| Abstrakt: |
The paper compares some epigrams of Cassia, a nun and poetess living in the 9th century in Constantinople, with songs from the collection Carmina Burana (CB), written in Western Europe between the 11th and the 13th centuries. The author presents her own translations of the poems and discusses their possible interpretation. What unites Cassia with Latin chants is the miniature form, the accuracy of observations on man and society, and satire. The poems were also composed in similar circumstances: the Greek poetess was a nun, the authors of the Latin songs were clerics and scholars. Yet the image of love is different in those two groups. In the CB, we find songs of sensual, erotic nature, while Cassia writes about love in its spiritual dimension. Moreover, the texts exemplify completely different attitudes to the clergy: Cassia writes beautiful praise of the life of monks, while the CB are full of cutting satire. The CB are a very rewarding material for the translator. Full of simple rhymes and rhythms, with a regular structure, they are easy to translate into Polish. Since we are accustomed to mediaeval poetry being just that: a rhythmic and rhymed text with a simple arrangement of sentences, the measures of mediaeval chants can be used in translation to introduce the reader not only to the content, but also to the form of those Latin songs. Cassia's poetry has a closer connection with music; her songs about saints are not rhythmic, rhyming nor isosylabic, but melody gives certain rhythm to the structure of the sentence. Translation, therefore, should provide some equivalent of the music. In contrast, Cassia's satirical poetry was not meant to be sung and it was written in iambic verse, easier to render in translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
