Między „szarym przebraniem” a „trudnym znojem”
Between „a Grey Costume” and „a Hard Toil”

On the Italian Translations of Maria Konopnicka’s "Italia"

Author(s): Alessandro Amenta
Subject(s): Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Polish Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Clotilde Garosci and Cristina Agosti Garosci; Enrico Cozzani; Italia; Maciej and Władysława Loretowie; Maria Konopnicka
Summary/Abstract: Maria Konopnicka’s poems inspired by her travels to Italy have been repeatedly translated into Italian between 1916 and 1929 and published in literary magazines and in a book form. The team composed of the essayist and publisher Ettore Cozzani, the historian and diplomat Maciej Loret and his wife Władysława Zapolska produced a version that reveals a significant manipulation of the source text, often transforming it by means of techniques such as amplification, specification, modulation, reduction, rationalization. The translations made by the sisters Clotilde and Cristina Garosci tend instead to reproduce the word order, syntactic figures, and poetic imagery of the source text, raising its linguistic register through lexical ennoblement and archaization. Though both teams translated poetry into prose and considered translation as ancillary to the source text, a comparative analysis of their versions shows a different approach to Konopnicka’s poems that ultimately depends on different views on language, work methods, and attitude to the Italian poetic tradition. Their reception illustrates that translation of poetry into prose was generally accepted by critics of that time, as it was supposed to preserve the “soul” of the source text, though giving up its form.

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