Occulta sapientiae. On the translation of Psalm 51 by Czesław Miłosz
The essay focuses on Czesław Miłosz’s translation of one of the most celebrated
penitential psalms, Psalm 51. Contrary to the medieval practice of illuminating books
of psalms, and thereby providing a vivid narrative and personal context for the
lamentations and pleas, Miłosz aims at highlighting the universal and archetypical
dimension of King David’s prayers. Consequently, he strives to create a new hieratic
convention which would reconcile the suggestiveness and prosodic specificity of
Hebrew poetry with its liturgical application, as well as sustain the coherence of theological
interpretation. Struggling with the characteristic patterns of repetitions and
parallelisms, Miłosz draws the lexical and syntactic inspiration from the earliest
Polish translations of psalms, Psałterz Puławski in particular. The resulting translation
is a complex amalgam of the religious intuitions of Judaism, the hieratic tradition of
the Polish language, and the semantic intensity of Miłosz’s poetry.

Occulta sapientiae. On the translation of Psalm 51 by Czesław Miłosz
The essay focuses on Czesław Miłosz’s translation of one of the most celebrated
penitential psalms, Psalm 51. Contrary to the medieval practice of illuminating books
of psalms, and thereby providing a vivid narrative and personal context for the
lamentations and pleas, Miłosz aims at highlighting the universal and archetypical
dimension of King David’s prayers. Consequently, he strives to create a new hieratic
convention which would reconcile the suggestiveness and prosodic specificity of
Hebrew poetry with its liturgical application, as well as sustain the coherence of theological
interpretation. Struggling with the characteristic patterns of repetitions and
parallelisms, Miłosz draws the lexical and syntactic inspiration from the earliest
Polish translations of psalms, Psałterz Puławski in particular. The resulting translation
is a complex amalgam of the religious intuitions of Judaism, the hieratic tradition of
the Polish language, and the semantic intensity of Miłosz’s poetry.