IJ study archive

Tak samo, ale inaczej

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TL;DR

A November 2017 Polish-language interview in Dwutygodnik (Poland's leading online culture biweekly, issue 225) — Zofia Zaleska questioning Jolanta Kozak, the veteran literary translator (100+ titles: William Wharton, Philip Roth, John Irving, Lewis Carroll, Kurt Vonnegut, Poe, Blake, Hanya Yanagihara, and Wallace). The title, «Tak samo, ale inaczej» (the same, but differently — gloss ours), is lifted from Kozak's own closing wish for her Wallace translation: that it be the same Infinite Jest, only «napisane trochę inaczej» (written a little differently — gloss ours). This is a career-spanning translator profile that culminates in her IN-PROGRESS translation of Infinite Jest — five years before the Polish edition (Niewyczerpany żart, W.A.B.) actually appeared in 2022. She calls Wallace «najtrudniejszy pisarz, jakiego w życiu tłumaczyłam» (the hardest writer I have ever translated — gloss ours) and Infinite Jest the first book that ever beat her: it «przemawia do mnie tylko nocą» (speaks to me only at night — gloss ours), waking her around two to translate; it forced a nocturnal, BY-HAND-not-computer method, longhand in big notebooks. Her images for the work: carving a great marble block with a tiny chisel in constant fear the stone will crack; a hundred-sided Rubik's cube. On the title she walks the Hamlet provenance (Yorick, 5.1) and the Polish Hamlet tradition (Słomczyński, Paszkowski) to defend her working choice Niewyczerpany żart. She reads Wallace's excess as a war on the banality of language, his prose as shot through with pain yet controlled with «iście naukową precyzją» (a truly scientific precision — gloss ours); she describes the IJ radio-studio passage set inside a building shaped like a human brain, and glosses the novel's plot (the three Incandenza brothers; James; Enfield; the 2020s setting). She frames the endnotes as language overflowing even the expansive frame Wallace builds for it. No paired-passage translation criticism of the Polish IJ (it did not yet exist); the novel is discussed but never quoted; the only crux contacts are translator's-eye sightings, all graded conservatively below.

Key claims

The frame: a working translator who prefers resistance in the material

  • Wallace is the hardest, and welcome for it. Kozak likes «czuć opór materiału» (to feel the resistance of the material — gloss ours) and prefers difficult texts; hence her delight in Wallace, «to najtrudniejszy pisarz, jakiego w życiu tłumaczyłam» (the hardest writer I have ever translated — gloss ours). She translates by ear — «słyszę teksty i tłumaczę zdecydowanie przez ucho» (I hear texts and translate decidedly by ear — gloss ours) — and calls translation an actor's craft, a «wcieleniówka» (a role-embodying — gloss ours), having to identify with the author's melody and logic of thought.
  • Her Wallace list. She has already translated three Wallace books — Krótkie wywiady z paskudnymi ludźmi (Brief Interviews With Hideous Men), Niepamięć (Oblivion), and Rzekomo fajna rzecz, której nigdy więcej nie zrobię (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) — and is now translating «jego opus magnum, czyli „Infinite Jest”» (his opus magnum, that is Infinite Jest — gloss ours). She did NOT discover Wallace in Poland; Dariusz Suska first handed her Brief Interviews and The Broom of the System, and she chose the Interviews; after his small press folded she peddled the manuscript around Warsaw publishers until W.A.B. took it.

