Mieliśmy swój modernizm
Review: Włodzimierz Bolecki, Modalności modernizmu. Studia, analizy, interpretacje [The Modalities of Modernism: Studies, Analyses, Interpretations], Wydawnictwo IBL, Fundacja Akademia Humanistyczna, Warsaw 2012.
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Review: Włodzimierz Bolecki, Modalności modernizmu. Studia, analizy, interpretacje [The Modalities of Modernism: Studies, Analyses, Interpretations], Wydawnictwo IBL, Fundacja Akademia Humanistyczna, Warsaw 2012.
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Review: Edward Balcerzan, Literackość. Modele, gradacje, eksperymenty [Literariness: Models, Limits, Experiments], Wydawnictwo Naukowe UMK, Toruń 2013, series: Monografie Fundacji na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej [Monographs of the Foundation for Polish Science].
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The aim of the article is to present an interpretation of one of literary visions of traumatic experiences. Suffering a wrongs in childhood is, by the author, the main cause of many problems in grown people’s life. Those wounds, psychical and physical, may not be cured. The destruction of emotional sphere of human personality causes also a damage of the language capable to express not only trials or harms but even commonplace experiences. Joanna Bator in her novel examines also the abilities of cultural patterns especially those permitting to understand the trauma dimensions and describes the changes of principles ruling a common life.
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The linguistic ways of presenting emotions such as communicating and expressing emotions in Polish medieval texts have not been the subject of linguistic analysis. The majority of the oldest linguistic relics are mostly the texts published both in transliterated and transcribed versions and may constitute a basis for large-scale research of vocabulary. Słownik staropolski 1953–2002 (The Dictionary of Old Polish 1953–2002) and resulting The Conceptual Dictionary of Old Polish are a valuable help in the analysis of presenting emotions in medieval texts. The article presents the categories of concepts in The Conceptual Dictionary of Old Polish that concern emotions. The autosemantic continuous and discontinuous units are assigned to 26 conceptual categories concerning emotions . The contents of the category shame from The Conceptual Dictionary of Old Polish are described in order to show the way of presenting data. The general principles of the comprehensive study on communicating and expressing emotions in Polish medieval texts have been formulated.
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The aim of the article is to reflect on the ‘double life’ of writers in Poland. Bernard Lahire’s concept is employed to clarify writers’ position in the field of literature and in the system of work and employment. The article is based on qualitative data gathered during the project Pierre Bourdieu and Polish literature after 1989. Interviews with 74 Polish writers present the consequences of writers’ unstable condition for literary production in Poland, main agents influencing their situation, as well as some, however scarce, ideas for systemic strategies of improvement.
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The realism of Bolesław Prus’s novel The Doll [Lalka] has been studied many times in relation to the topography of Warsaw, but his pedantic accuracy also extends to the domain covered by the railway. Contrary to the claims of eminent scholars (such as Józef Bachórz and Stanisław Fita), Prus’s description of Wokulski’s aborted journey to Cracow is perfectly in sync with the timetable from the second half of May 1879. Wokulski’s return from Skierniewice to Warsaw and his earlier suicide attempt also overlap with actual train times. The train timetable appears to be a key text in the interpretation of The Doll. This is a novel about the life of the great metropolis, whose smooth functioning, according to Georg Simmel, demands citizens meticulously to respect the ‘trans-subjective time scheme’ [übersubjektives Zeitschema].
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The text is an interpretation of a poem by Justyna Bargielska titled “Katullka” from the “Nudelman” (2014) volume. The author uses the literary idea of meeting herself from many years before. The occasion was her discovery of her own childish notes showing her knowledge about the world in the form of three riddles. The most difficult and most important of them (“How many animals did Moses take onto the Ark”?) is based on the mixing of two expressions: “Noah’s Ark” and “the Ark of the Covenant” (Moses’). The deceptive question of the child forces us to seek animals in the Bible (especially in the Decalogue), which leads to surprising theological conclusions concerning relations with God and animals. In the finale of the poem, the writing of the seven-year-old girl is eaten by a roe deer; this is a symbolic suggestion of a “communion” between the child-like and the animal-like.
