The history of literary output can be seen as a developing process in which the activities of writers and translators gradually become isolated and autonomous from each other. From this perspective, many national literatures, including that of Poland, have been constituted in two clearly distinct stages. In the first place, artistic writing is formed according to the syncretic ‘mixed’ order which approves of both original inventions and the fruits of someone else’s imagination co-existing in the same literary work. How unstable the border between creating and recreating artistic qualities transpires to be! Understanding authorship in these situations is highly problematic; coding and decoding the text involves two conflicting principles.
On the one hand, the principle of apocrypha—so to speak—comes into play; one’s own word is presented as the other’s word. In the sense
that is of interest to us here, apocrypha constitute plagiarism à rebours. The translator ascribes their own thoughts and
images to the author of the prototype, which was originally written in a foreign
language. “The Old Slavonic booksellers”, as Dmitrij Lichačev stated, “would
sometimes reconstruct the composition of a translated work differently or create
their own large collective compositions on the basis of translated texts” Lichačev 1962, 390. The authorial
competence of any translator at that time (up to and including the eighteenth
century) spanned all levels of the text’s structure: not only the “bottom” tiers
of lexical and idiomatic features, but also the “upper” ones affecting the plot,
the gallery of characters, the narrator’s image, and other figures of the
depicted world. The strategy of the “apocryphist” is formed consciously, a state
of affairs that becomes evident from numerous pronouncements of interpreters at
the time. The aim of these transformative devices, as I have already mentioned
on a few occasions, principally tends to be the reader’s ethos. At the same
time, the principle of apocrypha results in the inclusion of the translator in
the creative process. Translation is meant to enhance and continue the original
creation; even if these improvements are often only ostensible, the very pursuit
retains the sense of creative liberties and the possibilities of numerous
innovations.
On the other hand, there is another factor of no lesser importance that used to
stimulate writing experience in the pre-Romantic era: namely, the principle of annexation. According to this principle, the other’s
word was presented as one’s own word. Appropriating a text in a foreign language
resembles plagiarism and today we would indeed speak of plagiarism in such
cases. The Classicist system, however, allowed for paraphrasing foreign works—most often individual episodes or other constituent parts—with a minimal
degree of innovation. In some instances, it was enough for the appropriated word
to make its way into a new language, style, or genre.
Tak i ja, jak z autora którego wiersz zarwę, Za swój go już mam własny, jeno dam mu barwę, [And so, as I’ve snapped a poem from this or that author, I already have it as my own, only giving it a new color,] Kochowski in Balcerzan 1976, 68
– admitted the seventeenth-century Polish Baroque poet Wespazjan Kochowski, with a disarming honesty. As can be seen, the principle of annexation leads us to study the “original” Classicist works as fruits of covert translation. “Not even literary history suggests the traditional notion”, Walter Benjamin wrote, “that great poets have been eminent translators and lesser poets have been indifferent translators” Benjamin 2004, 19. Both this statement and the “traditional notion” it refers to reflect the impact of the two intersecting principles of writing: the principle of apocrypha and the principle of annexation.
Romanticism disparages what Adam Mickiewicz, a Polish poet of the Romantic period, called “the school of imitators and translators” Mickiewicz 1955, 269. It established the dictatorship of innovation and originality. From the nineteenth century onwards, the translator has faced a much more complicated task, while their creative leeway has shrunk considerably. The richer the repertoire of their duties, the narrower the scope of their privileges.
Firstly, the system of transformative devices becomes curiously asym
metrical. Let
us assume that the translation process activates the afore
mentioned fundamental
types of transformation: reduction, inversion, substitution, and amplification.
If so, we need to notice that they are situated at unequal distances from, and
in unequal relations with, the courses of “creation”. Reduction occurs not so
much in dealing with the text creatively, but mainly in censoring it. Inversion
seems a more creative device than reduction, but less so in comparison with
substitution (exchanging elements of a text). Undoubtedly, any evaluation of a
“creative” moment always needs to focus on a particular literary situation;
however, the discussion above is of the most general and typological character.
From a typological perspective, translatorial “creativity” is most saliently
manifest in amplification. It involves supplementing the text with components
that are absent from the original and do not result from any compensation for
losses in case a relatively equivalent translation cannot be reached. And in
fact, it is this very manifestation of creativity that would be most ruthlessly
criticized in contemporary times. Reduction can be pardoned, but amplification
always raises voices of protest. Korney Chukovsky scathingly called it otsebiatina, which in Russian means inventions coming
“from oneself”. It is thus no coincidence that the translator Irinarch Vvedensky
became an anti-hero of Russian translation history. In 1930, Chukovsky wrote
that “Irinarch Vvedensky’s main guilt is his passionate love for otsebiatina additions. As soon as he starts imagining
that Dickens has languished and wasted away, he comes to write in Dickens’
stead, to supplement and correct his text” Čukovskij 1936, 78. The expression “to write in the author’s stead”
becomes directly opposite to the term “to translate”.
Secondly, this asymmetry encompasses the structure of the text. The higher the
layer of this structure, the fewer possibilities for creative inventions there
are on the translator’s part. I have already highlighted the Classicist
convention, which hardly objected to such inventiveness in the realm of the
world depicted. When, in 1566, Łukasz Górnicki published his Polish remake of
Il Cortegiano entitled The Polish
Courtier, he did not need much justification for freely remolding the
characters’ different patterns of behavior. “Castiglione wrote in the Italian
language and wrote for Italians whose customs are far different from ours”,
Górnicki argued. He then elaborated as follows:
Here, one does not love each other from the window; neither are adequate comedies
nor such tragedies produced that could accustom Poles (that is, those who don’t
have literas) to what a histrio
is. Here, the masquerades do not proceed in the Italian way. The gentry
does not play the violin or the fife; and even if some tend to, they do so once
in a blue moon. Likewise, nothing is known about those French degenerates with
their lords. And thus, I did not deem it appropriate to render all that in the
Polish.
Reductions almost automatically paved the way for amplifications. Surprisingly,
the very same transformations are nowadays a privilege of intersemiotic
translation, manifest especially in the practice of adaptation for performing
arts, in film and, ever more intensely, in theatre. The disappearing of
characters, or splitting them into two (as in the case of Juliusz Słowacki’s
play Kordian, when staged by Adam Hanuszkiewicz),
alternations to the plot, etc., are out of the question in literary translation
nowadays. How would critics receive a translation of Anton Čechov’s Tri sestry [Three Sisters] if the
translator decided on four sisters, or two, or started spinning a tale about
three brothers? However, a theatre performance quite often metamorphoses a
literary text in a similar manner. Within the realm of literature, if
translation does not quite seem to contradict, then it at least considerably
restrains, the creative process. Excess of invention is treated as a mistake,
carelessness, betrayal of the original idea. “When translating poems”, Valery
Bryusov would explain himself, “you yield to an artistic impulse, one may say
that what you do is ‘create’; and in this way, voila! you lose the ability of
assessing critically what you write in terms of a ‘translation’”. But at the
same time, this restriction of creative liberties—and does it take place
solely due to the lack of terminological discipline?—does not abolish the
belief that translation is art. Presumably, the term “the art of translation”
positively influences the translators’ well-being, which in turn depends on the
contemporary horizon of the audience’s expectations. Readers put their trust in
the text following what they presuppose about the origins of a given work. They
want to believe that the work in question is a fruit of conscious and deliberate
creative action, rather than an effect of sheer happenstance. Admittedly,
literary communication knows of deviations from this norm. Practiced among the
lowest echelons of mass culture, commercial literature has taught us how to be
indifferent to the work’s authorial, individual, and creatively unique genesis.
On an incommen
surably smaller scale of social impact, Dadaism revealed that
chance can be an attractive stimulus of creative process. These cases
notwithstanding, it is still the Romantic canon that prevails today, which
assumes that the authentically valuable artistic work has to emanate from the
author’s unfeigned experience. The deeper it reaches into the most intimate
biography of the master of words, the greater value it possesses.Note added in 1997: This is what I thought in the
early 1980s. From today’s perspective, I wouldn’t formulate this statement
in such a radical way. The Romantic model coexists with the postmodern one;
the latter contradicts the first and purports to be the triumphant ‘tomb’ of
the author (i.e. announcing the author’s ‘death’). The postmodern paradigm
attempts to popularise the belief that ‘we’ve seen it all’ and so, since it
is only possible to produce combinations of past forms and concepts, it
doesn’t matter who these producers of contemporary literary installations,
collages, contemporary silvae, and centos
are.
When we discuss the issue of ‘translation as creativity’, things get more complicated inasmuch as the category of “creativity” is ambiguous and historically determined. According to the Polish philosopher Władysław Tatarkiewicz, it may function as a “useful phrase” TatarkieMaster i Margaritawicz 1975, 311, but it does not meet the standards set for academic terms today. At the same time, however, the newest results from psycholinguistics and related disciplines, and thus from sociolinguistics as well, rather tentatively try to help us understand the distinction between those linguistic variants of individual behavior that seem either more strongly or more mildly invested in creativity. Alexander Shveitser differentiates between:
two types of linguistic situation: the standard (stable) and the variable (changeable) ones. In the standard situations, the actions of an individual are subject to strict rationing […]. The variable (changeable) ones, however, are unique in offering a larger or smaller scale of choice from among available linguistic devices. Švejcer 1977, 15
This would be the basic “zero” level of separating the “creative” and
“non-creative” activities. We may expand Shveitser’s remarks with one more
reflection: texts created in stable situations (which prevent any creative
innovation) are subordinate to the external norms of verbal communication. The
issue of whether a text is correct or incorrect is entirely controlled from the
point of view of language as a social institution. The experts who ‘know better’
whether or not it is allowed to speak in a particular manner in a given standard
situation are anonymous. The concept of ‘error’ appears here as something
entirely legitimate, and so the speaker feels justified in correcting a wrongly
phrased text straightaway. On the other hand, the utterance that comes into
being in the variable situation becomes creativity par
excellence – provided that an individual questions external norms.
Objecting to subordination to norms, which all of a sudden prove helpless
against the need for individual expression, is a first step into creative work.
Without exceptions, all language decisions are resolved on the border between
correctness and incorrectness. Each word may turn out to be an artistic error,
though still meeting the demands of correctness dictated by practical norms. The
situation of a word in the creative process equals that of a neologism. What I
have in mind are not only the extreme attacks of literary art on the institution
of language in the style of zaum' (zaum) poetry or Joyce’s experiments; the most common sentence can lose
its feature of ‘commonness’ and, so to speak, fall into the situation of
metaphor. The first sentence of Michail Bulgakov’s Master i
Margarita (The Master and Margarita) in the Russian original reads as follows: V čas žarkogo vesennego zakata na Patriaršich Prudach
pojavilis dvoe graždan [During the hot spring sunset,
two citizens appeared in the Patiarch’s Ponds] Bulgakov 1999, 7. Besides the opinion of author,
there exist no standard norms to determine whether it is an error or a correct
decision for a writer to start a novel in this particular way, with this word
order, intonation, and such a configuration of stylistic values.
The translator’s activity unfolds between the creative speech situations and
those that paralyze creativity understood as such. On the lowest level of text
construction—so throughout the lexical and phraseological layer—translation
approximates creativity. Neither the translator nor the original author ever
know whether they have found the only legitimate equivalent that optimally
corresponds to the function of a foreign phrase. Is it an error when the
aforementioned sentence by Bulgakov gets translated into Polish as follows: Kiedy zachodziło właśnie gorące wiosenne słońce, na
Patriarszych Prudach zjawiło się dwu obywateli [Just
as the hot spring sun was setting, two citizens appeared in the Patriarch’s
Prudy]? Such an equivalent of the Russian sentence was proposed by
Irena Lewandowska and Witold Dąbrowski, the Polish translators of The Master and Margarita
Bulgakov 1969, 7. However, these
grey, ostensibly generic, and stylistically unmarked sentences feature a few
discrepancies that surely cannot go unnoticed by critics. The original “hot
sunset” turns into the “hot sun” in the translation. Bulhakov’s word prud is not only a part of the local name, but also a
visual suggestion. In Russian, prud is a pond, a small
pool of muddy water; and indeed, the fate of the “two citizens” is going to get
muddied up quite soon. What disappears in Lewandowska and Dąbrowski’s
translation is the irony achieved by juxtaposing high and low registers: “the
time of hot sunset” and a “muddy pond”, the “muddy pond” and the “patriarch”.
Repeated after the Russian original, the word prud
adapted into Polish does not spark the associations projected within the source
text. Let me stress, however, that in raising these doubts here, I do not intend
to enter into a polemic with the translators. Something else is rather of
interest to us here, namely the perpetual state of doubt that appears
unfailingly in every reading of a translation, and even earlier on: in every
attempt to translate a literary text. Thus, the most elementary translation
activities occur in the clearly variable situation; they take such a situation
for granted.
But the very choice of language repertoire does not yet amount to creativity.
Authentically creative dilemmas can arise in translating phrases that
communicate concealed meanings and implied messages. The literal rendering of
the source text does not make it easier. In fact, translators do not seek the
equivalent of a word, but its equivalent function. It is thus crucial to see to
what end a foreign text engages a given word. Whether compelling or artistically
flawed, each and every decision of the translator here becomes in its essence a
creative one. It manifests itself in the previously discussed creative order.
Here we have our two citizens from The Master and
Margarita’s initial pages heading to the kiosk that sells “Beer and
soft drinks”. Due to supply shortages, they’ve got no mineral water and no beer,
only an apricot drink. Nu davajte, davajte, davajte, e!
Bulgakov 1999, 8, they keep pushing
the shopkeeper. How to translate it? The faithful calque in Polish: No, dawajcie, dawajcie, dawajcie sounds like an
unquestionably poor solution—it would be a phraseological Russicism.
Furthermore, according to the colloquial use of language, the Russian verb davat’ is a way to urge a person
to do any one of many different things, something that cannot be confined to the
connotative field of the Polish dawać [to give]. The translator needs to invent, arrange, and construct an
equivalent of this expression’s function. Może być. Niech
będzie! [Fair enough, let it be!] Bulgakov 1969, 8, Lewandowska and
Dąbrowski have proposed. But the critics might be even more doubtful in this
case than regarding the previous sentence about Patriarsze
Prudy. An immense multitude of possible solutions is at stake here, for
instance: Dobra jest, dobra jest, dobra jest [Al-right, al-right, al-right…] or No to
prędzej, prędzej, prędzej [So hurry up, hurry
up…], etc. The translator finds themselves in a situation that is
analogous to that of the author—with no external norms. Every decision is both
the right one and at the same time a problematic one.
As mentioned before, the innovations on the translator’s part concern the lowest
levels of an artistic work and play out among micro-stylistic combinations
within the text. It might come as a surprise that these interventions influence
the shape of an individual text to an incom
mensurably greater extent than
stylistic polysystems formed within the local literary tradition.