ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two recent retranslations of the fiction of the Polish modernist author Bruno Schulz: John Curran Davis’s fan translation, first shared online without consideration of copyright regulations, and then legally self-published by the retranslator in book form in 2016, and Madeline Levine’s “authoritative new translation” (as advertised by the publisher), publicized since 2012 and published in March 2018. As manifest in the para- and extratextual material accompanying their publication and/or pre-publication announcements, the public competition of these versions with Celina Wieniewska’s well-established translation (two volumes first published in 1963 and 1978), and with each other focused on extratextual factors rather than textual qualities. Critics, readers, and other stakeholders largely engaged in matters such as translator profile, patronage, or copyright, rather than discussing the texts themselves. In Levine’s case, this was due to the prolonged absence of the published text, combined with a growing interest in it, especially from Schulz scholars; in the case of Davis, it seems that the legally dubious origin of this retranslation and lack of institutional support overshadowed its textual existence, at least for some prospective readers. This has led to the emergence of certain preconceptions about these retranslations, which are not fully corroborated by actual textual analysis.
