Julia Dickstein-Wieleżyńska e la storia editoriale della prima traduzione completa dei Canti in polacco

Abstract

The paper focuses on the long and complex editorial history of the first complete translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti into Polish. Entitled Poezje and published by Instytut Wydawniczy ‘Biblioteka Polska’ in 1938, the volume was translated by Julia Dickstein-Wieleżyńska (1881–1948), a polyglot, poet, organiser of cultural events, feminist activist and literature and philosophy scholar. Dickstein-Wieleżyńska’s letters to Raffaele Pettazzoni (1883–1959), her close friend and mentor and himself an eminent scholar of religions, suggest that the original idea of the book as conceived in the early 1920s also envisaged the inclusion of translations by Edward Porębowicz (1862–1937), which had been made for his 1887 collection of Leopardi’s writings. Although Porębowicz had withdrawn his permission for publishing his versions in 1924 and Dickstein-Wielżyńska had to translate another eighteen poems, the manuscript was ready for printing at the beginning of 1925. Drawing on archival resources, the author investigates the reasons behind the conspicuous temporal distance between the drafting of the translations and their publication in the volume of Poezje. Examined from the perspective of recent translation and collaboration studies, Wieleżyńska’s letters shed some new light not only on the agents, modes and circumstances of translation and editorial work in the early twentieth century, but also on the position of women in the cultural and academic hierarchies of the time.