Translated Literatures

The existence and the practice of literary translation has as its consequence not only a transfer of individual works into another language and culture. As more and more works of the source culture appear in the target culture, a phantom of the former is gradually formed in the latter.

For this phantom to be anywhere close to the original, the importation of sources must be fairly comprehensive. The image of Polish literature in the culture of the English language is very far from that. The various waves of interest in thing Polish were always short-lived and usually associated with violent political upheaval in Poland. Translation from the Polish was also hampered by the language - not very popular among English learners of foreign languages.

The three example of (relative) success stories presented in this section are three exceptions from this sad rule.

Reading:

Itamar Even-Zohar, The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem, The Translation Studies Reader, 192-197.

Roman Jakobson, On Linguistic Aspects of Translation, The Translation Studies Reader, 113-118.

© Jan Rybicki 2005