Erudycja, dowcip i intertekstualność w przekładzie. O polskim tłumaczeniu zbioru felietonów Umberta Eco Rakiem Gorąca wojna i populizm mediów

Erudition, Wit and Intertextuality in Translation. Umberto Eco’s Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism in Polish Umberto Eco’s work within the fi eld of translation studies is not well known in Poland (for example, his Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione is still waiting for its Polish version). Fortunately, Polish readers know and enjoy his fi ction and essays; most recently they have been offered Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism. Its three translators, Joanna Ugniewska, Krzysztof Żaboklicki and Anna Wasilewska met the same challenges as other translators of Eco’s works: erudition, wit and intertextuality. Moreover, they had to deal with the fact that this collection of column articles is a compositional whole anchored in a specifi c political and social situation. Therefore, Eco’s typical reliance on the intelligence of his readers and his intellectual games had to be accounted for: the translators could not explain away the pleasure of arrival at the solution to Eco’s puzzles. Ugniewska, Żaboklicki and Wasilewska rely on two strategies, preferred by Eco himself: they treat translation as communication between two cultures and they try to avoid overexplaining or improving the original (though occasionally they cannot resist amplifying or glossing). Another question is the untranslatability (or partial translatability) of Eco’s linguistic puns – the Polish translators offer interesting equivalents, which are discussed in greater detail