Wisława Szymborska in Ost und West: Übersetzungen im Vergleich

In both East and West Germany, Wisława Szymborska was discovered early and published in translations by various translators in numerous journals and anthologies. By 1990, the year of reunification, three volumes of her poems were published in West Germany, translated and edited by Karl Dedecius, whereas in East Germany only one book was published, edited and translated by Jutta Janke. This article offers an analysis of these publications in both German states, focussing on which poems were included in which publications and which poems were not published in either state. Finally, one of the poems, translated and published in both German states, “Dwie małpy Bruegla” [“Brueghel’s two monkeys”], is compared using the so-called Göttingen approach to translation research. This methodological approach assumes that the differences between the source text and the target text can provide indications of the conditions under which the respective translations were written, in order to find out to what extent the translations differ in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. Although individual poems might have been chosen for ideological reasons, the assumption that differences in translations of the same poem could be due to ideological factors cannot be confirmed in the case of this particular poem.