English Translations of Korczak’s Children’s Fiction

A Linguistic Perspective

Michał Borodo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030381165
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030381172
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book investigates major linguistic transformations in the translation of children's literature, focusing on the English-language translations of Janusz Korczak, a Polish-Jewish children's writer known for his innovative pedagogical methods as the head of a Warsaw orphanage for Jewish children in pre-war Poland. The author outlines fourteen tendencies in translated children's literature, including mitigation, simplification, stylization, hyperbolization, cultural assimilation and fairytalization, in order to analyse various translations of King Matt the First, Big Business Billy and Kaytek the Wizard. The author then addresses the translators' treatment of racial issues based on the socio-cultural context. The book will be of use to students and researchers in the field of translation studies, and researchers interested in children's literature or Janusz Korczak. 

© The Author(s) 2020

M. BorodoEnglish Translations of Korczak’s Children’s FictionPalgrave Studies in Translating and Interpretinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38117-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Michał Borodo¹

(1)

Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz, Poland

Michał Borodo

End Abstract

This study has been occasioned by the fact that there has so far been no book available in English about the translation of Polish children’s literature in general, and about the translation of Korczak in particular. Janusz Korczak (1878–1942), the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit, was a Polish-Jewish children’s writer and paediatrician, known for his innovative pedagogical methods as the head of a Warsaw orphanage for Jewish children in pre-war Poland. His most famous children’s book Król Maciuś Pierwszy [King Matt the First] is the novel most frequently translated into English from all of Polish children’s literature, although its English-language translations have so far received very little scholarly attention. Focusing on four different translations of this classic text and some other titles by Korczak translated into English over a period of seventy-five years, this linguistically oriented study aims to fill this void. The book’s major contribution lies in showing how Polish-to-English translators mediate children’s fiction, activating different reserves of meaning of the source texts and leaving their “linguistic fingerprints” on the target texts—modifying them in terms of their linguistic organization, underlying ideologies, cultural references and style.

The book also delves into the largely unknown history of the English translations of Korczak. His most famous children’s novel was first translated as Matthew the Young King in 1945 in New York by Edith and Sidney Sulkin, emigrants from Eastern Europe, and published by Roy Publishers—a continuation of the dynamic Polish Rój publishing house established in pre-war Warsaw. The second translation, King Matt the First, was published in 1986 in New York by Farrar, Straus and Giroux with an introduction by Bruno Bettelheim. The translation was the work of Richard Lourie—an American translator from Polish and Russian, a writer, journalist and political commentator. The third translation, titled Little King Matty, was created by Adam Czasak—a versatile bilingual, professional translator and interpreter born in Cheshire, in north-west England, and currently living in Krakow—and published by Joanna Pinewood Enterprises in London, in 1990. The most recent translation, King Matthew the First, was completed by Adam Fisher and Ben Torrent and published in New York by Nanook Books in 2014. With the exception of Lourie’s 1986 version, little is known about the history of the other three translations. For example, in his review of Lourie’s translation, Jack Zipes (1986) observes: “Thanks to the fine translation by Richard Lourie and the informative introduction by Bruno Bettelheim, ‘King Matt the First’ has finally made its American debut.” It had actually made its debut already in 1945 in a full-fledged translation by the Sulkins. Similarly, little is known about Czasak’s 1990 translation—published in a small number of copies and the only English version of Korczak’s novel created on this side of the Atlantic. The present book aims to bring such unjustifiably forgotten, “invisible” translations “if not into the limelight, then at least into the daylight” (Lathey 2006: 16). The other Korczak novels examined in this study include Bankructwo małego Dżeka [The Bankruptcy of Little Jack], published in Cyrus Brooks’s translation in London by Minerva Publishing under the title Big Business Billy, and Kaytek the Wizard, created in 2012 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, an acclaimed translator and distinguished ambassador of Polish literature abroad.

