Translating a Worldview

INTRODUCTION

MOTTO:

The understanding of a simple poem [...] involves not merely

an understanding of the single words

in their average significance, but a full comprehension of the whole life of the community as it is mirrored in the words, or as it is suggested by their overtones.

Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a Science” (Language 1929: 209)

The word world appears frequently in works in the field of cognitive linguistics. Cognitive-linguistic studies, including cognitive poetics, cognitive approach to translation, and cognitive analyses of texts often use the word world, giving it various meanings, as in the world of a text and linguistic worldview. This book, too, deals with a world, and more precisely: with the different conceptualizations of elements of the world, such as a stone and clouds, in literary texts, and in poetry in particular. It also deals with the practice of translation; and therefore it is about translating a world.

Linguistic worldview (abbreviated as LWV) is excellently, because immediately, revealed in translation. Translation brings out differences between worldviews hidden in two different languages. The fact that each language contains a given worldview has long been known, but it becomes especially apparent when we put different languages together – and translation activates the translator’s imagination, conceptual resources and cognitive abilities from the very beginning of the translation process. This happens already at the stage of reading and analysing the source text, as reading itself is already an interpretation. It can therefore be concluded that LWV is not something that the translator arrives at while concluding their work; it is more of a determinant of the whole and holistic approach to the translation task, i.e. the translation strategy. Detailed translation procedures, or techniques, i.e. the translator’s local decisions, result precisely from the awareness of possible differences in LWV. That awareness is therefore at the beginning of the translation process. To be sure, LWV also reveals itself in the study of a finished translation: in a comparative analysis of the original text and its translation or translations.

The aim of this book is to show the usefulness of the linguistic worldview theory in the process of analysis and translation of literary texts, using selected examples in Polish and English. An analysis of selected examples of translations of Polish texts into English allows us to consider LWV as a helpful tool at every ←9 | 10→stage of the translator’s work: first of all, in constructing an overall strategy and, then, in making particular decisions.

I would like to thank Professor Elżbieta Tabakowska, whose wisdom, knowledge and scholarly attitude have been guiding me at every stage of my academic path, including the preparation of this work, and Professor Jerzy Bartmiński, ←10 | 11→whose works sparked my interest in the linguistic worldview, and who thoroughly reviewed this book. I owe special thanks to Professor Dorota Filar, who in her review of this book included very important, detailed comments that allowed me to cope with many inaccuracies. I am solely responsible for any remaining shortcomings in the book.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

This book is a translation of my own study, written in Polish and published under the title Przekładanie obrazu świata. Językowy obraz świata w przekładzie artystycznym, in 2018. Self-translation has turned out to be no easy task as the effort to understand the original author was doubled by the struggle to understand myself: my own thoughts and intuitions, recorded some time ago.

Some of the terminology proved to be a challenge, too. First of all, the key term linguistic worldview consists of three words in Polish: językowy obraz świata, which makes it easy to use it in reference to specific concepts, e.g. językowy obraz kamienia, językowy obraz chmury, while its English equivalent has to undergo an operation of removing one part of the compound (worldview) in order to produce the analogous combination, e.g. linguistic view of stone, linguistic view of cloud. Moreover, the Polish language makes an important distinction between pojęcie and koncept (followed by Polish linguists) whereas English has just one word: hypernym concept. The title of my book is about przekład artystyczny, where the adjective artystyczny allowed me to imply – in Polish – that what is meant is the translation of not only literary but also other creative texts. Unfortunately, artistic translation is uncommon and seems to refer to the graphic qualities of a text rather than its literary character; therefore, I opted for literary translation. Another possibility, creative translation, would be too broad a term, implying such phenomena as transcreation. One more key problem that I came across unexpectedly was the Polish adjective potoczny. While it can be rendered as colloquial in reference to language or style, it does not form a collocation with worldview (and linguistic worldview). I hope to have chosen the golden mean by sometimes saying colloquial linguistic worldview and sometimes (more often): conventional or shared linguistic worldview.

The fact that I have translated a text some of whose parts were prepared a long time ago meant that certain modifications were necessary, such as updating or deleting some information. I also removed errors and inadequacies, including a quotation from another source which contained a factual mistake. At the same time, however, I felt that some passages, especially in Chapter 1 (theoretical), are worth quoting in a more extended form in the English version of the book.

Finally, translating into English an ethnolinguistic analysis of Wisława Szymborska’s poems in English translations, and, when necessary, having to avoid the use of fragments of published English versions of those poems, forced me to meander between two icebergs (to refer to my own translation model, proposed ←13 | 14→in Chapter 2): the icebergs of the source and the target culture, language and text. Being aware that A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor, I sincerely hope that my own case: this book has proved the aptness of the model of translating as navigating between the icebergs.