Gawędowe opowiadanie w przekładzie Trans-Atlantyku Witolda Gombrowicza na język szwedzki – analiza stylistyczna
Storytelling in the Swedish translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk: a stylistic analysis

Summary/Abstract: This paper contributes to research on the various strategies adopted in the translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s works into foreign languages. The aim is to find out whether the highly acclaimed Swedish translation of Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk, made by Anders Bodegård (2009), managed to preserve the stylistic effect of exaggerated speech and archaicity as two important aspects of the original stylization into Polish 17th-century storytelling (gawęda szlachecka) at the morpholexical level. Following the methodology proposed by Ewa Sławkowa (1981) in her complex analysis of language use in the novel, the linguistic microanalysis carried out in this paper demonstrates how Bodegård “explains” to Swedish audience the world constructed in the original text, as well as shows what kind of linguistic means have been used to achieve this goal at the level of the elements of style, considered qualitatively and, to a limited extent, quantitatively. Special attention is paid to those forms that deviate from standard modern Swedish and make it possible to create the effect of orality and archaicity: on the one hand, these include archaic inflectional forms genuinely rooted in Old Swedish, elements of linguistic diachrony present in the standard language, words marked stylistically as obsolete, old-fashioned or rarely used, and, on the other, colloquial forms developed recently that have gradually been institutionalized in standard written language. The analysis of their use in translation shows some of the most general principles of how a Swedish text functions as a whole and allows us to examine the translator’s methods in reconstructing the source content.

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