Boris Paternu (1926—2021)

The article discusses the growing interest in Central and Eastern European literary modernisms in the context of the transnational turn, the translational turn and the archival turn recently diagnosed in the New Modernist Studies. The aims of the investigations are twofold: (1) to draw attention to the specificity of Slavic cultures of artistic translation and their ability to refocus and rebalance Western Eurocentric research on literary modernism, and (2) to introduce a new series of studies of the transnational interconnections between Slavic modernisms.

The development of modernism in the history of Ukrainian literature at the beginning of the 20th century was accompanied by a discussion in which the younger generation of writers opposed the conservative attitudes of the elders. The variety of artistic trends of that time led to the complexity of defining many aspects of the formation of modernism, including the question of the chronological framework of Ukrainian modernism as a phenomenon, as well as the origins of the ideological shift in Ukrainian culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The task of mastering the new content of contemporary “foreign” literature was set by the literary groups “Moloda Muza” and “Ukrayins’ka hata”, who turned the development of the poetics of modernism into their aesthetic credo. It is important to determine what role literary translation, that Ukrainian writers in the early 20th century attached great importance, played in this process.

The Irish writer Oscar Wilde was extremely popular in Croatian culture in the first decades of the 20th century. Although Croatian writers of that time generally did not read the original works of British authors but rather their translations, Wilde’s popularity in Germany and Vienna sparked interest in his works among the Croatian readership and spectatorship. This paper explores the translation of Wilde’s Salomé from German by Julije Benešić and Nikola Andrić, and the complex influence that this translation had on Croatian literature of early modernism, relying primarily on the interpretation of the same motif in the texts of young Fran Galović and Miroslav Krleža. The paper argues that the influence of Wilde’s aestheticism is visible not only in the adoption of typical motifs, characters, or atmosphere but also in the autonomous and self-reflective language play in Krleža’s texts.

The paper aims to examine Serbian translations of Whitman and Poe published by the representatives of the 1920s avant-garde movements and to point to the place of these translations in the context of the developing Serbian modernism. A special focus is on the book series “Albatross”, a short-lived but important project of Belgrade avant-gardists, which significantly influenced the course of Serbian literature.

The paper presents the translation concept of the Library Albatross (1921), the most significant project of today’s canonical Serbian modernists and avant-garde writers. This concept is paradigmatic within the modernist creative tendencies and programs between the two world wars. Although Library published only the translation of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, the list of announced translations, the paratexts that accompany the Library’s promotional material, and the translation published, allow us to discuss specific translation strategies of Albatross. Albatross translation practice is a template for more comprehensive thinking about poetic innovations of Serbian literature after First World War. Moreover, the Albatross translation platform allows us to consider the concepts of modern/modernism, periphery/center, and world literature in Serbian culture during the twenties.

The paper deals with the Polish translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra made by the Polish writer Wacław Berent (1905). The translation is considered in the context of its epoch (“Young Poland”) and of Berent’s own literary work. The analysis aims at distinguishing the most important stylistic features of the translation: poetic devices typical of Young Poland, such as archaisms, neologisms, and reinforcement of the original’s audial qualities. Despite being criticized as “mannerist”, Berent’s translation appears as an innovative example of modernist translation, consistent with the symbolist model of translation.

Among the great number of translations by Jan Kasprowicz we find those of all tragedies by Aeschylus. Kasprowicz was fascinated and inspired by this playwright since he was a schoolboy. He also considered Aeschylus an artistic soulmate. This paper is devoted to the beginning of the second part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, manuscripts of which have been damaged. Only 21 verses have been reconstructed from the original. However, in Kasprowicz’s translation, the beginning takes 46 verses.

The article deals with the analysis of Italian and Croatian translations of constructivist poems (the “conses”) by Srečko Kosovel, one of the most important Slovene poets. The translations of selected Kosovel’s constructivist poems are analysed by using Andrew Chesterman’s translation strategies. The analysis shows that, for the most part, in Croatian and Italian translations the literal translation strategy prevails, with Italian translations including more frequently other translation possibilities. In general, both translators have strived to preserve the multifaceted aspects of Kosovel’s constructivist poems by adopting a predominantly foreignising translation approach.

