Is a Crime Novel in Translation Capable of Teaching Us History? A Consideration of the Translations of Śmierć w Breslau [Death In Breslau] and Głowa Minotaura [The Minotaur's Head] by Marek Krajewski

Abstract

Crime novel is considered one of the most important innovations of the twentieth century in the field of fiction. Together with cinema, television and “elite” literature which often take over some of its features (themes and plots), it plays a significant role in creating the representation of reality proposed to the readers. The investigation described in the novels is set in a context which refers to the real world, in its social, political or historical aspects. The realistic dimension of the crime story makes it a kind of “social document”, which attracts the attention of researchers, including non-literary scholars. Reading crime novels allows them to acquire strictly literary information, but also some knowledge about communities, which leads them to an interpretation of relationships between literature and society. In this paper, the translated crime novel is seen as a special means of enriching the reader’s knowledge of the source culture. The realistic character of the work, which is supposed to fulfil a primarily ludic function, implies a certain tension in the work of the translator, who is led to ask himself: “shall I entertain or shall I entertain and teach”? If realism becomes a constitutive feature of crime fiction, if, as stated by Maryse Petit and Gilles Menegaldo, “under the pretext of attracting a crime novel client, the intention is to give him a history lesson or to make him think about a certain state of society”, the translator may be bound to include in the translation some elements that supplement the “encyclopaedic” knowledge of the target reader. The analysis is based on two novels by Marek Krajewski – his first novel, Death in Breslau (1999), set in the inter-war period, featuring the German policeman Eberhard Mock, and The Minotaur’s Head, published a decade later, which action takes Mock to Lwów in the time when it was a Polish city and makes him befriend a Polish commissioner, Popielski. A comparison of some of their translations (eight for the first book, three for the second) shows differences in the treatment of the historical component of the novels, both in the treatment of selected text elements, as a result of the translator’s project, and in the peritexts, which, however, usually do not depend on the translator, but on the publisher.