Józefina Inesa Piątkowska

Virginity Lost in Translation: The Analysis of Individual Style of Zuzanna Ginczanka in Polish Original Poems and Their Ukrainian Renditions

The aim of this article is a comparative study of original poems by Zuzanna Ginczanka (Zuzanna Gincburg) and their translations into Ukrainian language by Yaroslav Polishchuk. The poetess crafted a distinctive, highly dynamic style in Polish literature. Among the particular features of her style are: phonetic experiments, neologisms, lexical and grammatical repetitions, ironic utterances and extended metaphors. The loss or rendering of these features will be the key criterion in judging Polishchuk’s translations. The study focuses on the poem called Virginity, but numerous examples are taken from many other poems and their Ukrainian versions.

The aim of this paper is to reveal the growing explicitness of utterance as one of the main aspects of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems. While metaphors are mostly used in poetry at the end of the compositions, Tsvetaeva tends to start with a metaphor and then move gradually from weak to strong implicatures, and to explicatures. As the explicitness grows, the speaker, whose existence depends on expressing her own thoughts, takes more and more responsibility for what is said, thus increasingly unveiling herself. Tsvetaeva’s metaphors can be compared to a curtain raised gradually to reveal the speaker. As it turns out, their untypical role may serve as a criterion for judging the equivalence of translation.
To present Tsvetaeva’s move from the opening metaphor toward the explicit conclusion of the poem, the paper analyses Пoпытка ревности (“An Attempt at Jealousy”), one of her most famous texts. It also discusses its translations into Polish made by Wiktor Woroszylski, Joanna Salamon and Seweryn Pollak.