WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA W TŁUMACZENIACH ROSYJSKICH
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA IN RUSSIAN TRANSLATION

Summary/Abstract: Wislava Szymborska’s works were translated into 36 languages all over the world (the Russian, German, Hungarian, New Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Hindu and other languages), but the translations into Swedish, German and English are the most known. Russian readers have known her works for a long time in translations by Akhmatova, Eppela, Astafieva, Starosielska and many others. In 2007, a collection of poems by Szymborska was published in Russian translation along with their original version to give the reader a possibility of simultaneous reading and comparison of the text in the Russian and Polish languages. The paper presents some peculiarities of translation of Wislawa Szymborska’s poems “Nic dwa razy”/“Nothing Twice” and “Milość od pierwszego wejrzenia”/ “Love at First Sight” into Russian. The research focuses on certain modifications of the original text translations into Russian by Xenia Starosielska and Anatoli Kobienkov.Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry, seemingly concise and simple, mostly without rhyme, can be very sophisticated to translate. Unbelievably subtle wordplay of the poetess cannot be transferred easily to another linguistic and cultural reality. The poems by Szymborska bustle with some sort of humor and irony, being a challenge for translators when mastering them in the Russian language. Starosielska and Kobienkov, they both have modified the original texts with poetic image development, expanding the semantic field, specifying meanings and intensifying expression. The sequence of original poetic images is sometimes changed, but Szymborska’s metaphors and similes still remain. The increase in emotional content is observed from colloquial expressions and idioms introduced into the translation (especially in that by Starosielska). However, the modifications give a possibility to retain what is most important in the poetry – sense and music, indeed. All those modifications are acceptable since they do not influence the semantic content of the text.

• Details
• Contents