Are there reasons to be sad? Wisława Szymborska’s translation of Vesna Parun’s poem Balada prevarenog cvijeća

Abstract

The subject of the analysis is Wisława Szymborska’s translation of Vesna Parun’s poem Balada prevarenog cvijeća. This is the only work from Croatian poetry translated by the Polish Nobel Prize winner. It was published in 1960 in the anthology Liryka jugosłowiańska and in the journal “Życie Literackie”. The most important changes that take place in translation are: the increased presence of certain stylistic devices, primarily anaphora and syntactic parallelism, the simplification of metaphoricity, i.e. increasing the communicativeness of the poem in the sphere of imagery, reducing emotionality and giving nature more subjectivity and causality. All these elements are included in the original text. The Polish poet does not misappropriate the intention of the text. Her changes in stylistic devices are within the poetics and semantics of the original work. Therefore, if there is any reason to be sad at all, it is only that there are no more translations of Croatian poetry by Szymborska.