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Theater 32.3 (2002) 19-21



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Translating Kott

Jadwiga Kosicka


A good translation is not a glove turned inside out; it is another glove.

—Julien Green

I served as one of Jan Kott's translators during the last fifteen years of his life, after the moment passed when he had thought seriously of returning to Poland. History suddenly intervened with the imposition of martial law in December 1981. After that, it was too late; his health became too fragile to consider such a move. His exile became permanent; he was destined to remain in a country where he never felt truly at home. When he emigrated in 1967, he was in his early fifties; "emigration is for a young man without memories," Kott said. His European cast of mind was too deeply engrained. He sorely missed the conversational style of the Polish literary café, a style he preserved in his essays. Kott never ceased reading and writing, thinking and feeling in Polish as a Pole. And he continued writing for Polish readers. He had tried to write in English—unsuccessfully, by his own admission; he must have realized that his English would never equal his Polish.

He never could have the kind of readership abroad that he had in his own land, nor could he count on the same level of influence and immediate response. In a sense, whenever he wrote he returned to Poland; as he wrote—and he wrote all the time—it became a country he had never really left. And he remained remarkably loyal to the outstanding period in modern Polish theater from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, when he was the most influential critic in the country. In the final phase of his life theater became for him almost exclusively a theater of memory; this explains his great enthusiasm for Tadeusz Kantor's theater.

Translation was a mode of writing Kott highly valued and constantly employed. In fact, he was a translator. His modern prose version of The Misanthrope exemplified his unending preoccupation with "making it contemporary." Most of all, he depended on translation in all his writing; whether it was Shakespeare, Stendhal, or Büchner, he worked from Polish translations. And if he had no access to them, he translated what he needed himself. Wherever possible, as with Shakespeare, he liked to compare translations (and there are many to choose from in Polish). He never felt comfortable working [End Page 19] directly from Shakespeare's text alone, although he kept it alongside. In his essays the citations from English or other foreign authors were given in Polish. This technique of appropriation was, of course, an integral part of making it his own and rendering contemporary whatever he read.

One of my tasks was to find the original citations and put them into English. Since he never bothered to provide the foreign-language quotations, I ended up tracking them down and, in case of multiple English translations of the same text, had to decide which would stand up to Kott's equivalent in Polish. It was a formidable challenge, since the original quotation often lacked the particular malleability that Kott achieved when he wove the translated citation into his Polish argument. Evidently Kott expected from his translators the same infallible ear and linguistic sensibility that he displayed in picking the right translation. Sometimes this posed insoluble difficulties. Kott liked to use segments of different translations of the same text within one essay (it was his rule with Shakespeare), choosing the one that fitted seamlessly and sounded best. If these translations happened to be free and differed radically from the original, I might discover that the English text refused to be molded as Kott required. On one occasion I "backed out," to Kott's surprise. He had no place for "I can't" in his lexicon. In his essay on Moby-Dick (Nowy Jonasz, 1993), he used a fine Polish translation of Melville and in the process "tailored" it brilliantly to suit his needs. But Melville's original would not submit to Kott's demands. The result was awkward and unconvincing. Lacking the...

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