In the paper we analyze and compare two translations of Prešeren’s poem Slovo od mladosti (Farewell to youth) as cultural and literary artifacts. We focus on linguistic and stylistic solutions as well as decisions in the context of cultural transfer. First, we research the translation by František L. Čelakovski (1799—1852), published in 1832 in the newspaper Časopis českého Museum from the period of romanticism, and second, the translation of the same Prešeren’s poem by Josef Hiršal (1920—2003), a famous poet of experimental poetry and a well-known Czech translator of his time, published in the book Můj sen šel po hladině (My dream faded on the water surface, 1978). We emphasize on Hiršal's translation from the period of the Czech experimental poetry from the sixtieth and seventieth.

The article is devoted to the reception of Czesław Miłosz’s body of work in translations into Lithuanian language as well as his cooperation with Lithuanian authors. The issue addressed is the reception of Miłosz’s work among the writers of the “Literatūros lankai” emigrant journal and in Tomas Venclova’s eyes, who himself is one of the main translators of Miłosz into Lithuanian, and the author of a newly published traduction of his A Treatise on Poetry.

Catholic priests who were practicing artistic creativity, mostly poets, in the Czech lands, formed a group called the Catholic Modern in the nineteenth century. Jakub Deml, a Czech priest, poet, and writer from Moravia, was in close contact with the group. His works were not always positively received by concurrent readers, but today he is considered a precursor of contemporary literary trends, especially surrealism. This
article presents a portrait of one of the most original Czech writers of the first half of the twentieth century. The text also takes into account the issue of the Polish translation of his work Zapomenuté svĕtlo (Forgotten Light) by Andrzej Czcibor-Piotrowski and published in Wołów in 2000 by the Czarne Publishing House.

The paper focuses on Ukrainian and Russian translations of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, published in 1989 and 1990. The framework for the analysis is provided by Loren Glass’s idea of a significant role of obscene vocabulary in the aesthetics of the twentieth-century Anglo-American literary modernism. The comparison of the two translations shows significant differences in the translators’ approaches to rendering Lawrence’s sexual-based language.

This paper shall attempt to explain, from a literary historical perspective, the genesis of the Croatian translation of Zofja Nałkowska’s novel Niedobra miłość, considering the state and tendencies — both related and disparate — in Polish prose in the time of interwar Modernism and Croatian literature in the early 1930s, keeping in mind that the translation by Zdenka Marković, Zla ljubav, and Miroslav Krleža’s novel Povratak Filipa Latinovicza, were both printed in 1932.

The aim of the paper is to carry out a comparative analysis of the Polish translation of one of the most important Croatian modernist dramas A Trilogy of Dubrovnik. Ivo Vojnović’s text from 1900 was translated into Polish relatively quickly. Its first excerpts were published as early as 1904. The translation of the entire text by Helena d’Abancourt de Franqueville appeared in the periodical “Przegląd Polski” in 1906, and
the book version was published in 1910. In the same year, the play was also staged in the theatre. The article focuses primarily on the problem of the performability of the translation, understood as a reflection of theatrical signs encrypted in the source text and visible in the translation, and shows what translation difficulties are associated with it.

Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s drama Lato w Nohant was translated to Slovak twice: first time, before the war, but that translation ultimately did not receive acclaim and fell into oblivion; and then again in the 1970s, during the so-called normalisation of what was at the time Czechoslovakia. In this historical context, this translation would be
considered socialist realist. However, the translation of Iwaszkiewicz’s text defends itself from such a classification.

The publication discusses the latest translation initiatives by Wojciech Gałązka, a Bulgarian and literary scholar and a translator of Bulgarian literature. Between 2019 and 2020, six works by Bulgarian writers and poets translated by Wojciech Gałązka were published: the novel Under the Yoke by Ivan Vazov (2020); volumes of verse Revealed from Anywhere by Petar Parvanov (2019), Seasons of Feelings by Petar Karaangov
(2020), Moon Spots by Nikolay Liliev (2020), A Dream of Happiness by Pencho Slaveykov (2020), as well as poetic prose and poems included in the collection Against the Absence by Nikolay Kantchev (2020). The review has been supplemented with a commentary on specific problems related to translation practice, such as sound and grammatical structures, the translatability of idiomatic expressions, taking into account the literary convention in translation and issues related to the understanding of translation as an intercultural transfer.