Attributes of national identity in the poetry of Lesya of Ukraine and its Polish translations: how to illuminate the soul with a word

Abstract

The article analyzes the Polish translation versions of the realities and markers of national identity used by Lesya Ukrainka in her poetry. Attention is drawn to the semantic content of individual national attributes of Lesya Ukrainka, rooted in
mythology and folk tradition, and their invariance within the scope of the poetic interpretation of various translators. A special place in this attributive-figurative system is given to the “Forest Song” as a system of mythologies that create the folk background of Ukrainian and Polish cultures.
It is emphasized that the main ones in this list are the images of the house and its elements (walls, windows, doors, smoke, etc.), which are used with a double purpose – to depict human transience or love for the native land, trees (viburnum, birch, willow, oak), Additional attributes of national identity are folk songs, proverbs, and incantations.
By comparing the mythologist Lesya Ukrainka and their counterparts translated into Polish, we come to the conclusion about the adequacy of the
translations of Lesya Ukrainka’s poetry and their value in Polish society. The work achieved the goal of identifying the main attributes of national identity, which do not always coincide in the Ukrainian and Polish cultural spaces.
Different interpretations of territorial factors and manifestations of patriotism are superimposed on them, since the land sung in Lesya Ukrainka’s poems occupied a different place in the Ukrainian and Polish environments – the Motherland and the
Kresy. The mythologems based on the mythical and traditional worldview of the people, as well as the mythical images themselves, did not coincide, although they largely overlapped. Similar are Polish and Ukrainian song motifs, which, despite
common images and artistic means, contain individual national elements.
A new methodological discovery is the analysis of attributes of national identity in the poems of Lesya Ukrainka and their Polish versions through the prism of the concept of “totem”, which has not yet undergone proper development. Among the main “totem” and mythological images is the word, which goes from traditional folk magic to a nation-building factor in the system of universal values.