SOURCE: “Toward a Reassessment of Mickiewicz's ‘Ciemność,’” in Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 19, No. 4, December, 1977, pp. 468-80.

In the following essay, Zakrzewski offers a reexamination of the poem “Ciemność,” one of Mickiewicz's translations of Byron's poems. Suggesting that many unfavorable evaluations of the poem by earlier critics result from a flawed method of approach, Zakrzewski maintains that the poem is not a simple exercise in translation but rather a creative endeavor.

This paper is a re-examination of “Ciemność,” one of Adam Mickiewicz' most controversial poetic renderings from Lord Byron. Apart from re-opening the question of the artistic merits of the Polish poem, it proposes to adduce new textual evidence concerning the poem's dating.

Generally speaking, critics have not been favourably inclined toward Mickiewicz' rendering of Byron's apocalyptical poem, “Darkness.” Wilhelm Bruchnalski, the first scholar to compare the translation with the original, stated quite categorically that “artistically ‘Ciemność’ is by...