Bohater groteskowy "Ferdydurke" Witolda Gombrowicza w przekładzie Katriny Šalamun-Biedrzyckiej
The grotesque character of Witold Gombrowicz’s "Ferdydurke" translated by Katarina Šalamun-Biedrzycka

Summary/Abstract: The grotesque is an aesthetic category, which undermines the conventional and acknowledged image of the world, illustrates the complexity of certain phenomena and their other surprising aspects. In Poland the term „grotesque”, being a calque from German, was first used at the threshold of the 19th-century. However, according to the Polish 20th-century literature and art researchers, grotesque becomes prominent in Polish literature on the verge of modernism. The assumption that modernist art had an almost entirely grotesque character cannot however be ruled out. Grotesque manifests itself in the novel Ferdydurke on each level of the work, including language. The grotesque character of the language is shown among other things through neologisms and a mixture of pompous and colloquial style. Body parts (such as bottom and mug), having a symbolic meaning throughout the novel, play an important part in giving the figures their grotesque character. The language of the novel may undoubtedly constitute a problem for the translator, as the writer uses neologisms and disturbs the word order to achieve a grotesque character of events. The translator tried to deliver an identical image of the grotesque character in her translation. Frequently, the translator couldn’t however disturb the correctitude of the Slovenian language. She preserves the sense of the original on the lexical and syntactic level through imitating the syntactic structures of the original or through replacing them with other grammatical categories. Each translator must recreate the model of the world embedded in the source text.

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