Rhymes in the Poetry of Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński (Aspects of Translation into Bulgarian)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the rhymes in the poetry of Polish author Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński and the ways they have been translated into the Bulgarian language. First, distinguishing features of the poetic text and the concept of rhyme are discussed, after which basic characteristics of rhymes in Polish poetry are noted. An overview of Gałczyński’s translations into Bulgarian leads to the main focus of the paper which concerns translators’ difficulties in converting the original rhyming pairs into the target language. The analysis is based on three translations of one poem: “Rozmowa liryczna” (“Lyrical Dialogue”), made by two prominent translators, Parvan Stefanov and Dimitar Pantеleev between 1960 and 1984. The observations indicate that the Bulgarian versions of the poem modify the original rhyming patterns due to the specificity of each language, as well as the translators’ individual aesthetic preferences. Almost all rhyming lexical units in the Polish text are adjacent and feminine, while there is a significantly more frequent use of cross and masculine rhymes in the three Bulgarian versions. Also, the translators refuse to preserve several irregular rhymes. The article concludes that the approaches of Stefanov and Panteleev are related to general trends in translating rhymed poetry from Polish into Bulgarian. Among them, the increased presence of masculine rhymes, largely dictated by the analytic nature of the Bulgarian language, seems prominent.