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The article presents young Żeromski’s fascination with the writings of Paul Bourget. Basing on the Polish writer’s journal entries concerned with Une crime d’amour and Mensonges one can trace an ambivalent attitude towards those psychological novels developed in the late 1880s. By young Żeromski’s standards Bourget falls behind other masters of prose he admires at the time, namely Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. Still, despite Bourget’s didacticism, the aspiring youth cannot refrain from fascination for the descriptions of characters, whose emotions so often so clearly mirror his own. There are at least a few plots (an aspiring writer’s ambitions in the great world, the memory of a love lost etc.) which could have caught Żeromski’s attention as valid attempts to capture experiences known to him as well. It is therefore the identification process that stands in the way of condemning the moralistic ambitions of Bourget and allows the French writer’s works to remain an important point of reference for the Polish witer’s upcoming writing endeavors.
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The article points to a relationship between Mikołaj Mieleszko’s Nabożne westchnienia and meditations, and shows the meditative character of the baroque emblematic works. It also presents the division of the work into three books introduced by Mieleszko, which can be referred to the model of a three-stage mystical way to God (via purgativa, via illuminativa, via unitiva), used by St. Ignatius of Loyola (but knowing by Pseudo-Dionysius The Areopagite and fully expressed by St. Bonaventure). Moreover, it discusses the participation of human faculties in the emblems: memory, intellect, will, imagination, and feelings, which are so important for the act of meditation. Above all, emphasis is put on the goal of the reflections presented by Mieleszko in the subscriptio; they were supposed to touch the soul and convince one to a spiritual transformation. They were, therefore, just like meditations, a way of achieving inner growth.
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The term “imagination” has numerous meaning: colloquial, paraliterary, scientific. They all refer to auto-communication, which is a conversation of an individual with him or herself, when our mind faculties: memory, intuition, observation, intelligence, knowledge – and imagination, too – compete for dominance or strive for harmonious cooperation. Similarly to the generally understood imagination, its particular, important species (literary imagination) requires internal classification, because it is always an imagination of role: of the author, the reader, the expert, the performer, the censor, the distributor, or sometimes of the translator. The question of translator’s and author’s status provokes a comparison between author’s and translator’s imagination: they share some qualities, but also have decidedly different ones. The opposition between created nature and creating nature, which is a notion used by Józef Czechowicz, might be helpful in capturing the similarities and differences. But this opposition, too, demands a literary and historical context. The author created by the romantic myth seems someone gifted with imagination creating literary worlds, which are limitless, whereas the author of realist works, especially diaries, must give priority to observation, when a piece of external, empirical reality is described and recorded. Baroque, romanticism, realism, expressionism, avant-garde, postmodernism differ in their canons of imagination. The creative process by the author of an original work becomes a negotiation between innovations of authorial fantasy and recreation of the canon. The translator is under much stronger pressure from his or her times, because his or her objectives and tasks are different. Usually, knowledge is enough for a translator: linguistic, historical, literary, common, encyclopaedic, specialised. If knowledge fails, the translator reaches out to imagination as an instrument for interpretation of source text, but this happens only when the text is ambiguous and rich in images. Be it as it may, the quality and range of translator’s activity are determined by someone else’s imagination, accumulated in the translated work, and present in its rhetorics.
