The Magic of Sound and Colour. Multimodality in Eleanor Farjeon’s Martin Pippin Books and their translations into Polish

Abstract

Eleanor Farjeon belonged to the most popular British authors writing for children in the first decades of the 20th century. However, very few of her stories have occurred in translation. There exist no translations of her major work, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard, and its sequel, Marin Pippin in the Daisy Field,into German, French, Spanish, Russian, or the Scandinavian languages. One of the reasons may be that in Eleanor Farjeon’s work, sound effects play a central role. Hertexts are multimodal in many aspects, but rhyme, wordplays, and linguistic jokes pose the utmost challenge to translators. However, theMartin Pippin books have beentranslated into Polish, by Hanna Januszewska. The article investigates the linguistic exponents of multimodality in Farjeon’s books and their equivalents in the Polish version. The theoretical framework is the translationshift approach [Vinay and Darbelnet1958/1995] and its later extensions. The conclusion is that Hanna Januszewska’s translation is an almost perfect example of functional equivalence.