Ostępy języka. Modernistyczna proza Djuny Barnes w polskim tłumaczeniu
Backwoods of Language. The Modernist Prose of Djuna Barnes in Polish Translation

Summary/Abstract: No sooner than after eighty years since the moment of the original publication of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood was Polish literary market enriched by a translation of one of the most peculiar novels of the Euro-American modernism. Marcin Szuster’s translation under Polish title Ostępy nocy has already managed to earn much praise and also some prizes and open a first Polish discussion about the work of the eccentric American writer. The paper’s focus is to analyze the Polish translation of Nightwood with a special interest in Barnes’s style as it becomes a central character in the novel which connects, according to feminist critics (K. Kaivola, S. Benstock), to its emancipatory potential. In my paper I follow a claim that the complex style of this prose writing is a (conscious) manifestation of a woman’s voice (as an affect), behind which one can discover a body – one that experiences and is experienced (J. Taylor). The body, both a structural and a rhetorical category in feminist criticism, in Barnes’s prose can be seen as an element organizing time and space – therefore, ambiguity of her terms and complexity of style are forming a true translation challenge. Marcin Szuster as a translator needs to follow Barnes’s “distinctive point of view,” which is a “feminine” one and distanced by the length of gender, experience and time.

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