Irina Adelgejm – the translator of (not only) the Nobel Prize winner

Abstract

This article presents Irina Adelgejm, an award-winning translator of many Polish works into Russian, including books by the Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. It shows the way to becoming a translator, the first encounter with the prose of Olga Tokarczuk and further stages marked by successive translations of her texts. It is worth adding that these were not only the translation stages, but also scholarly ones. Irina Adelgejm owes her reflection on the autopsychotherapeutic potential of the word in literature to the book The Last Stories by Olga Tokarczuk, which in turn became the impetus for her to write a book of over 600 pages – Psychology of Poetics. Autopsychotherapeutic functions of a literary text (on the material of Polish prose in the years 1990–2010).

In the article the word “way” is often used because it is a metaphor for the translation process: the desire to follow the author’s footsteps, to walk carefully, step by step, word for word. In this context, the subject of experiencing the translated text, assimilating it by the awareness of even false memories, translation difficulties resulting from, among others, this profound experience of reading, but also from working with the realities, and – which is extremely important – responsibility for the translated word, and the issue of translation ethics are analysed.

The translator often remains invisible, but in the end it is he/she, not only the author, who authors the text and he/she who signs the translated content with his/her name. That is why it is so important that the thoughts of the author and translator are related, and that the original is accepted.