Playing with the Polish Translation of The Grasshopper

ABSTRACT

The article presents the story of the Polish translation of Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper. It was prepared by Filip Kobiela, a philosopher and researcher of Suits’s legacy, and published in 2016. Some remarks concerning the difficulties of the translation and its peculiarities particularly related to the Polish ludic terminology have been added as well as an explanation of the translator’s attitude towards the translation as a type of game in Suits’s sense of the term. The article concludes with information concerning the reception of the translation of Suits’s magnumopus in Poland and its possible impact on future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Suits
• The Grasshopper
• translation
• Polish

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Turkish translation of the title of Suits’s book is literal—Cekirge which means ‘grasshopper’; so perhaps the cicada won’t return to its place in the fable even in places very close to its origin.

2. Such a representation could hardly be used by the illustrator of The Grasshopper, Franc Newfeld, since its protagonist is engaged more in playing games and not playing musical instruments.

3. This fact was also very important during my work on the translation of Suits’s article ‘The Tricky Triad’.

4. Another example of spoonerism in Suits’s work might be found in his article ‘The Tricky Triad’—a hybrid sport, a combination of a game and a performance, is called ‘gameformance or pace’ (Suits 1998, 6).