Remixed Fairy Tales, Distorted Legends: Agnieszka Taborska’s Surrealistic Picturebook Szalony Zegar (The Crazy Clock) and Its German Translation by Klaus Staemmler

Abstract

Agnieszka Taborska is one of the most interesting Polish authors of children’s literature. Her picturebooks are surreal imaginative games following the tradition of the absurd. The features of her style are: a highly ironical imagination, wordplays, black humour, and a rich sound texture, which appeals to the child’s imagination and sensitivity to poetry. Taborska’s picturebooks are also an intertextual playground, being carnivalistic rewritings of fairy tales and legends. The article focusses on the picturebook The Crazy Clock [Szalony Zegar] and its German translation by Klaus Staemmler. The text is a carnivalistic dialogue with multiple pre-texts that are mixed up and distorted. The absurdity of figures and events is part of the surrealistic aesthetics of the author, and can be considered as a meta-comment on artistic creation itself, an apology of the power of imagination. It is an example of Taborska’s metafictive writing strategy that is marked by postmodernism. The analysis of the translation cannot be limited to the narrow semantic contents of the ST, but what has to be preserved in translation, is an aesthetic strategy that is embedded in a literary tradition. The analysis focusses on postmodern and surrealistic features such as narrative fragmentation, disruptions to the logical and linear relationship between narrative events on the macro-level, the auditory imagery of the text (startling word plays, jokes, the sound texture, rhythmical recurrences), and the interplay between the verbal and the visual. The central question is, whether the translator rendered the carnivalistic world of Taborska’s picturebook, and to what extent he is ‘loyal’ to his child-reader.