From the Editors and From the Translator
From the Editors and From the Translator

Summary/Abstract: From the Editors: The 2023 Michael Henry Heim Prize in Collegial Translation is awarded to Christina Manetti for translating “Lustration: A Post-Communist Phenomenon” by Andrzej Paczkowski. The very title of Andrzej Paczkowski’s essay “Lustration: A Post-Communist Phenomenon” perfectly illustrates the challenges its translator had to overcome. The meaning of the concept “lustration” as applied here is anchored in the specific experiences of peoples who had been ruled by communist regimes and who, when those regimes collapsed, had to reconcile themselves with their past. This meant not only prosecution of overt crimes committed by the functionaries of the old regime, but also dealing with the various forms of collaboration, and even mere compliance, in which so many had been involved. The words we use acquire their specific meaning in a given context; this meaning may not only pose problems in translation to a different language, but differ from generation to generation, from region to region, from one institutional jargon to another. The Polish word “lustracja,” rendered here, with due respect to its Latin roots, by Dr. Manetti as “lustration,” is sometimes translated to English as “vetting” or even “purge.” None of these three words (or others that have been used) fully reflects the cognitive and affective nuances of the Polish meaning of the concept. The same can be said of the Czech “lustrace,” the Croatian “lustracija,” or the Latvian “lustrācija.”

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