Navigating construal in translation: defamiliarization in Miron Białoszewski’s a Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising

This paper provides a transdisciplinary approach linking translation studies with cognitive linguistics and poetics. Following Elżbieta Tabakowska’s pioneering research into this problem, we use Ronald Langacker’s notion of construal to operationalize and evaluate the equivalence in translation. However, we also couple this notion with the cognitive poetics’ concept of defamiliarization as proposed and developed by Peter Stockwell. We claim that defamiliarization arises as a result of the interplay of imagery in a context. As an illustration material we use Miron Białoszewski’s Pamiętnik z Powstania Warszawskiego and its translation into English ( A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising translated by Madeline G. Levine).