| Summary: | This doctoral thesis introduces the notion of 'literary metatranslation', a self-reflexive literary strategy in which the translator (or a group of translators) exposes the process and act of translation by producing different parallel variants, placing them next to each other as legitimate versions of the original, and presenting them jointly as an artistic work. Pointing to its artistic and ethical relevance, I first identify the gesture of multiplying possible readings of an original text in the contemporary Anglophone context and then discuss it in much more detail in the Polish translation tradition. I argue that the ethical task of such multiplied translations can be compared to the one of metaliterature: alerting the reader to the creative transformation occurring in the process. I briefly discuss this idea with reference to multiplied translations of poetry in English (e.g. Weinberger, Paz 1989, Hofstadter 1997, Waldrop, 2000, Bergvall 2000, Cobb, Coleman 2003, Carson 2012). Then, in the three core chapters of the thesis, I focus on literary translation practice in the Polish post-1989 context and show how a multiplicity of interpretative angles could also be read in pluralist terms: as opening a forum for discussion about the original, introducing different viewpoints through translation, and undermining the authoritative legacy of the Communist literary order. At this juncture, I analyse three key examples against the background of socio-cultural phenomena, publishing practices, and translation debates of that time: Stanisław Barańczak's translation polemics and multiple translations of the early 90s; Robert Stiller's double/triple rendering of 'A Clockwork Orange' from 1999; and Andrzej Kopacki's quadruple Brecht from 2012. In discussing the ethical ideas underpinning these works, I demonstrate how literary metatranslations and their gesture of acknowledging more than one view and line of thinking could also undermine totalised discourses and put forward a more democratic agenda.
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