Following Juliane House’s (2004: 683) suggestion that the translation of children’s literature is a fruitful field for linguistic analysis, Korczak’s English translations will be examined from a linguistic perspective. This approach will go beyond such broad categories as “addition”, “omission” or “mistranslation”, with the aim of discovering recurrent and systematic linguistic patterns in the choices observable in the English translations (ibid.: 684). Such an approach deserves some explanation and clarification, however, as, after all, the book also adopts an interdisciplinary approach, dealing with children’s fiction from historical and socio-cultural perspectives and providing the necessary contextualization. This is essential in a study of several literary translations produced in the UK and the USA over a period of more than seventy years, and in this sense the book does not deal with translation issues from a purely linguistic perspective. It draws special attention to the nature of the language of translated children’s fiction, however—to the changing styles and worldviews, as they are expressed in the language of translated texts. In particular, the book draws upon and builds on the work of various translation scholars who specialize in the language of (translated) children’s fiction and who have researched the issues of translation, style, idiolect, sociolect and ideological manipulations in children’s books (e.g. Gillian Lathey, Juliane House, Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjær, Jan van Coillie, Victòria Alsina, Martin B. Fischer) as well as researchers who have investigated the concept of style in translation (e.g. Mona Baker, Gabriela Saldanha and again Kirsten Malmkjær).

With regard to the book’s organization, Chap. 2 presents theoretical considerations regarding the language of translated children’s fiction. The first part of this chapter introduces fourteen key translation strategies commonly found in translations of children’s literature and based on a review of the existing literature: mitigation, censorship, didacticism, sentimentalization, infantilization, hyperbolization, fairytalization, simplification, explicitation, standardization, stylization, cultural assimilation, foreignization and modernization. These fourteen strategies form the basis for a new and integrated framework for analysing translated children’s literature, where to date the discussion of these strategies has been scattered throughout the literature. The framework builds and expands on the existing work of such scholars as Birgit Stolt (1978), Göte Klingberg (1978), Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska (1988), Riitta Oittinen (2000), Juliane House (2004), Emer O’Sullivan (2005), Maria Nikolajeva (2006), Eliza Pieciul-Karmińska (2011), Jan Van Coillie (2011), Gillian Lathey (2016) and Themis Kaniklidou and Juliane House (2017). The second part of the chapter introduces a number of concepts of relevance to the analyses conducted in Chaps. 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, such as sociolect, style, ideology and the metonymics of (re)translation. The chapter demonstrates that in translated children’s literature one may encounter linguistic modifications amplifying the emotional tone of a text; that elements regarded as inappropriate may be deleted or toned down; and that a children’s book may be subject to linguistic standardization, simplification, explicitation or deliberate stylization through the use of a different degree of formality, manipulation of grammatical constructions and lexis, omission or introduction of a particular sociolect. The added value of the proposed framework is that it places special emphasis on various linguistic concepts and categories and on the analysis of recurrent linguistic patterns in translated texts. The concepts and strategies introduced in this chapter are then used to analyse the English translations of Korczak mentioned above.

Chapter 3 traces the history of Polish children’s literature in English translation. Despite the predominantly one-sided nature of this exchange between Poland and English-speaking countries, some Polish titles have nevertheless found their way to Anglophone markets. The chapter describes this largely under-investigated field of cultural activity, the “invisible” and overlooked translations of Polish children’s literature. In the second part of this chapter, special attention is given to Korczak, his works in English translation, his translators and the cultural and publishing context in which the translations were created. Emphasis is placed on Korczak’s biography and the major characteristics of Król Maciuś Pierwszy, followed by the description of the novel’s American debut in 1945, thanks to Edith and Sidney Sulkin and the pre-war Polish publisher Marian Kister. The chapter then concentrates on the novel’s retranslations, as well as briefly discussing its English-language adaptations. It also examines two other children’s books by Korczak in English translation—Big Business Billy and Kaytek the Wizard.

Chapter 4 initially focuses on the strategies of cultural assimilation and foreignization, illustrating them with the first two American translations of Korczak’s novel—Matthew the Young King from 1945 and King Matt the First published in 1986. It demonstrates that in 1945 Edith and Sidney Sulkin created a version oriented towards American culture. Richard Lourie’s 1986 translation, on the other hand, is more source culture oriented, retaining some of the cultural references signalling Polishness, a strategy that to some extent exemplifies...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Language of Translated Children’s Fiction: Key Issues
• 3. Sketching the Context: English Translations of Polish Children’s Literature
• 4. Cultural Assimilation, Foreignization, Fairytalization and Hyperbolization
• 5. Mitigation, Standardization, Simplification and Explicitation
• 6. Style and Sociolect: A Corpus-Based Study
• 7. Formal Literary Style and Modern American Idiom
• 8. On Cannibals and Savages: Translators’ Treatment of Racial Issues
• 9. Conclusion
• Back Matter