Psalm 130 translated by masters of the word: Leopold Staff, Roman Brandstaetter and Czesław Miłosz. Translators’ rivalry or humbleness towards the original text?

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of three translations of Psalm 130 into Polish created by masters of the word: Leopold Staff, Roman Brandstaetter and Czesław Miłosz. Made in the 20th century, they are steeped in distinct literary periods. Leopold Staff’s translation was published before the Second World War, in 1937, whereas the remaining two after the German occupation, in 1968 and 1979, respectively. All three creators, due to their biological age, were familiar with the traditions of the Young Poland movement, however, they did not dominate their linguistic decisions and did not influence either the semantics or the stylistic quirkiness of the translation. Therefore, the analysed versions do not show any significant discrepancies in the scope of style and semantics, but lines 5 and 6 translated by Staff vary significantly from the linguistic choices made by Brandstaetter and Miłosz. The dissimilarity lies in the selected source text: for Staff, it was The Vulgate, while for the other two it was The Hebrew Bible. According to the author’s assessment, the said translations do not show any features of creative rivalry. What can be noticed is the translators’ steady drive to maintain formal and semantic discipline, which, in turn, attests to the fact that they had approached the source text with humbleness.