Considerazioni sulla traduzione polacca delle Novelle di Arrigo Boito

The paper discusses some translation problems in the Polish version of four fantasy short stories by Italian writer and composer Arrigo Boito: ‘Iberia’ (1868), ‘L’alfier nero’ (1868), ‘Il pugno chiuso’ (1870), and ‘Il trapezio’ (1873–1874). The book with their translations by Aleksandra Cypko and Klaudia Sarafin was published by the Cracow-based publishing house Austeria in 2021. The challenges faced in translation work were manifold, starting with the reproduction of Boito’s stylistic and poetic peculiarities in contemporary Polish. In this paper, I first survey the salient features of Boito’s literary Italian and style to focus subsequently on the Polish translators’ solutions for rendering loanwords and technical words and to examine the functions of the notes and the paratextual apparatus of the translations. In the final part of the paper, I address the issue of translating the antinomies underlying Boito’s writing. In this sense, his four short stories represent an ideal expression of the dualistic conception of Scapigliatura, an important artistic movement in which the young Boito was involved. To find metaphors and similes through which to adequately reproduce this dominant feature of Boito’s writing was one of the most difficult challenges for the Polish translators.