LINGUISTIC INNOVATION IN BOLESLAW LESMIAN: MYTHEMATICS AND EXTROPY (POLISH, POETRY, TRANSLATION).
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Title
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LINGUISTIC INNOVATION IN BOLESLAW LESMIAN: MYTHEMATICS AND EXTROPY (POLISH, POETRY, TRANSLATION).
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Identifier
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AAI8501121
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identifier
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8501121
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Creator
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CHCIUK-CELT, ALEXANDRA MARTHA.
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Contributor
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Gregory Rabassa
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Date
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1984
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Slavic and East European
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Abstract
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This paper examines the biography, historical context, poetic philosophy, and linguistic innovations of the Polish poet Boleslaw Lesmian and contains an appendix which consists of 67 of his poems plus English translations. Each poem is translated twice: once in a completely literal, word-for-word manner which is neither poetry nor English, but which furnishes valuable insight into the thought pattern and sentence structure of the original; the second is in verse, since the poet himself considered rhythm and rhyme essential to poetry because they allow words to be classified in a manner not subject to the dictates of logical content. The poet generally used the thirteen-foot syllabotonic verse traditional in Polish; the translations were made into rhymed alexandrines or iambic pentameter, which are equally traditional in English. The translations are followed by notes containing information on the genesis and interpretation of individual poems, plus a discussion of translation problems encountered.;A quarter-century before such things became fashionable, Lesmian was already exploring the roots of poetry in primeval non-rational thinking and magic. Rather than a pointless duplication of reality, he strove for alternative states of consciousness and for a depiction of ongoing metamorphoses, especially failed ones. He was able to accomplish this thanks to the ability of the Polish language to express aborted or dynamic transitions by means of prefixes and suffixes; English translation thus frequently involved the invention of equivalent neologisms, the combination of truncated but recongnizable words, or the formation of adverbial expressions. It was deemed that the virtual inaccessibility to non-Slavs of this poet and the importance of Poland in international developments rendered an annotated translation of a selection of his works a novel and worthwhile undertaking.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Comparative Literature
