APPENDIX ONE

SOME NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION OF ANDRZEJ BUKO’S ‘ARCHAEOLOGY OF EARLY MEDIEVAL POLAND’

Paul Barford

Translation of an archaeological work written in one scientic milieu in order for it to function on an equal footing in another can produce a number of problems. Besides lexical and semantic issues, the translator is faced with the task of confronting the linguistic manifestations of conceptual divergences between a foreign archaeology and that repre- sented by the target language. There are some fundamental differences in the local traditions of Polish archaeological research and those of the English speaking world. Some of them are self-explanatory (such as the place of the written word and ‘tradition’ in Polish Early Medieval archaeology) but others have required some deliberations about how best to present this text to the English-speaking reader. In general, the tactic adopted has been to make the text as comprehensible as possible to a wider readership rather than using the text to underline the differences in traditions and approaches it unconsciously reveals (while the latter are also of course of great methodological interest to the outside reader). The book was originally written without the intent to have it trans- lated at a later date into English and this is reected in its structure and approach. In particular, the author freely uses terms well known to the original target audience, but obviously not so familiar to the foreign reader of the current translation and a few words might be helpful.

Geography

The modern state of Poland lying in the center of Europe, between the southeastern coast of the Baltic and the northern anks of the Carpathian and Sudeten mountains, corresponds to a great extent to the segment of the North European Plain within the watersheds of the Oder and Vistula rivers. After a period of partition, Poland’s political 432 appendix one borders were re-established in 1918 and then largely redrawn in 1945. The country today occupies an area roughly equivalent to that of the rst Polish state of the tenth and eleventh centuries, a fact used to great effect in post-War identity politics in the new state and affecting the way the archaeology of this period and the issue of historical continuity were conceptualized. The boundaries of the state have however varied widely in the intervening ten centuries. By the later part of the Medieval period they did not correspond to the present ones in the west (after 1146 and 1181 when territories were lost to German overlordship) nor in the east (when Poland expanded eastwards under Kazimierz the Great after 1349). Terms like ‘Poland’ are therefore difcult to use unambiguously, and the term “Polish lands” has become adopted in the Polish literature, though is itself not without problems. The term is used in this book without nationalist overtones. Since the 14th/15th centuries, the core of the Early Medieval state, the area around Gniezno and Pozna , has been known as Great Poland (Wielkopolska, Polonia Maior) while the area to the southwest around the later capital at Cracow became known as Little Poland (Maopolska, Polonia Minor). The modern state encompasses many other different regions with different histories and for this reason, the author asks rhetorically whether one can speak of an archaeology of Poland or of the major regions of Poland, such as Silesia, Pomerania and Mazovia. Other smaller regions are referred to in the text in terms of the ‘Land’ around certain large towns, these are historical terms, corresponding in many cases to Old Polish administrative divisions, in turn to some degree reecting the Medieval system of territorial division and administration. Most of these towns can be located on maps in this book. In general, we give place and river names according to their present Polish form with a few exceptions which are well-established in Anglo- phone circles. We thus use Vistula instead of Wisa, Warsaw instead of Warszawa, Cracow instead of Kraków. There seems no reason in our English text to give the old German names for towns (Breslau, Danzig) or rivers sixty years after the end of the Second World War and the redrawing of the frontiers between Poland and Germany in 1945. The term ‘Pomerania’ is used here to mean ‘Polish’ Pomerania (Pomorze) which is the eastern half of the Medieval territory (the other half now corresponds to the region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in Germany). To add to the geographical complications, the framework of local administration of the area has changed several times in the past few