W obcej Leśmianii. Poezja Bolesława Leśmiana w przekładach na język angielski

Authors:

• Aleksandra Wieczorkiewicz

Abstract

Bolesław Leśmian is an impossible writer – according to Edward Balcerzan, „a poet with no masters, a master with no followers”. Additionally, he is usually considered as an untranslatable poet: a creator of his own idiomatic language, fraught with neologisms, archaisms, and dialectisms and subjected to the rigours of rhythm and rhyme, permeated with philosophical thought and vivid colours of the Slavic world – in short, an evident proof of the existence of the phenomenon known as untranslatability. However, a surprisingly substantial amount of Leśmian’s poetry translated into many languages contradicts such clear-cut statements. The present monograph is an attempt to explore translational existences of Bolesław Leśmian’s poetry, beginning with the points in his biography where the foreign-language elements are especially evincing (bilingualism, Leśmian poems written in Russian, his own translations from other authors) through drawing an outline of Leśmi�an’s translations into different European and non-European languages. Hence, the main aim of the monograph is to find examples of English translations of Leśmian’s poetry and to critically compare the translation strategies adopted by their authors by conducting a comparative analysis of translations mainly by Rochelle Stone, Sandra Celt, Marian Polak-Chlabicz and Krzysztof Bartnicki. The author of the monograph investigates how and by what means English transla�tions convey Leśmian’s poetic world, retaining not only its form and content, but also philosophical and aesthetic message. Another issue of importance is to what extent translation of this poetry can preserve its specific flavour and, above all, the language, which for the author of Sad rozstajny was not only the matter of poetry, but also the matter of the world. The monograph is also followed by an appendix collecting and arranging all found translations of Leśmian’s poetry into English