“My lot is cast in with my sex and country”: Generic Conventions, Gender Anxieties and American Identity in Emma Hart Willard’s and Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Travel Letters

Author(s): Małgorzata Rutkowska / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

The article analyses generic conventions, gender constraints and authorial self-definition in two ante-bellum American travel accounts – Emma Hart Willard’s Journal and Letters, from France and Great Britain (1833) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841). Emma Hart Willard, a pioneer in women’s higher education and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, an author of sentimental novels, were influential figures of the Early Republic, active in the literary public sphere. Narrative personas adopted in their travel letters have been shaped by the authors’ national identity on the one hand and by ideals of republican motherhood, which they propagated, on the other. Both travelogues are preceded with apologies filled with self-deprecating rhetoric, typical for women’s travel writing in the early 19th century and both are intended to instruct the American reader. Other conventional features of American antebellum travel writing include comparisons between British and American government and society with a view of extolling the latter as well as avid interest in social status and public activities of European women. Willard and Sedgwick deal with possible gender anxieties of their upper middle-class female readers by assuring them that following one’s literary or educational vocation in the public sphere does necessarily mean compromising ideals of true womanhood in private life

“Orders Behind the Visible” – Puritan Elements in the Polish Translation of "Gravity’s Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon

Author(s): Łukasz Barciński / Language(s): English / Issue: 19/2018

The article discusses contemporary American writer Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, a leading representative of postmodernism in literature. The study contains an examination of possible references to Puritanism in his novel, Gravity’s Rainbow. Religious motifs seem to play a crucial role in the interpretation of Pynchon’s work where the past is combined with the present and the Puritan religious doctrine merges with a paranoid approach to reading. Then, fragments from Gravity’s Rainbow in Polish translation are analyzed in terms of preserving the source text’s productive potential regarding the most important Puritan themes in the novel, e.g. animal symbolism and the doctrine of Preterition. Finally, the study offers conclusions related to the extent to which Puritan elements are recreated in the target text, highlighting the most considerable losses and gains in the translation process.

“Palabras que no tienen una correspondencia exacta”: La voz de los traductores principiantes

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Author(s): Marisa Presas / Language(s): Spanish / Issue: 04/2011

It seems obvious that expert translators, whether self-taught or formally trained, work on the basis of some theoretical notions and are capable of voicing them explicitly. What may not seem so obvious is that novice translators also have some theoretical bases. Nonetheless, empirical studies show that even novice subjects can formulate certain principles that they have applied when translating. From a different perspective descriptive studies try to identify in translated texts which standards have been used by the translators. Both kinds of studies show that translators often make their decisions intuitively but based on some theoretical knowledge. In the social sciences and psychology this kind of knowledge is referred to as implicit theories or subjective theories. My paper will present the results of a preliminary qualitative analysis of work from my own translation students. The notional framework for this analysis draws from precursors in both descriptive and cognitive approaches to translation. It also draws from a model of implicit theories of translation that has been developed from models in the fields of pedagogy and cognitive psychology. The results may not be taken as solid proof, but they partially confirm our assumptions about the content, nature and function of the implicit theories of novice translators.

“Someone I’ve Been Watching for Awhile”. Selected linguistic and semantic problems in English and Spanish translations of Wisława Szymborska’s poem Ktoś, kogo obserwuję od pewnego czasu

Author(s): Magdalena Okła / Language(s): English / Issue: 6/2017

This paper aims at identifying the most important aspects of Wisława Szymborska’s poem Ktoś, kogo obserwuję od pewnego czasu that should be preserved in the translation and then reflecting on how those aspects were rendered in the English and Spanish translations. By comparing and contrasting two translations not only with the original but also with each other the author attempts to answer the question what strategies are used and whether the similar translation strategies can be used in different languages. Furthermore, to what extent the use of a particular strategy is determined by the requirements of a target language or depends on the translator’s choice.

