Revising Anna Świrszczyńska: The Shifting Stance of Czesław Miłosz’s English Translations

Abstract

This article reconstructs Czesław Miłosz’s multiple translations into English, done between 1983 and 2002, of the Polish author Anna Świrszczyńska’s poetry as a case study contrasting the ideological underpinnings of his translations prior to the fall of Communism in 1989 with those he presented after, when literature could cross more freely between the two cultures. Because Miłosz’s translations of Świrszczyńska’s poetry appeared in three different versions, two books for the American audience and one book for the Polish audience, it is possible to track a process of travel at work behind his translations. The three books demonstrate how translated texts often circulate in our globalized literary culture, first when a work of literature crosses from one language to another (from source to target culture), then when knowledge of the translation recrosses back to the original culture. This process of travel shows that translation from a “minor” language such as Polish to a “major” language such as English is often used in an attempt to preserve, broaden, and canonize the source literature, regardless of the translation’s effects in the target culture.