Przekład : czyli na styku dwóch podmiotowości

Abstract

The book raises a fundamental issue of the science of translation, that is the relationship between the author and translator / interpreter. Making use of an interdisciplinary research methodology and a broad philosophical background, the author presents the concept of translation (the process) as an intercultural dialogue, and translation (the text) as a work resulting from the meeting of two subjectivities, that is two personalities, cultures, languages and text strategies. The ‘meeting point of subjectivities’ understood in this way implies a relational and dynamic nature of translation, whose ontology is ‘mobile’. Each translation (the text) functioning even only in the framework of a theoretically assumed translation series comes close to the original-prototype. This motion means a clash of ideas and interpretations, as well as mutual ‘elucidation’ of the texts. Thus the study on the relationship between the translation and the original enables tracking that motion of the idea, and also provides an insight into the textual genesis of translation changes; sets the horizon of exploring the presence of the Other in the translation and the attitude of the interpreter towards the category of strangeness. The treatise is characterized by two types of discourse: 1) theoretical and philosophical and 2) hermeneutical and emblematic. The theoretical discussion is illustrated by examples from the Polish edition of the novel entitled The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić, which is part of a trend of postmodern literature while simultaneously containing elements of autobiography. The choice is not accidental: the prose of such a genre generates, as it were, a model of subjectivity described by the philosophers of the twentieth century. In her deliberations on the science of translation, the author utilises the philosophy of the subject; she goes beyond the traditional structural and semiotic methodology of the studies of translation, while remaining critical of post- -structuralism concepts. The author of the treatise seeks the text traces of the writer and his / her interpreter, reconstructing their subjectivity. The meeting point of the two subjectivities may be therefore understood as the resultant of the strange and the familiar observed in the translation, or as a dynamic relationship wherein the main role is played by empirical and textual figures of the author and the interpreter.