ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the cultural aspect of untranslatability. Complementing the comparative text-based linguistic definition of cultural untranslatability that J. C. Catford proposed in his 1965 monograph A Linguistic Theory of Translation, the chapter attempts to expand the realm of the cultural in the concept of untranslatability. The main focus lies not in the texts of individual works but rather in a corpus of literary texts that have largely been untranslated into English: Polish-language prose fictions written by Polish Jews before the outbreak of the Second World War. The investigation of the cultural history of these texts reveals that real-life events embedded in the birth and development of pre-war Polish-Jewish fiction writing in its home context can also contribute to limiting the literature’s translatability. The untranslatedness of that literature then becomes a manifestation of its inherent resistance to translation, but the identification of non-textual factors of a cultural, social and political nature helps to offer means that can enhance the texts’ capacity for translation.
