Abstract
From the Editors:
The 2023 Michael Henry Heim Prize in Collegial Translation is awarded to Christina Manetti for translating “Lustration: A Post-Communist Phenomenon” by Andrzej Paczkowski.
The very title of Andrzej Paczkowski’s essay “Lustration: A Post-Communist Phenomenon” perfectly illustrates the challenges its translator had to overcome. The meaning of the concept “lustration” as applied here is anchored in the specific experiences of peoples who had been ruled by communist regimes and who, when those regimes collapsed, had to reconcile themselves with their past. This meant not only prosecution of overt crimes committed by the functionaries of the old regime, but also dealing with the various forms of collaboration, and even mere compliance, in which so many had been involved. The words we use acquire their specific meaning in a given context; this meaning may not only pose problems in translation to a different language, but differ from generation to generation, from region to region, from one institutional jargon to another. The Polish word “lustracja,” rendered here, with due respect to its Latin roots, by Dr. Manetti as “lustration,” is sometimes translated to English as “vetting” or even “purge.” None of these three words (or others that have been used) fully reflects the cognitive and affective nuances of the Polish meaning of the concept. The same can be said of the Czech “lustrace,” the Croatian “lustracija,” or the Latvian “lustrācija.”
In her Translator’s Note Dr. Manetti gives several examples of such context-specific expressions, but the challenges she faced went well beyond that. In his long essay (over forty pages), Dr. Paczkowski, the doyen of Polish historians of the post-1945 period, attempts simultaneously an analysis of lustration, a key element of transitional justice in post-communist societies, as distinct from similar processes that took place after the fall of other totalitarian or authoritarian regimes (Nazi Germany, South African apartheid, Latin American juntas), as well as a synthesis of our understanding of lustration processes in post-communist nations, which themselves differed from case to case. Rendering this essay into English required an intimate familiarity with the subject on the one hand, and a broad perspective on global historical, political, and social phenomena on the other. This could have been done only by a peer, somebody from within the profession, in a collegial collaboration between the translator and the author. The outcome of this collaboration published in this issue of EEPS (collaboration which, by the account of both parties involved, was quite intense) will become an indispensable source for historians, sociologists, political scientists — in short, all students of post-communism and the region — for years to come.
Our congratulations to Dr. Christina Manetti for this accomplishment!