Anna Mach

Between Heaven and Hell: Roman Kołakowski’s Poetry and His Translations of The Tiger Lillies

Songs of The Tiger Lillies, a “punk cabaret” group from London, entered the Polish- speaking culture mostly through the translations by Roman Kołakowski. Translation formed just one of many fields of artistic activity of Kołakowski, who was also a poet, a songwriter, a performer, and a theatre director. There exists, however, a striking contrast between the style of the Kołakowski’s own oeuvre and his translation choices. His poetry is mostly religious, patriotic, marked by a solemn tone and elevated register, while The Tiger Lillies delight in ridicule, irony, and perversion, mocking religion in an almost blasphemous way. The paper is an attempt at analysing this contrast and searching for its assumed sources. The target texts are found to be marked by significant semantic and stylistic modifications when compared to the original songs. Amplification of religious tropes and of negative views on modern society is identified as the main form of the translator’s interventions. Based on the comparison of Kołakowski’s translations with his own poetry, it is posited that their ostensible discrepancy may be explained by perceiving the translations as a subsidiary field of artistic expression, where the translator pursues his interests in grimmer aspects of morality and society, expressing them in a form that would not be coherent with his own poetry. Consequently, Kołakowski’s translations of The Tiger Lillies’ songs are considered appropriations in a sense that the translational choices are directed by the translator’s own interests, ideological stance, and sensibilities, rather than by any attempted equivalence with the source texts. It is to be hoped that the paper will form an in itation to further investigations of translational agency in the field of song translation.