Narracja w prozie Mikołaja Gogola jako problem przekładowy: na materiale opowiadań z „cyklu petersburskiego” w tłumaczeniu na język polski

W recepcji literatury rosyjskiej w Polsce w ostatnich latach twórczość Mikołaja Gogola zajmuje szczególną pozycję. Gogol jest odkrywany na nowo: jego utwory są coraz częściej wydawane i przedstawiane na scenie polskich teatrów, powstają kolejne interpretacje dzieł pisarza, co więcej – nowe tłumaczenia. Językowa niebanalność Gogola stanowi dla tłumaczy ogromne wyzwanie. Autor jest nieprzewidywalny nie tylko w konstruowaniu neologizmów, w grze słownej i tworzeniu licznych anomalii językowych – zaskakuje również różnymi sposobami opowiadania o wydarzeniach lub opisywania bohaterów, czyli tym, na co składa się narracja w tekście literackim. Zasadniczym celem niniejszej rozprawy doktorskiej jest szczegółowa analiza narracji Mikołaja Gogola w utworach z „cyklu petersburskiego” z uwzględnieniem implicytacji (niewyrażonej wprost informacji semantycznej) oraz zbadanie sposobów odzwierciedlenia oryginalnych właściwości narracyjnych w przekładach na język polski. W rozprawie zaprezentowano, w jakim stopniu informacja implicytna (niejawna, domyślna) jest zachowana w polskich przekładach, a które elementy narracji nie znajdują w nich odzwierciedlenia i jakie są tego przyczyny; przeanalizowano również skutki nieuzasadnionych transformacji tłumaczeniowych w narracyjnej strukturze przekładów oraz specyficzne problemy translatorskie, jakie narracja Gogola stawia przed tłumaczem. W płaszczyźnie teoretyczno-metodologicznej praca mieści się w obszarze literaturoznawstwa, językoznawstwa i translatoryki.

The topic of this doctoral thesis, which is entitled Gogol’s Narration as a Translatoric Problem (as exemplified by “St Petersburg Stories” and Polish Translations) is a presentation of the translatoric issues of the peculiarities in N. Gogol’s narrative style which are not explicit, but implicit in his prose. The theoretical part (chapter 1) starts with the explanation of the definition translated narrative discourse and the main discourse relations are based on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT, Asher and Lascarides 2003), i.a. coordinating relations and subordinating relations. The former push the discourse structure from left to right (i.a. narration, backgrounds etc.), while the latter (i.a. elaboration, explanation, restatement etc.) are the discourse relations that push the structure down. The narrative discourse is considered as connected and coherent, when coordinating and subordinating relations perform their prototypical functions. The subsequent practical part of my dissertation is based mainly on the assumptions of SDRT. The second chapter is devoted to implicit and explicit relations in discourse. The British philosopher of language, Paul Grice, known for his theory of implicature, wrote that the meaning of “what is said” and “what is implied” must be distinguished (Grice 1975). The meaning of a discourse is more than the sum of the meaning of the clauses and sentences it consists of. One and the same clause can be understood in many different ways depending on the context it occurs in and one of the aspects of this additional content that comes on top of the semantics of the clause as such is its relation to other clauses in the discourse. In current pragmatics implicit relations are described by using the terms “implicature” and “presupposition”. In this chapter I show in specific examples from “St Petersburg Stories” why it is important for a translation to take account of implicatures and presuppositions and what the consequences are of ignoring them. The third chapter is concentrated around the peculiarities of Gogol’s narrative style in “St Petersburg Stories” – primarily it is about ambivalence, uncertainty and fluidity. Some of these peculiarities are marked by Russian and Polish literary scholars, but I examine them from a different angle, conducting a deep linguistic analysis by using methods of pragmatics (indicated in chapters 1 and 2). The fourth chapter (the main practical one, which deals with translation problems) opens with an explanation of the difference between the role of the narrator in Gogol‘s original text and in the Polish translations. It involves a description of the terms “domestication” and “foreignization” (Venuti 1995), which are used in the translation of culturally specific words. I draw attention to constructions which, on the face of it, serve to highlight the national “local color”, e.g. with the qualifier russkij, ‘Russian’, referring to phenomena deeply rooted in Russian culture. Yet on a closer inspection one finds that, contrary to expectations, these constructions reflect the alienation of the narrator with respect to reported events, being a kind of exoticism and thus additionally complicating translation. The next phase of this chapter is focused on one of the most obvious stylistic devices employed by Gogol – restatements (i.a. repetitions, tautologies and pleonasms) – which at first sight seem to be under-informative, superfluous and at variance with prototypical functions appropriate to restatements in artistic texts. The methods of reproduction in the Polish translations, as well as the reasons for their occasional omissions are presented at some length. It is shown why, having access to a vast variety of stylistic devices, Gogol so often prefers repetitions, tautologies and pleonasms, and what the perils of distortion of their basic semantic/pragmatic features, or of their omission in translation are. A deeper linguistic analysis of Gogol’s texts, taking into consideration the relevant connotations intended by the author, as well as the semantics of context, leads the author to establish several less-studied functions of repetition, tautology and pleonasm, and to view them as a means of implicit organization of discourse structure. In this chapter I also consider the translation issues of the nominations in Gogol’s narration, first of all “unexpected” nominations, or nominations not related to the context, which can cause difficulties in interpretation and translation. The role of these nominations in the development of certain motives in the narration and in restoration of the backstory lost in narration is analyzed. Finally in chapter four, I show how prototypical models of relating portions of text to each other are eroded in Gogol’s narrative – in particular, how the thematic-rhematic structure of sentences is deformed, expected anaphoric links are interrupted, anti-narration effects arise in those parts of the text which most certainly should be of narrative nature. The result is that erosion of syntactic relations is characteristic of Gogol’s text as a whole. The findings of the discourse analysis in this PhD thesis show that most of the meanings in Gogol’s narrative style are not expressed clearly (they are not explicit), but implied. Otherwise the discourse relations in Gogol’s text often don’t perform their prototypical functions (for example, explanations don’t explain why a situation arose, but inform about other situations or non contextual things), which can mislead the readers and translators. The results of the analysis show that ignoring Gogol’s narrative peculiarities as described in this dissertation leads to wrong translations. Translators of Gogol’s works would be well-advised to be mindful of this special variety of exoticization characteristic of his prose. Asher, N., Lascarides, A. (2003), Logics of Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grice, H. P. (1975), Logic and Conversation. Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts., ed. by P. Cole & J. L. Morgan, New York: Academic Press. Venuti, L. (1995), The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. New York: Routledge.