The Art of Translating Alasdair Gray

This paper aims to address and explore the problem of rendering Alasdair Gray’s prose in Polish, by focusing on his works’ extra-narrative elements. It seeks to identify the difficulties and limitations in translating an author of this kind – a writer, but also, and perhaps primarily, an artist, whose texts function as book-objects, relying heavily on artwork as well as typographical experimentation. The analysis, centred on Gray’s Lanark, 1982, Janine and Poor Things, leads to a discussion of the broader question of translating these books in which the actual text is only part of the story.