Król-Duch w przekładzie Waltera Schamschuli

Abstract

The article is devoted to the translation of Juliusz Słowacki’s King-Spirit into German. The author of the translation of this romantic epic is Walter Schamschula, a Slavist born in Prague in 1929. He became famous for his research into Russian, Czech and Polish literature, but most of all he became known as an outstanding translator. Aside the aforementioned King-Spirit, he translated Słowacki’s Beniowski and Forefathers’ Eve by Adam Mickiewicz into German. Thanks to work at the University of Berkeley, he met Czesław Miłosz (which influenced his interests). Schamschula not only translated The King-Spirit, his ambitions went in the artistic direction, as he himself admitted in the introduction: “Fidelity to the original in terms of meaning and form must give way to fidelity to a higher kind: the translator must have embodied himself so far into the world of the poet’s ideas, felt his poetic cosmos, that he should succeed in writing as if it were written by Słowacki himself, but writing in German”. Libera considers Schamschula’s comments on individual excerpts from Słovacki’s epic, often detailed and erudite explanations that sometimes take up a whole page of print, to be the most valuable in the publication.