Polish editions of German Romantic tales. From translation to edition

Abstract

The subject of this article is two collections of Romantic tales published in the “Black Romanticism” series: Baśnie z Phantasusa by Ludwig Tieck and Łubowickie baśnie i bajki by Joseph von Eichendorff. Despite the common series and the genre features that link the two books, the collections are fundamentally different, which weighed on the decisions made during their translation and the final form of the text. The collections also demonstrate the complexity and existence of different forms of Romantic tales within Kunstmärchen and Volksmärchen. Tieck’s collection includes works from the first volume of his greatest work, the crowning achievement of his mature oeuvre of Phantasus, published and improved by the author a number of times. The multitude of editions, however, raises the question of selecting the right textual basis, the novelty of the works, the language of both prose and poetry, the tricks used, and the literary solutions characteristic of Tieck, while forcing the translator and editor to intricately weave the text of the Polish version of the book and annotate it with comments. Eichendorff’s collection, on the other hand, includes several works and fragments created in his early youth, left as a legacy and unpublished during the writer’s lifetime. Published by his grandson, composed into a cycle, embellished and titled, they collided with a recently found manuscript challenging all previous editing and translation decisions. These two collections of tales, so similar and different in many respects, reveal features of the works of the German Romantics on display, and raise important questions and suggest solutions relevant to the works of Tieck and Eichendorff, the editions of German Romantic tales and other works written during this era and published in Polish. They demonstrate the pitfalls hidden in them and give numerous tips to editors and translators.