The first ever direct translation into English of the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem’s most famous novel, Solaris, has just been published, removing a raft of unnecessary changes and restoring the text much closer to its original state.

Telling of humanity’s encounter with an alien intelligence on the planet Solaris, the 1961 novel is a cult classic, exploring the ultimate futility of attempting to communicate with extra-terrestrial life. The only English edition to date is Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox’s 1970 version, which was translated from a French version which Lem himself described as poor.

Now Bill Johnston, a professor at Indiana University, has produced the first Polish-English translation of the novel. It has just been published as an audiobook download by Audible, narrated by Battlestar Galactica’s Alessandro Juliani, with an ebook to follow in six months’ time. Lem’s heirs are hoping to overcome legal issues to release it as a print edition as well.

“Much is lost when a book is re-translated from an intermediary translation into English, but I’m shocked at the number of places where text was omitted, added, or changed in the 1970 version,” said Johnston. “Lem’s characteristic semi-philosophical, semi-technical language is also capable of flights of poetic fancy and brilliant linguistic creativity, for example in the names of the structures that arise on the surface of Solaris. I believe this new translation restores Lem’s original meaning to his seminal work.

One of the major changes Johnston has made to the text is to the names of two of the book’s main characters. “In Polish the woman who comes to Kris Kelvin is called ‘Harey’. In the Kilmartin/Cox translation her name has been changed to ‘Rheya’, an anagram. Lem had created a very unusual name for this character. In Polish, women’s names always end in an ‘-a,’ and so the choice of ‘Harey’ would have been very exotic and memorable for a Polish-language reader in 1961,” Johnston said.

“To call the character ‘Rheya’, a more conventional form, detracts from the distancing effect Lem intended. The same is true of Kelvin’s crewmate, who in Polish is called ‘Snaut’, pronounced like the English word ‘snout’. In the Kilmartin/Cox version he is ‘Snow’, a name that immediately identifies him as an English speaker and sounds completely ordinary. ‘Snaut’, on the other hand, is comic or, perhaps better, grotesque – for Poles who spoke English or, more likely, German it would recall ‘snout’ or ‘Schnauze’ – and it’s also hard to place nationally, like ‘Gibarian’, ‘Sartorius’, or indeed ‘Kelvin’. Once again I restored the original name.”

He also returned the name of a spaceship, which in Lem’s original was the classically referencing Laocoon, back from the Kilmartin/Cox version the Laakon, “which doesn’t mean anything”. The star Alpha Aquarii, “a standard scientific name (Lem really knew his science)”, is rendered as “Alpha in Aquarius” in the Kilmartin/Cox edition, and is restored to its original name in Johnston’s version.

“There are also moments where the meaning has simply become distorted or even inverted,” said Johnston. “In the chapter entitled Monsters, Snow (Snaut) writes a note to Kelvin. In the Kilmartin/Cox version, the note begins: ‘Kelvin, things are looking up.’ In the Polish, Snaut says entirely the opposite: ‘ugrzęźliśmy’ or ‘we’ve gotten bogged down’.”

He has also replaced the “numerous cases” where the Kilmartin/Cox translation provides description instead of spoken dialogue. “Kelvin wakes to find Harey crying. The Polish reads: ‘Harey!’ She curled up even more. ‘What’s wrong? Harey … ‘ In Kilmartin/Cox, we read only: ‘I called her name and asked her what was wrong, but she only curled up tighter.'”

Johnston said that as the number of these instances grows, Lem’s style is changed: “the text is not being translated but rewritten, a wholly different matter”.  Read more.

See: Guardian.co.uk