Backwoods of Language. The Modernist Prose of Djuna Barnes in Polish Translation

Abstract

Only eighty years after the original publication of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood was the Polish literary market enriched by a translation of one of the strangest novels of Euro- American modernism. Marcin Szuster’s translation, with the Polish title Ostępy nocy, has already garnered praise as well as prizes, leading to the first Polish discussion concerning the work of the eccentric American writer. The focus of this article is to analyze the Polish translation of Nightwood with a special interest in Barnes’s style, which itself becomes a central character in the novel and which connects, according to feminist critics (K. Kaivola, S. Benstock), to its emancipatory potential. In this article I discuss the claim that the complex style of such prose is the (conscious) manifestation of a woman’s voice (as an affect), behind which one can discover a body – one that experiences and is experienced (J. Taylor). The body, both a structural and a rhetorical category in feminist criticism, can be seen in Barnes’s prose as an element which organizes both time and space – therefore, the ambiguity of her terms and the complexity of style make for a real translation challenge. Marcin Szuster as a translator needs to follow Barnes’s “distinctive point of view,” which is a “feminine” one, distanced by gender, experience and time.