Inferno and Los Caprichos of a Translator. Translation of Intertextual References in Andrzej Bursa’s Poems

Abstract

In his poetic output, Andrzej Bursa alluded to a variety of Polish and foreign artistic works: mostly poetry and prose, but not only (e.g. Goya’s Los Caprichos and Dante’s Divine Comedy). The paper discusses the intertextual allusions in Bursa’s poems and analyzes the translation techniques applied Kevin Christianson and Halina Abłamowicz (Utwory zebrane. Selected Poems, 2008). In the first part, a brief introduction of the issue of intertextuality and its translation is presented. The analysis concerns the function of those allusions and it leads to seeing what was preserved and what was lost in translation, and in what way it influences the final form of the English versions. As in a number of cases the translators did not use the already existing (and published) English translations of the quoted works, a question are asked whether the references remained recognizable.