BARAÑCZAK S. - Saved in Translation. Sketches on the workshop of a translator of poetry ...

BARAÑCZAK Stanislaw - Saved in Translation. Sketches on the workshop of the translator of poetry with the inclusion of a small anthology of translations. Poznan 1992. a5 Publishing House. 8, pp. 442, [1]. broch.
Covers slightly dusty, otherwise very good condition.
"OCALONE IN TŁUMACZENIU - A fundamental book by Stanislaw Barańczak, an outstanding poet and phenomenal translator, consists of three parts. The first, A Small but Maximalist Translatological Manifesto, is more general in nature and presents theoretical conclusions from Barańczak's more than twenty-five years of experience as a translator of poetry. The second part contains analytical sketches about individual translations from foreign languages into Polish, both by other translators and by Barańczak himself (including, naturally, the translation of Shakespeare) - and from Polish into other languages (here, in particular, an excellent story about how the Author, together with a young Californian woman, translated Wisława Szymborska's Voice on Pornography into English). The third part, Small anthology of translation-problems, may prove particularly interesting for the Reader, as it combines theory and practice in an attractive way. It consists of forty very sophisticated (and therefore extremely difficult to translate into our language) poems by various authors (as different as, for example, Saint John of the Cross and John Lennon), from different eras and different languages, accompanied by a commentary, explaining what the difficulties of translation are - and finally - from Barańczak's virtuoso translations, thanks to which we can read for the first time in Polish, for example, Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven or Anna Akhmatova's deeply poignant Requiem as they are in the original - brilliant."(From the publisher).