“Such beauty transforming the dark”: Wallace Stevens’s Project in Frank Ormsby’s “Fireflies”

Author(s): Wit Pietrzak,Karolina Marzec / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

Although Frank Ormsby’s poetry is associated with what Terry Eagleton has called tropes of irony and commitment, his 2009 collection Fireflies inclines, rather surprisingly, towards Wallace Stevens’s idea of imagination as a force impacting reality. Reading Ormsby’s volume against a selection of poems by Stevens unravels what appears to be a consistent affinity between the author of Harmonium and the Ulster-born poet. This affinity manifests itself, as the present paper aims to show, in the fact that in Fireflies, much like in Stevens, a form of perception of reality is delineated that is never to stagnate into an achieved balance.

“Survival is insufficient”: The Postapocalyptic Imagination of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven

Author(s): Maximilian Feldner / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

Postapocalyptic narratives proliferate in contemporary fiction and cinema. A convincing and successful representative of the genre, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) can nevertheless be distinguished from other postapocalyptic texts, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy, and the television series The Walking Dead (2010–). The novel does not focus on survival, struggle, and conflict but rather examines the possibility and necessity of cultural expression in a postapocalyptic setting, demonstrating the importance and value of art and memory even in strained circumstances. As a result, it presents an unusually optimistic and hopeful vision of an otherwise bleak future.

“THE OUTLOOK THAT WOULD BE RIGHT.” WALLACE STEVENS’S CINEMATIC VISION

Author(s): Octavian More / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2019

“The Outlook That Would Be Right.” Wallace Stevens’s Cinematic Vision. Drawing on the premise that a fundamental characteristic of modernist art is the convergence of various expressive and technical modes, this paper provides an examination of a selection of texts by Wallace Stevens in which the poetic vision and method intersect with the principles of cinematic montage, with a view to demonstrating the persistence throughout his oeuvre of a particular form of “sight”, employed for tackling a series of epistemological and aesthetic issues.

“The Translator Must...”: On the Estonian Translation Poetics of the 20th Century

Author(s): Maria-Kristiina Lotman,Elin Sütiste / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2016

The paper outlines the main features of Estonian translation poetics in the 20th century, examining the expression of the prevalent ideas guiding literary translation in writings about translation (mostly reviews and articles) in juxtaposition with examples from actual translations. The predominant ideal of translating verse and prose has been that of artistic translation, especially since the end of the 1920s. On the other hand, this general principle can be shown to have had somewhat differing emphases depending on the field of application as well as time period, ranging from the mostly form-oriented to mostly content-oriented translation.

“They Are All Too Foreign and Unfamiliar…”: Nabokov’s Journey to the American Reader

Author(s): Olga Voronina / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2017

Both in Speak, Memory and in Strong Opinions, Nabokov insists on his early proficiency in English, French. This authorial stance makes it easy to believe that the writer’s transition to English was easy. And yet, Nabokov’s correspondence with publishers and his literary agent, Altagracia de Jannelli, reveals that this conversion was torturous and required extensive support from native speaker editors and translators. The essay documents Nabokov’s inner turmoil at the time when he began to explore the British and American markets. In spite of the publication of Camera Obscura in England (1936) and, as Laughter in the Dark, in the US (1938), his other works’ journeys to the Anglophone reader required time and effort. A close reading of the famous afterword to Lolita, a comparative analysis of Winifred Roy’s translation of Camera Obscura and Nabokov’s self-translation of Laughter in the Dark, and the perusal of the author’s correspondence illustrate the difficulties he had to overcome in order to convey stylistic intricacy of his fiction to this new audience.

“This language still motivates me!” Advanced language students and their L2 motivation

Author(s): Anne Huhtala,Anta Kursiša,Marjo Vesalainen / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2019

The article focuses on written narratives of 51 Finnish university students who study German, Swedish or French as their major or one of their minors at an advanced level. The study aims to find what keeps these students motivated to study their L2. The data have been analyzed using analysis of narratives (Polkinghorne, 1995). Dörnyei’s (2009a, 2009b, 2014) L2 motivational self system (L2MSS), built around the concepts of ideal L2 self, ought-to L2 self and L2 learning experience, is used as the theoretical framework. The results indicate that perceived social pressure (ought-to L2 self) may be important when the study decision is made, but its importance diminishes during the studies. Instead, a future L2-related vision (ideal L2 self) as well as peers, teachers, course contents, and learning atmosphere (L2 learning experience) become increasingly important during the studies. The role of the emotional dimension of possible selves seems to be central in developing and preserving study motivation. At the end of the article, some implications of the results for higher education programs of languages other than English (LOTEs) are presented.

