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Longing for an Olga that belongs in English: a Nobel Prize laureate’s micro-narratives

ABSTRACT The Nobel Prize lecture is a message from someone whose voice matters. The lecture by the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, the 2018 laureate in literature, is both a message consistent with the author’s writings and a literary text in and of itself. However, for this message to reach a wider audience, it must be rendered from the original Polish into English in a way that recognizes the intratextual and intertextual semantic patterns being activated. These nuanced networks of meanings are traced here in two selected motifs: that of tęsknić (verb)/tęsknota (noun) (‘miss/missing’ or ‘long/longing for’) and that of jestem ‘(here) I am’. In this way, Tokarczuk’s message is analysed in terms of words as micro-narratives and language as grand narrative. The micro-narratives of the Polish tęsknić/tęsknota and jestem converge into a coherent portrayal of existence, and an attempt is made to obtain a comparable degree of coherence in the English translation of the lecture. Both the original speech and its English rendering can be viewed as coming from the ‘tender narrator’, a unique category proposed by Tokarczuk. I claim that only through a careful recognition of these semantic patterns can the translation amplify the voice of the Nobel laureate.