| Selected Poems by Cyprian Kamil Norwid: SR, JANUARY 2005 (960 words) |
 | Norwid’s “Their Strength” (“Siła ich”) illustrates a few strengths and weaknesses in Czerniawski’s work as well as certain problems which Norwid’s poetry presents to a translator. |
| Though Czerniawski maintains Norwid’s idiosyncratic punctuation, his compulsion to duplicate the formal structure of an epigram-even though he ends up substituting couplets (AABB) for Norwid’s original ABAB rhyme-results in distortion of meaning. |
| English speakers might benefit from a footnote alerting them to Norwid’s unusual diction as well as providing relevant background information about censorship and political oppression which Poles were subjected to by their German and Russian occupiers in the nineteenth century-and prophetically in the twentieth. |
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