Until now there has been no Polish translation of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica,
although five Polish classicists: W. Klinger, Z. Abramowiczówna, A. Świderkówna,
W. Steffen and W. Appel, have translated some fragments of this Hellenistic epos. The
paper attempts at comparing these fragments with the first complete translation of the
poem done by Emilia Żybert, in order to trace the strategies used by the translators.
A translator of epic poetry must first of all decide on a form the poem is going to have in
Polish, where there are three main traditions of translating eposes: thirteen-syllable
verse, prose or hexameter. Hexameter was chosen by five out of the six translators; only
Świderkówna decided to render the Apollonian poem in thirteen-syllable verse. There
are also stylistic and lexical differences, due to individual preferences of the translators
as well as to the language style characteristic of their times. Klinger, for instance, prefers
the stylistics of Modernism, while Steffen uses archaization. However, the aim of the
article is not to evaluate the translations, but to open up a discussion on the most adequate
contemporary form for poems written more than two thousand years ago.

Until now there has been no Polish translation of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica,
although five Polish classicists: W. Klinger, Z. Abramowiczówna, A. Świderkówna,
W. Steffen and W. Appel, have translated some fragments of this Hellenistic epos. The
paper attempts at comparing these fragments with the first complete translation of the
poem done by Emilia Żybert, in order to trace the strategies used by the translators.
A translator of epic poetry must first of all decide on a form the poem is going to have in
Polish, where there are three main traditions of translating eposes: thirteen-syllable
verse, prose or hexameter. Hexameter was chosen by five out of the six translators; only
Świderkówna decided to render the Apollonian poem in thirteen-syllable verse. There
are also stylistic and lexical differences, due to individual preferences of the translators
as well as to the language style characteristic of their times. Klinger, for instance, prefers
the stylistics of Modernism, while Steffen uses archaization. However, the aim of the
article is not to evaluate the translations, but to open up a discussion on the most adequate
contemporary form for poems written more than two thousand years ago.