Decadence in Translation: Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde as Considered by Antun Šoljan and Ivan Slamnig

The article considers the traits of Ivan Slamnig and Antun Šoljan’s translation of Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Harlot’s House” in the anthology Suvremena engleska poezija (Contemporary English Poetry), and of Slamnig’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Le parfum” in Šoljan’s Antologija moderne poezije zapadnoga kruga (Anthology of Modern Western Poetry). In his theoretical reflections on the problems of literary translation, grounded in his own translation practice, Ivan Slamnig paid particular attention to the translation of poetry, which he explicitly distinguished from the translation of prose by using the term “poetic translation” (prepjev - version). He also stressed that in poetry, as opposed to prose, where the content possesses a larger degree of independence from its concrete textual realisation, semantic and acoustic potentials of any language are particularly intensified and it is therefore impossible to view them as isolated structural elements of a poem in translation. On the basis of translational analysis, the anthological models of approaching the poem and the models of literary interpretation are established, which are then measured against the ideas of modernism and decadence exposed by Slamnig and Šoljan in their concept of the literature of the Western world