Whitman in Ukraine

[Nina Shevchuk]

That sounds good to me. I will keep your email for future reference -- for whenever I find my way from under the pile of Russian translations :)
  Meanwhile, FYI, here's what the Archive's director has collected so far:
   
  Nina, 

For info on Polish translations, you may want to write to Marta Skwara, of Szczecin University in Poland. Or I can write to her since I met her this February in Paris. Just fyi her email is

<Marta.Skwara at univ.szczecin.pl> 

Here are a couple of things she has written. We may want to consider these before writing her with questions. Ken             Skwara, Marta. Krag transcendentalistów amerykanskich w literaturze polskiej XIX i XX wieku: Dzieje recepcji, idei i powinowactw z wyboru [The Circle of American Transcendentalists in Polish Literature of the 19th and the 20th Centuries: A History of Reception, Ideas, and Literary Affinities]. Szczecin, Poland: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecinskiego, 2004. [Examines "all aspects of Polish reception of American Transcendentalists," including Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, and Whitman; in Part 1, one chapter, "Walt Whitman" (68-86), deals with his writings "in Polish translations, the opinions and discussions they provoked, and the way they were understood and interpreted in Polish literary culture"; in Part 2, seven chapters deal with Whitman (212-355), looking at early Whitman reception in Poland, where he was initially "perceived as a failed
 poet by Seweryna Duchinska and Zenon Przesmycki-Miriam," then truly discovered by Antoni Lange, who wrote about Whitman and translated his poetry, and further responded to by novelist Stefan Zeromski and Stanislaw Brzozowski; exploring how Whitman became "widely known" in Poland through the "enthusiasm" of poets Julian Tuwim, Kazimierz Wierzynski, and Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, as well as translator and critic Stanislaw Vincenz; examining how Whitman was of interest to "Polish futurists, like Jerzy Jankowski" and to Polish expressionists, like Jan Stur and Stefan Stasiak; analyzing the "new ideological mode of reading Whitman," first by Antonina Sokolicz and later by others who sought to "fit Whitman into the ideal of social realism," including translators (like Stanislaw Helsztynski) who manipulated Whitman's poetry for ideological reasons; analyzing in detail Czeslaw Milosz's response to Whitman as "a poet of metaphysical reality"; and discussing recent Polish translations
 of Whitman by Andrzej Szuba and Krzysztof Boczkowski, who "underline certain aspects of Whitman's poetry, like the homosexual undertone, not visibly present in [the] Polish tradition of interpreting Leaves of Grass before"; in Polish, with a summary in English (430-433).]              Skwara, Marta Anna. "Some Aspects of Cross-Cultural Intertextuality as Seen through the Polish 'Rewriting' of Emerson and Whitman." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (March 2004), 67-76. [Examines "the long-lasting presence" of Emerson's and Whitman's writings in Polish literature and the ways their works "were creatively incorporated by Polish writers and poets into their own texts as a voice of 'another culture' that could redefine and reshape 'our culture'; focuses particularly Whitman's presence in Stefan Zeromski's novel Dzieje grzechu (The History of Sin, 1908) and in the poetry of Julian Tuwim and Czeslaw Milosz.]

Zielinski <zielinski at GMX.CH> wrote:
  > Jan,
> At this point, that would be me. I read Polish decently, and I'm the
only person at the archive who could handle transcribing it. Any information
you provide is interesting to us. I will copy Dr. Kenneth Price, the Archive
co-director on this message -- I'm sure he'll be interested in this as well.
Chukovsky mentions at least one Polish translation in his 1919 book, but I'm
not at the archive at this moment, and can't tell who it is he mentions.
> The early translations are always exciting, since they show how
Whitman's work entered another literature.

Well, maybe send me one day what you already have on the Polish side and I
will see what can be done. I was once, many years ago, asked by a Warsaw
publisher to prepare an edition of translations done by Julian Tuwim (from
various kanguages) and I remember coming in Muzeum Literatury across a
manuscript of an early lecture on Whitman by Tuwim, that contained some
fragments translated, as far as I know the draft was never published,
Unfortunately my publisher has suffered a crisis and the planned edition was
cancelled. But I'm still interested in Tuwim.

Best,
Jan

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