The Human Soul in Today’s World. Two Perspectives: Wisława Szymborska’s and Olga Tokarczuk’s, and their Translocation in Translation

Abstract

The article offers an analysis of the linguistic-cultural concept of dusza/soul present in two literary works by contemporary Polish Nobel-Prize winners, as well as in their translations to English: Wisława Szymborska’s poem Trochę o duszy and Olga Tokarczuk’s story Zgubiona dusza. Their English translations are, respectively: A Few Words on the Soul (trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh) and The Lost Soul (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones). Alternative translation attempts by BA translation students at the University of National Education Commission in Kraków are also discussed. The two texts share the idea that today’s world, with its haste, attention deficit, and consumerism, is not a friendly place for the human soul. In their search for the human soul, both authors prompt similar solutions: a person must return to a small world of their own, or their inner reality, far from fast progress and globalisation. The present analysis takes a cognitive-ethnolinguistic perspective and begins by considering the entity named dusza in Polish and soul in English as cultural-linguistic concepts, tracing the similarities and differences conventionalised in the two languages, and thus the status of those concepts in the respective linguistic worldviews. This leads to an interpretation of Szymborska’s poem and Tokarczuk’s story as non-standard, individual, literary realisations of the standard worldview shared by the community of speakers of Polish. In this context, the English translations can be viewed as records documenting the transfer of the Polish concept of dusza to a new cultural-linguistic location. This approach is grounded in the idea of culture as an iceberg, where individual texts are viewed as expressions of an underlying cultural content.