"All my sour-sweet days I will lament and love" – a comparative analysis of metaphors with the basic taste adjectives in Polish and English

Author(s): Marta Helena Falkowska,Magdalena Zawisławska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 18/2018

This paper provides a comparative analysis of verbal synesthetic metaphors with the basic taste adjectives in Polish and English: słodki/sweet, gorzki/bitter, kwaśny/sour, słony/salty. Since taste seems to be an ideal candidate for a universal, biologically determined source of metaphors, the authors seek to verify the hypothesis of metaphor embodiment. The corpus-based analysis of nominal phrases with basic Polish and English taste adjectives indicates that cultural influences on the metaphorical mapping, as well as the importance of the target conceptual domains, must be taken into account.

"Ikaromenippos" – starożytny dialog o locie na Księżyc i do niebiańskiej siedziby bogów

Author(s): Dominika Budzanowska-Weglenda / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

Dominika Budzanowska-Weglenda’s chapter proposes an analysis of the Ikaromenippos or Voyage in Space, which is one of dialogues of Lucian of Samosata and probably the first literary description of the human trip to the Moon. The main character takes on this journey because of his aversion to philosophy. Lucian’s Ikaromenippos is a fantastic dialogue: a philosopher, probably the cynic, and satirist Menippus of Gadara, flies here “through the stars”. He takes two wings of large birds: the wing of the vulture and the wing of the eagle, and performs an incredible feat, worthy of Icarus: he reaches the Moon (from where he looks at the people and their actions on Earth), and then flies to Heaven—to the gods, “in upper Zeus’ rooms”. The story of Menippus’journey is like a swift current of the river, full of jocular tone, with a fantastic plot. But it clearly carries a deeper message: it expresses criticism of human attitudes and actions (adulteries, murders, conspiracies, perjury, betrayals among the closest to ones, war, courtship, piracy), meanness, false and mercenary piety, especially when stigmatizing bad behavior of philosophers, without sparing the representatives of any philosophical school. According to Lucian’s narrative, philosophers are lazy, quarrelsome, bloated, angry, grotesque, tumultuous, surly, unworthy people. The author reinforces the accusations of philosophers with the deity’s words, as the goddess of the Moon, Selene, having been encountered by the traveler, complains about them as well. She believes that philosophers are impostors, leading a shameful nightlife behind the scenes: they commit adultery, steal, and commit any other evil deeds. Ikaromenippos belongs to Lucian’s satirical works featuring reflective comedy. Correspondingly, Lucian postulates the liberation from the practical cognitive pressure of the logical rules and from the philosophical logic of cognition of the universe.

"Koralina" Neila Gaimana w realizacjach teatru lalek w Polsce

Author(s): Maria Janus / Language(s): Polish Publication Year: 0

Maria Janus focuses on theatrical adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s "Coraline" in Polish puppet theatre. The analysed performances were directed by Włodzimierz Fełenczak in Teatr Miniatura in Gdańsk with a stage design by Mikołaj Malesza (opening 2009) and in the Białostocki Teatr Lalek with a stage design by Joanna Braun (opening 2011) and directed by Karolina Maciejaszek in Teatr Pinokio in Łódź with a stage design by Anna Chadaj (opening 2013). In addition, the Author discusses the performance of Rozalinda, written and directed by Krystyna Jakóbczyk in the Teatr Dzieci Zagłębia in Będzin (opening 2012), which was inspired by Gaiman’s novel. Janus presents this performance in the context of copyrights and difficulties of obtaining licenses for use of texts written by popular authors (especially from the Anglo-Saxon region). The author compares the adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s novel written by Fełenczak, Maciejaszek and the translation of the novel’s narration by Jakóbczyk (theatrical situations and visual narration vs. the narration performed live on-stage). Maria Janus also highlights theatrical references from the novel considering meta-theatrical elements that enhance the performance. Janus compares theatrical media used in performances from Gdańsk, Białystok and Łódź with special consideration to the stage design and puppetry techniques. In the second part, the author focuses on the popularity of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline among theatrical directors despite little interest in horror fiction. Puppet theatres in Poland do not produce performances based on modern epic literature, especially those nbased on fantasy. Classical fairy-tales and modern dramaturgy containing fairy-tale motives are still more popular. Furthermore, Janus reflects on the possibility of a change of the herein discussed situation. She further refers to the arguments of Bruno Bettelheim, Stanisław Grzelecki and Katarzyna Slany considering young spectator benefits from the contact with theatrical representation of youth horror literature.

