The Berlin Anglicist and linguist Martin Lehnert (1955: 33) says that there are some 30,000 alliterative lines in Old English, 7,300 Eddic long lines, 6,000 and 335 in Old Saxon (Heliand and Genesis) and 200 in Old High German (Hildebrandslied, Muspilli etc.). The following contains some notes on alliteration in the Poetic Edda. The three main types of alliteration ([a] for alliterating, [x] for not alliterating stave) are [aa/ax] [ax/ax] and [xa/ax]. There are, however, a number of cases where the principal stave (Hauptstab, hofuðstafr, Snorri Sturluson, c.1220, quoted from A. Heusler 1918-1919, §35) is not in the normal place. Moreover, there are also several lines where no alliteration is available, and where, although I am not a medieval Icelandic poet, I would compose the line to make it more alliterative. Toward the end of the article is given a select list of 50 alphabetically arranged alliterations from the Poetic Edda.
Starting with the thesis that Gombrowicz’s unique “linguistic form”, which is a stylistic equivalent of form as an anthropological-philosophical category, we claim that it has become an important point of reference, a kind of stylistic stamp or matrix, used and modified by contemporary Polish authors. Following Olaf Kühl’s suggestions in his Stilistik einer Verdrängung. Zur Prosa von Witold Gombrowicz, we assume that indeterminacy and ambiguity are most characteristic features of Gombrowicz’s style clearly manifested upon the level of semantics (polysemy) and syntax (nominalised construction, retardation syntax). Reading texts by Wojciech Kuczok, Jerzy Pilch, Micha³ Witkowski, and Szczepan Twardoch, we find variously functionalized features of this style on all formal and thematic levels.
Joseph Conrad’s narratives featuring Marlow are composed as stories within stories, in which Marlow (the intradiegetic narrator) tells stories to his few listeners (the intradiegetic addresses). Critics have found analogies of these narratives with the Polish gawęda tradition and the English sailor’s yarn, both related to oral story-telling. This paper sets out to look at one literary device — alliteration — found in early works narrated by Marlow (Youth, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim), and to indicate that various effects achieved by alliterative phrases (onomatopoeic, emphatic, rhythmical, and autotelic) all contribute to this narrator’s status as an oral performer.
In the article, from different linguistic and literary theoretical perspectives, parodic function of anaphora is analyzed on samples of Croatian contemporary poetry. The aim is to present how a poem, especially one that is not from the contemporary lyric collection, is not a realization of „mythic time”, but in its rhythms and structures, where repetition is condition sine qua non of lyricism, it keeps a trace, a memory of the imaginary, of the myth which in speech revives what is hidden and suppressed.
The present article discusses selected examples of the poetic means which Seneca uses in order to achieve the effect of synaesthesia in his tragedies. An analysis of these examples reveals that the poet makes the most of the Latin language’s semantic and musical potential and in doing so achieves quite spectacular sensory effects.
In the context of a long-term project of collecting and cataloguing the alliterating word-pairs in the earliest stages of German, i.e. Old and Middle High German, the role of word-pairs of legal origin and-/-or context has been repeatedly addressed. Alliteration is defined according to the Germanic tradition of alliterating only stressed syllables; word-pairs as terms joined by conjunctions with the same morpho-syntactic elements. Here we study the use of the rhetoric device in “Reinhard Fuchs,” a text that survives in both Early Middle High and Middle High German versions. The word-pairs are discussed in the context of their appearance in the transmission of the text, within the context of the story, then assessed with regard to the recorded occurrences of the pairings in earlier and / or near contemporary works. This collection suggests hints of the kind of education to which the author was exposed, and characterizes the work as using traditional rhetoric elements within its specific genre. It further supplements the ongoing survey of the alliterating word-pair within the history of recorded German.
The article presents the linguistic games in selected poems by Małgorzata Strzałkowska. The subject of the research were 300 works from ten volumes that have been published over the last twenty-five years. The text examines these verbal games, which are mainly based on the sound layer of the utterance, i.e. sounds / sounds, onomatopoeia, rhymes, and rhythm. It was found that Strzałkowska’s poems can be ready-made lesson plans that can be used in Polish lessons, in phonetics, in voice emission as well as during speech diagnosis or therapy.
The article discusses, both polemically and critically, a few instances in which Maciej Świerkocki, in his new translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, renders the novel’s puns into Polish. In order to indicate other possible translations in this regard, the author of the article quotes from previous Polish version by Maciej Słomczyński and the Czech translation by Aloys Skoumal.
PL
Artykuł stanowi polemiczne i krytyczne omówienie kilku przykładowych tłumaczeń gier słownych w powieści Jamesa Joyce’a Ulisses w nowym przekładzie Macieja Świerkockiego. Aby pokazać inne możliwości translatoryczne, autor artykułu przytacza także tłumaczenia Macieja Słomczyńskiego i Aloysa Skoumala.
