AGENCY IN INDIRECT AND COLLABORATIVE TRANSLATION IN THE SLOVAK CULTURAL SPACE DURING SOCIALISM

This article is a historical critical survey of one historically specific case of collaborative poetry translation, which we call translation in pairs, in socialist Slovakia during the 1950s and 1960s. Our point of departure is the broadly defined concept of agency (Kinnunen and Koskinen 2010) which allows us to bridge the various gaps between the individual vs. the social sphere and the determining circumstances vs. the determined ones. We argue that translation in pairs combines aspects of both indirect and collaborative translation. From the point of view of agency, it is even more complex, since a detailed look at specific cases reveals an intricate and historically determined web of intertextual and cultural influences and of personal, institutional, and power relations whose historical relevance goes beyond our examples. In the article we discuss two cases of cooperation: the Slovak translation of Dante’s Inferno (1964) and of Ferlinghetti’s poetry (1965). The two projects are distinct in terms of their genre, the form of collaboration, and their spatial-temporal and translation specifics. Drawing on the textual examples and the historical sources related to the creation and relevance of the translations, the article seeks to define such cooperation in terms of agency and in communicational terms; to define the social context of the activity in the given period; to look at agency on the level of para-texts as “footprints” (Paloposki 2010) of the agents involved.