She chooses a male grammatical form for I have () known –
nie widziałem [I have not seen (M)] –
although it contradicts with her implied female narrator. In her article
about her translation of “A Room of One’s Own ”, she explains
that she did it because she “felt deceived with pushy presence of a
male novelist” (Graff 1997:304), appearing two sentences prior.
Noteworthy is how the translator’s capital (the mastered
knowledge of English) manipulates a non-English-speaking public,
completely unaware of all those arbitrary choices. In another
translation from 2002 by Ewa Kamińska, the same grammatical decisions
prove Graff’s strategies to be trustworthy. Therefore, the factors that
determined its feminist overtones must have been of a different nature.
Terentowicz-Fotyga (2002:144) proposes the following ones: the
translator was a very famous feminist, Agnieszka Graff; it was published
by a publishing house involved in gender-related issues, Wydawnictwo
Sic! [The Publishing House Sic!] ; and the introduction was
written by the feminist writer, Izabela Filipiak. An interesting aspect
of Filipiak’s introduction - sort of a feminist manifesto – is the
comparison of Woolf’s times to the contemporary Polish position. What
Terentowicz-Fotyga does not seem to notice is the historical context of
its publication. The book was published in 1997, four years after
anti-abortion law enforcement (Znamierowski 2012). Soon, Parliament
began talks regarding the Equal Status Law draft (Graff 2009) and the
Polish feminist movement was brought to life as a result of
disillusionment with a new democracy that did not guarantee women’s
rights. In the chorus of those facts, Graff’s motives - illusio -
become explicit; the translation of the canonical text becomes a tool to
fight for the cause of women’s rights. Her comments regarding the
process of translation are worth noting too. She calls “A Room of
One’s Own ” “a kind of feminist Bible” (Graff 1997:299). Also, she
feels guilty about her decision in the choice of the female gender of
the addressees, for she knows that it strips the text of its neutrality
and gives it special meaning and overtones (Graff 1997:304). In the
light of those comments, it appears that Graff was clearly aware of her
illusio and its consequences.
Graff’s influence on the actual perception of Woolf in Poland is
powerful and this is an example of how a translator’s habitus
(feminist values) has contributed to that. Her translation of “A
Room of One’s Own ” is the most quoted feminist book in Poland. The
quotations from this book even appeared in the popular women’s magazine
“Wysokie Obcasy” [High Heels] (Dunin 1999). In the
line of Bassnett’s suggestion, the comparison of English and Polish
versions allows us, also, to reveal their different status in their
literary systems. While the English version was criticized for some
aspects, for example, not including women of colour (Walker 1984:235),
the Polish version was met with enthusiasm and only one negative stance
(Terentowicz-Fotyga 2002:143).