The article explores procedures used for the rendition of alliteration in the novel Pnin written by Vladimir Nabokov (1957). Two target texts will be compared. The first one is the Polish translation prepared by Anna Kołyszko (1987), the second one is the Russian version done by Sergey Ilyin (1993). The analysis of the texts will draw on research into three major thematic areas: proper names, appearance and feelings/emotions where an accumulation of alliteration is distinctly noticeable. These fields are linked by the focal character, a Russian émigré who comes to America after the Russian Revolution. His oddness and eccentricity are constantly emphasized by the unreliable narrator, whose speech abounds in alliterations. In the original this device not only reinforces the narrator’s orality but also structures the image of the focal character. In the target texts alliteration is subject to various formal modifications. In many cases it is substituted by onomatopoeias, consonances, descriptive equivalents or it is simply abandoned. As a result, the translators do not always preserve the alliterative effect (especially when it comes to proper names, feelings and emotions). Translation procedures applied by the translators allow them to achieve partial equivalence on the semantic level. Inaccuracies in this field are visible in examples referring to Pnin’s feelings and emotions in which alliterative word strings are omitted and semantically distant counterparts are used.
Celem artykułu jest opisanie kilku mechanizmów językowych, które wykorzystał Tomasz Olbratowski w felietonach, komentujących aktualne wydarzenia w Polsce. Do gier, które zasadzają się na zabawie znaczeniem, należy zaliczyć: reinterpretację etymologiczną, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem komizmu opartego na skrótowcach, zmianę formy graficznej i aliterację głoskową.
EN
The aim of the article is to describe a few language mechanisms used by Tomasz Olbratowski in a series of radio segments commenting the current events in Poland. Among the described mechanisms there are: etymological reinterpretation (especially humor based on abbreviations), the change of the graphic form of a word, and alliteration.
The article analyses the poetry where verse and prose, two varieties of artistic language organization, cooperate closely. Modern poetry is open for experiments. For this reason many authors allow themselves to combine poetic and prosaic elements in one text. As a result, we get texts that carry a double emotional loading. Among such texts there are rhyme metrical prose, strophic prose, verse in prose, vers libre and pollymetric constructions that combine verse and prose.
The article presents a short comparative analysis of two versions of the English ro mance in verse Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – the original text from the 14th century and its modern translation by J.R.R. Tolkien. The Middle English source text uses a North-West English dialect and is an interesting example of a late revival of alliteration originally rooted in the old English tradition. Alliteration as a formal organizing principle is combined with end-rhymes which complete the structure of the poem; this is both sophisticated and rare. Tolkien’s modern rendition of the romance recognizes and respects its dominant structural elements and attempts to recreate all the formal aspects of the text as adequately as possible. The modern version, while being a translation, acquires the semi-authorial signature of Tolk ien, both a translator and scholar who creates a highly competent and historically informed rendition. The translator’s craft is particularly visible when Tolkien’s ver sion is juxtaposed with the Polish translation by Andrzej Wicher. The linguistic and cultural distance between Polish and English is larger than the distance between the original and the modern rendition in English, and, as a result, the translation of Andrzej Wicher manages to reproduce only a limited number of alliterations and hence loses many artistic features that were essential components of the original text.
Celem niniejszego artykułu jest analiza i porównanie rozwiązań translatorskich zastosowanych w przekładzie aliteracji. Materiał badawczy został zaczerpnięty z utworu Pnin (1957) Vladimira Nabokova, jego polskojęzycznej wersji przetłumaczonej przez Annę Kołyszko (1987) roku oraz rosyjskojęzycznego wariantu przygotowanego przez Siergieja Iljina (1993). Nagromadzenie aliteracji jest widoczne w trzech grupach tematycznych. Pierwszą stanowią nazwy własne, następnie wygląd zewnętrzny, uczucia oraz emocje. Wymienione grupy tematyczne odnoszą się do postaci głównego bohatera Timofieja Pnina – rosyjskiego emigranta mieszkającego w Ameryce. Oprócz niego niezwykle ważną postacią w utworze jest „nierzetelny” narrator, który w swych opisach „kreuje” ekscentryczny i nieco dziwaczny obraz głównego bohatera. W oryginale to właśnie dzięki aliteracjom zarówno jego wypowiedzi, jak również sam Pnin nabierają charakterystycznego „humorystycznego” zabarwienia. W przekładach nie zawsze ten efekt zostaje osiągnięty bowiem aliteracje ulegają formalnym modyfikacjom i są zastąpione przez onomatopeje, konsonse, ekwiwalenty opisowe (szczególnie dotyczy to wyglądu zewnętrznego) bądź zostają całkowicie utracone (w grupie obejmującej imiona własne oraz uczucia i emocje). Zastosowane zabiegi translatorskie doprowadziły do zmiany lub utraty oryginalnej, fonetycznej wartości. Umożliwiły również osiągnięcie częściowej ekwiwalencji na poziomie semantycznym. Istotne rozbieżności na tej płaszczyźnie są widoczne w przykładach opisujących emocje Pnina, w których tłumacze nie tylko nie oddali aliteracji, ale również wykorzystali odległe semantycznie odpowiedniki.
