Retracing The History Of Literary Translation In Poland

This book, the first of its kind for an English-language audience, introduces a fresh perspective on the Polish literary translation landscape, providing unique insights into the social, political, and ideological underpinnings of Polish translation history. Employing a problem-based approach, the book creates a map of different research directions in the history of literary translation in Poland, highlighting a holistic perspective on the discipline’s development in the region. The four sections explore topics of particular interest in current translation research, including translation and cultural borderlands, the agency of women translators, translators as intercultural mediators, and the intersection of translation research and digital methods. The 15 contributions demonstrate the ways in which Polish culture has represented translated work in its own way, informed and shaped by socio-political changes in Polish history. At the same time, the volume situates Polish research in translation within the growing body of work on Central and Eastern European translation studies, as well as looking at them against the backdrop of the international development of the discipline. This collection offers a valuable addition to existing research on Western literary canons, making it key reading for scholars in translation studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and Slavonic studies.

This carefully curated collection consists of 16 chapters by leading Polish and world literature scholars from the United States, Canada, Italy, and, of course, Poland. An historical approach gives readers a panoramic view of Polish authors and their explicit or implicit contributions to world literature. Indeed, the volume shows how Polish authors, from Jan Kochanowski in the 16th century to the 2018 Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, have engaged with their foreign counterparts and other traditions, active participants in the global literary network and the conversations of their day. The volume features views of Polish literature and culture within theories of world literature and literary systems, with a particular attention paid to the resurgence of the idea of the physical book as a cultural artifact. This perspective is especially important since so much of today's global literary output stems from Anglophone perceptions of what constitutes literary quality and tastes. The collection also sheds light on specific issues pertaining to Poland, such as the idea of Polishness, and global phenomena, including social and economic advancement as well as ecological degradation. Some of the authors discussed, like the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz or the 1980 Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, were renowned far beyond the borders of their country, while others, like the contemporary travel writer and novelist Andrzej Stasiuk, embrace regionalism, seeing as they do in their immediate surroundings a synecdoche of the world at large. Nevertheless, the picture of Polish literature and Polish authors that emerges from these articles is that of a diverse, cosmopolitan cohort engaged in a mutually rewarding relationship with what the late French critic Pascale Casanova has called “the world republic of letters.”

The Routledge Handbook of Translation History presents the first comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this multi-faceted disciplinary area and serves both as an introduction to carrying out research into translation and interpreting history and as a key point of reference for some of its main theoretical and methodological issues, interdisciplinary approaches, and research themes. The Handbook brings together 30 eminent international scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, offering examples of the most innovative research while representing a wide range of approaches, themes, and cultural contexts. The Handbook is divided into four sections: the first looks at some key methodological and theoretical approaches; the second examines some of the key research areas that have developed an interdisciplinary dialogue with translation history; the third looks at translation history from the perspective of specific cultural and religious perspectives; and the fourth offers a selection of case studies on some of the key topics to have emerged in translation and interpreting history over the past 20 years. This Handbook is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation and interpreting history, translation theory, and related areas.

This volume offers an in-depth exploration of the translation activity of Greek women translators in the nineteenth century, illuminating the role of translation as a means of resistance against sociocultural norms and the enduring impact of their work on the rise of feminism in Greece. Drawing on frameworks from the sociology of translation, the book situates the practices and behaviours of women translators within this specific sociocultural and historical context to underscore the importance of translation in their lives and society. Drawing on authentic texts, including dedication letters and prologues, Misiou unpacks the discourses, themes, strategies, and dialogues individual translators employed to affirm a sense of agency in their claims to education and civil rights, their role in cultural life as producers of texts, and to give greater voice to the wider community of women translators. The volume showcases women translators as agents and mediators of cultural and social change and active contributors to the theory and practice of translation, expanding theoretical discourse on gender and translation and offering directions for future research. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in translation studies, particularly those with an interest in translation and gender, feminist translation studies, and translation history.

This book sheds light on the important role played by interpreters during the Spanish Civil War, offering a historical overview of the ways in which interpreters on both sides mediated the myriad linguistic, cultural, and ethical difficulties of wartime communication. Drawing on archives, interpreters’ memoirs, and testimonies from their own children, the volume extends beyond traditional historiographic accounts to demonstrate the significance of interpreters’ work in facilitating communication during the war across a range of settings, including in combat, hospitals, interrogations, detention camps, and propaganda. Baigorri-Jalón showcases the diverse backgrounds of these interpreters through individual and collective portraits, paying special attention to the work of the many women working as interpreters during the conflict. In turning its attention to lessons from the past, the book reaffirms the work of interpreters in present-day international conflicts toward better understanding the ethical dilemmas they face, in wars, humanitarian aid, demobilization tasks, and multilingual criminal proceedings. This volume, the first book in the Routledge Research on Translation and Interpreting History series, will be of interest to scholars in translation and interpreting studies, particularly those interested in historical and sociological approaches as well as Spanish Civil War scholarship.

The "world of letters" has always seemed a matter more of metaphor than of global reality. In this book, Pascale Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements--a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of globalization, with its suggestion of a happy literary "melting pot," Casanova exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence of their dominant counterparts. Inspired by the writings of Fernand Braudel and Pierre Bourdieu, this ambitious book develops the first systematic model for understanding the production, circulation, and valuing of literature worldwide. Casanova proposes a baseline from which we might measure the newness and modernity of the world of letters--the literary equivalent of the meridian at Greenwich. She argues for the importance of literary capital and its role in giving value and legitimacy to nations in their incessant struggle for international power. Within her overarching theory, Casanova locates three main periods in the genesis of world literature--Latin, French, and German--and closely examines three towering figures in the world republic of letters--Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner. Her work provides a rich and surprising view of the political struggles of our modern world--one framed by sites of publication, circulation, translation, and efforts at literary annexation.

Self-Translation: Brokering originality in hybrid culture provides critical, historical and interdisciplinary analyses of self-translators and their works. It investigates the challenges which the bilingual oeuvre and the experience of the self-translator pose to conventional definitions of translation and the problematic dichotomies of "original" and "translation", "author" and "translator". Canonical self-translators, such Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and Rabindranath Tagore, are here discussed in the context of previously overlooked self-translators, from Japan to South Africa, from the Basque Country to Scotland. This book seeks therefore to offer a portrait of the diverse artistic and political objectives and priorities of self-translators by investigating different cosmopolitan, post-colonial and indigenous practices. Numerous contributions to this volume extend the scope of self-translation to include the composition of a work out of a multilingual consciousness or society. They demonstrate how production within hybrid contexts requires the negotiation of different languages within the self, generating powerful experiences, from crisis to liberation, and texts that offer key insights into our increasingly globalized culture.

Academic Paper from the year 2018 in the subject Interpreting / Translating, grade: 5.0, language: English, abstract: The primary aim of this thesis is to present the art of literary translation through the perspective of a book. This book was written by the musician Wladyslaw Szpilman and depicts his life. Szpilman is a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, which is the period in Polish history that was shadowed by the horrors of mass murders both on Polish and Jewish nations. Translation gives us access to the literature of the world. It allows us to enter the minds of people from other places. And it enriches not only our personal knowledge and artistic sense, but also our culture's literature, language, and thought. Still, literary translation is an odd art. It consists of a person sitting at a desk, writing literature that is not his or her own but has someone else's name on it. Like a musician, a literary translator takes someone else's composition and performs it in his own special way. Just as a musician embodies someone else's notes by moving his body or throat, a translator embodies someone else's thoughts and images by writing in another language.