The article analyzes Henri Robillot's 1979 translation of Philip Roth's The Professor of Desire (1977) into French. It demonstrates the manner in which apparently minor stylistic choices, slight omissions, and more generally the stylistic treatment of male and female characters in the translation constitute a strategy of excessive interpretation and gender politics traced back to the critical reception of Roth's work. Through the analysis of the translation, the article aims to improve the analytical perception of the novel.

Through a reading of J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace this paper discusses the contemporary genre of reading literature in terms of an "ethics of perception." In the fourteen years since its publication the novel has elicited a rich body of commentary and criticism with an ethical edge, often focusing on the unfolding vision or stunted but developing perceptiveness of its uneasy protagonist David Lurie. This path of criticism is paradigmatic of a broader interest in studying literary works as paths to moral philosophical illumination. I discuss how the novel yields to this kind of reading, but also how this path of reading is complicated by its various other features, above all, a plurality of values that may be hard to reconcile and a Christian perspective of grace which is played against the novels secular, intellectual perspective on perceptiveness. I argue that reading Disgrace in terms of any pre-given ethical formula, however compelling, may be problematic considering the nature of Coetzee's authorship.

In Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, Sartre tells the story of the writer Jean Genet. He does it from the presuppositions he developed in his major philosophical book, Being and Nothingness, where he presented man as a free being acting in specific situations but always able to surmount the given by decisions of his own. Nevertheless, Sartre describes the story of the orphan Genet as it begins in childhood with the accusation of theft made by his adopted parents and by the adults of the village where he had been sent. This accusation turns out to be traumatic. Genet will actually become a thief later, and a writer of theft and crime. It thus determines his entire life. By telling this story, Sartre himself puts his basic ideas to the test, and has to admit that events which occurred in childhood influence and determine our life. Sartre the philosopher of freedom is thus challenged by Sartre the writer of existence.

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. 

Robert Lowell coined the famous distinction between cooked and raw poetry, but beginning with Joel Barlow's epic treat The Hasty Pudding there is a long tradition of American poetics sustained by copious and artful use of tropes of hunger, food, and eating. Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems and Lowell's Life Studies would be emaciated beyond recognition without them. Also taking other poems into account, the essay argues that Lowell and Ginsberg did more to enrich the American alimentary poetic tradition than anyone else since T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. 

This article addresses the problems of the Italian translation of Philip Roth's American Pastoral by Vincenzo Mantovani. The theoretical backdrop against which the assessment is set concerns the novel's intentional system as David Herman interprets it in his "Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance." Accordingly, the notion of "intentional equivalence" is proposed as a tool for comparing the original text and its translation. Well aware that the creation of effects starts at the lexical level, word choices at crucial textual junctures are examined, starting with the incipit and proceeding with pivotal moments in the first 90 pages of the book. These pages revolve around a very tight intentional construction depending on Zuckerman's immersion in the Swede's mystique and the consequent need for the narrator to write his story. The article demonstrates that because of inexplicable translation choices the Italian reader is inevitably led into a storyworld different from the original as far as focalizing perspective, ironic distance, and empathetic involvement are concerned. 

June 2013: Pia Masiero is assistant professor of North-American Literature at the University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari. Her research and teaching focus on twentieth-century prose, the American Renaissance, as well as narratology and contemporary American fiction. Her recent publications include, Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: the Making of a Storyworld (Cambria Press 2011) “‘Nothing is impersonally perceived’: Dreams, Realistic Chronicles and Perspectival Effects in American Pastoral” (Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2011) and Names across the Color Line: William Faulkner’s Short Fiction 1931-1942 LT2 Studio 2012).

This article focuses on the effects of censorship on the translations of two of Roth's novels into Spanish: Portnoy's Complaint (1969) and The Professor of Desire (1977). These two novels, published in Spanish for the first time in 1977 and 1978 respectively - a period when Spain had barely left behind General Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975) - suffered various forms of censorship. The article shows how the four criteria (Abellán 1980) used by the censors of the period - sexual morality, linguistic decorum, politics and respect for religion as an institution - were applied in the case of these two Roth novels.

The article discusses the problems that faced the English translator of Balys Sruoga's Forest of the Gods, a book written immediately after World War II and based on the author's experience as a prisoner in the Stutthof concentration camp. The article shows that, largely owing to the translator's choices in rendering culture-specific concepts and expressions, the original and the translation may acquire different kinds of standing in the literary-historical process.

Doppelgänger narratives of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries relate in different and sometimes incompatible ways to their Romantic precursors. They often parody these precursor narratives, criticize their popular interpretations, or tinker with their conventions. Some of them follow the Romantic tradition in highlighting the harsh rivalry between "original" and double and its catastrophic results, whereas in others the double acts as a catalyst for self-reflection and selftransformation. Doppelgänger narratives of the last decades tend to focus on the intersection of the psychological with the scientific or the aesthetic domains, while the significance of the supernatural principle is reduced, eliminated, or replaced by implausible coincidences and analogical relations typical of (post)modern fiction. In order to demonstrate these ideas, the article begins with an analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixir (1815-1816) and continues with an exploration of five types of later Doppelgänger narratives.