This article attempts to refute the generally accepted view that Jan Wojciech (Albert) Łubieński, Pantler of Sieradz, was the patron of Piotr Baryka,, the author of the comedy Z chłopa król ( The Peasant Become King), first staged in 1633 (editio princeps, 1637). The attribution results from a conjecture, which has never been properly verified, formulated by Ludwik Bernacki in 1904. Yet in the 1630s Jan Wojciech Łubieński held no public office (he was probably completing his education) and, crucially, did not become Pantler of Sieradz until 1643. In consequence, we presume that Baryka's patron may well have been Łubieński's uncle, a wealthy man renowned for his generosity, who had the same first name.
Representations of loss, grief and mourning are have a prominent place in Mikhail Shiskhin's fiction. They coexist with other parathanatological themes such as funerals and reflections on life after death. As funerals provide the proper opening of periods of mourning, the first part of the article deals with the characters’ reactions to the scenes of death and burial. It is followed, in the second part, by a close examination of the internal life of selected female characters who experience grief after the loss of a person they love. On the whole, Shiskhin's characters seem to be less preoccupied with the funeral as a social institution, but rather tend to experience bereavement in a way which is typical of a melancholic. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's conceptualization of mourning, the article demonstrates how Shishkin's female characters conceal mourning by the act of incorporating the dead into their own bodies and allowing them their voice. At the same time, the activity of letter writing enables them to hinder or even deny bereavement, and in this way, hold off the admission of a complete loss.
This article examines a cycle of poems by Maria Kurecka, the acclaimed writer and translator, in which she mourns the loss of her husband, Witold Wirpsza, who died in 1985. Held by the archives of the Pomeranian Library in Szczecin, these unpublished poems were written in the final years of her life. In this article they are positioned and read against the background of Polish funerary poetry and its traditions. Apart from having single poems published in literary magazines, Maria Kurecka produced just one volume of poetry, Trzydzieści wierszy ( Thirty Poems, 1987). In fact, though, there may be quite a lot of poems that she chose to keep private. Remembered as an outstanding translator of German literature, Maria Kurecka the poet is virtually unknown. It is hoped that by drawing attention to her poetic work this article will contribute to a better appreciation of her achievement.
Current research into the life and work of Kazimiera Alberti, a poet and writer popular in the interwar period, connected from 1930 with Biała Krakowska, owes a great deal to Jacek Proszyk, who in 2009 staged a spectacle based on her biography at the Teatr Polski in Bielsko Biała called The Literary Salon of Kazimiera Alberti. It was followed by a spate of publications which, at this point, form a body of work ready for reassessment. This article deals with one of them, written by Karolina Pospiszil, where it is claimed that the heroine of Ci, którzy przyjdą ( Those Who Will Come, 1934), Helena Rumiszewska, is both a stereotyped, idealized female character. Focusing on the episodes which belie that description and show a character of considerable complexity driven by an emancipatory desire. She is not free from doubt when faced with various dilemmas, yet does she represent the ideal of the New Woman? This article addresses this question and discusses the issue of emancipation in the broader context of bourgeois culture and class, i.e. the social milieu o which Helena belongs.
This is a deconstructive reading of Juliusz Słowacki's Lilla Weneda, focusing on Ślaz, an enigmatic character usually marginalized in interpretations of this quasi-historical Romantic drama. Drawing on Professor Marta Piwińska's study of ‘Lilla Weneda’ in Dramat polski: Interpretacje (2001), this article explores the gaps and fissures in Słowacki's text. While complementing her analysis with a number of alternative readings, this article also uses deconstruction to challenge some of the points that are embedded in the traditional reception of the drama.
This interpretation of Michał Choromański's novel Schodami w górę, schodami w dół ( Upstairs, Downstairs) focuses primarily on issues related to the inner life of the characters and the representation of the outside world in the context of classical psychoanalysis. The appropriateness of the psychoanalytical approach is justified by numerous references to Freud's theory in the text of the novel. The study reaches out to Choromański's other novels and short stories, but embarks on a more systematic comparison of Schodami w górę, schodami w dół with only one of them, Zazdrość i medycyna ( Jealousy and Medicine), his most popular novel published in 1936.
