Translation and the emigrant experience. A case study

Abstract

The article offers a discussion of the bilingual collection of poems by Wioletta Grzegorzewska, the Polish émigré poet living in Britain, as an example of the condition of an émigré poet-in-translation. The book, addressed both to her „native” Polish-language readership and to the new, foreign-language readers in the country of her settlement, shows how the status of the émigré poet undermines the distinction between the foreign and the familiar, providing an apt illustration of Salman Rushdie’s view of emigrants as „translated people”. As the detailed analyses of the English translations in Grzegorzewska’s book reveal, the translator not only defi nes her readers, but also, paradoxically, creates the poet he is translating: the translator’s choices are shown to work towards obliterating the poet’s status as an émigré writer and, with British readers in mind, eliminating traces of her linguistic and cultural otherness.