The Question of Rendering the Addressee in the Polish Translations of Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
Sławomir Studniarz
Katedra Filologii Angielskiej Uniwersytet Warmińsko-Mazurski w OlsztynieAbstract
The subject of the article is the question of rendering the addressee in the Polish translations
of Song of Myself by Walt Whitman, in which a certain indeterminacy in the shaping of
the recipient can be observed. The crucial distinction between the intratextual addressee and
the extratextual addressee projected by the text, based on the typology proposed by David
Herman, allows taking into consideration the personal reader as the communicative partner of
the speaker in the poem. Initially, the Polish translation of the poem by Andrzej Szuba projects
a community as the addressee, whereas from the translation by Ludmiła Marjańska the
image of the individual recipient emerges. However, further on in the translation by Szuba
the collective addressee changes into the single one, whereas in the translation by Marjańska
the opposite process takes place because in the final section the individual addressee turns
into the collective one. But it is not an unspecified community that is the participant of the
communicative situation projected by the text; it is an individual, it is each personal reader.
It is the individual extratextual addressee that is the beneficiary of the poetic undertaking.
Unfortunately, the existing Polish translations are not conducive to the understanding of the
role assigned to the extratextual addressee by the text, and make it hard for the Polish reader
to form a proper mental image of the recipient projected by the poem.
Keywords:
literary translation, epic poem, intratextual addressee, extratextual addressee, horizontal address, vertical addressReferences
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Katedra Filologii Angielskiej Uniwersytet Warmińsko-Mazurski w Olsztynie
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