"Le Tramway" de Claude Simon : une vanité postmoderne ?

Author(s): Mokhtar Belarbi / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

The theme of vanity occupies a prime place in Claude Simon's "Tramway". In this text, he has adopted a new conception of vanity. Certainly, the author has always evoked themes intimately associated with vanity, such as the theme of death, the theme of melancholy, the theme of war, etc., but the “finitude” has always been for him a crucial phase for the return to the primordial and the origin for the beginning of a new cycle of life. In "The Tramway", the vanity of the world is presented in a tragic way. No reference to the primordiality or the cyclical return of things. The author insists on updating in the memory of the time of death. A large number of metaphors and symbols highlight this theme of death; it is as if the author throws to the reader a memento mori from someone on the point of experiencing this fatal experience which is irremediable and definitive. This gives the text a tragic and undeniable human dimension.

"Późne lato" Johna Crowleya jako postmodernistyczna wizja procesualnej koncepcji tożsamości

Author(s): Małgorzata Gancarczyk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2018

The article John Crowley’s “Engine Summer”: A Postmodern Vision of the Processual Construction of Identity analyses the eponymous novel as pivoted around the narrative’s role in constructing both individual and collective identity. Drawing from Mieke Bal’s narrative theory, as well as a number of establi­shed (such as paratextuality) and emerging theoretical concepts (Piotr Kubiński’s emersion), Gancarczyk emphasises the multifacetedness of novelistic references, including the stereotypisation of the Other and top-down control of social relationships. Furthermore, Engine Summer is interpreted he­re as drawing the reader’s attention to the medium itself and to the embodied text which co-creates narrative identity, allowing for its inscription and transmission—an idea literally realised in a postapocalyptic world of the novel. Finally, Gancarczyk shows how Campbell’s concept of monomyth reverberates in Crowley’s narrative, proving pivotal for the overall interpretation, indicating the active role of the medium and narrative subjectivity in constructing the meaning.

"Skazani na ciężkie norwidy”? Kilka uwag o kulturowych aspektach przekładu poezji Wisławy Szymborskiej na język norweski

Author(s): Aleksandra Wilkus-Wyrwa / Language(s): Polish Issue: 3/2019

The aim of this paper is to discuss selected cultural keywords in the Norwegian translation of Wisława Szymborska’s (1923–2012) poetry. Translators O.M. Selberg and Ch. Kjelstrup used multiple approaches, thanks to which Norwegian readers have a chance to get acquainted with typical Polish phenomena, although often at an expense of the original text. Since the kind of publishing itself – an anthology of translated poetry – indicates the place of Szymborska’s work in the foreign discourse, her published works in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, along with her reception in Norwegian discourse as a Nobel Prize winner, are discussed here as well.

"Женитьба" Н. В. Гоголя на болгарской сцене

Author(s): Tatiana Fed / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2/2019

The article traces a range of performances staging Gogol’s play Marriage in Bulgaria with a special emphasis on the respective translations into Bulgarian. The theory features translation and adaptation mechanisms specifically applied to cultural realia. The staging in the Sofia Theatre is highlighted. The methodology applied belongs to the framework of cross-cultural communication studies and employs cultural-historic and reception approaches.

"Замок" Франца Кафки: постмодернистский дискурс в современной австрийской литературе

Author(s): E.M. Shastina,G. F. Frolov / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2018

