ABSTRACT
Katherine Mansfield wrote her poem ‘To Stanisław Wyspianski’ in 1909 under the impression of Wyspiański’s work she was acquainted with through her lover, a Polish translator Floryan Sobieniowski. Sobieniowski translated the poem and published it with a commentary already in 1910, long before the original. The essay discusses the translation, notorious for its infidelity and mistakes, in the context of Polish Romantic Messianism. Its aim is to explain the sources of the discrepancies between the original and Sobieniowski’s rendition, and the role the translator envisaged for the poem and for Mansfield herself within Polish culture. The paper includes a back translation of Sobieniowski’s version, making it available to English readers for the first time.
