Translator’s struggle with a footnote. Reduction of translator’s paratexts as a poetry-making process – the case of Stanisław Barańczak

Abstract

The paper attempts to make a reflexion on translation techniques, by means of which a translator-poet Stanisław Barańczak reduces the number of footnotes and translator’s comments in the process of translating English-written poetry into Polish. Barańczak’s code of translator, declared in the volume Ocalone w tłumaczeniu, contains the postulate of literary translation which are both “comprehensible” and “poetic”. In the case of poems which were strongly embedded in their original cultural context it means, on the one hand, the necessity to supplement a model reader’s knowledge with additional information, on the other hand, to limit the commentaries which are not directly included into the composition (which are “non-poetic” paratexts). The conflict between both necessities forces Barańczak to develop a non-standard translating practice: making use of intertextual explications, which are however marked (by means of graphemica and punctuation: with brackets, pauses and quotation marks) as explanatory additions which are absent in the original composition, yet introduced arbitrarily by the author. Consequently, the transformation of an intratextual comment into an element of the composition results in a modification of the lyrical message; this, in turn – bearing in mind the creative nature of poetry translation – makes such transformation an element of the artistic process.