Understanding Misunderstanding. Vol.1: Cross-Cultural Translation

The contributors strive to answer how a diligent reading of culture-specific and tradition-bound works produces “fallacious,” “erroneous,” but nevertheless productive, persuasive and ultimately accepted views on the original’s semantics and function. The authors explore multiple aspects and sources of misunderstanding in cross-cultural contacts: multilingualism in literature; translation mistakes as an inspiration for artistic creativity, experimental translations as strategies of going beyond the limits of linguistic communication, and, last but not least, the politics of misunderstanding. The first volume of the collective monograph addresses a number of problems which have profound implications for the understanding of the dynamic, vibrant cross-communication processes.

It is not a coincidence that eminent practitioners and theoreticians of translation treat their professional vocation as not only a linguistic operation, but also as an activity conveying culture-specific perceptual realities and cognitive conceptualizations. Examining the very concept of understanding in relation to translational reading experience, Clive Scott arrives at crucial re-definitions of the source text as formal and expressive palimpsest, and of literary translation as a mode of textual interference. Providing a set of his own intermedial conceptual translations of Guillaume Apollinaire’s and Charles Baudelaire’s poems, the scholar foregrounds the essential role of the target recipient’s sensual, somatic, perceptual, and cognitive experience of the artistic text. Both Marta Kaźmierczak and Katarzyna Lukas focus on the tension between incomprehension and comprehension being the core of various literary works. Kaźmierczak examines literary charades and the intended conundrum in the original and translated works by Achille Campanile, Charlotte Brontë and John Fowles, whereas Lukas investigates some examples of multilingual entanglements resulting from poor translation within the play by Plautus (and its Polish version) and in J. S. Foer’s novel. Both scholars inquire into how the translators represent the original (mis)comprehension as the fabric of the original texts causing both humorous and surprisingly serious effects. Lukas also scrutinizes German retranslations of one of the most influential volumes of Polish Romanticism – Ballady i romanse [Ballads and Romances] by Adam Mickiewicz tracing their (changing) stylistic immersion in the target culture, and, last but not least, revealing the surprising perpetuation of the early translators’ (mis)comprehension of the original.

However, in the opinion of Magda Heydel and Joanna Partyka even purposeful transmutations of the original may not always be proclaimed invalid. Heydel’s article concentrates on Andrzej Tobis’s A-Z photographic project based on Bildwörterbuch Deutsch und Polnisch: Mensch – Natur – Gesellschaft (1953). While tracing the artistically intended (mis)matches between the lexical entries and their photographic counterparts, the author emphasizes the creative potential of misunderstanding as deliberate artistic strategy and a source of cross-cultural estrangement. In her metatranslatological study, Joanna Partyka explains why Jorge Luis Borges praised mistranslations as a full-fledged inspiration of his own original writing. According to the Argentinian writer, the freedom of re-creating the original text produces unexpected and astonishing effects. Thus, mistranslation should be evaluated as an invaluable source of expressiveness and beauty, and as an indispensable side-effect of translational processes. This approach is inseparable from the focus on modernist multilingualism as an integral part of the cultural landscape and artistic creativity. In her article on interlingual tensions and translational misunderstandings in modernist prose, Juliette Taylor-Batty clearly demonstrates that “not knowing” foreign languages can indeed become a source of modernist innovation and stylistic experiment.

However, not only cultural, but also social and political impact of misunderstanding seems to have been overlooked. Günter Berghaus focuses on the intersections of art and politics, discussing some of the greatest misunderstandings within Italian Futurism. The author traces the entanglements of the Marinettian idea of making politics aesthetic, and art – political. Utopian projects collapsed one after another in different socio-political circumstances, leaving a trace in the Futurist artistic and meta-artistic texts and proving politics and art cannot be easily joined. Wojciech Małecki adds some other solid arguments to the debate on political aspects of miscomprehensions. They are also a function of the major partitions existing within literary and social fields, as Małecki theorizes the problem. Misunderstanding occurs at the intersections of political and social factors, including class, ethnicity, and others. As such it not only has important consequences for the institution of literature, but also – in a broader context – for the whole public sphere.

Cross-cultural contact is definitely a dynamic and asymmetric process rather than a static and symmetric transfer of values from one culture to another. New “understanding misunderstanding” may become a crucial factor whenever people try to negotiate their past, disseminate ideas, compare analytical tools and terms, or arrange common ground for connections and dialogue across linguistic and cultural borders. In the world of intense international contact, in a time of increasing social and political conflict, we do need to deepen reflection on the reasons for various cultural misunderstandings, and on their positive aspects. Such reflection enables a collaborative rather than confrontational approach to communication – both face to face and at a global level…

This collective monograph is one of the publications commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1948–2018). The editors express their gratitude to the Institute authorities for co-funding the publication.

The editors of the monograph would also like to express sincere thanks to its reviewer, Prof. Witold Sadowski (Institute of Polish Literature, Warsaw University) whose sustained counsel and incisive methodological suggestions have helped to complete this monograph in its present form.

Within the monograph all the quotations from literary works of art appear both in the original form and translated into English. Cited fragments from critical and scholarly texts are given in both language forms only if the original shape of the quote is of special importance for the presented analyses.