Assumptions and aims
The present contribution is an attempt to explore the interrelation between the notions of quality and seriality in literary translation. Its aim is not, however, judging the “excellence” of the target texts in a normative way, but rather observing certain “quality patterns” in translation poetics.
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Although it may seem counter-intuitive to discuss the crime novel in the context of superhero stories, this impression is deceiving. Once we attend to the several registers on which it operates, the superhero figure turns out to be a complimentary designation.
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“Sir, if you will, everything but
the criminal case is a puzzle;
the case becomes a fragment
carefully extracted from reality,
just a snippet of it, momentarily
caught in the spotlight.”[1]
The structural parameters for crime literature have been the subject of numerous overviews, critical essays, and recapitulations.
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The contemporary Polish crime novel is a fascinating but unusually complex phenomenon. It would be difficult to sketch out a Polish school of crime literature, as we might do more easily in the Scandinavian context. Nor is it easy to identify commonalities among Polish authors.
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To begin, I will introduce three contexts.
The first context: A course in the Adam Mickiewicz University’s Faculty of Polish Studies. Due to the small number of students, the group meets in the instructor’s office.
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In the realm of theory, travel literature remains a somewhat obscure phenomenon. It is genealogically diverse and its long tradition reaches back to antiquity, having passed through several cultural transformations along the way.
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As was the case elsewhere in Europe, Croatian travel literature began to flourish in the Romantic period.[1] This being said, if we compare the situation in Croatia to its counterparts in Western Europe or even Poland and Slovakia, where “Dark Romanticism”[2] and the uncanny[3] were the dominating motifs, then the Croatian case is somewhat distinct.
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Recent decades have witnessed a surge of interest in travel writing among scholars, shaped in large part by postcolonial discourse. Travel sketches have proven to be a particularly useful reservoir of material for scholars seeking to map out the ramifications of European expansion, as they both depict Europeans’ activities and shed light on the ideologies and motives that loomed behind the colonial project. (...)
As a branch of writing, travel literature poses a range of hurdles to any attempts at theoretical, methodological, genealogical or poetic classification. In a canonical reference book for philologists in Poland, Dictionary of Literary Terms (Słownik terminów literackich), Janusz Sławiński defers to the broadest possible definition for the genre, arguing that travel literature operates between two poles: that which is “fully factual” sits on one end of the spectrum, while on the other, we find contrived travel tales both realistic and fantastical. (...)
One could argue that any exploration of the experience of travel, the sense of the world captured in transit and the intellectual tools used to conceptualize the traversed (absorbed, consumed, etc.) space (geographically, physically and culturally) must be foregrounded by first identifying the basic obstacles to articulating the nuances of travel and its literary and textual counterparts. (...)