"Virgin Mother, daughter of your son". On the prayer to the Virgin (Par. XXXIII, 1-39) in Polish translations
Abstract
The article proposes an in-depth study of St Bernard's Prayer to the Virgin (Par. XXXIII, vv. 1-39) in the six best-known Polish translations of the last one hundred and fifty years (Korsak, Stanisławski, Porębowicz, Świderska, Kuciak, Mikołajewski 2001).
There is a brief mention of other versions or adaptations of Par. XXXIII, vv. 1-39, with particular reference to the work of Ignacy Kraszewski and Stanisław Vincenz.
An in-depth analysis of the translations of the first four tercets follows. Then a more rapid analysis of the remaining nine tercets highlights the major phenomena of enlargement, reduction, substitution and compensation that occur on the lexical-semantic, rhetorical-stylistic and metric-versificatory levels in the six translations analysed.
A separate paragraph is dedicated to the new translation of the Divine Comedy in Polish by Jarosław Mikołajewski (Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2021), which presents innovative aspects compared to the translations that preceded it. The most evident innovative aspect consists mainly in the abandonment of formal elements in favour of a greater focus on content in translation.