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: