Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

This article discusses a few very exceptional translations of the famous Shakespearean love tragedy. The first one was published in 1892 by Wiktoria Rosicka, one of the first Łódź writers and columnists, and remained the only Shakespearean translation of this woman author. The second translation was written by Zofia Siwicka, an eminent translator awarded by Pen-Club for her achievements in rendering Shakespeare’s plays into Polish in a faithful and concise way. Issued in 1956, it was the seventh of the fifteen Shakespearean translations published by her. The third feminine Polish translation of Romeo and Juliet was created in the late 1980s and the early 1990s by Krystyna Berwińska, prose writer, playwright and translator of Elizabethan literature. This latter translation has unfortunately never been published. The early 1990s was the time when the late Stanisław Barańczak’s translations of Shakespeare’s plays dominated the market and the publishers decided not to issue Berwińska’s translation. They decided, however, to publish the Polish translation of the script of the famous Romeo and Juliet film with Leonardo DiCaprio, thanks to which we have got access to the work of another woman translator, Elżbieta Gałązka-Salamon, who in the late 1990s proposed her incomplete, nevertheless interesting, Polish version of the tragedy following the script of Baz Luhrmann’s film.
The excerpt of the Shakespearean drama studied in the present paper is the first meeting of the young Capulet with Romeo at the ball. The fragment has been chosen since it represents some of the main characteristics of the tragedy, including references to the themes of love and sin, wit and courtship, faith and death. The conversation led by the protagonists takes the form of a sonnet, which adds to the lyrical atmosphere of the moment. One of the conclusions is that 20th-century women translators were excellent at retaining the sonnet form and the melody of the text. Another conclusion concerns the market-related issues, which, sadly enough, have made it impossible for Polish readers to get acquainted with Berwińska’s translation of Romeo and Juliet.