Narodziny romantyzmu z ducha przekładu. Mickiewiczowska Rękawiczka a gest poetycki
The Birth of Romanticism Out of the Spirit of Translation: Adam Mickiewicz’s Glove and Poetic Gesture

Author(s): Christian Zehnder
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Translation Studies
Published by: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza
Keywords: birth of Romanticism; Friedrich Schiller; Adam Mickiewicz
Summary/Abstract: This essay explores the role of The Glove (Rękawiczka), a translation of Friedrich Schiller’s 1797 narrative poem “Der Handschuh”, within Adam Mickiewicz’s Ballads and Romances (Ballady i romanse, 1822). Critics have shown various functions of The Glove, including a compositional one and a polemical one directed against the literature of Polish sentimentalism. What remains a blind spot, however, is the salient laconism of Schiller’s ballad, which Mickiewicz’s translation, despite some variations, renders very carefully. This essay argues that such a poetics of brevity corresponds with the acute ges- turality of the ballad. By rewriting a poem in 1820 that enacts the crisis of the medieval “civilization of gesture” (Jacques Le Goff) – the historical setting being sixteen-century France – Mickiewicz presents Romanticism as a space of artistic and social openness: Like the protagonist, the knight Emrod (Delorges, in Schiller’s original), who at the end throws the lady’s glove in her face and disappears forever from the court, Mickiewicz polemically refers to a symbolic order and at the same time negotiates it anew. The signi- ficance of gesture as “pure deed” (Goethe on Schiller’s The Glove) for the emergence of the Romantic ethos of the deed (czyn) in Poland, this essay concludes, has not been conc- lusively explored even two hundred years after the publication of Ballads and Romances.

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