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In a literary work, signals that trigger reader’s inferential excursions allow the reader’s imagination to identify with and control the represented world. They constitute an important element of sense-generating mechanism. Thanks to imagination, the translator imitates the inferential mechanism of the original on various level’s of the text’s structure, activating the imagination of the reader. The translator’s imagination is bi- or multivalent in having the linguistic-semiotic, literary, and cultural quality. Although it manifests itself in language, it goes beyond the boundaries of language. Imagination is a form of consciousness which has no object of its own, and a medium connecting a specific non-imaginary knowledge with representations. It constitutes a mind faculty shaped on the basis of sensory and mental perception. It is derived from individual principles of perception and cognition data processing. It usually requires a stymulus to activate the capabilities of the imagining subject. As a mind faculty, imagination is based on the mental capability common to all people, which is the ability to create chains of associations.Translator’s respect for inferential excursions in the original text is necessary for retaining the original meaning, regardless of whether they occur on the phonetic-phonological level (as in Ionesco’s The Chairs), or on the level of image-semantic and syntactic relations (as in translation of Apollinaire’s Zone), or on the level of syntax (as in translation of Mrożek’s short stories into Slovenian), or on the level of cultural communication (as in Slovenian translation of Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantic).
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The author attempts to determine the role of imagination in (literary) translation Definitions of various types of imagination, taken from dictionary, or discussed in psychological works, are referred to in relation to processes occurring in the mind of a recipient of text (the readertranslator and the intended reader of translation) confronted with the original, defined as “the Other’s word.” The discussion is illustrated by three selected examples of relations between imagination and foreign cultural determinants: a poet’s reference to an outdated, idealised cognitive model, reference to the Other’s realities of material culture, and grammatical determination of a cultural cognitive model. The article ends with conclusions related to the notion of translation equivalence.
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The article proposes a short review of studies presenting the development and intellectual background of the notion of national community from the perspective of major civilizational transformations of the last fifty years (including books by Ulf Hannerz, Robert Reich, and Kenichi Ohmae). In this perspective, the discussion focuses on historical and theoretical aspects of functioning of translation in community making process. The discussion also explores relations between translation and imagination, especially in the context of the notions of imagined communities by Benedict Anderson, and cultural translation by Homi Bhabha. Both notions stress the dimensions of translational and translatological activity, which can be discussed in the categories of critical activity and a sort of political activity.
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The subject of the present discussion is the cubist model of literary translation, which assumes a multilateral perspective in simultanism, expressed in rotation of the original text through various historical timespaces, styles, poetics, conventions, registers, and varieties of an ethnic language (or several languages) in the field of target text, nullification of the oppositions between domestication and exoticisation, archaising and modernising, and maximisation of reader’s reception: reader’s multilingual and multicultural competences. The “eclipticity” of relation between source and target text, peculiar to the cubist model, as well as the nonlinear (stereometric) approach to original, metonymic and juxtapositional translation technique, and ironic modality, all lead, in cubist translation, to the requirement of intertextual confrontation with the original, which is necessary of an assessment of scale, value, and range of a translation experiment.
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The author addresses the problem of translation series, demonstrating that the rich tradition of creating and researching such series focused mainly on structural and model analyses, and usually isolated translations from other reception phenomena related to a foreign text in a national culture. By shifting the attention from translation-only studies to research in a wider scope of reception of a foreign text, such as intertextual relations of originals/translations with national literature/ culture, comments, and the work performed around a foreign text and its translation (e.g. convention of an editing series, anthology editing, canon creation), the author proposes to introduce three complementary notions: translation series, textualisation series, reception series. The author also discusses the proposals on specific examples derived from the Polish reception of Walt Whitman’s poetry.
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On the example of Mann’s Der Erwählte (1951) and its Polish version Wybraniec (1960) by Anna Linke, the article demonstrates how the creator’s imagination (the creators are the author and the translator) is related to translation and cultural memory, the basic notions of recent German culture studies. Mann’s novel can be described as a parodistic translation of a medieval epic, a text belonging to German cultural memory, into 20th century discourse and language. The article shows Mann’s translation strategies, whose aim is actualisation of the stocks of cultural memory of German readers: an experimental style imitating Medieval language, specific structure of narration time, represented world, and the narrator’s character, the montage and ecphrasis, which are all techniques calling for creative imagination. The article then demonstrates how Mann’s techniques were rendered in the translation. The analysis shows that Linke’s text, by referring to cultural memory of Polish readers, activates the content which is absent in cultural memory of German readers: this is because the translation employs fabulous and archaic elements derived from Polish historical novel, instead of stylistic and genre-specific techniques of German medieval epics. References to the visual archive of common European cultural memory (medieval iconography and architecture) clearly facilitate the translation, and the translator’s own imagination allows for credible rendition of names of medieval realities. The most important task was the rendition of the medieval dialect, which was fully Mann’s imaginary creation.
