THE POEM “TKANINA” BY ZBIGNIEW HERBERT AND UKRAINIAN TRANSLATION BY VIKTOR DMYTRUK

Abstract

The author considers Zbigniew Herbert’s lyrical masterpiece “Tkanina” (1998), written almost three months before his death. In this latest poetic, Herbert expresses his perception of the world and himself, as well as his sparse self-reflections. In terms of genre and style, the researcher describes this poem consisting of two stanzas as a supplication (first stanza) and a farewell (second stanza). Sometimes the genre of this poem is interpreted as a literary and ethical testament, given that Zbigniew Herbert wrote it almost three months before his death. The author of the article has also included some comments on the translation of this poem by Viktor Dmytruk (*1945–†10 February 2024), who is known for his best Ukrainian translations of Herbert’s poetry. The researcher shows that in the case of the poem “Tkanina”, the translator faced the problem of reproducing the semantic content of the text and the need to preserve the rhymes according to the ABBA CDDC scheme present in the original. Looking for the optimal solution, the translator balanced between adequately conveying the meaning of words and tropes and searching for successful rhymes, and since it was not entirely possible to find words to rhyme that matched the original, he adjusted the semantics to rhyme, limiting himself to words similar in meaning. As a result of this approach, semantic nuances in rhyming words are sometimes lost in translation. What Herbert had in mind, relying on the guess of an inquisitive reader, and therefore expressed in a hint, however, easily readable, the translator says directly. For Herbert, the epithet “brzeg niedaleki” is situational and deeply personal. With this key psychological epithet, the poet expresses his piercing pain, unfathomable sadness due to the feeling of imminent departure. The poem, thus, constitutes a touching poetic farewell to the real shore, on which he is still “here and now”, but which is already moving away from him in a fleeting aging memory. In Viktor Dmytruk’s translation, the epithet “берег одвічний”(“the eternal coast”) appeared instead of the epithet “brzeg niedaleki”. As a result of such a replacement, the translated stanza turned out to be too general, the maxims expressed in it about crossing the border that separates life from death apply to all people in general.