n Volume 10, Part 1, we publish articles collected from the conference “Peripheries and Translation”, held in Ustroń from 11 to 13 October, 2018. Interest in the category of peripherality is, on the one hand, a consequence of the postmodern crisis of grand narratives; on the other, it has a certain amount of ubiquity, because peripheral phenomena (left unexplored or unperceived in culture) have attracted writers and artists of every epoch. The authors of the articles here examine the problem from a number of perspectives and research positions, and the material under scrutiny is varied in terms of language. Among the topics they address are: experiment in translation; translation from one of the Slovakian dialects into the standard language; Polish-mediated translations of English and Russian literatures into the regional language of Kashubian; the problem of the Polish reception of Old Serbian literature; the possibility of translating into a third language the peculiar dialogue among Canadian poets in French and English; the potential of translating creative literature from Polish into English; relationships between a writer’s own work and translations, drawing from the example of two cases removed from each other in time and space; translation of gay novels and the rhetorical figure of the onomatopoeia; the problem of minor literature and of “literature from cultural periphery” which has found its way into literary salons [higher spheres]; Polish reception of Czech structuralist thought; translation as a form of promotion, and what happens when a flawed translation becomes a success. Among the authors (some appearing here in a double role, as author of both the original work and the translation) whose work’s translations have been examined are Adam Mickiewicz, Wisława Szymborska, Julian Tuwim, Michał Witkowski, Robert J. Szmidt, Jan Mukařovský, Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, August Šenoa, Herta Müller, Jozef Kolarčik-Frantický, Edward D. Blodgett, Jacques Brault, Brina Švigelj-Mérat. Translators under consideration include Julia Hartwig, August Šenoa, Stanisław Barańczak, Clare Cavanagh, Susan Bassnett, Piotr Kuhiwczak, Andrij Bondar, Jasmin Novljaković, Enes Kišević, Maria Dąbrowska-Partyka, Aleksander E. Naumow, Radka Denemarková.

The analysis of stylistic, compositional, and typographic devices used in postmodernist translational experiments shows that they predominantly rely on repetition and reminiscence of artistic ideas of the historical avant-garde as a source of their innovativeness. This paper examines the creative potential of (post) avant-garde styles of translational production, associated not merely with applying, adapting, and improving the various avant-garde techniques of disillusion but rather with transferring the avant-garde disillusion into the environment of translation with all its norms, conventions, semantics, and pragmatics of interlingual and intercultural communication.

Both of the concepts — mistranslation and literary success — are far from being clear and unambiguous, which leads to various limitations on the one hand, but also to potentially beneficial new readings on the other. Moreover, the difference between a translation and a mistranslation is not an easy one to assess (particularly when poetry is concerned) just like any literary success is difficult to measure. Apart from evidence such as reception, we are left mostly with aesthetic criteria when assessing a literary success and, to some extent, also the successfulness of any translation. In order to discuss such unclear but deeply intertwined issues, I look into three matters. Firstly, I draw attention to two undeniable examples of both mistranslation and literary success to point out possible (and impossible) criteria of both phenomena. Secondly, I proceed to a particular case of a (mis)translation and literary success (Auden’s version of Mickiewicz’s “Romantyczność”), to shed some more light on the issues in question. In the end, I confront the case with another seemingly similar one (Bassnett & Kuhiwczak’s rendition of Szymborska’s “Dzieci epoki”), yet resulting in a different outcome. At the end I point out where, in my opinion, lies a difference in assessing a particular (mis)translation and its literary success.

The author discusses a new feature, which develops in Julia Hartwig’s poetry after her several visits to the States in the years 1970—1974 and her immediate introduction to the American verse — through reading and translating. In Hartwig’s poetry, new mundane lyrical situations appear and her verse becomes much more concrete, but also voyeuristic. Some analyses of excerpts from her Dziennik amerykański [American Diary] and Wiersze amerykańskie [Americana] are provided, as well as of The Young Housewife by William Carlos Williams in Polish translations done by Hartwig, Piotr Sommer, and Stanisław Barańczak.

