The Translation of Diminutives in Miron Białoszewski’s “A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising.” A Cognitive Analysis

In this paper we investigate the diminutives in Miron Białoszewski’s Pamiętnik z powstania warszawskiego and how they are rendered in the English translation by Madeline G. Levine – A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising. We adopt the semantic account of the category of the diminutive proposed by John Taylor (1989), which treats meanings of the diminutive as a radial network of interrelated senses. In Pamiętnik…, the diminutive seems to be used most commonly in the descriptions of highly stressful and dangerous events, possibly to make those experiences less frightening (the meaning of low intensity and low quality) and more manageable (the literal meaning of smallness). At times it seems to help re-interpret a bad experience, or rather to mitigate the subjectively experienced impact of a negative event. The proliferation of diminutives is made possible by the productivity of the morphology of the Polish language and by Białoszewski’s linguistic creativity. In the English version, the translator employs compensatory strategies to address linguistic nuances, but often omits the diminutive altogether. This work aims to investigate the effect the diminutive has on the construal of the analysed texts and to highlight the problems it poses for translation from Polish to English.