Infinite Jest as the book that beat her — a method it forced

  • The first book that won. Infinite Jest is the first book that beat her: «która ze mną wygrała, kręci mną jak szewc kopytem» (that beat me, it works me the way a cobbler works his last — gloss ours).
  • A nocturnal compulsion. It «przemawia do mnie tylko nocą, regularnie budzi mnie w okolicach drugiej i domaga się tłumaczenia» (speaks to me only at night, regularly wakes me around two and demands to be translated — gloss ours); she rises in the middle of the night and works, usually until five or six. She had never worked this way on any other book; the novel really rules her, «niczym żywy organizm» (like a living organism — gloss ours).
  • By hand, not by computer. The book forced longhand translation in large-format notebooks full of crossings-out and doublings-back, later to be typed up and given a final edit — a method she uses for nothing else.
  • The images of the labour. Working on Infinite Jest is «wykuwanie malutkim dłutkiem wielkiego marmurowego bloku w ciągłej obawie, że kamień popęka» (carving a great marble block with a tiny chisel in constant fear the stone will crack — gloss ours); the novel «przypomina stuścienną kostkę rubika» (resembles a hundred-sided Rubik's cube — gloss ours). With Yanagihara she moved on the breath of a paragraph; «u Wallace’a idę na oddechu pojedynczych słów» (with Wallace I move on the breath of single words — gloss ours).
  • The German precedent. She notes the translator who rendered the novel into German took «podobno osiem lat» (reportedly eight years — gloss ours); she used to mock him a little and now no longer laughs. (See Accuracy notes and the Blumenbach cross-reference.)

The reading of Wallace: a war on the banality of language

  • Not incommunicability but banality. Asked whether Wallace's excess fights the incommunicability of language, she counters that it is rather a war on its banality: language comes too easily, «zagaduje rzeczywistość» (talks reality away — gloss ours), and since we experience the world largely through language, the world too goes banal; Wallace's prose, by contrast, is «przepełniony jest bólem» (brimming with pain — gloss ours), full of enormous struggle. She likens the pain-splitting of language to Bruno Schulz and Kafka.
  • Sickness as truth. The worlds Wallace describes are «w bardzo mądry sposób chore» (sick in a very wise way — gloss ours); perhaps, she asks, «choroba jest prawdą o nas?» (is sickness a truth about us? — gloss ours) — in Wallace's version it is certainly a truth about the world; to live consciously is to prepare for pain.
  • Overconsciousness, controlled. Wallace's mode issues from a certain over-consciousness and over-sensitivity — he sees the atoms most people do not — and his writing is «podszyte jest chorobą psychiczną» (undergirded by mental illness — gloss ours) which he battled all his life, yet he always controls himself, never crosses the bounds of good sense, and builds his texts with «iście naukową precyzją» (a truly scientific precision — gloss ours). Elegance in his texts is «wielka, zamierzona» (great, deliberate — gloss ours); the writing is «podszyte rozpaczą» (lined with despair — gloss ours) which is in turn lined with subtle irony and lightness.
  • The whole method in one passage. She had recently translated the passage detailing a radio broadcast in the basement of a building whose construction resembles a human brain — corridors as blood vessels leading to cellars with sinuses and lymph nodes — and insists it is no metaphor: «idąc tymi korytarzami, naprawdę jesteśmy w mózgu – depczemy po mózgu, gdy to czytamy» (walking those corridors we are really inside a brain — we tread on the brain as we read — gloss ours). (This is Kozak's paraphrase of an IJ passage; no Wallace prose is quoted.)

The endnotes and the shape of the book

  • The endnotes as overflow. The novel runs over a thousand pages, of which the last one hundred fifty are endnotes; Wallace's text does not even fit the very expansive frame of language he builds for himself — it spills out of it — «stąd nadbudowywanie sążnistych przypisów» (hence the piling-up of fathoms-long endnotes — gloss ours). A Supposedly Fun Thing has notes to notes; only Oblivion lets the reader rest, with none or vestigial ones. (Her page/count figures are approximate — see Accuracy notes.)
  • A nested, self-generating structure. Wallace's action usually has a «konstrukcję szkatułkową, historia rodzi historię» (a nested-casket structure, story births story — gloss ours), one association leading to the next, unstoppable — though it develops logically and consistently; the huge novel can seem chaotic, «ale w tym szaleństwie jest metoda» (but in this madness there is method — gloss ours).
  • The plot, glossed. The novel presents the story of the three Incandenza brothers — Hal, finishing the Enfield tennis academy and trying to get into college; his older brother Orin; and his disabled brother Mario — plus the separate strand of their father James, tennis genius and academy founder. She places the main action «w latach dwudziestych XXI wieku» (in the 2020s — gloss ours) and James's strand in the 1960s-70s.

