Domestication in song translations
Krzysztof Puławski
University of Białystok, PolandKrzysztof Puławski is an English philologist, translator and a research assistant at the University of Białystok, Poland. He obtained his PhD from the University of Warsaw. His publications concern broadly defined literary translations (mainly poetry and songs) and include many articles and a monograph on Polish translations of the books in Hiberno-English: Przetłumaczyć Irlandię (Białystok 2020). Apart from that, he translated over a hundred books from English by authors such as David Lodge, Tracy Chevalier, Raymond Carver, Flann O'Brien, Michael Ondaatje, Bruce Chatwin, E. L. Doctorow or Joe Biden, and poems by William Blake and William Butler Yeats, as well as dozens of plays including those by Andrew Bovell, Jordan Tannahill, Max Posner and Jez Butterworth, and songs by Michael Flanders and Tom Lehrer, among others. Puławski is also the author of plays, a volume of poems entitled Martwiątka (Deadlings) (Białostocka Filologiczna Kolekcja, 2017), a book of short-stories Mikołajek w szkole Dobrej zmiany (Little Nicholas in Present-Day Polish School)) (Kielce 2019), and a novel Pan Walczyk w mieście B (Mr Waltz in the city of B).
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5846-9619
Abstract
The presented article examines the notion of domestication as applied in the translation of song lyrics. Since the famous essay Translation, Community, Utopia by Lawrence Venuti, who condemned domestication as a form of cultural appropriation, this technique has generally been under attack despite some mitigating voices, such as that of Krzysztof Hejwowski. And this situation did not change when the new idea of translator’s authorship appeared. This article takes the stance of Hejwowski’s arguments and tries to apply them in the realm of (mostly melic) song translations, presenting positive and negative features of domestications there. It is meant to show that domestication can be used not only for informative purposes for the reader (as is usually assumed), but also as a creative tool in its own right.
Keywords:
Hejwowski, domestication, foreignization, song translation, melic translation, lyricsReferences
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University of Białystok, Poland
Krzysztof Puławski is an English philologist, translator and a research assistant at the University of Białystok, Poland. He obtained his PhD from the University of Warsaw. His publications concern broadly defined literary translations (mainly poetry and songs) and include many articles and a monograph on Polish translations of the books in Hiberno-English: Przetłumaczyć Irlandię (Białystok 2020). Apart from that, he translated over a hundred books from English by authors such as David Lodge, Tracy Chevalier, Raymond Carver, Flann O'Brien, Michael Ondaatje, Bruce Chatwin, E. L. Doctorow or Joe Biden, and poems by William Blake and William Butler Yeats, as well as dozens of plays including those by Andrew Bovell, Jordan Tannahill, Max Posner and Jez Butterworth, and songs by Michael Flanders and Tom Lehrer, among others. Puławski is also the author of plays, a volume of poems entitled Martwiątka (Deadlings) (Białostocka Filologiczna Kolekcja, 2017), a book of short-stories Mikołajek w szkole Dobrej zmiany (Little Nicholas in Present-Day Polish School)) (Kielce 2019), and a novel Pan Walczyk w mieście B (Mr Waltz in the city of B).
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5846-9619
