Pięć żywotów Kruka, czyli o polskich przekładach wiersza The Raven Edgara Allana Poego
Five Lives of Raven, or about Polish Translation of the Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

Summary/Abstract: The article examines five Polish translations of the famous ballad „The Raven” written by Edgar Allan Poe. The translations come from different periods; the efforts by Przesmycki and Beaupré belong to the period of “Młoda Polska”, and date roughly from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century. The translation by Kasiński, although it was created a few decades later, still shows a clear influence of the specific aesthetics of the “Młoda Polska” movement. These three translations, in spite of numerous differences, form quite a uniform set, with the dominant underlying strategy of domestication, which manifests itself in “ennoblement” and “clarification”. By contrast, the two contemporary translations, by Barańczak and by Kozak, lack the stylistic homogeneity of their predecessors. They are also characterized by the various departures from the original, motivated by the different subjective approaches taken by each translator. None of the five examined Polish translations has attained the satisfactory degree of equivalence with respect to the original text.

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