The Feminist Intervention
I consider the works of Virginia Woolf to be the most manipulated texts
of English literature in Poland and I find the Polish translation of her
texts to play a significant part therein. The oeuvres of Woolf were
relatively overlooked in Poland until the 1990s due to political
pressures. Although Woolf as a propagator of feminism could have written
herself well into the contemporary socialist context, as translation
studies scholar Magda Heydel (2015) argues, the authorities considered
her feminism to be a type of erotic and imperialist import. Woolf’s
works became more popular alongside the economic and political changes
which occurred in the Polish arena after 1989. We observe here the
feminist motif of recuperation of women’s “lost” work - in this case
due to the political system. However, as Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga
(2002:147) illustrates, feminist intervention in the choice of books for
translation and publicity around it is the main reason why the Polish
readership today perceives Woolf as an advocate of feminism, androgyny,
and transgression. It is the translation of “A Room of One’s
Own” from 1997 by Agnieszka Graff that particularly shaped Woolf’s
perception as such.
This novel is an essay where the first-person narrator directly
addresses the reader. While ‘You’ and ‘I’ in English sound
neutral, for a Polish translator this constitutes a linguistic problem
because Polish is an inflected language, which means that verbs,
adjectives and nouns have different endings for males and females. The
following examples illustrate how translators use female forms –
prosiłyście [you asked – F] , bym powiedziała
[I would speak – F] - thereby deciding that the addressees
and narrator are women: