On the Process of Translation of a Literary Text. A Case Study of "Edzio" by Bruno Schulz (an overview of an exercise)

The vast majority of texts regarding a number of issues connected with the notion of translation describe the translated text as a product - that is as another text rendered into another culture, not even mentioning another language. The idea of this exercise was based upon an attempt of having a look at how exactly the process of translation of a literary text would proceed. All the participants of the exercise wished to see if it would be at all possible to work upon one and the same text, and continue working on it at certain randomly selected points. This short paper is just a small fragment of a much larger work devoted to the process of translation. It is a presentation of a translation exercise undertaken by seven students. Each of the six students have translated two pages, the seventh student was supposed to assemble and unify the translated texts, integrating them into a coherent narration in the target language. All students were asked to try to write down their impressions while they were working on the text, including what was the rationale behind their decisions. As it appears it was not very difficult for the students to come up with quite interesting translations, but it was much more harder for them to describe their choices as translators. As one can notice, the exercise went very well, the students entertained themselves, and at the same time perhaps they also understood a little better that the translation processes worked differently within their minds, even though after all they were working on the text of the same short literary work by Bruno Schultz.