Solidarity, Translation and Postcolonial Literature in Polish

The goal of the paper is twofold: I first theorize 'solidarity' in relation to translation, suggesting that both are about bridging differences and perhaps salvaging similarities. Then I illustrate the ideas with an example from a study of the Polish reception of translated postcolonial literature, seeing reception as an act of selective salvage and subsequent reconfiguration of meaning. The term solidarity punctuates seminal texts on translation and politics, power and identity (Spivak 2004, Tymoczko 2007, Cronin 2006) and yet it has not been systematically theorized in translation and interpreting studies (cf. Baker 2015). I argue that examining diverse definitions and discussions of solidarity from neighbouring disciplines will allow us to employ the term with greater precision and thus make the most of its visionary appeal but also its analytical and critical potential. For instance, solidarity is conceived of as a guarantee of local intra-group cohesion founded upon perceived sameness, and as a mechanism for forging intergroup relations globally or transnationally by bridging differences of country, class and creed, and by salvaging or constructing similarities. On a conceptual level, therefore, solidarity operates in a way not dissimilar to translation itself - negotiating local and global identities with both inclusive and discriminatory effects - while on a more practical level solidarities attempted across linguistic barriers are helped, or hindered, by interlingual translation and interpreting. To illustrate some of the ideas, I analyse the Polish reception of translated postcolonial literature in the 1980s and 1990s. Using an extensive corpus of book reviews, I demonstrate that translated postcolonial narratives resonated for some reviewers with Polish history, going against the grain of a long tradition of othering attitudes to postcolonial non-Europeans and marking a new sense of transnational similarity. I then ask if this re-negotiation of similarity and difference, enabled by literary translation, may pave a way to Polish-postcolonial solidarity. © British Comparative Literature Association.