Abstract:
Goran Vojnovic’s novel Čefurji raus! in Tomasz Łukaszewicz’s Polish translation is undoubtedly an opportunity to commune with cultural otherness, and, simultaneously, it touches upon the issue of seeking one’s identity in the face of multiculturalism. The translator undertook a very difficult and ambitious task. In the translation of the novel, which deals with the issue of multiculturalism and subculture, the difficulties the translator is confronted with are being multiplied. The comparative analysis of the original and the translation of the novel reveals that Čefur’s identity in the translation has gained more universal frames than in the original. It is mainly because of the cultural barrier which, for the translator, is a strong differentiation between main characters’ language in terms of their nationality. It is a means of conveying vital information as well as a source of characters’ identification which in the original is reduced. Unfortunately the translator did not make an attempt to individualize the characters’ speech using, for example, different language registers or elements of slang, humour, or vulgarity. At the same time, some of the translator’s choices either sharpen the opposition friend-stranger on the basis of which the characters define their attitude to the surroundings and shape their own identity or enhance the familiar character of the relations which take place within Čefurian community. At the stylistic level, the main characters’ language is more crude and limited in comic elements. And thus, in the Polish context, Čefur appears to be more obscene and less sensitive. These displacements give evidence to the translator’s inefficient rhetorical and pragmatic abilities. Despite the fact that, as a consequence of semantic losses the universal features of the main character’s identity are clearer, the novel may become attractive to secondary readers because of the possibility of identification with the analysed issue.
