędas, Piotr Mitzner, and Żaneta Nalewajk invites its readers to develop a multifocal reading that attends simultaneously to (1) the complex historical, social, political and economic factors involved in the production of translations and its relationship to reading communities (both in Soviet Russia and in the Polish People’s Republic), (2) Pasternak’s personal and creative biography, (3) Pasternak’s views on the tasks of art, literature and artistic translation, (4) the history of the Shakespearean translations in Russian, (5) modernist concepts of literary translation, (6) the essayistic and translational legacy of Seweryn Pollak, and, last but not least, (7) Pollak’s unpublished archives. Particularly the last of the mentioned research areas leaves a sense of insufficiency, incompleteness and regret in the reader’s mind. As sadly reported by the editors of the collection, Pollak’s archives have not yet been duly classified and examined, despite their compelling importance for the history of Polish literary translation and translation studies. The translator’s manuscripts remain scattered across various institutions and still await sustained scholarly attention and coordinated elaboration in a search for their secrets.

The article discusses the first critical edition of Seweryn Pollak’s translations of Boris Pasternak’s essays (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2021). The collection prepared by Katarzyna Gędas, Piotr Mitzner, and Żaneta Nalewajk invites its readers to develop a multifocal reading that attends simultaneously to (1) the complex historical, social, political and economic factors involved in the production of translations and its relationship to reading communities (both in Soviet Russia and in the Polish People’s Republic), (2) Pasternak’s personal and creative biography, (3) Pasternak’s views on the tasks of art, literature and artistic translation, (4) the history of the Shakespearean translations in Russian, (5) modernist concepts of literary translation, (6) the essayistic and translational legacy of Seweryn Pollak, and, last but not least, (7) Pollak’s unpublished archives. Particularly the last of the mentioned research areas leaves a sense of insufficiency, incompleteness and regret in the reader’s mind. As sadly reported by the editors of the collection, Pollak’s archives have not yet been duly classified and examined, despite their compelling importance for the history of Polish literary translation and translation studies. The translator’s manuscripts remain scattered across various institutions and still await sustained scholarly attention and coordinated elaboration in a search for their secrets.