Department of Foreign Languages

Traditional and Courtly Alba: A Selection of Romance Lyrics Translated by Magdalena Pabisiak
A selection of mediaeval Romance lyrics complementing the two previous studies published in this issue of Terminus. It presents the first Polish translations of a number of works classified as traditional and courtly albas. The translations were made from five mediaeval Romance languages and Latin. The works whose authors are known are provided with a biographical note. Additionally, a historical and literary perspective for the presented collection is outlined. It also discusses some terms of fin' amor poetry that are difficult in translation. A comprehensive introduction gives information on the intentions of the authors of this collection, the translation technique developed here, and the specifics of translating Romance lyric into Polish. The three troubadour albas (Rimbaut de Vaqueiras, Cadenet, Uc de Bacalaria) examined here illustrate the translation strategies developed by Magdalena Pabisiak, presenting different variants of the translated text and criteria for making particular choices in the translation. Difficulties related to recreating the metric system of Romance lyric in a language with different prosody, syntactic structures, length of words, and vowel frequency are discussed, showing, inter alia, how difficult it is to obtain in Polish the same repeatability of rhymes so characteristic for this type of lyric.