ВОПЛОЩЕНИЕ ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИХ УСТАНОВОК ЮЛИАНА ТУВИМА ВЕГО ИСКУССТВЕ ПОЭТИЧЕ¬СКОГО ПЕРЕВОДА
REALISATION OF THEORETICAL VIEWS OF JULIAN TUWIM IN HIS ART OF POETRY TRANSLATIONS

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this article is to summarize and present the views on artistic translation formulated by Julian Tuwim. Despite having been perceived as one of the greatest translators (especially from Russian into Polish), the poet did not leave any regular work on his theoretical approach. In order to collect Tuwim’s ideas, the author of the article studied his letters, humorous essays and the interviews he had given. The article contains the analyses of Tuwim’s version of Alexander Pushkin’s poem “The Prophet”, in order to see whether Tuwim’s theoretical approach is reflected in his own translation. As Tuwim once said, the word was his greatest passion. It seems that the word with all its aspects, like “its sound, meaning or colour”, was in the centre of his approach towards poems. When translating literature, Tuwim tried to find rare and forgotten words and to give them back to Polish readers. We can also observe lots of lexical and grammatical transformations of different kinds. He hardly ever used phonetic similarity between Polish and Russian words in order to copy the pairs of original rhymes in his translations. As he used to describe the process of translation: he “stretched and shrunk the words, overturned and rearranged them”. At the same time, however, he followed the strict rules of Russian syllabotonics, while syllabic metrical system is far more natural for Polish language. It proves that, as he claimed, rhymes and rhythm were of equal importance to him. For Tuwim, “poetry was mathematics of words” and his works prove he was brilliantly exact in his “calculations”.

• Details
• Contents