Transfiguration is a poetry collection in which not only creation is transformed into translation, but it is translation that triggers an act of creative writing. Two Canadian poets, an Anglophone — Edward D. Blodgett and a Francophone — Jacques Brault, conduct an original dialogue: each of them writes a poem in his mother tongue, and then each consecutive fragment is a response to a previous poem, which is an interesting French and English mosaic. Moreover, the volume also gains a strictly translative dimension, as it is Brault who translates Blodgett’s poems and vice versa. The unprecedented collection is one of the rare examples of a connection between the two cultures. Furthermore, it is an interesting illustration of the phenomenon of border crossing between cultures, languages and creative activities. The article describes the specificity of bilingual writing and seeks to answer the question about the possibilities of translating a bilingual text into a third language.

The paper focuses on the Ukrainian translation of Michał Witkowski’s Lovetown, published in 2006, in the context of social and cultural background of today’s Ukraine. The decision of the translator Andrii Bondar to render the text into Ukrainian may be regarded as an aesthetic gesture directed against traditional patterns and models in the target literature. This decision finds its logical continuation in the translator’s approach to rendering the original stylistic pattern, which results in a series of shifts in register from neutral to colloquial and from colloquial to vulgar. This strategy is rather peripheral for the translation traditions of the target literary culture.

Polish speculative fiction occupies a peripheral position with regard to its English-language counterpart, which becomes visible in the context of the polysystem theory and the genre’s founding texts. On the example of Otchłań by Robert J. Szmidt, a novel from Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033 universe, it is possible to show the features of a potential translation, focused on the strategy of foreignization, which would determine the peripheral character of the target text. These features are, among others: neologisms, word plays or references to Polish reality.

The present study focuses on the challenges of the intralingual translation from the peripheral dialect into official, standard Slovak that has been performed on unique Šariš region dialect fairy tales preserved in the village Fintice. They have been published recently in a bilingual form with their Slovak translation Zazračni dzvonček — Zázračný zvonček (FACE 2018). The first part of the paper points out the peripheral aspects of the analysed text and stresses the importance of presenting such forgotten literary pieces for the community identity as well as for preserving community cultural heritage. The second part of the paper focuses on translation analysis and differences between the two texts on morpho-syntactic and lexical level, and in the degree of expressiveness.

The article concerns translations of Russian and English literature into Kashubian language, performed not from the original language, but from the existing Polish translation. Such “second-hand” translations are: a fragment of the novel Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a fragment of the novel Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy, and translation of the novel Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. In the first part of this article, I discuss examples showing that Kashubian translators follow the interpretations suggested by the authors of previous translations of the same works into Polish. In the second part, I discuss idioms and proverbs, which did not appear in the source texts, but come from Polish translations and have been adapted by Kashubian translators.

In the article, a problem of translation of the old Serbian literary texts into Polish is discussed together with the basic mechanisms of the reception process of creativity revealed by the Orthodox Slavs from the Balkan region, that is, in other words, the works arisen in the circle of the Slaviae Orthodoxae and their presence in the Polish culture’s space which belonged to the circle of the Slaviae Latinae. The considerations regard the essence and function of translation, presence and absence of translated literature — its initial version in the target space, and their foundation is located in the collections of translations existing in the Polish reading circuit. The issue of the presence or position of the old South Slavonic literatures, namely, the old Serbian texts in their Polish translation, is featured in several possible perspectives. The problem is exposed in the aspect of these texts’ peripheral character and literary genetics. By dint of the first reference, a phenomenon of asymmetry in the realm of translated literatures is emphasized, which results from the domination of the so-called world literatures and the marginalization of the so-called small literatures along with the translated literary texts’ place — their initial (Old Church Slavonic) status from the view-point of the target (Polish) culture’s space, and their situation in this specific polysystem. The genetic studies’ path, however, is used in order to expose a form of the translated literature’s presence (old Serbian texts in their Polish translation), and to indicate the strategy of its introduction, namely, anthology as a supporting platform of the initial (source) literature in the space of the target culture together with its presentation, dialogical, and intercultural function derived from the authorized genre. In the article’s conclusion, the author accentuates the fact that the collections or individual publications of the old Serbian works, omitting various values of the particular projects and realizations, exist in the Polish reading circuit in order to reflect largely their presence status, knowledge, and need for those concrete South Slavonic literature.