The title decision — Hamlet, and the Polish Hamlet tradition

  • Yorick, Act 5. The title comes from Shakespeare, Hamlet 5.1: Hamlet over the grave, Yorick's skull in hand, [S] «Poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest» (transcribed by Kozak from Shakespeare — see Accuracy notes; this is her rendering, and it is not exact). Yorick was a man of «nieskończonego żartu» (infinite jest — gloss ours).
  • Why not the literal. But «„nieskończony żart” brzmi jak „niedokończony żart”» (endless jest sounds like unfinished jest — gloss ours). Most Polish Hamlet translations — Słomczyński, Paszkowski — call Yorick a man who was an inexhaustible source of jests, and so «ja na razie też obstaję przy tytule „Niewyczerpany żart”» (for now I too stand by the title Niewyczerpany żart — gloss ours): in that version exhaustion sounds through, and life is exhausting and Wallace's prose is exhausting too.
  • The aim: same book, written differently. She has no illusions the translation will match the original — that is inevitable — but wants its fibres as close as possible, to «chemicznie odtworzyć» (chemically reproduce — gloss ours) the source; she feels «presję doskonałości materiału wyjściowego» (the pressure of the source material's perfection — gloss ours), and wishes the result to be «to samo „Infinite Jest”, ale napisane trochę inaczej» (the same Infinite Jest, only written a little differently — gloss ours) — the line that gives the interview its title.

Career texture (non-Wallace, but part of the profile)

  • The Roth years. She passed «test Rotha» (Roth's test — gloss ours) with American Pastoral and translated Roth for a decade under his approval system — he demanded the whole typescript, not samples, vetted by his hired «czytaczy» (readers/checkers — gloss ours) — yet she is decidedly not in love with him: «Mnie jego proza po prostu nie bierze, mogłabym bez niego żyć. Natomiast współczesna literatura amerykańska bez Rotha żyć by nie mogła» (his prose simply does not grip me, I could live without him; contemporary American literature, though, could not live without Roth — gloss ours). A CONTRAST worth noting: with the living, controlling Roth she worked under vetting; Wallace, dead, exerts control only through the difficulty of the page.
  • The Kubiak laudation. Receiving a Polish Writers' Association prize in the 1990s for Irving's The Cider House Rules (Regulamin tłoczni win), she sat through a laudation that was a crushing attack on the very book being honoured — Zygmunt Kubiak, who loathed the novel (reading it as pro-abortion), demolished book and translation to her face; she declined the prize money.
  • Wharton, Carroll, Yanagihara. Ptasiek (Birdy) was a Polish phenomenon; Alicja w Krainie Czarów is the one translation she keeps revising (against her rule that «pierwsza myśl jest złota», the first thought is golden — gloss ours); Yanagihara's 800-page A Little Life she did in three months, whereas Infinite Jest will take years — «Proza Wallace’a to więcej niż literatura, to przeżycie totalne» (Wallace's prose is more than literature, it is a total experience — gloss ours).

Reception fear

  • Under the magnifying glass. Infinite Jest is a cult book, and she feels enormous pressure; after Oblivion a Facebook commenter flagged an error — her «gąbczaste ciasto» (spongy cake — gloss ours) where he insisted on biszkopt — sponge cake, gloss ours (the raw's own form is the locative «o biszkopcie») — a choice she defends as deliberate. She knows Wallace devotees watch her hands and expects to be «szczególnie pod lupą» (especially under the magnifying glass — gloss ours) with Infinite Jest.

Theories & evidence

(This is a translator INTERVIEW conducted while the Polish IJ was still being made, not a study of the finished novel. Its Wallace/IJ observations are a working translator's asides; grades are honest to what she argues, and every contact is a sighting graded conservatively. The translation-craft and biographical material — the richest part of the interview — has no home slug and is not folded.)

CONNECTION: the title's Hamlet provenance — Yorick of infinite jest (5.1), and why the Polish edition becomes Niewyczerpany żart rather than a literal nieskończony żart

