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No 3 (46) 2016

Joseph Conrad as a bilingual writer? On A Personal Record (1912)

Joseph Conrad as a bilingual writer? On A Personal Record (1912)

Karol Samsel (University of Warsaw)

The full version of this article is available  in Polish  in the printed version of Tekstualia and in the on-line subscription.

The article is an attempt at comprehensive research on the diffi cult issue of the Joseph Conrad’s bilingualism. However, formulating the thesis is preluded by a detailed description of the analysed phenomenon – in the view of the interdisciplinary studies: linguistic or, to be precise: contactological. Intentionally the image of Conrad has been constructed here specifi cally, although not idiomatically: the patterns to consider his works will be provided by the most signifi cant Polish elaborations of the literary bilingualism’s experience, Edward Balcerzan and Ewa Kraskowska. Basing on the portrait of Joseph Conrad as the comparatist and the commentator of his own translations (notes on the Polish translation of Il Conde and the interview with Marian Dąbrowski in 1914), the creator of letters-language hybrids (English, Polish and French) or the founder of the style constructed of language norm’s, system’s and usage’s infringements (the subject of analysis is in article Conrad’s prose Some Reminiscences [A Personal Record]), we are able to drive only to the very one – as it seems – generalization: the ambiguity of Joseph Conrad had been caused by the writer’s suspension between systems of creative and defi cient bilingualism and passive bilingualism (Balcerzan’s terms). Accretion of that ambiguity could we observe specially explicitly about 1914. It provokes more careful (than it occurred previously) statement concerning Conrad’s knowledge of language systems, Conrad’s experience and surviving them, and also Conrad’s usage of them. It encourages us to use ‘middle-terms’ such as interlingualism, rather than monolingualism, bilingualism, trilingualism and so on.

The sample of Polish version of this article is available here: https://tekstualia.pl/files/534c1502/samsel_karol-bilingwizm_conrada.pdf 

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