Translating Emotions in the Modern „Waste Land”: Winterreise at the Turn of the 20th and 21st Centuries
Translating Emotions in the Modern „Waste Land”: Winterreise at the Turn of the 20th and 21st Centuries

Summary/Abstract: The subject of this paper is the process of translating emotions in Podróż zimowa (1994), a cycle of 24 poems by the poet and translator, Stanisław Barańczak. The Polish author wrote them to the music of Franz Schubert, who had previously composed this music to the work of another poet, Wilhelm Müller. In each of these three artefacts – by Müller, Müller-Schubert, Müller-Schubert-Barańczak – a different emotional landscape is created. The comparative analysis of selected aspects of each of them, proposed in the article, is providing the opportunity to examine the exceptionally complex process of translating emotions: from the early romantic poetic text to music of the same era, and from these vocal works – back to a poetic text, almost two hundred years younger. One of the crucial figures we can observe in Podróż zimowa, when read or listened, is irony, both in the poems as well as between them and the Schubert’s music.

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