  • Crux: hamlet-frame
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [K] The source named: the title is drawn from Shakespeare, «Tytuł jest zaczerpnięty z Szekspira, a dokładnie z piątego aktu „Hamleta”» (the title is taken from Shakespeare, precisely from the fifth act of Hamlet — gloss ours), Hamlet over the grave with Yorick's skull. [the title-plan answer]
    • [K] The rendering problem: a literal «„nieskończony żart”» sounds, she says, like «„niedokończony żart”» (unfinished jest — gloss ours), so she follows the Polish Hamlet tradition (Słomczyński, Paszkowski) that makes Yorick an inexhaustible source of jests and settles, for now, on Niewyczerpany żart. [same answer]
  • Notes: A mentions: Kozak invokes the Hamlet 5.1 gravedigger scene ONLY to account for the book's title and her Polish rendering of it — she does not argue Hamlet as the novel's organizing intertext (the crux's actual question). New NON-ENGLISH evidence that the title's Hamlet source is common ground, plus a Polish-specific datum (the nieskończony/niedokończony near-homophone; the Słomczyński/Paszkowski precedent) found in no English source. A sighting only.

CONNECTION: the endnote apparatus as language overflowing its own frame — a translator's functional account of why the notes exist

  • Crux: endnotes-function (adjacency: endnotes-structure)
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [K] The overflow account: his text «Nie mieści się nawet w tych bardzo rozbudowanych ramach języka, który sobie stwarza, jego tekst się z nich wylewa, stąd nadbudowywanie sążnistych przypisów» (it does not even fit the very expansive frame of language he builds for himself, his text spills out of it, hence the piling-up of fathoms-long endnotes — gloss ours). [the endnotes answer]
    • [K] Cross-book comparison: A Supposedly Fun Thing has notes to notes; Oblivion alone lets the reader rest, its notes «nie ma wcale albo są szczątkowe» (there are none at all or vestigial — gloss ours). [same answer]
  • Notes: A mentions, leaning: unlike a bare sighting, Kozak offers a REASON the endnotes exist (the prose overflows even Wallace's own expanded frame) — but as a one-sentence translator's aside, not the sustained argument the crux weighs, and she treats the notes as a symptom of maximal style rather than a designed device. Rhymes with the endnote-apparatus testimony the translator cluster already holds (Nesi's encyclopedia-lookup anecdote; the Dutch reviewer's footnote-difficulty note) — from the Polish desk; a sighting, nothing more than mentions. NB her page/count figures are loose (see Accuracy notes).

CONNECTION: the macro-shape as a nested, self-generating casket structure — story births story, a hundred-sided cube

  • Crux: annular-structure
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [K] The structure figure: Wallace's action has «konstrukcję szkatułkową, historia rodzi historię» (a nested-casket structure, story births story — gloss ours), one association leading to the next, unstoppable, yet developing «logicznie i konsekwentnie» (logically and consistently — gloss ours). [the what-is-it-about / structure answer]
    • [K] The cube figure: Infinite Jest «przypomina stuścienną kostkę rubika» (resembles a hundred-sided Rubik's cube — gloss ours). [the Yanagihara-contrast answer]
  • Notes: A mentions: a translator's texture-image for the novel's macro-shape — nested/recursive (the casket, story-births-story, the many-faced cube) rather than the ring/gasket the crux's English anchors argue. She reads method in the apparent chaos («ale w tym szaleństwie jest metoda»), but offers no ending/dead-center claim. A sighting only.

CONNECTION: the main action dated to the 2020s

  • Crux: ydau-real-year
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [K] «Wallace ulokował akcję książki w nieodległej przyszłości, ocenia się, że rozgrywa się ona w latach dwudziestych XXI wieku» (Wallace set the action in the near future; it is estimated to take place in the 2020s — gloss ours). [the plot-summary answer]
  • Notes: A thin mentions: a plot-summary aside placing the action in the 2020s (it is estimated, she says), with no argument about the mapped calendar year the crux debates (the fandom's Year-of-Glad reckoning lands earlier). A datable-year a sighting only.

