Style and Status in Retranslating Childrens’ Classics: On the History of Polish Translations of Kipling’s Just So Stories

Izabela Szymańska

doi:10.70596/cts184

Autor/innen

Izabela Szymańska Uniwersytet Warszawski

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.70596/cts184

Schlagworte:

Just So Stories, Polish, retranslation, style, status

Abstract

This paper examines the 2018 Polish retranslation of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902) against the background of the earlier Polish renditions of this book, interpreting the re-translator’s and publisher’s approach in terms of tendencies that can be observed on the Polish market of children’s books as regards retranslations of canonical titles. It traces the history of the Polish translations of the book, starting in 1903, in order to bring out the evolving approach of publishers to the integrality of the source text, reflecting its changing status. The analysis also concerns the changing approach to the special features of style exhibited by Kipling’s stories such as alliteration, rhymes, syntactic parallelisms, repetitions, and neologisms, which are integral to the text that was originally intended to be read aloud and drew very creatively from the tradition of oral texts. The evolving approach to rendering this very distinct and challenging style, with the newest retranslation reflecting it much more consistently than the previous translations, is interpreted in connection with the changes in the hierarchy of functions ascribed to children’s literature in the Polish context and with the changing reception of the original, which has grown into the status of a canonical text.

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