Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

As her Norwegian translator has put it, Ali Smith is the novelist who can really listen “to the ways in which language is actually being used by the people to whom it belongs”. Smith’s 2005 Whitbread Award winning novel, The Accidental, is a tour de force of polyphonic narration: it combines the voices of five disparate speakers, which intersperse in a somehow symmetrical, but ultimately collapsing structure. The main diegetic axis of the story is the intrusion of an enigmatic stranger, Amber, into the holiday house of the Smart family, an invasion which results in the transformation of four differently perplexed lives. Due to the book’s framework, the translators of The Accidental must grapple with five distinct narrative voices, each displaying its own idiosyncrasies. But they must also cope with other linguistic challenges, including the excessive use of puns, syntactic deadlocks and over-abundant intertextuality present on many levels in the novel. This paper attempts to review the strategies pursued by the Polish translator of Smith’s work, Agnieszka Andrzejewska, with the view of analysing the extent to which the translation preserves the polyphonic qualities of the original text.