CONNECTION: Wallace's excess as a war on the banality of language; sickness as a truth about the world; the whole method figured in the brain-shaped radio-studio passage

  • Crux: (no home slug — reception / critical-aesthetics)
  • Stance: n/a (reception/craft texture)
  • Evidence:
    • [K] The banality thesis: language «zagaduje rzeczywistość» (talks reality away — gloss ours) and so the world goes banal; Wallace's counter-prose is «przepełniony jest bólem» (brimming with pain — gloss ours) and built with «iście naukową precyzją» (a truly scientific precision — gloss ours). [the excess answer]
    • [K] Sickness-as-truth: the described worlds are «w bardzo mądry sposób chore» (sick in a very wise way — gloss ours); «choroba jest prawdą o nas?» (is sickness a truth about us? — gloss ours). [the uniqueness answer]
    • [K] The brain-building paraphrase (no Wallace prose quoted): walking the corridors «naprawdę jesteśmy w mózgu – depczemy po mózgu, gdy to czytamy» (we are really inside a brain — we tread on the brain as we read — gloss ours). [same answer]
  • Notes: Kozak's own interpretive framework — an aesthetic/ethical reading of Wallace's method (maximalism as a fight against linguistic banality; illness as a truth the prose enacts under scientific control). It is a reviewer/translator's interpretive claim about the oeuvre, not an argument about any IJ plot/ending crux, and the archive holds no reception/aesthetics slug that fits (the same do-not-coin finding every landed non-English note reached). NOT a fold; NOT a coinage.

Themes

Translation as an actor's embodiment and a listening art (translating by ear); the singular difficulty of Wallace — the hardest author she has met, the one book that won, dictating a nocturnal, longhand, computer-free method; the translator's images of the labour (the tiny chisel on the marble block, the hundred-sided Rubik's cube, moving on the breath of single words); the reading of Wallace as a war on the banality of language and of his worlds as wisely sick, his despair-lined prose held in scientific control; the endnotes as language overflowing even its expanded frame; the nested casket structure with method in its madness; the Hamlet title-provenance and the Polish rendering problem («nieskończony»/«niedokończony»; the Słomczyński/Paszkowski precedent behind Niewyczerpany żart); the aim of chemical reproduction — the same Infinite Jest, written a little differently; and the translator's career context (the Roth approval-and-vetting regime versus the dead Wallace's control-through-difficulty; the Kubiak laudation-as-attack; Wharton, Carroll, Yanagihara) — plus a translation-history datum: Poland's Infinite Jest is being made here in 2017, five years before Niewyczerpany żart (W.A.B.) appeared in 2022.

Cross-references

  • The translator-testimony cluster — blumenbach-trashpool-2011, blumenbach-spiegel-2009, nesi-minimaetmoralia-intervista, kerline-vice-2015, kerline-books-2015, galindo-graca-infinita-historia-pessoal-2018 — the German/French/Italian/Portuguese translator-primaries on rendering Wallace's registers and syntax. Kozak's night-work compulsion, longhand method, and single-word-breath pace are the Polish desk's counterpart. Direct rhyme with Blumenbach: Kozak cites the German translator's «podobno osiem lat» (reportedly eight years — gloss ours) she once mocked and now understands — the same years-long grind the Blumenbach notes record from his side (and a figure to weigh against his own account; see Accuracy notes). Contrast with Kerline: where Kerline deliberately did NOT read Infinite Jest before translating, Kozak knows Wallace intimately (three prior books) and lets the novel dictate her method.
  • mokita-blumenbach-passage-2017 — the passage-comparison sibling: where that source walks specific renderings against the original, Kozak (mid-translation, nothing published) instead gives the translator's phenomenology of the work — the two are the how-it-is-made and how-it-reads faces of the same craft.
  • lapresse-infinie-comedie-2015 / letraslibres-no-necrologica-2008 / news247-kaltsas-2026 / peppelenbos-tzum-2026 — the French, Spanish, Greek and Dutch non-English reception/reception-adjacent primaries; this Polish interview is their Central-European counterpart, and — like the Greek and Dutch editions — a document of a language that came late to Infinite Jest (Poland 2022).
  • esposito-ij-around-the-world — the cross-language reception round-up; Kozak's in-progress Polish IJ is one more pin on the who-has-it-yet map, dated from inside the work (2017) five years before the edition landed.

Notable passages

Kozak's words unless marked [Z] (interviewer) or [S] (Shakespeare, transcribed by Kozak). Polish is the verbatim anchor; the English in parentheses is our gloss (paraphrase). The source's quotation wrapper is the low/high pair „ … ” (reproduced byte-true inside the spans); this note's own wrapper is the guillemet « … » (byte-absent from the source). Several spans occur twice in the txt because Dwutygodnik reprints them as pull-quotes.

