Parodia w służbie nonsensu. Przypadek Stanisława Barańczaka
Parody’s role in nonsense: the case of Stanisław Barańczak

Summary/Abstract: This article presents the work of Stanisław Barańczak as a spectacular example of using parody in modern nonsense literature. In the case of Barańczak, broadly conceived parody turns out to be an omnipresent device that lends a distinctive and original character to his nonsense texts. The author’s parodic play is based, on the one hand, on classic nonsense poetry of English literature (Edward Lear), an object of sophisticated re-writing in translation, and on the other hand, on the Polish literary canon easily recognizable by the educated reader. Thanks to this level of intertextuality, nonsense gains an intellectual form as well as an in-joke function. The special domain of Barańczak’s work is nonsensical parody of academic discourse resulting in his ‘private theory of literary genres’ contained in Pegaz zdębiał (1995) and supplemented by a long register of newly invented nonsense genres (‘mnemonic paraphrase’ such as Hamlet’s Soliloquy, its beginning lines successively following alphabetic order to facilitate role learning by actors or ‘mankofon’, a literary text free from ‘difficult’ sounds and meant for people with speech impediments). The proliferation and variety of parodic techniques in Barańczak’s work leads to the conclusion that the definition of nonsense as a parody of sense finds a convincing confirmation in modern intellectual nonsense, being a remarkable variant of pure humorous intertextuality.

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