EN
The article explores procedures used for the rendition of alliteration in the novel Pnin written by Vladimir Nabokov (1957). Two target texts will be compared. The first one is the Polish translation prepared by Anna Kołyszko (1987), the second one is the Russian version done by Sergey Ilyin (1993). The analysis of the texts will draw on research into three major thematic areas: proper names, appearance and feelings/emotions where an accumulation of alliteration is distinctly noticeable. These fields are linked by the focal character, a Russian émigré who comes to America after the Russian Revolution. His oddness and eccentricity are constantly emphasized by the unreliable narrator, whose speech abounds in alliterations. In the original this device not only reinforces the narrator’s orality but also structures the image of the focal character. In the target texts alliteration is subject to various formal modifications. In many cases it is substituted by onomatopoeias, consonances, descriptive equivalents or it is simply abandoned. As a result, the translators do not always preserve the alliterative effect (especially when it comes to proper names, feelings and emotions). Translation procedures applied by the translators allow them to achieve partial equivalence on the semantic level. Inaccuracies in this field are visible in examples referring to Pnin’s feelings and emotions in which alliterative word strings are omitted and semantically distant counterparts are used.
Język polski i angielski różnią się pod względem najczęściej stosowanych fonicznych środków stylistycznych, jak również związanego z powyższym stopnia ekspresywności. Jednym z czynników kształtujących odmienne tradycje stylistyczne są systemy fonemiczne danych języków. Do najistotniejszych różnic fonologicznych między polskim a angielskim zaliczyć można odmienny stosunek samogłosek do spółgłosek oraz reguły fonotaktyczne (zbitki spółgłoskowe, status geminat). Pod względem stylistycznym język polski i angielski charakteryzują się również odmiennością typologiczną oraz częstotliwością zastosowania aliteracji, która wpływa nie tylko na poziom foniczny, ale także znaczeniowy tekstu. W języku angielskim często stosowana jest aliteracja nagłosowa, podczas gdy w polskim – sufiksalna. Celem niniejszego artykułu jest porównanie tych dwóch systemów fonologicznych oraz – w oparciu o wybrane przykłady (literatura piękna, slogany reklamowe, teksty piosenek) – przedstawienie konsekwencji tych różnic, w tym wyzwań, jakie stoją przed tłumaczem. Foniczne środki stylistyczne są szczególnie trudne z perspektywy translatorycznej, zmuszając tłumacza do wyboru między zachowaniem formy i treści lub też do zastosowania innego środka stylistycznego (np. wykorzystania potencjału polskich zbitek spółgłoskowych, bądź użycia aliteracji w innym miejscu tekstu).
EN
Polish and English differ with respect to typical phonic stylistic devices, as well as the resulting degree of their expressiveness. Among the factors influencing distinct stylistic traditions are the phonemic systems of the two languages. The most significant phonological contrasts between Polish and English comprise a vowel-consonant ratio and phonotactic patterns (different consonantal clusters and the status of geminates). Stylistically, Polish and English differ also with regard to the type and frequency of occurrence of alliteration, a stylistic device that is significant not only from the phonetic, but also from the semantic perspective. In English, alliterative devices are used in the onset, while in Polish – in the coda. The aim of the article is to compare the two systems and, with the use of selected examples (comprising poetry, advertising slogans and song lyrics), to show the consequences of such differences and challenges posed to the translator. Phonetic stylistic devices are particularly problematic in the process of translation, frequently forcing the translator to choose between the form and the meaning or to compensate for the loss with the use of a different stylistic device (e.g. Polish complex consonantal clusters or the use of alliteration in different positions compared with the original).
Овој труд ги разработува проблемите кои произлегуваат при преводот на поезијата од македонски на полски и од полски на македонски јазик. При тоа се обрнува посебно внимание на формата на поетската творба како ограничувачки фактор на слободата на преведувачот. Во статијата се земени примери од постари преводи, како и примери земени од наставата по превод и преведувачката работилница на Семинарот за македонски јазик, литература и култура. Се става акцент на дилемата дали да се зачува формата и до кој степен содржината треба да подлегне на губење во преводот.
EN
This article deals with the problems which appear in translating poetry from Macedonian into Polish and from Polish into Macedonian. At the same time it pays special attention to the poetic form as a limiting factor of the translator’s freedom. The article presents examples of older translations, as well as examples from translation classes at the University of Skopje and from the translation workshop at the Summer School of Macedonian Language, Literature and Culture. The focus is on the dilemma of whether the form should be preserved and to what degree the contents could succumb to translation loss.
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