Date Published:

Abstract:

The article examines one of the problems of translating Philip Roth's novel Deception into Polish. In the novel, written entirely in dialogues, the speakers are not defined as regards their identity, including their gender. This device contributes to the novel's theme of deception and ventriloquism: all the voices in the novel, no matter how diverse, belong ultimately to the writer as their sole creator. The translator should leave the dialogues untagged, otherwise the meaningful indeterminacy of the text is lost. This, however, proves impossible in the Polish translation, since the Polish language is gendered, and the Polish translator has to disambiguate the text, deciding who makes what utterances in the dialogue. In doing so the translator has to follow clichéd preconceptions about gender or, on the contrary, subvert them. In both cases, what in the source text is left ambiguous and indeterminate becomes concretized and determinate in the process of translation.

June 2013: Jerzy Jarniewicz  (b. 1958 in Lowicz) is a Polish poet, translator, and literary critic, who lectures in English at the universities of Lodz and Warsaw. He has published twelve volumes of poetry and nine critical books on contemporary Irish, British, and American literature. He has written extensively for various journals, including Poetry Review, Irish Review, and Cambridge Review. His poetry has been translated into many languages and presented in international magazines, including Index on Censorship, Paris Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Oxford Poetry, and Poetry Wales; it has also appeared in The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (1999). He is editor of the literary monthly Literatura na Swiecie (Warsaw) and has translated the work of many novelists and poets, including James Joyce, John Banville, Seamus Heaney, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth, Edmund White, Derek Walcott, and Craig Raine. His most recent work is the anthology Six Irish Women Poets. In 1999 he attended International Writers Program in Iowa, in 2006 he was writer-in-residence at Farmleigh, Dublin, and in 2010 he won the Ireland Literature Exchange bursary for literary translators. 

Publisher's Version