Poezja Bohdana Ihora Antonycza w polskim przekładzie Kazimierza Andrzeja Jaworskiego
Bohdan Ihor Antonych’s poetry in the Polish translation of Kazimierz Andrzej Jaworski

Bohdan Ihor Antonych’s poetry in the Polish translation of Kazimierz Andrzej Jaworski

Summary/Abstract: The poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909–1937), a Ukrainian writer born in Lemkivshchyna near Gorlice, attracted Kazimierz Andrzej Jaworski’s attention with its fairy-tale qualities, a feeling of unreality and idealization of the world. From three collections of poems, Welcome to Life (1931), Three Rings (1934) and Book of the Lion (1936), varying in terms of their subject matter, the translator from Lublin chose works which reveal youthful joy of life and optimism Lemkivshchyna endowed their author with. Jaworski devoted most attention to the poems from The Green Gospel collection (1938), reflecting the essence of Antonych’s poetry, in which nature becomes religion. Jaworski was inclined to select works which were close to his own poems, e.g. from The Tatras and I cycle and the collection On a Granite Mast (1920). In the Polish version of Antonych’s poems, the translator’s interference is clearly noticeable. Jaworski does not fully rely on the original; he often introduces certain transformations within lines or stanzas as well as additions and semantic equivalents which are far from the Ukrainian version. This could result from his personal observations on nature, which he admired. It could also be caused by the difficulties of translation ensuing from linguistic complexities, as Antonych had the remarkable ability to represent complex images in a few lines. He achieved it through an appropriate choice of words and metaphorical constructions, which often prove to be challenging for the translator. Kazimierz Andrzej Jaworski was one of the first Polish translators who faced this task. As early as in the 1930s, he familiarized Polish readers with a few poems of the Lemko poet who lived and wrote in the period when Polish-Ukrainian coexistence within the borders of one country was being shaped.

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