August Šenoa belongs to a transitional period of Croatian literature, falling between Romanticism and Realism. The paper analyses the relations between Šenoa’s numerous translations and the poetics of his texts focusing on his proclivity towards the aesthetics of Realism, as opposed to the dominant perception of his poetics as Romanticist. This paper researches the source and target cultures, cultural links, contacts and exchanges, but also possible twists in the perception of cultural periphery, as well as the influence of economy on cultural politics.

This article analyzes the onomatopoeias in the poem Locomotive by
Julian Tuwim and its translation into Croatian. Onomatopoeia is a figure of speech and
a linguistic principle deeply rooted in the phonic layer of language and in its culture. The
sound organization of the text based on this phenomenon creates not only the formal level,
but also the semantic level of the poem. Translating process structures of this type requires
not only knowledge of the phonic features of language systems, but also poetic skills.

The article draws on the Deleuzoguattarian conceptualisation of minor literature in order to analyse the literature of Brina Svit. The concepts of (de)territorialisation (schizophrenia), minor, and other attributes of minor literature are employed in the comparative analysis of different literary elements of four of Brina Svit’s novels. The article outlines the ‘line of flight’ (defined as deterritorialisation, de-oedipisation, politicalness, and collectiveness) that manifests itself from Svit’s novels written in Slovenian to the novels written in French. The literature of Brina Svit is placed in between minor literature and minority literature.

The paper attempts to describe selected aspects of the impact of new concepts (such as history of European literature or history of the world republic of literature) that have entered into the literary and translation discourse and that coexist with the traditional categories such as ancient literature, modern literature, national literature, world literature, synthesis of the history of literature or process of the history of literature. The “confusion of tongues” (confusio linguarum) connected with the emergence of these novel concepts has undoubtedly affected the discipline of translation studies and, in particular, the promotional aspects of translation and self-translation as well as other related phenomena. An interesting role in this discussion is also played by what I refer to as “perspective,” from which the incorporation of given works or authors into European literature or world literature is being observed. In two out of the four analyzed works, the French (Parisian) perspective prevails, characteristic of a certain stage of comparative studies that seemed to have lost significance some time ago. The two remaining works, written from the Czech perspective, are addressed to English- and German-speaking readers, respectively.

This paper entitled is devoted to the peripheral nature of Herta Müller’s
oeuvre. Müller is regarded as a person who created “German-language literature from the
cultural periphery of the German linguistic area,” as the Italian Germanist Paola Bozzi
called it. It turns out that although the literature or anti-literature of the Germans of
Romania is located on the cultural periphery of the German language area, Herta Müller occupies a central place in German literature, mainly due to subject areas unknown to West-German readers, but also due to her extraordinary language, which is a conglomerate of her idiolect, the archaic character of the German language used, the Banat-Swabian dialect and word-images from the Romanian language. The research, which is carried out from a mental, expressive, and cultural perspective, also focuses on the issue of embedding translation in a polysystem that embraces translation as an interrelated system of culture, language, literature, and society.

Jan Mukařovský (1891—1975) is a character who does not need to be introduced to Polish humanists. Recognized as a leading representative of structuralism, the so-called Prague School has its place in the history of literary theory, as well as the entire school of thought. Most of Mukařovsky’s texts, as well as those by others from Prague, which we know today as articles in magazines or books, were given at the meetings of the Prague Linguistic Circle as lectures. The presence of Czech structuralism, including the work of Jan Mukařovský, is not a closed issue in Poland. In the article, we will trace the Polish presence of his texts from the 1940s to the latest translations by Aneta Daszuta, which also contain critical studies and those are Zamierzone i niezamierzone w sztuce (Warsaw 2014) and Studia semiologiczne (Warsaw 2017).