Filmowa kronika dzieciństwa. Dolina Issy w przekładzie na język szwedzki i norweski

The Issa Valley by Czesław Miłosz is a childhood chronicle inspired by the author’s own experiences in contemporary Lithuania, which used to be part of Poland in his youth. His narrative is rich in stylistic devices, which render it film-like: the background information is provided in the simple present tense (even when such details are presented in the middle of a paragraph formulated in the past tense); nominal phrases and sentences lack predicates, which makes them similar to stage directions. Miłosz also uses a number of dialectal expressions (the so-called Lithuanian Polish). In the existing Swedish and Norwegian versions of the novel the dialectal elements are not translated adequately. Moreover, most of the stylistic devices are lost: the grammatical tense is changed so as to fi t the rest of the paragraph, nominalizations are presented as verb phrases and predicates are inserted where there were none in the original. Even if readable, the Swedish and Norwegian texts are not as creative as Miłosz’s prose.