The facts of K. I. Gałczyński’s biography in the Russian translations of his poetry

Abstract

This paper tackles the role that a specific type of background knowledge – familiarity with the original author’s biography – plays in the translation of literary images. We use seven Russian translations of K. I. Galczynski’s poems as our material for analysis. With their help we show that knowledge of the poet’s biography can be essential for understanding the initial text and, consequently, proper translation thereof. References to the author’s life are usually explained by means of introducing corresponding explanatory elements into the original. Besides, the translators take advantage of their knowledge of Galczynski’s life and works while performing transformations of the initial literary images. Images based on autobiographical references tend to get demetaphorized. Among other noteworthy types of transformations are concretization and replacing an element from the original with one from another text of the poet.