The purpose of the paper is to follow the reception of F. Kafka’s “The Castle” in contemporary Austrian literature based on the following novels: “The Peaches Killers” (“Die Pfirsichtöter”, 1972) by Alfred Kolleritsch, “Among the Bieresch“ (“Bei den Bieresch”, 1979) by Klaus Hoffer, and “Into the Castle” (“Ins Schloss”, 2004) by Marianne Gruber. The attention has been focused on the writers, whose creative manner reflects the tendencies in contemporary Western European literary process – from avant-gardism (A. Kolleritsch) to postmodernism (K. Hoffer, M. Gruber). The intertextual links between the works under the consideration and F. Kafka’s novel have been established. The “Kafkaesque discourse” suggests that there exist direct and inverse links between the author and the reader, the extra-textual tradition and reality. The comparative methodology has been used to reveal the mechanism of reception of the “Kafkaesque discourse” in contemporary Austrian literature, as well as to draw conclusions about the ways the authors treat ontological questions. Particular emphasis has been placed on the narrative strategies of Austrian literary avant-gardism, postmodern discourse of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, typological similarity of the analyzed novels, which seems productive for understanding of the influence of literature during the period of modernism on the emergence of a postmodern paradigm in the German-speaking literary space.

"Путешествие вокруг его комнаты": жанровое своеобразие романа И.А. Гончарова "Обломов"

Author(s): Lyubov' Aleksandrovna Sapchenko / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2018

The paper is the first attempt to reveal the genre specificity of I.A. Goncharov’s novel in the light of the parodic variety of sentimental travel (“A Journey Around My Room” by Xavier de Maistre). It has been noted that the plot of journey in the work by I.A. Goncharov, which is connected, as it would seem, only with the book of essays “Frigate Pallas”, is actually present in all three novels of the writer, showing itself as a theme or a motive and as a symbolic image or an ideal form of human activity. The author gives a number of examples proving that the novel “Oblomov” can be defined as “anti-travel”: as a book about a man who “did not go”: did not travel through Europe, did not go to the springs, did not visit Oblomovka, did not keep his promise to come to Paris… The comparative-historical method of analysis (historical-typological and “contact”) have been used during the research. As a result, the following conclusions have been drawn: 1) the artistic entity of the novel contains the genre signs of “anti-travel”; 2) this genre component represents the actualization of the sentimentalist tradition in a parody aspect and in part - the transformation of Xavier de Maistre’s famous book “A Journey Around My Room”; 3) the commonality of the two works reveals itself at various levels: at the genre level, the central character and the plot and in the system of characters and in the figurative and symbolic system. The version of the title translation adopted by the researchers (“A Journey around My Room” as opposed to “A Journey through My Room”) does not enclose the character within the space of his home but brings him out into the limitless imagination. The most important of the results obtained is the following: the tradition of sentimental travel, with its reduction of the external space, minimization of movement and actualization of the inner world, with irony characteristic of the Sternian variety of sentimentalism, turns out to be kindred to Goncharov. The obtained results are important for understanding the genre specificity of the novel “Oblomov”, for recreating the historical and literary context, for determining the place of I.A. Goncharov’s work in the history and theory of the travel genre, and for preparing comments for the complete collection of works by I.A. Goncharov.

"С елените и дунавските лебеди": история и колективна психика

Зеленохорският и краловедворският ръкопис в прочита на Едгар Кине

Author(s): Xavier Galmiche / Language(s): Bulgarian Publication Year: 0

Released in 1817 and 1818, the Manuscripts of Zelená Hora and Hradec Králové in Bohemia are part of the literary mystifications whose vogue spread across Europe from the end of the eighteenth century. They remain until today the most often pre sented among the Czech literary corpus: this exceptional reception extends for over a hundred and fifty years. Among the philologists and scholars who first devoted texts of modest but decisive scope to them, the French poet and Romantic thinker Edgar Quinet brings a comparative perspective in his article “From the Epic of the Bohemi ans” (1831). This essay proposes to read this early chapter of the French reception of modern Czech literature as an example of historiography based on analogy and empa thy. It is indeed possible to understand these early analyses in the context of the “pre history” of French comparative literature, philosophically influenced by Vico, Herder and the French Ideologues and initiated by Claude Fauriel, but also in a subjective understanding of the history in which Quinet includes his own experience of the Napo leonic wars: an individual and collective psychoanalysis?

