CFP – Retracing the History of Literary Translation: New Areas and Methods of Research in the Polish Context

Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

27-29 September 2017

Keynote speakers

Susan Bassnett, University of Warwick

Lieven D’hulst, University of Leuven-Kulak

Matthew Reynolds, University of Oxford

Translation Studies in Poland, with its strong emphasis on the problems of language, style and equivalence, has paid relatively little attention to the study of the history of translation with its social, political and ideological entanglements. The few contributions to the field include the anthology Polish Writers on the Art of Translating (ed. Balcerzan, Rajewska 1977; enlarged edition 2007) and Wacław Sadkowski’s (2002) concise outline of the history of literary translation; despite this, a systematic investigation into the history of translators and their work, the position of translated literature within the domestic sphere, the impact it exerted on canon formations and the role it played in Polish writing has not yet been undertaken as the awareness of the importance of this kind of research has been rather low.
Translation Studies on the other hand have paid increasing attention to the diachronic dimension of translation as part of literary systems and to translators as agents of cultural processes, with Venuti’s The Invisibility of Translator (1995) and Pym’s Method in Translation History (1998) marking the beginning of this line of research. Since then this has produced a fair body of work, both descriptive and theoretical, including books by Delisle & Woodsworth’s (1995), Robinson (2001), Bastin and Bandia (2006), Wolf (2006) and von Flotow (2011). Drawing on this previous scholarship, the workshop’s goal is to stimulate research in translation history in the Polish context with a view to creating a starting point for further collaboration and research projects.

With the growing number of programmes in Translation Studies at Polish universities and the increase in general interest in translation, there is an urgent need for more systematic research into translation as part of Poland’s literary and cultural history. Translation has been its integral part for centuries since until World War II Poland was a multinational, multilingual and multicultural society; moreover, the country’s location between Western and Eastern parts of Europe has made it a rich and sometimes dramatic translation zone. Given this historic participation in translation, it is important to develop and implement new models for the study of the history of translation as a valuable part of wider Polish cultural studies and the humanities.

Máis información: https://www.iatis.org/index.php/iatis-conferences/regional-workshops/current-regional-workshops/item/1433-sixth-regional-workshop-theme-cfp