“Thou art translated”: Remapping Hideki Noda and Satoshi Miyagi’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Post-March 11 Japan

Author(s): Mika Eglinton / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2016

Ever since the first introduction of Shakespeare to a Japanese audience in the nineteenth century, his plays have functioned as “contact zones,” which are translingual interfaces between communities and their cultures; points of negotiation, misunderstanding and mutual transformation. In the context of what is ostensibly a monolingual society, Japanese Shakespeare has produced a limited number of performances that have attempted to be multilingual. Most of them, however, turn out to be translingual, blurring the borders of linguistic specificity. As an example of this, I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream as adapted by Hideki Noda originally in 1992 and then directed by Miyagi Satoshi for the Shizuoka Performing Arts Centre in 2011. Drawing on my experience as the surtitle translator of Noda’s Japanese adaptation “back” into English, I discuss the linguistic and cultural metamorphosis of Noda’s reworking and the effects of its mediation in Miyagi’s rendition, and ask to what extent the production, adapted in post-March 2011 Japan, can be read as a“contact zone” for a translingual Japanese Shakespeare. In what way did Miyagi’s reading of the post-March 11 events inflect Noda’s adaption along socio-political lines? What is lost and gained in processes of adaptation in the wake of an environmental catastrophe?

“Vain dalliance with misery”: Moral Therapy in William Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage”

Author(s): Piotr Kołakowski / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

The following paper will examine how (male) speakers in William Wordsworth’s “The Baker’s Cart” and “Incipient Madness,” which eventually became reworked into “The Ruined Cottage,” narrate the histories of traumatised women. It will be argued that by distorting the women’s accounts of suffering into a didactic lesson for themselves, the poems’ speakers embody the tension present in the chief psychiatric treatment of the Romantic period, moral therapy, which strove to humanise and give voice to afflicted subjects, at the same time trying to contain and eventually correct their “otherness.”

“War song of America”: The Vigilantes and American Propagandistic Poetry of the First World War

Author(s): Sara Prieto / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2018

When the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, the Committee of Public Information (CPI) organised several branches of propaganda to advertise and promote the war in hundreds of magazines and newspapers nationwide. One of these organisations was the group of writers known as “the Vigilantes.” This essay examines Fifes and Drums: A Collection of Poems of America at War (1917), published by the Vigilantes a few months after the American declaration of war. The discussion frames the context under which the Vigilantes conceived their poems as well as the main strategies that they employed to poetically portray the role that the United States was to play in the conflict.

“WE STOPPED DREAMING”: JULIE OTSUKA’S (UN)TOLD STORIES OF PICTURE BRIDES

Author(s): Cristina Chevereșan / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2019

“We Stopped Dreaming”: Julie Otsuka’s (Un)Told Stories of Picture Brides. Focusing on Julie Otsuka’s acclaimed 2011 novel, The Buddha in the Attic, this paper will investigate the picture bride phenomenon as a multilayered trade of lives, identities, emotions and expectations, drawing a vivid picture of the protagonists’ subjection to exploitation, abuse, discrimination and deceit.

“WHAT IS THIS WHICH …” IN A BILINGUAL (COPTIC AND ARABIC) MANUSCRIPT OF THE PENTATEUCH

Author(s): Ofer Livne-Kafri / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2012

he Arabic version of the Pentateuch in MS Paris BN copte 1 (14th century) was basically translated from the Bohairic Coptic version which is set in parallel columns to it. Previous articles published here earlier (Livne-Kafri 2009b; 2011a) were dedicated to a specific a phenomenon. In this article the relative interrogative clause -الذي هذا هو ما is studied in relation to the Coptic parallel ⲞⲨ ⲠⲈ ⲪⲀⲒ ⲈⲦⲀ. Although similar constructions are quite frequent in Middle-Arabic, the instances quoted here are literal translations from the Coptic. The different approaches represented by J. Blau and A. Shisha-Halevy (whose works are essential to such a study) point to a unique Relative construction.

