Keywords in Andrei Platonov's prose : interpretative and translational aspects

Ключевые слова в прозе Андрея Платонова : интерпретационный и переводческий аспекты

Indeks. Bibliogr. s. 171-186. Bibliogr. przekładów utworów A. Płatonowa na jęz. polski s. 165-170

In this book author makes an attempt to describe the work of Andrei Platonov through the prism of keywords found in his prose. Author's main objective was to look at how different translators of the same works written by Platonov interpreted such keywords and check whether they selected similar equivalents while translating them. Thus, the keywords that author has analyzed come from works which have a few translations into Polish (The Ether Road; The Sea of Youth; Young Rosa; Doubting Makar; The Fierce and Beautiful World), or works that may be combined in pairs, in which one text is a larger whole while the other is its fragment prepared by Platonov as an individual text (Soul (Dzhan); Happiness at hand; Happy Moscow; Moscow Violin; Chevengur; The Origin of a Master). It is obvious that it is not possible to include all doubts and comments that may come to one’s mind while reading Platonov’s works in one publication, let alone to describe all keywords detected by researchers. Thus, although this book is in author's opinion a complete whole, in fact it is a presentation of only one out of many methods of interpretation of Platonov’s works and almost every interpretation trail opens to more new readings. Author has presented difficulties in reception and translation of Platonov’s prose using examples taken from several selected works and using the model of keywords only. But although author has managed to mention only several problems, they still illustrate how fascinating it may be to read Platonov’s works. The world of his works is an inseparable multidimensional structure, which in author's opinion may be proven, for instance, by mutual relations among analyzed keywords. Such mutual penetration of Platonov’s works on different levels of text organization is sometimes, as author has proven, difficult for some translators to grasp. Every such single lack of equivalence, like for instance omission of keywords or their replacement with other expressions that are adequate in the opinion of translators distort the image of Platonov’s presented world.