Singer-songwriters' song poems and translation : a literature review of English and Polish sources

Bibliogr. s. 52-55

The article presents a review of English and Polish sources on the translation of song poems, with a special focus on the studies featuring at least basic methodological and theoretical proposals. The selection of sources serves two goals. Firstly, to enable readers interested in researching song translation access to the key texts. Secondly, given the rapidly growing interest in studies on song translation and the institutional recognition of the topic in the last two decades (see the Introduction), the article provides an accessible overview to other readers, interested in a general state of the art in a relatively new sub- domain of translation studies. The structure of the article follows two principles. The texts are discussed chronologically, starting with the earliest, short studies looking into song translation (1915-1921), then investigating the developments in academic thinking on the subject in the latter half of the 20th century, and concluding with an overview of the book-length publications and complete theoretical models proliferating in the 21st century. Secondly, the main part of the article follows a comparative approach. Polish sources are discussed in the context of their Anglophone counterparts. The article points to ideas shared by texts published decades apart and those whose authors, surprisingly, did not seem to have read the earlier works. Short summaries of the subsequent sections of the article and its concluding part strive also to shed some light on the position of the aforementioned texts and models within general translation studies. The reviewed sources are shown in the context of their explicit and implicit theoretical assumptions and consequences, such as untranslatability, shifting criteria of equivalence, the semantic dominant, the creative role of the translator, the ambiguous distinctions between translation and adaptation or travesty, and even translational "losses," "semantic fidelity," or instrumentalisation of the subject of translation cum music as a useful metaphor enabling studies in the spirit of New Humanities, outside the paradigms of translation, literary, and linguistic studies.