Polish musical criticism of 19th century is a fascinating research field for musicologists, music theorists, as well as literary scholars. They can find there a wealth of texts whose expressive style tries to emulate the homage paid to the great virtuosos of the time in poetry. While Frederick Chopin and the violinist Karol Lipiński held sway over captive audiences, there was yet another musician whose name featured prominently in reviews and poems. It was Stanisław Szczepanowski, the great guitarist, whose concerts gave rise to numerous reviews representing the romantic school of musical criticism. This paper examines some of those reviews as well as two poems dedicated to Szczepanowski, one by Teofil Lenartowicz and the other by Władysław Syrokomla.

This article outlines the approach adopted by Władysław Syrokomla (the pen name of Ludwik Kondratowicz) in his translation of Latin verse and examines, by analyzing some of the poems he translated into Polish, how it worked in practice. He believed that the translator should strive for an empathic attunement to the writers voice (Einfühlung) while ‘remaining oneself’ and that abandoning ‘slavish imitation’ was the best way to animate a poem (an approach much criticized by philological authorities). These ideas are discussed in the fi rst part of the article; the second part contains analyses of his translations of Latin odes written by Maciej Sarbiewski, i.e. Ode I 19 (Ad caelestem adspirat patriam), II 3 (Ad suam testudinem), and IV 12 (Ad Ianum Libinium. Solitudinem suam excusat). Syrokomla does not engage in any intertextual games with the ancients; instead, he adapts the original to the formal and stylistic conventions of his time, most notably the Romantic concept of the poem as a projection of a poetic consciousness (‘ego’). In effect, Sarbiewski’s (neo) classical poetic personas become versions of the Romantic hero, most conspicuously in the case of Ode IV 12.