This article is an attempt to present a comprehensive view of the poetry of Józef Czechowicz in the context of Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology. Czechowicz's poetic work, the article argues, is an exploration of mutual relations of the basic ontological categories of being and nothingness ( das Sein and das Nichts). They constitute the philosophical foundations of the purely literary tensions that can be detected in all comprehensive accounts of his work, such as the opposition of Arcadia and Catastrophy (Tadeusz Kłak) or the discussion of the ‘bright’ and the ‘dark’ strain in the poetry of the Second Avant-garde (Jerzy Kwiatkowski).
The article shows the history of the Spanish and American editions of the novel Dalla parte di lei by the Italian-Cuban author Alba de Céspedes and the process of its retranslations starting from the several English versions of the text used as “text-pivot”. Through the investigation of the author’s intense correspondence with her publishers and taking into account Berman’s “Retranslation hypothesis” and Venuti’s approach within the Translation Studies, this work demonstrates how, in the 1950s, one of the most popular Alba de Céspedes’ novel used to be translated in other languages through different editing, revision and retranslation practices depending on the public of readers. In particular, Francoism censorship was decisive in editorial choices for the Spanish edition of the text.
The article reconstructs the history of the Italian retranslation of Thomas Mann’s Joseph und seine Brüder. Although Mondadori already published the work (four volumes from 1933 to 1948), shortly after the death of the first translator, the retranslation of the entire tetralogy was commissioned. Based on the letters between the publisher, the author and the new translator, the paper tries to shed light on an unusual case of retranslation, where the rules that generally determine its necessity do not seem to be applicable.
This article offers a reading of Einaudi’s trilingual series “Scrittori tradotti da scrittori”, a project that the publisher Valerio Magrelli conceived as a critical experimental work, based on the fusion of translation, rewriting and interpretative essay. The first volume of the series, Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon translated into French by André Gide and into Italian by Ugo Mursia, prompts a reflection on the role of “canonising” translations within the retranslation movement that has influenced editorial choices over the last decades.
The aim of this article is to highlight the positive role that Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Walter Benjamin attribute to retranslation in their essays. Despite some differences in their way of understanding poetry, both authors claim that retranslating helps us recognize the “life” and the transformation of a poetical work behind its apparent fixity. Thus, according to them, the process of (re)translation sheds light on the way the meaning of a work unfolds.
A very particular form of reception of the Don Quijote de la Mancha is musical reception. In transcoding from narrative prose to the language of the Opera, the librettist shows his personal knowledge of the work of Miguel de Cervantes, read in the original text or in translation. Since the eighteenth century, in some librettos written in Italian, adherence to the hypotext, albeit interpreted in a new light, leads in some passages to an authentic rewriting of the play. The aim of this article is to show the processes of transcoding de Cervantes’ novels based on significant Italian librettists.
This paper deals with the philological issues arisen in Italy in the case of Beckett’s drama in relation to his status as a self-translator, a fact still unclear when the first Italian translations were composed. This produced some inaccuracies as to the status of the original text: Fruttero usually translated from French, but several modifications were later introduced based on the English version. It was not revealed in the paratext that a modified translation combines both authorial texts.
Starting from the famous controversy connected with the publication of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts, this article sets out to explore how the originals were finally restored to the author’s intent. A brief analysis of the first Italian translations followed by some of the most recent attempts will prove that new translations of Dickinson’s output are still necessary.
In this article, we address the issue of poetic translation and re-translation, beginning from a theoretical approach and, then, contextualizing it by the Italian versions of Antonio Machado’s poetry during the 20th century and the last decades. In the first part, we underline the most important elements that make poetic (re-)translation an autonomous, creative and original “literary genre”. In the second part, we compare Machado’s translations by Oreste Macrì to the ones newly realized by the author of the present article in terms of language, strategies and editorial target.
The two versions of Flaubert’s Un coeur simple, both signed by writer and translator Lalla Romano, prompt a reflection on a practice which lies in the hybrid space between revision and retranslation. Mainly due to extratextual reasons, two often conflicting dynamics emerge from Romano’s interventions in the text and in the paratexts: the tendency to get closer to the source text and, at the same time, the translator’s unusual independence from its stylistic features.
The paper aims at analyzing the practice on the borderline of retranslation and revision carried out by translators who rework their own previous translations. The comparison between the three Italian editions (1999, 2013, 2020) of Olga Tokarczuk’s Prawiek i inne czasy shows how the same translator gradually moved towards a more foreignizing approach, fixings errors and modernizing the language, though not eschewing a domesticating strategy. These re-editions seem to be linked with the growing symbolic capital and contractual power of the writer on the international arena, which arouse the need of more accurate translations and reinterpretations of her works.
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