DOES THE PHRASE „POLISH LITERATURE” MEAN THE SAME THING IN ENGLISH AND POLISH? (A PROBLEM OF RECEPTION THEORY AND MUCH MORE…)

This article challenges a notion that translators and scholars of Polish literature abroad typically take for granted, namely, that what the non-Polish reader understands as Polish literature could or should be equivalent to the literary canon in Poland. By considering fundamental concepts of reception theory, particularly as it has been developed by Hans Robert Jauss, as well as more recent arguments about the construction of so-called „world literature”, the author demonstrates how basic differences in readers’ access to linguistic, historical, and cultural information alters the dynamic interactions of reader and text in foreign versus native environments. As a result, the process of translating and interpreting Polish texts can never reproduce that literature in a foreign language environment, but can only produce a new text that will be absorbed as native.

This article challenges a notion that translators and scholars of Polish literature abroad typically take for granted, namely, that what the non-Polish reader understands as Polish literature could or should be equivalent to the literary canon in Poland. By considering fundamental concepts of reception theory, particularly as it has been developed by Hans Robert Jauss, as well as more recent arguments about the construction of so-called „world literature”, the author demonstrates how basic differences in readers’ access to linguistic, historical, and cultural information alters the dynamic interactions of reader and text in foreign versus native environments. As a result, the process of translating and interpreting Polish texts can never reproduce that literature in a foreign language environment, but can only produce a new text that will be absorbed as native.