Longing for an Olga that belongs in English: a Nobel Prize laureate’s micro-narratives

ABSTRACT

The Nobel Prize lecture is a message from someone whose voice matters. The lecture by the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, the 2018 laureate in literature, is both a message consistent with the author’s writings and a literary text in and of itself. However, for this message to reach a wider audience, it must be rendered from the original Polish into English in a way that recognizes the intratextual and intertextual semantic patterns being activated. These nuanced networks of meanings are traced here in two selected motifs: that of tęsknić (verb)/tęsknota (noun) (‘miss/missing’ or ‘long/longing for’) and that of jestem ‘(here) I am’. In this way, Tokarczuk’s message is analysed in terms of words as micro-narratives and language as grand narrative. The micro-narratives of the Polish tęsknić/tęsknota and jestem converge into a coherent portrayal of existence, and an attempt is made to obtain a comparable degree of coherence in the English translation of the lecture. Both the original speech and its English rendering can be viewed as coming from the ‘tender narrator’, a unique category proposed by Tokarczuk. I claim that only through a careful recognition of these semantic patterns can the translation amplify the voice of the Nobel laureate.

KEYWORDS:

• Nobel lecture
• Olga Tokarczuk
• tender narrator
• micro-narrative
• tęsknić/tęsknota
• jestem

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank several people who have helped me shape my ideas and arguments. They are too numerous to list; let me just mention James Underhill, Elżbieta Tabakowska, Piotr Blumczyński, as well as Przemek Łozowski, Alon Benach and several colleagues and students at my university. I also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers. None of them, of course, are responsible for any errors and inadequacies that may remain.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Retrieved March 24, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXV85kILiu8.

2 Retrieved March 24, 2021, from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/lecture/.

3 I will be referring, for convenience, to its Polish and English versions as NL-P [Nobel Lecture in Polish] and NL-E [Nobel Lecture in English], respectively. Full details are provided in the References.

4 The term ‘panoptical’ comes from an earlier essay. Both that essay and the Nobel lecture are now available, in Polish, in a single collection (Tokarczuk, 2020a).

5 As I am writing this, in March 2021, the novel’s English translation is scheduled to appear in 2022.

6 Filar’s approach is an adaptation of Lyotard’s (1979/1984) historiosophical model of metanarratives and small narratives.

7 This is my rendering of Tokarczuk’s ‘najważniejsze i najdziwniejsze słowo świata’ (NL-P, p. 2). I find Croft and Lloyd-Jones’s strangest for najdziwniejsze somewhat misguided: strange usually connotes a measure of oddness or unfamiliarity, whereas the Polish dziwny may also invoke, more positively, surprise and wonder (cf. dziwić się ‘be surprised’; dziw nad dziwy ‘wonder of wonders’).

8 We will not be delving into the otherwise fascinating linguistic details of this line, specifically the lack of the present tense of ‘to be’ in Hebrew, which is why in traditional Judaism it is usually rendered as ‘I will be what I will be’ (Wikipedia; accessed 12 April, 2020).

9 According to The Oxford English Dictionary (OED 1991, II: 3) the primary sense of the English be was ‘to occupy a place’, and only then was the existential sense abstracted away from it, as ‘to be somewhere, no matter where […], to have a place among existing things’. In fact, this a secondary development from the locative semantics of the Old English wesan (cf. was/were) as ‘remain at a place’ (wesan is often rendered into contemporary English as remain or even live or dwell).

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Adam Głaz

Adam Głaz is Associate Professor of English and Linguistics at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (UMCS) in Lublin, Poland. He researches in cognitive and cultural linguistics, linguistic worldview, and translation. In particular, his interests include viewpoint in language and linguistics and comparative analyses of linguistic worldviews (also with regard to translation). He has authored three monographs, including Linguistic Worldview(s): Approaches and Applications (to be published by Routledge in 2021) and several dozen articles. He has edited or co-edited ten volumes, most recently Languages-Cultures-Worldviews: Focus on Translation (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). Głaz has translated in the fields of linguistics and general humanities, including two monographs (Anna Wierzbicka’s Semantyka. Jednostki elementarne i uniwersalne, UMCS Press 2004, and Jerzy Bartmiński’s Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics, Equinox 2009).