  • Kozak (the epigraph / hardest author): «Lubię czuć opór materiału, lubię, jak praca nie idzie mi zbyt gładko» (I like to feel the resistance of the material, I like it when the work does not go too smoothly — gloss ours), «Dlatego niezmiernie cieszę się z Wallace’a, to najtrudniejszy pisarz, jakiego w życiu tłumaczyłam» (which is why I so delight in Wallace, the hardest writer I have ever translated — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (the book that beat her): Infinite Jest is «pierwsza książka, która ze mną wygrała, kręci mną jak szewc kopytem» (the first book that beat me, it works me the way a cobbler works his last — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (the nocturnal compulsion — pull-quote): «„Infinite Jest” przemawia do mnie tylko nocą, regularnie budzi mnie w okolicach drugiej i domaga się tłumaczenia» (Infinite Jest speaks to me only at night, regularly wakes me around two and demands to be translated — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (the marble block — pull-quote): «Praca nad „Infinite Jest” to wykuwanie malutkim dłutkiem wielkiego marmurowego bloku w ciągłej obawie, że kamień popęka» (working on Infinite Jest is carving a great marble block with a tiny chisel in constant fear the stone will crack — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (the hundred-sided cube): «„Infinite Jest” przypomina stuścienną kostkę rubika» (Infinite Jest resembles a hundred-sided Rubik's cube — gloss ours); with Wallace «idę na oddechu pojedynczych słów» (I move on the breath of single words — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (a total experience — pull-quote): «Proza Wallace’a to więcej niż literatura, to przeżycie totalne, a książka Yanagihary to świetna i przejmująca, ale „tylko” książka» (Wallace's prose is more than literature, it is a total experience; Yanagihara's book is superb and moving but only a book, her scare-quoted word — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (the war on banality): language «zagaduje rzeczywistość» (talks reality away — gloss ours); Wallace «toczy dramatyczną walkę o oddanie złożoności ludzkich przeżyć i materii świata, nie tracąc przy tym humoru» (wages a dramatic struggle to render the complexity of human experience and the matter of the world without losing his humour — gloss ours); «Pisanie jest u niego podszyte rozpaczą» (his writing is lined with despair — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (scientific control): his writing is «podszyte jest chorobą psychiczną» (undergirded by mental illness — gloss ours), yet he constructs his texts «z iście naukową precyzją» (with a truly scientific precision — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (sickness as truth): the worlds are «w bardzo mądry sposób chore» (sick in a very wise way — gloss ours); «choroba jest prawdą o nas?» (is sickness a truth about us? — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (the brain-building paraphrase): «idąc tymi korytarzami, naprawdę jesteśmy w mózgu – depczemy po mózgu, gdy to czytamy» (walking those corridors we are really inside a brain — we tread on the brain as we read — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (endnotes as overflow): his text «Nie mieści się nawet w tych bardzo rozbudowanych ramach języka, który sobie stwarza, jego tekst się z nich wylewa, stąd nadbudowywanie sążnistych przypisów» (does not even fit the very expansive frame of language he builds for himself, his text spills out of it, hence the piling-up of fathoms-long endnotes — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (the nested structure): the action has «konstrukcję szkatułkową, historia rodzi historię» (a nested-casket structure, story births story — gloss ours), «ale w tym szaleństwie jest metoda» (but in this madness there is method — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (the plot, glossed): «Powieść przedstawia historię trzech braci Incandenza: Hala» (the novel presents the story of the three Incandenza brothers: Hal — gloss ours), his «starszego brata Orina i upośledzonego brata Mario» (older brother Orin and disabled brother Mario — gloss ours); the action «w latach dwudziestych XXI wieku» (in the 2020s — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (the Hamlet title): «Tytuł jest zaczerpnięty z Szekspira, a dokładnie z piątego aktu „Hamleta”» (the title is taken from Shakespeare, precisely from the fifth act of Hamlet — gloss ours). [S] The line she transcribes: «Poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest» (Shakespeare, via Kozak — inexact; see Accuracy notes).
  • Kozak (the rendering problem): «„nieskończony żart” brzmi jak „niedokończony żart”» (endless jest sounds like unfinished jest — gloss ours); «ja na razie też obstaję przy tytule „Niewyczerpany żart”» (for now I too stand by the title Niewyczerpany żart — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (the aim — the interview's title): «Żeby to było to samo „Infinite Jest”, ale napisane trochę inaczej» (so that it be the same Infinite Jest, only written a little differently — gloss ours); she would «chemicznie odtworzyć» (chemically reproduce — gloss ours) the source and feels «presję doskonałości materiału wyjściowego» (the pressure of the source material's perfection — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (the German precedent): the German translator's work took «podobno osiem lat» (reportedly eight years — gloss ours).
  • Kozak (Roth — pull-quote): «Roth wciąż potrafi błysnąć. Mnie jego proza po prostu nie bierze, mogłabym bez niego żyć. Natomiast współczesna literatura amerykańska bez Rotha żyć by nie mogła» (Roth can still dazzle; his prose simply does not grip me, I could live without him; contemporary American literature, though, could not live without Roth — gloss ours).

