Resistance to the Original: Polish Translation at the Turn of 1989

This chapter discusses the notion of resistance to the original with reference to literary translation practices in late-Communist and post-Communist Poland. Drawing on the idea of dissident and subversive literary translation, it demonstrates how translators could distance themselves from certain traits and ideological implications of the original in the act of ‘dissociative’ reading. The author puts forward the example of two Anglophone novels with Russian interference as approached by Polish translators and discusses it in terms of a metatextual fight with the original notion. In briefly discussing Anna Kołyszko’s Pnin (1987) and revisiting the controversial case of Robert Stiller’s A Clockwork Orange (1989, 1999), it is argued that translation can enter a more intricate network of resistances, intellectual protests, and anti-systemic sentiments.