On Recreating Identity in Translation. R. L. Stevenson’s “The Tale of Tod Lapraik” and Its Polish Rendition

This article analyses Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Tale of Tod Lapraik”, a Scots-language short story in the novel "Catriona", and its Polish translation by Jan Meysztowicz from 1956 in order to highlight translation problems posed by texts that are lingusitically and culturally marked in a manner interpretable as manifesting cultural identity. The analysis concerns the function of this Scots “insert” in the English-narrated novel and the function of its highly marked language against the background of Stevenson's writings, as well as the possibility of rendering those functions in translating for a different audience in a different time. Applying translation scholars’ views on language variation as a linguistic allusion (Wojtasiewicz 1957, Hejwowski 2015) and on stylistic features as communicative clues (Relevance Theory, Gutt 2000) it is examined what techniques and why have been chosen by the translator, which aspects of the story have been recreated and which have been manipulated, and, on a more general plane, to what extent and under what conditions identity-expressing stylistic traits can be recreated in translation.