Abstract
Gomola offers an analysis of English translation of a contemporary Polish mystical text. The chapter examines how the translation process affects representation of evaluative concepts like homeland or morality as well as selected conceptual metaphors of the original: knowledge is light, emotion is heat, mental pleasure is sweet or morality is accounting and discusses lexical and stylistic differences between the source and the target texts. Pointing to shifts in meaning resulting from translation, Gomola concludes that in some respects Diary is stylistically more convincing as a mystical text than the original, which may explain its popularity among English readers.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Janda writes that, according to some cognitive linguists (including George Lakoff), their discipline can be taken as a proof that God does not exist (2010: 8).
- 3.
When Kowalska writes: ‘Let the sinner know that he will be tortured throughout all eternity in those senses which he made use of to sin’ (741), she is closer to Dante’s Divine Comedy than to twentieth-century Christian theology. The same may be said of her depicting a demon as a cat (412), which is in line with even earlier medieval imagery and goes back to the Vox Rama papal bull from the thirteenth century. Besides, Kowalska—like John Milton—cannot dispose of the problem of visual communication in her conceptualization of hell and although there are no references in her text to ‘darkness visible’, still she writes that ‘despite the darkness, the devils and the souls of the damned see each other’ (741).
- 4.
Other conceptualizations like metaphors with water as a source domain have been analyzed by Borkowski (2001). Actually, various linguistic aspects of Dzienniczek have already been analyzed by Polish researchers (they were not, however, compared with their English translation, which we are doing here for the first time). Unfortunately, most of these analyses are not in English.
- 5.
Without this and other conceptual metaphors using verbs of perception in the source domains, most of Christian mystical literature is inconceivable. For the most recent study of Christian mystical language employing verbs of perception, see Gavrilyuk (2014). The knowledge is light metaphor is extremely popular in English devotional texts, and can be found in John Henry Newman’s poem Lead, kindly light as well as in John Newton’s Amazing Grace.
- 6.
Such opposite polarity, namely, presenting a concept or direction both as positive and negative, depending on the context, appears also in the pre-Copernican Christian vision of the universe, taken over from Aristotle and Ptolemy. On the one hand the Ptolemaic world represents an up-down image schema in which positive value is ascribed to the celestial sphere where God resides and negative value to the sublunary sphere inhabited by people. Yet if we look at the Ptolemaic world through the prism of the centre-periphery image schema, then the celestial sphere receives a negative value and positive value is associated with the very centre of the universe, the very middle of the Earth, where, as we learn from the Divine Comedy, Satan lives.
- 7.
Pange Lingua speaks of dulce lignum, dulce clavo, dulce pondus (‘sweet wood, sweet nail, sweet weight’) of the cross while Ave verum corpus addresses Christ with the words O Iesu dulcis (‘O sweet Jesus’).
- 8.
Quite a few symbolic elements of Kowalska’s simple poem resemble Tennyson’s poem Crossing the Bar. It might be interesting to examine whether English readers of the Diary notice this undoubtedly accidental correspondence, and to what extent this may affect their reception and interpretation of Kowalska’s text; however, such examination goes beyond the scope of this chapter.
- 9.
The vitality of this conceptualization is confirmed by the title of one of Kołakowski’s books God owes us nothing (1996) devoted to Augustine of Hippo and his theology of grace.
- 10.
We can jokingly say that Sister Faustyna has managed to unite two, clearly different, visions of God as a Strict Father and a Nurturing Parent that George Lakoff discusses in his Moral Politics (1996).
- 11.
‘Reparation’, from Old French reparacion and directly from Late Latin reparatio ‘act of repairing, restoration’, a noun of action from the past participle stem of the Latin reparare ‘restore, repair’; amends: ‘restitution’, from Old French amendes ‘fine, penalty’; ‘atone’ from adverbial phrase ‘atonen’ (c. 1300) ‘in accord,’ literally ‘at one’, a contraction of ‘at’ and ‘one’; ‘expiation’ via Middle French expiation or directly from Latin expiationem ‘satisfaction, atonement’ (Online Etymological Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com [accessed on 20 August 2015]).
- 12.
Zwierzyńska goes as far as to doubt whether there is a single, general concept in English corresponding to the Polish ojczyzna (1993: 275–286).
- 13.
Following Blumczynski (2010), who discusses the role of capitalization in translations of religious texts, we may say that the capitalization of Ojczyzna in the source text situates the term in the close vicinity of terms like Jesus or God in terms of its sacredness. Such a process does not take place in the target text.
- 14.
The strategy adopted by translators seems to confirm the observations made by Zwierzyńska (cf. n. 12).
- 15.
With one exception: ‘Motherland’ (Kowalska 2005: 32).
- 16.
Sicherl, discussing translating diminutives from Slovene (also a Slavic language) into English, points out that ‘expressing diminutiveness in English often demands going beyond the borders of a lexeme and […] stretches over an entire syntactic structure or even sentence’ (2012: 55). Presumably the translators of Diary wished to avoid such radical solutions and decided to ignore this stylistic feature of Dzienniczek.
- 17.
T.S. Eliot entitled one of his poems ‘Animula’, yet this Latin diminutive is, of course, not a part of standard English.
- 18.
The German translation of Dzienniczek also ignores at least some diminutive forms of the original text. The German language has a diminutive form of Seele (‘soul’) namely Selchen, but it does not appear even once in translation.
- 19.
On word order in the translation of religious texts see also Blumczynski (2010).
Bibliography
Sources
Kowalska, F. (1981). Dzienniczek. Miłosierdzie Boże w duszy mojej. Zgromadzenie Sióstr Matki Bożej Miłosierdzia. http://www.faustyna.pl/zmbm/dzienniczek-sw-siostry-faustyny/#. Accessed 20 Aug 2015.
Kowalska, F. (2005). Diary. Divine mercy in my soul. Stockbridge: Marian Press.
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Gomola, A. (2016). English Evaluative Concepts in a Contemporary Devotional Christian Text. A Comparative Study of Dzienniczek by Faustyna Kowalska and Its English Translation. In: Blumczynski, P., Gillespie, J. (eds) Translating Values. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54971-6_7
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