El problema del género gramatical en la traducción: un estudio comparativo de dos traducciones del Romance de la luna, luna de Federico García Lorca (1928) al polaco
The Problem of Grammatical Gender in Translation: A Comparative Study of Two Polish Translations of Romance de la luna, luna by Federico García Lorca (1928)

Author(s): Anna Jamka
Subject(s): Language studies, Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Federico García Lorca; translation of poetry; linguistic worldview/linguistic picture of the world; cognitive linguistics
Summary/Abstract: In Romance de la luna, luna the moon, a symbol of death in Lorca’s poetry, is portrayed as a charming woman who tries to seduce a boy in order to kidnap him (Arango 1995: 60). Given the feminine grammatical gender of the lexeme luna and the fact that in the Spanish and Latin American culture death is usually personified as a woman (Guthke 1999: 7), such image does not seem strange or unusual to the Spanish speakers. However, what will happen if we translate the poem into a language in which the equivalent of the word luna is of the masculine grammatical gender? The paper aims to examine two most recent Polish translations of García Lorca’s romance – Romanca o lunie, lunie by Leszek Engelking (2017) and Romanca o księżycu, księżycu by Jacek Lyszczyna (2017) – with a particular focus on the problem of grammatical gender in translation of the lexeme luna. The starting point for the author will be a thesis that any literary translation is a reconstruction of a non-standard linguistic picture of the world/linguistic worldview (językowy obraz świata) which, in turn, arises from a standard linguistic worldview embedded in each language, i.e., from the interpretation of the world in given language and culture shared by its speakers (Gicala 2018).

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