Czesław Miłosz as a translator of the poetics of grammar and language asymmetries in the poems of Herbert, Różewicz and Szymborska

This article discusses Czesław Miłosz as a poet-translator of the poetry of his younger colleagues: Herbert, Różewicz and Szymborska. The comparative analysis focuses on features largely neglected in translation studies, such as Polish-English linguistic asymmetries and the poetics of grammar, that is, the functions of defi nite, indefi nite and zero articles, verbs and their aspects, personal pronouns as well as the auxiliary verb jest/is. Whereas some of these items cannot be translated adequately because they cause aesthetic loss in any translation, others allow for adequate, sometimes even “optimal” translation.