Przekład z duszy leci bystro, nim się w metrum złamie, czyli o formie angielskich tłumaczeń Pana Tadeusza
Translation Flies Fast out of Your Spirit until Meter Breaks It, or about the Form of English Translations of Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz

Summary/Abstract: The problem of classifying Pan Tadeusz as a literary gentre has serious consequences for the translation of the work: what form should the text take in another language? Should one translate Pan Tadeusz in verse in the target language versification scheme (domestication), in the original versification scheme (foreignisation), or render it in prose? Seven translators have so far faced this challenge in English: M.A. Biggs (1885 – blank verse), G.R. Noyes (1917 – prose), W. Kirkconnell (1962 – heroic couplet with enjambments), K.R. MacKenzie (1964 – heroic couplet without enjambments), M. Weyland (2004 – 12-syllable line), L. Kress (2006 – rhymed pentameter), Ch.A. Zakrzewski (2010 – prose). Each of the selected strategies resulted in some gains and losses for the target reader; no translator managed to find the golden mean for the translation form of the Polish national epic. Edward Balcerzan may therefore be right as he suggests to analyse the translations of a given work as a series – only all the existing and potential translations of Pan Tadeusz together can produce the effect of the original work by Mickiewicz.

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