Niedługo ukaże się mój artykuł o książkach Jaspera Fforde'a w przekładzie Marzeny Chrobak.
Wklejam pierwsze akapity:
Proportions
of the familiar and the strange in Jasper Fforde’s fictional world, from the
perspective of the reader of the original and the Polish translation
The
world created by the Welsh writer Jasper Fforde in a series of novels featuring
the female literary detective Thursday Next – the first two of which, The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book, have been translated into Polish, both by Marzena Chrobak – is characterized by
huge linguistic and comic inventiveness, as well as relying heavily on the
canonical works of English literature and engaging in creative play with them
it on many levels. To a translator, all these characteristics pose quite a
challenge, albeit not a defeating one, as attested by the fact that by the year
2005, four years from its publication date, book one, The Eyre Affair, had been translated into nine languages. The
challenge to the reader is another question, and it is this question that I
have focused on in this paper.
What I would like to propose is that
the difficulties in the translation and reception of the Thursday Next books do not form a continuum, but two
distinct categories: one comprising all sorts of words, phrases and neologisms
describing the world in which the action takes place, and the other, all things
literary, from authors’ names and the names of the characters in their works,
to more or less direct allusions to those works. In order for a reader to
understand entities belonging to the former category, it is enough to have an
imagination and some experience of reading fiction; in order to “get” the
entities from the latter category, however, some contextual knowledge is
indispensable, in this case, at least cursory acquaintance with the major
literary works in English of the last few hundred years and related literary
facts. I will try to show how the existence of these two categories leads, in
the process of translation, to a disparity of the worlds presented in the
original text on the one hand and the translation on the other – specifically,
a radically different distribution of the familiar and the strange.
To lend my analysis a wider context,
I will start by a brief description of the premises of the world described in
the Thursday Next books. Its reality is alternative to ours. The England where
most of the action takes place is not a monarchy: the highest office is that of
a president (currently held by a virtuoso of the ukulele), and the neighbouring
Wales is a People’s Republic. The Crimean War has not ended, but has been going
on for over a hundred and thirty years, claiming thousands of casualties,
fuelling the arms race and oiling the clogs of the propaganda machine. The
human inhabitants of Fforde’s alternative universe can travel in time and,
consequently, alter the course of history. The ChronoGuard (a lamentably
corrupt force) exists to prevent this. Actual power is wielded by the
monster-sized Goliath Corporation. The people living in that world are fanatics
of literature: to them, it is the most fun thing imaginable and they make it as
central to their lives as possible (hence the profession of the protagonist,
literary detective). In book one the protagonist’s mission is to capture a
dangerous criminal who kidnaps characters from well-loved novels; in book two
it is to find out, urgently, how literary works can be entered without the help
of the usual gadgets, because what is at stake is the present and future
existence of Thursday’s own husband. To sum up, the action of the Thursday Next
books takes place in an alternative universe where there are elements which are
purely fictional, as well as numerous analogues of the world we know, plus one
entire sphere of reality (or, more precisely perhaps, ‘a blend of reality and
fiction’?) which is identical with its counterpart in our world: namely,
literature.
