An unfaithful phrase. Semantics of the enjambment in Mieczysław Jasturn’s translations of Das Buch der Bilder by Rainer Maria Rilke

The article discusses a broadly understood relation between the translation of a poetic text and versification. Assuming that reading a poem (as well as its translation) is always an interpretation that heavily depends on the reader’s activity, his choices and intentions, and assuming that the prosodic shape is an important sensemaking factor, the author of the article tries to show how the title “unfaithfulness of a phrase” – translator’s incorrect reading of the source text’s prosody (in Bloom’s understanding) – might influence the shape of the reader’s perception of the text and thus become an important factor of the poetic semantics. Assuming the asymmetric paradigm of the theory of a poem, the author does not focus on the metrical size nor the poetic rhyme (as it is frequently done in older papers) but on those aspects of a poem (like enjambment or the graphical shape of the text) that used to be marginalized, and which – if viewed from the perspective of the reader – are easier to notice than intertextual qualities of the meter that require familiarity with versification rules