Responsibility for shaping meaningful reality: literary translation as dialogue in Vasyl Stus. Goethe's ‘Wanderer's Night Song’ and Stus' “Night Song of the Wanderer”

The article highlights literary translation as a dialogue, using the example of Vasyl' Stus' translations of Goethe's Wanderers Nachtlied, and aims to demonstrate what can happen in and between literary texts from different times when one engages with the relationships and questions their meaning. The goal is to make the literary dialogue and the place where it occurs visible and bring it to awareness through a concrete example. Instead of following the equivalence model, which evaluates translations based on formal and content-based similarity, the semantic shifts in Stus' renderings are analyzed. These shifts reflect individual poetic decisions that, in contrast to Goethe’s poem, carry a somber diagnosis of the time. While Goethe explores man and nature as part 32 of a divine, transcendent (meaningful) order, Stus' translation, in a dialogical reading, powerfully speaks of an order of stagnation, conformism, and constant existential threat. The contribution views literary translation as a multifaceted dialogue between texts and times, in which it is the responsibility of both the translator and the reader to ensure that this dialogue, with an awareness of the specifics of literary communication, does not become stagnant due to reduced (ideological) readings, but instead contributes to an order (reality) experienced as meaningful.