1. From Eletelephony to Hippopotamika: A Collective Translation 

1In our first attempt at translating “Eletelephony” into Polish, we tried to stay faithful to the original, by using the words “elephant” and “telephone.” However, we soon noticed that Richards’s wordplay of entangling the syllables of the primary two words was lost in translation. The Polish language does not offer such possibilities; the words “słoń” [elephant] and “telefon” [telephone] have too few common sounds to create an analogous pun. We therefore decided to forgo the elephant and search for the principle governing the idea behind “Eletelephony.”

2We concluded that this governing principle lies in the linguistic entanglement on the one hand, and in the ars-poetic reflection on writing a poem on the other. While the first line of “Eletelephony” is reminiscent of the opening of a limerick (“Once there was an elephant”), the structure starts to fall apart almost immediately as the last two lines of each stanza express the impossibility of writing a poem at all—the result is a kind of confession, a poetic failure. The aim of our translation was, therefore, to render these two crucial features.  

3We started by looking for other animals to “entangle” linguistically with the telephone: Sound-wise, the best ones were lelek [nightjar] and muflon [mouflon], but we were not convinced that these animals give the desired comic effect. At this stage, we decided to dispense with the telephone and find another object that would allow us to extend the possibilities of animal selection (we still wanted to keep the animal-object pairing).  

4Some pairs we came up with were, for example, krokodyl – krokomierz [crocodile and pedometer], tarantula – tarantella, surykatka – makatka [suricat and wall hanging], but still, we were not convinced as the animals were either strange, or not funny or exotic enough; they were also not well-known and could be problematic for the child readers. We decided to try and give up the object, i.e. the equivalent of the telephone in Richards’s poem.   

5The strategy we eventually embraced was adaptation or transcreation, that is, transplanting the poetic idea of “Eletelephony” into Polish. We discarded the content but preserved the entanglement of words and misunderstandings; we also sought to keep the idea of a poem that refuses to be written because of words that “get in the way.” 

6However, we decided to keep the animal because of the joint Polish and English tradition of animal poems for children, but we opted for the hippo. Unlike the Polish słoń [elephant], which sounds somewhat too familiar, the big and clumsy hippopotamus embodies the kind of exotic unfamiliarity we were looking for. Its most vital asset is its linguistic potential; hipopotam can be entangled with many other words (hipster, hippodrome, hyper, hypothesis), creating comic imaginary scenes.

7The title we chose for this experimental translation – Hippopotamika [Hippostrianism] – combines hipopotam [hippopotamus] and hippika [equestrianism]. An additional layer of meaning was provided by the Greek etymology of the word “hippopotamus,” i.e. “river horse.” And so, from a poem about an elephant entangled in a telephone, we reached a text about a hippopotamus going for a ride, consequently highlighting the potential of “Eletelephony” as a matrix, open for multiple translations, as we can think of a whole set of similar “entangled” versions that can be “overwritten” on following the model of Richards’s original poem.

2. “My Japanese Fan”: Individual Translations  

8We adopted different translation strategies in our work on “My Japanese Fan.” While Aleksandra opted for playing with words and meaning, Anna chose to emphasize rhythm and rhyme. The main challenges we encountered concerned grammatical gender and the use of pronouns. In Polish, all the nouns are gendered (feminine, masculine, or neutral), which makes it hard to maintain the ambiguity of Richards’s original poem. The problem with pronouns lies in the fact that in Polish, the overuse of pronouns is a stylistic blunder, and since, in the present tense, the verbs have no gender, it is difficult to indicate the gender of the subject without using pronouns.

9Aleksandra’s translation has sought to preserve a “mirror” composition of the original. For this reason, in her translation, the first line of the first stanza (“I have a companion [f.], a friend [m.],”) and the last two lines of the final stanza (“Is my companion [m.] a girl, / Or is my friend [f.] a boy”) contain a pairing of the words towarzysz/towarzyszka [companion] and przyjaciel/przyjaciółka [friend], in which gender alternation is reflected: in the opening of the poem, “companion” is feminine and “friend” masculine, while at the end of the poem it is reversed. Another signal of the queerness of the lyrical situation in “My Japanese Fan” is the word “queer,” which was more neutral in Richards’s time than it is for a contemporary reader. Wishing to preserve this queerness, Aleksandra translated the line “His clothes they are so very queer” (l. 5) to “His/her clothes are in the rainbow colours / So queer.” Richards’s poem also reveals a certain hesitation, as the speaker wonders who the mysterious figure on the fan really is. This element of indecision, of suspense is conveyed in Aleksandra’s translation through the introduction of a wordplay, the paronomasia wachlarz [fan] and wahać się [to hesitate], which in Polish combine and form a poetic figure.  

10Aiming to capture the rhythm and rhyme of the poem to replicate its lightness and the melodiousness of Richards’s tone, and despite the differences between the English and Polish metric systems, Anna created a very similar prosodic pattern: iambic tetrameter with hypercatalexis in every other line. She also preserved the “mirror” composition: As in the original, the first two lines of the first stanza and the last two lines of the final stanza are almost identical. To render the queerness of the situation, Anna decided to translate “queer” as inny [different, other], a decision that was dictated by cultural context: The word queer does not translate to modern Polish since it is a borrowing from English. However, this wasn’t the case in Richards’s times. As Błażej Warkocki points out, the Polish translation of “queer” traditionally was odmieniec [different, other] (6). At the turn of the twentieth century, it was reflected not only in literature but also in biographies, e.g., of the modernist poet Maria Komornicka, who rejected femininity, experimented with changing her body, and took the new (masculine) name Piotr Odmieniec Włast. In order not to lose the sensual queer of the original, Anna reinforced them by selecting words such as “nęci” [“teases”] that convey an impression of sensual play to describe the figure on the fan: “Jej poza nęci gracją,” “Her pose teases with grace.” The cultural context of Polish Modernism also influenced translating the description of the figure’s costume and hairstyle. In translating these features, Anna was inspired by the painting Japonka [A Japanese Woman] (1908) by Polish painter Józef Pankiewicz, which depicts a figure seen from behind with her hair combed high in an elaborate bun, inspiring the phrase “Jej włosy tworzą gładki kok / Nad jego cud postacią,” “Her hair forms a sleek bun / Above his wonderful form.”