Accuracy notes

Cite-as-written throughout (orthography and typography preserved as printed).

  • This is an interview, PRE-publication of the Polish IJ. Kozak is mid-translation in November 2017; Niewyczerpany żart (W.A.B.) appeared in 2022. Nothing of her Polish rendering is quoted; the novel is discussed and paraphrased but never quoted verbatim. The interview also ranges across her whole career, not only Wallace.
  • The Hamlet line is inexact. At line 546 Kozak transcribes «Poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest». Shakespeare's Hamlet 5.1 reads, in standard editions, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest” — her version drops the opening “Alas,” and the comma after “him”. Reproduced cite-as-written as this source prints it; the underlying authority is Shakespeare's Hamlet (not held here, and not Wallace).
  • The endnote figures are approximate. She says the novel runs «ponad tysiąc stron» with «ostatnie sto pięćdziesiąt» pages of endnotes (line 484-485) and that there are «zaledwie kilkaset» of them (just a few hundred — line 493). The standard hardcover's endnotes run ~96 pages (pp. 983-1079) and number 388; the 150-pages figure is loose and a-few-hundred is roughly right. Spoken from memory mid-translation; reproduced as stated.
  • The German-translation eight-years figure. She reports (line 511-512) that the German translator took «podobno osiem lat» (reportedly eight years). The word «podobno» (reportedly) marks it as hearsay; the Blumenbach primaries in the archive give a different span for his IJ work. Kept as her stated figure; weigh against the Blumenbach notes, do not treat as an independent measurement.
  • The 2020s dating is her estimate. «ocenia się» (it is estimated — line 500) frames the 2020s setting as received opinion, not a textual derivation.
  • One straight ASCII apostrophe. The whole file uses the curly apostrophe U+2019 (Wallace’a, Blake’a, etc.) EXCEPT once: line 185, in the author-bio block, «Davida Fostera Wallace'a» is typed with a STRAIGHT ASCII apostrophe (U+0027) — the file's only one. A source typographic inconsistency in the boilerplate bio, reproduced byte-true; not the article's style.
  • The pull-quotes reprint body sentences — exactly for some, edited for others. Dwutygodnik sets five of Kozak's sentences as decorative pull-quotes (the page's quote-icon blocks). Three appear twice byte-identically in the txt (the dramatic-struggle, despair, and total-experience sentences — a count of 2 on those probes is not an error). The other two-quote pairs DIFFER between body and pull-quote: the nocturnal-compulsion, marble-block, and Roth sentences exist in two variants (e.g. the body's «Praca nad tym tekstem to…» against the pull-quote's «Praca nad „Infinite Jest” to…»); this note quotes the pull-quote forms, each attested once — a count of 1 there is likewise not an error.
  • The sponge-cake anecdote is about Oblivion, not Infinite Jest. The «gąbczaste ciasto»-vs-biszkopt Facebook dispute (lines 597-600) concerns her Niepamięć (Oblivion) rendering, offered as an example of the scrutiny she expects for IJ.
  • Plot-summary looseness. She calls Mario «upośledzonego» (disabled) and numbers the Incandenza sons as three brothers (correct: Orin, Mario, Hal); she calls James «genialnego tenisisty i założyciela» (a brilliant tennis player and founder of the academy). Reader-facing summary spoken from mid-translation memory; reproduced as stated.