Anna Stanisławska, A Transaction, or an Account of the Entire Life of an Orphan Girl by Way of Plaintful Threnodies in the Year 1685

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Writing years after the terrible events which colored her life forever, Anna Stanisławska (1651-1701) meticulously reconstructed in an epic poem the episode of her marriage to a deviant who terrorized her and humiliated her at every turn. Hers is a remarkable tale of triumph in the face of overwhelming oppression.

Here now at the altar I stand, And why, I’m asking, have you bound My temple with a golden wreath? Let all and sundry here behold The blushing groom and red-faced bride. What a coupling for Nature’s pride! He with his overgrown moustache. She with a crane’s neck that looks stretched.

Transactions. Threnody V, strophe 38.

 

Barry Keane’s translation of Anna Stanisławska’s Plaintful Threnodies in the Year 1685 is an outstanding translation of a fascinating text. It makes a powerful female voice available to the non-Polish-speaking reader for the first time. Stanisławska’s poem is an important one, a woman’s vision of the late seventeenth-century world of marriage, materialism, domestic malignity, and male power over women. It is a personal complaint, fully justified, and embodied in trenchant language. As with a good novel, the reader is absorbed and moved by the plucky heroine’s refusal to be done down by her oppressors. Keane’s verse translation renders Stanisławska’s Polish very well indeed. He follows her rhythm and her rhyme scheme, but in the latter allowing himself, quite rightly, the flexibility of employing consonance and half-rhyme where necessary. Keane’s English is splendidly modern and direct, producing a lively text, irresistible in its sprightly bravura. The introduction ably gives the history of the poem (long unknown to Polish letters) and its political, social, and biographical contexts. This translation allows Stanisławska to take her rightful place among the women poets and writers of early modern Europe. Keane is to be warmly congratulated for this fine translation of an important poem.

David Malcolm

 

Barry Keane’s superb verse translation of one of the earliest Polish women poets, Anna Stanisławska-Zbąska, brings to life her half-forgotten seventeenth-century autobiographical poem in a language which is lucid, idiomatic and highly inventive. The translation is a tour de force which astonishes the reader with its formal discipline, precision and directness of diction. The pleasure of reading the poem in Keane’s English version owes much also to the translator’s deep knowledge of the text and its historical, social and political contexts, amply exemplified by the erudite Introduction and Notes. Keane’s highly readable A Transaction is a rare case of a literary translation that manages to bridge the gap between distant cultures, languages and epochs, making this extraordinary poem for the first time available to the English-speaking reader. The English version of A Transaction testifies to the significance of the hitherto ignored heritage of women’s writing in the history of European literature.

Jerzy Jarniewicz

 

This landmark work is a triumph of scholarship, sympathy and creativity. Barry Keane’s historically important translation has grappled triumphantly with the dark truths and eternal hopes that underpin ‘The Aesop Episode’ of Anna Stanisławska’s A Transaction, whereas the accompanying Introduction and Notes manage to contextualize both the motivations and actions of the heroine of the piece and the broader issues of the age.

Piotr Urbański