The nineteenth-century translator as Model Creator. On the example of Polish translators of Shakespeare – Stanisław Koźmian, Leon Ulrich and Józef Paszkowski

Abstract

The question “Is the translator a creator?” has troubled translation scholars for years. This article attempts to answer this question according to the category of the Creator Model created by Howard Gardner (1993). The analysis is based on the translation biographies of three translators of William Shakespeare’s texts into Polish: Stanisław Koźmian, Leon Ulrich and Józef Paszkowski. Although they lived and translated in the same epoch, there was a lot that separated them, and an analysis of their situations using Gardner’s guidelines indicates that they can be considered Creators, because their translational paths went through the same stages as the authors of the original texts.

Each of them tried to write their own texts, but it was the translation activity that gave them recognition. They came from what can now be called “middle class” families and received similar education, so their start in life was comparable. However, for each of them, the end of the translation business meant something different. Koźmian’s translations began to go unnoticed. Ulrich lost himself in the ambition to publish his own translations in a single publication, and for this reason did not work on developing his translating skills. Paszkowski had health problems and died soon, which interrupted his promising translation activity.

The model proposed by Gardner makes it possible to reconstruct the translator’s path and, in the long run, to better understand the strategies and decisions that translators made. These decisions, in turn, had an impact on the enirety of the translated text, but also on the selection of specific authors and texts to be translated.