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L'EPICA CAVALLERESCA DELL'ETÀ MODERNA: UN MODELLO EUROPEO

Abstract

ON POETIC TRANSLATION IN 16TH-17TH CENTURY POLAND: IMITATION AND FIDELITY BETWEEN CENTRE AND PERIPHERY OF THE EUROPEAN POLYSYSTEM This article focuses on some of the ideas and poetics of literary translation that were circulating in Poland at the turn of the 16th and the 17th centuries, notably Piotr Kochanowski’s two arch-translations of Tasso’s and Ariosto’s poems (goffred and orland szalony), which are emblematic of two ways of translating. The first tends towards imitation, towards achieving analogous results idiomatically in the target language (“rendering” the text in the target language) – largely, as we would say today, “target oriented”; the second translation is more faithful to the original, though not entirely “source oriented”. The 16th/17th century literary translation can be situated within the dialectic polarity between these two modes, which are neither conflicting nor even opposed to each other (as evidenced by the fact that the same translator employs both approaches). Both in the practice of translators and in the few theories in existence at the time and in association with other cultural macrophenomenona such as the question of language, Italianism, versification etc., poetic translation represents a fundamental chapter of the great formative book of modern Polish literature. It characteristically and continuously positions itself between the centre and the periphery of the European cultural polysystem.