On the Hermeneutic Ontology of Language in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its Latest Polish Retranslation

Abstract

In 2015, the latest retranslation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, produced by Grzegorz Wasowski, appeared on the Polish book market. As the translator explained in his afterword (Wasowski 2015: 159-173), the main aim of producing a new translation was to render the idea of the source text and to avoid word-for-word translation. Wasowski intended to render the so-called ‘English spirit’ contained within the original version by means of the richness of the Polish language. And although Wasowski accentuated the necessity for adapting a language to the wealth of human imagination, at the same time he claimed that the whole process must be completed moderately, within particular linguistic bounds. The main objective of this paper is to analyse whether the latest retranslation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland meets the fundamental requirements specified by its translator, that is, whether the version renders the ‘spirit’ of the source text and whether the attempts which have been made might be referred to as moderate. The facets and dimensions of language depicted by Lewis Carroll are illustrated as juxtaposed against Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ontology of language. Finally, the idea of so-called ontological parallelism is put forward, which stands for another type of equivalence, a key notion in the theory of translation.