Translating Poe as a Professional and Personal Experience

Abstract:In this article I present my experience of translating Poe’s stories into Polish from a professional and personal perspective. I trace the publication history of my translations, from the first edition, which appeared in 2002, to the most recent expanded volume, dating from 2021. I also discuss the Polish reception of Poe’s tales and the inaccuracies and stylistic eccentricities of the older, established translations created in the early decades of the twentieth century by Bolesław Leśmian and Stanisław Wyrzykowski. I explain how, over the years, my appreciation of and insight into Poe’s texts had grown and how I had gained more proficiency as a translator. This had a direct bearing on the revision process I undertook for the latest edition, but the factor of even greater significance was my research on Poe’s poetry. In my study I took the phonosemantic approach, focusing on the relation between sound and meaning. I discovered that repeated sound configurations and networks of sonically aligned words and phrases pervade Poe’s fictional prose, and this was the area that needed looking into while preparing the new versions of his stories.