Izabela Winiarska-Górska : The Dialogue of the Sixteenth-Century Translators of The Bible and Tradition
Polish sixteenth-century translations of The Bible are analyzed as an example of a Renaissance printed devotional book, where, due to the demand of the mass recipient, certain elements of modern humanistic biblistics (obviously simplified) were introduced. The article includes a review of front pages, introductions and selected fragments of the Eight Blessings from the Gospel of St. Matthew excerpted from selected 16th-century translations of the New Testament, representing various beliefs (including editions from 1551, 1556, 1561, 1663, 1570, 1572, 1577, 1593, 1599). Differences between Catholic, Protestant and Aryan translations result from their confessional conditions, the translators’ mutual inspirations, their relations to the medieval Psalter-Biblical character as well as from the attitude of the translators, Jakub Wujek in particular, to the achievements of the Renaissance (non-Catholic) biblistics. The article draws attention to such phenomena as: popularization of the Polish translations of The Bible, as well as the special meta-language in the previous Latin version, associated with translation and comments on The Bible, including gradual semantic repartition of such notions as: wykład (lecture), przekład (translation) and disappearance of dokład (contribution). On the front pages there are clichés informing about the type of translation; they refer to humanistic philological translations or to the decree sacrosancta. In the structure of translation itself, differences due t various origins (Greek or Latin) manifest in another layout of the translated text. The fewest differences concern the linguistic layer of the translation of Gospel, which confirms the existence of certain patterns in Old Polish which constitute the so-called Polish biblical style.