„Całkiem zgrabny epigramacik”. O dawnych polskich przekładach z perspektywy italianisty

Author(s): Olga Płaszczewska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 31/2015

The main purpose of the essay is a critical review of recently published monograph on the presence of Italian literature in Poland Jadwiga Miszalska’s. Miszalska’s achievement is presented against the background of previous reflections on translations of older Italian literature in Poland. Her latest book collects and updates the bibliographies and considerations on “narrative prose”, “theatrical texts and dramas” and poetry. The quotations from original Italian texts and from their translations, acting as a kind of inner anthology, are an unquestionable advantage of the book, while meticulous summaries of literary works and the brevity of philological and historical comments constitute its main drawback.

„Dialogo dei testi“. Eugenio Coseriu: Grundzüge der Übersetzungstheorie

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Author(s): Miorița Ulrich / Language(s): German / Issue: 03/2010

La communication se propose de présenter et de commenter les quelques principes fondamentaux de la théorie de la traduction chez Eugenio Coseriu. Ces principes pourraient être résumés de la façon suivante : 1. on traduit des textes et non des langues ; 2. « la connaissance du monde » y joue un rôle déterminant ; 3. la relativité et la finalité des normes et des principes traduisants doivent être prises en compte.

„Dlouho jsem chodil brzy spát.“ K hledání ideálního tvaru Proustova Hledání

Author(s): Jovanka Šotolová / Language(s): Czech / Issue: 59/2019

The name of Jiří Pechar is inextricably tied up with the Czech translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The second complete publication of the novel was undertaken by the publisher Rybka in 2012 — its first two volumes, translated by Prokop Voskovec, were carefully revised and the rendition of the third to seventh volumes was, after Voskovec’s death, taken up by Pechar. Pechar’s participation in the revision was crucial as he drew on his profound knowledge of Proust’s complete oeuvre and its specifics. This analysis relies on the working document provided by Pechar, and it reveals that it is possible not only to generalize about the emendations and categorize them, but also to present the arguments accompanying them. Based on a detailed comparison of selected passages, it makes it clear that Pechar’s translation does work in Czech: besides being sophisticated and well grounded in theory, it offers brilliantly worded, reader-friendly solutions.

„El era Alfa și Omega atunce în Ţara Moldovei” Phraseologien mit Buchstaben des Alphabets und ihre Übersetzung

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Author(s): Miorița Ulrich / Language(s): German / Issue: 01/2008

Die oben erwähnten Anführungen zeigen eindeutig, dass die von der Übersetzungstheorie zu Unrecht vernachlässigten Phraseologien (und Sprachspiele), die Buchstaben und Buchstabennamen enthalten, in den geschriebenen und gesprochenen Texten und auch in der Übersetzungspraxis doch erstaunlich oft vorkommen und empirische Grenzen der Übersetzung darstellen. Diesem Faktum sollte die Übersetzungstheorie auch entsprechend Rechnung tragen. Auch hoffe ich, dass es mir gelungen ist zu zeigen, wie ungeahnt komplex, auch im Hinblick auf die Übersetzung, die Problematik um diese „cosa che comincia per elle” (=L) – um die Littera – ist.

„Gniew człowieka przyniesie Ci chwałę” (Ps 76,11)

Author(s): Wojciech Węgrzyniak / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 34/2018

The aim of this article is to analyze Ps 76:11, one of the most difficult verses in the Bible. First, the author analyzes (1) the Hebrew manuscripts and (2) the various ancient versions of this text. He then presents (3) the opinions of different biblical scholars and also (4) the rendering of the verse in selected modern Bible translations. In the conclusion, (5) the author offers three possible interpretations without resorting to emendation of the Masoretic Text.