The theoretical study of translation doesn’t enjoy wide renown. Both branches of research which comprise this field are, for a range of reasons, treated with some reserve, and their juxtaposition does more to deepen than to remove doubts.
(...)
The interviews with seventeen translators collected by Adam Pluszka in Wte i wewte [Back and forth] provide the reader with illuminating insights into the process of translation. Each of these approximately 20-page conversations focuses on a different aspect of translation, as seen through the eyes of translators whose background and experience vary.
(...)
A few dates: it has been 50 years since Poetyka przekładu artystycznego (The Poetics of Creative Translation)1 was first published. In this article, Edward Balcerzan, a young researcher of literary translation and a translator of poetry postulated that the poetics of translation should become the subject of rigorous literary study.
(...)
According to Mona Baker, universals of translation are linguistic features which usually occur in translated rather than original texts and are thought to be independent of the influence of the source language on the target language.
(...)
1. Barriers
Haiku, a micro-literary format emerging from ancient Japanese poetry, has become a synonym for short-form poetry, one often not taken seriously. It is widely mistaken for aphorisms, comic poetry, and seen as playful and far from serious.
(...)
We publish Polish translation of the fragment of David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear. Translation and the Meaning of Everything, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2011.
Engagement with literature, like all forms of contact, always lies somewhere between the pleasurable and the unpleasant. Reading and translating are activities which engage the body doing the experiencing – whether somatic, sensual or sexual.
(...)
The Brothers Karamazov, a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, has been present in the world of Polish letters since 1913, which is when the first translation by Barbara Beaupré was published (although previous to that, the chapter about the Grand Inquisitor was translated and published as a stand-alone text1).
(...)
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.
(...)