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The article discusses representation of a third culture in translation: it compares the image of Gdańsk as a city with strong German cultural presence, presented in Stefan Chwin’s novel Hanemann, with the same image in Ksenia Starosielska’s Russian translation of the novel. The image of the old Danzig in Chwin’s work consists of linguistic allusions and references to German literature: interpolations, German proper names, realities from early decades of the 20th century, and the figure of Heinrich von Kleist. Some elements of language and notions in the novel could seem more distant for a R ussian reader than for a Polish one. The present author considers, thus, if and how reality and topography of the city have been presented to secondary receipients. The article focuses on the translator’s strategy of approach to a third culture, reflected both in translator’s choices in the main text, as well as the number and formulation of footnotes. Because images of places in text are also created by non-verbal means, the graphical paratexts are also interesting for the discussion. The transformations are discussed in terms of refraction, which leads to conclusions about the role of the analyzed translation in its target culture.
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The article is an analysis of the English translation of Michał Witkowski’s Lubiewo, the translation first published in 2010 as Lovetown. The discussion focuses on the level of difficulty facing the translator, Bill Martin, in the context of numerous intertextual references in Lubiewo, the problem of memory and post-dependency. It is also an attempt at inquiry into the influence of translator’s decisions on the reception of the novel abroad. In particular, the question of translation of the aesthetic of bent and camp in the text, which is visible in theatric quality of language, use of emotionally marked expressions, hyperboles, sexual undertones, sexual language proper, language games, gay slang etc.
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The article presents selected translations of Yiddish literature into English, focusing on the influence of translator’s choices on forming the topography and realities of life in Poland before the Second World War. Elements related to material culture and multilingual quality of represented world are often eliminated or simplified. One of the main problems for translators, who usually do not know Polish, are Polish words and expressions, which are frequent in Yiddish literature written by authors of Polish extraction. Additional problems occur when Polish is used as intermediary between Yiddish and Polish. A reader who knows Eastern European realities receives an image of reality, which has been purposefully modified to facilitate reception in America, so that represented reality turns out to be more alien and exotic than in direct translation from Yiddish into Polish. This phenomenon occurs not only in fiction, but also in documentary texts, e.g. in the memorial books, which have been popular in Poland recently, and which are often translated from English intermediary texts. All this leads to important discrepancies and tensions between reality as it is imagined, remembered, and documented. Examples presented in the article come from texts by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shalom Asch, and the Zgierz memorial book.
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One of the most frequent problems in translation is the question of translation of hypocorisms: inasmuch as Polish is rich in diminutives, English practically does not have them. Diminutive and affectionate forms in a very limited range of contexts, and descriptive (analytical) diminutives are of little stylistic interest. The article discusses examples of coping with this problem in translations both from Polish into English, and from English into Polish. The authors tries to answer the question if it is possible to retain the emotionality expressed in diminutives of a translated text. Two texts were selected for the analysis: Jan Kochanowski’s Laments in Stanisław Barańczak and Seamus Heaney’s translation, and Ronal Fairbank’s The Flower Beneath the Foot, translated by Andrzej Sosnowski. Laments, addressed to a dead child, are of particular interest for the analysis, because diminutives and terms of endearment are frequently used and perform a peculiar function of creation of meaning. Discussing this translation, the author of the article tries to demonstrate that the emotionality expressed by Kochanowski through hypocorisms has been expressed by other means in the English translation: the right choice of epithets, and orchestration of the verse. In the Polish translation of Firbank’s novel, the hypocorisms introduced by the translator are read not as an arbitrary addition, but as elements that contribute to the camp climate of the novel, and reflect the irony, artificiality, and theatricality of the work, by means that are accessible in Polish language.
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