Reflections of the Master: The Reception of Henry James in Poland (1877-2000) (review)

To say something new and revealing about the works of Henry James is becoming increasingly difficult, yet by choosing theoretical approaches rarely used by Jamesian scholars Miroslawa Ziaja-Buchholtz has opened up new avenues of investigation and has managed to reveal a great deal about both the fiction and its readers. An exhaustive, comprehensive, and meticulously researched study, Reflections of the Master takes stock of well over one hundred years of criticism, reviews, and translations of James's works in Poland. Located at the intersection of literary criticism and sociology, Reflections of the Master combines New Historicist methodologies with German, French, and Polish theories of translation and reception. In telling a complex tale about the waxing and waning interest in James among Polish lay and academic readers, publishers, and translators, Ziaja-Buchholtz demonstrates a rare sensitivity to issues of gender, national politics, the politics of publishing, language barriers and cultural incompatibility, the effects of wars, the destruction of libraries, and decimation of Polish literary scholars, as well as the imprint of translators' personal preferences on the meanings they render. In short, she reconstructs a panorama of responses to James in Poland, thus making available to English-speaking readers a body of writing to which they have had limited access.

In fact, Reflections of the Master is two books in one, each with its own introduction. Part 1 follows the changing trends in Polish popular and scholarly responses to James by placing several generations of reviewers and critics in their historical, social, and economic contexts. Part 2 offers nuanced readings of several translated novels and short stories, occasionally referring to translations produced at various historical moments. Driving both lines of Ziaja-Buchholtz's investigation are the following questions: Why did it take so long for Poles to recognize James as one of the greatest writers in English? Why does an author securely canonized in the West occupy such a tentative position in Polish anthologies and textbooks, often dropping out altogether? And why do his works have to be reintroduced and retranslated every generation or two?

By studying a wide range of translation strategies with subtlety and insight, Ziaja-Buchholtz attempts to account for the reticence with which Polish readers have long approached James. Assuming the professionalism and linguistic competence of the translators, Ziaja-Buchholtz refrains from normative, prescriptive criticism, offering instead a sociocultural study in translation. The respect with which she treats every translator and commentator of James's prose is perhaps one of the greatest strengths of this study. She is, nonetheless, quick to problematize specific aspects of the translations, such as reductions, obliterations, misreadings, literal translations, telling omissions, added exposition, and tendencies to either exoticize James's prose or reduce its cultural distance. Among the most pervasive problems discussed is the loss of the psychological dimension of James's prose wherever the translator's goal was to produce a marketable text aimed at Polish readers accustomed to different generic conventions. Other problems targeted in the study are the removal of the homoerotic innuendo and instances of linguistic gender-bending. In studying translators' efforts to render James's characteristic abstractions and ambiguities in more concrete language Ziaja-Buchholtz highlights the Polish context. Even more importantly, however, her analysis reflects back on and modifies our understanding of the source text, for some of the qualities of James's prose only become apparent when we compare the source text with its translated and often deformed versions.

The strength of Ziaja-Buchholtz's study lies in her magisterial frame of reference combined with a passion for archival research. If the first part of the book, which historicizes Polish popular and academic writings on James, initially appears too detailed, we can also argue that only such a close look at words and their readers in context gives Ziaja-Buchholtz the authority to map...