“Bardzo żeśmy się zdziwili” — stylizacja na potoczność w polskim przekładzie cyklu opowiadań o przygodach Mikołajka

Abstract

One of the many supplementary school reading, elected at the fourth grade of primary school, is Nicholas — selection of stories from any volume. The famous series about the adventures of Nicholas by French humorist René Goscinny and illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempé includes: Nicholas, Nicholas recreation, Nicholas holidays, Nicholas and the other guys, Nicholas is in trouble. These books were published in Poland translated by Tola Markuszewicz and Elżbieta Staniszkis (authors of the translation of the first two parts) and Barbara Grzegorzewska (author of the translation of the other three parts). Stylizing childlike narration spoken language allows young readers to experience harder reported by the main character’s adventures and feel a significant relationship with the speakers of the same age. Treatments designed to make the text more colloquial and make it similar to the authentic expression reflect the character of immature, awkward expression and cause that the language of the stories is very simple, imitating everyday language of the average young child. In the stories translated by Barbara Grzegorzewska stylizing is achieved by means of language treatments that exceed the reference standard of written Polish. There is a clear tension between the didactic literature intended for children (and thus the exemplar) and necessity of mimetic, artistic credibility (making present of commonness natural in the child language). This problem does not come across in translation by Tola Matuszkiewicz and Elżbieta Staniszkis which shows that it is possible to avoid the linguistic norm violations, without losing anything of successful styling.