(BE)SMISAO VREMENA U ODABRANIM DJELIMA WILLIAMA FAULKNERA I MEŠE SELIMOVIĆA

Author(s): Selma Raljević / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 2/2014

The purpose of this paper is to compare the modern concept of time by “placing” William Faulkner’s (1897-1962) novels: The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Go Down, Moses (1942), and Meša Selimović’s (1910-1982) prose works: Death and the Dervish (Derviš i smrt, 1966), The Fortress (Tvrđava, 1970), The Island (Ostrvo, 1974) and Memories (Sjećanja, 1976). The aim of this paper is to compare the perception of time in the selected prose of these two writers within the context of the sum of combined intelligences. The topic will be explored by applying the thoughts of Einstein, Nietzsche, Bergson, Eliade, Freud and Jung. In their modern literary works, both Faulkner and Selimović transpose time into space, and time/space becomes a major player in their works. Accordingly, special attention will be given to the perception and (non)sense of time and space in their modern prose.

(De)scrivere Roma nell’Ottocento: alla ricerca delle radici culturali europee, a cura di Angelo Pagliardini e Alexandra Vrânceanu, Berlin, Peter Lang, 2020, 207 p.

Author(s): Pierre Musitelli / Language(s): Italian Issue: 70/2021

(In)distinct Languages: Revisiting the Dualism of Literal and Literary Meaning in Roman Jakobson and Donald Davidson

Author(s): Aleksandar Mijatović / Language(s): English Issue: 21/2021

The paper traces the relationship between the literal and literary language that is found in structuralism and analytic philosophy. The paper’s gist provides a comparative account of Roman Jakobson’s and Donald Davidson’s notions of poetic language and their relation to the general idea of language as it is given in their work. In reconsidering Jakobson’s and Davidson’s arguments, I propose abandoning the dualistic hypotheses of the oppositions between literal and non-literal language, and between literal and literary language. I contend that the notions of first and literal meanings are necessary for other types of interpretation. The dualistic hypothesis requires the cascade model, which displays a bottom-top transition across hierarchically arranged levels of meanings. Instead, I outline the multilayered structure of language with two thresholds: mimetic and semiotic. Therefore, the cascade model should be replaced with the palimpsest model of concurring, merging, and blending layers of meanings.

(In)visibles persévérances de l’absence. Les enjeux de la mise en forme dans Les Années d'Annie Ernaux

Author(s): Jolanta Rachwalska von Rejchwald / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2011

A dialectic between presence and absence, remembrance and oblivion, testimony and silence, body and its trace reflects the gist of the most recent Ernaux’es book. It constitutes not only plenteaus thematic confluence but also or even majorly an axis of the book’s construction. Its structure encompasses various layers such as: rhetorical, stylistic and typographic, which separately and together combined reside in prevailing tensioned coexistence of presence and absence.

(Nie)obecny w przekładzie – (nie)obecny w pamięci? Refleksje na temat najnowszych przekładów na język polski poezji Eliasza Rajzmana, szczecińskiego twórcy w języku jidysz

Author(s): Magdalena Ruta / Language(s): Polish Issue: 9/2018

The article discusses Polish translations of Yiddish poetry written by Eliasz Rajzman, Jewish writer who was living in postwar Szczecin. His literary output was presented to the Polish readers as early as in the 1960s by translators who either knew Yiddish language or cooperated with the autor in the process of the relay translation. Magdalena Ruta focuses on the latest collection of Rajzman’s poems in order to show some misunderstandings and communication falsifications (at linguistic, historical, cultural, religious levels) which are the result of an relay translation made by two persons: a native speaker who prepares so called philological translation, and a professional poet, who – not knowing the original language of a poem – works on its final version in the target language. Due to the special status of the Yiddish whose nearly all users died in the Holocaust, there is a moral obligation to translate Yiddish literature with special care and diligence in terms of language, history and culture.

(Post)colonial Chronopolitics and Mapping the Depth of Local Time(s) in Global Literary Studies: an Itinerary to Guinea-Bissau

Author(s): Ewa Łukaszyk / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

This article is an attempt at deconstructing the chronopolitics inherent to the (post)colonial way of thinking about the world. As it is argued, what should replace it is a vision of multiple, overlying temporalities and forms of time awareness, reaching deeper than a literary history reduced to the cycle of colonisation – decolonisation – postcolonial becoming, originating from just a single maritime event: the European exploration and conquest of the world. The essay brings forth a choice of interwoven examples illustrating the variability of local time depths, associated with a plurality of origins, narrations, forms of awareness and cultivation of cultural belonging. It shows the lack of coincidence between the dominant and non-dominant perceptions of the past in such places as the archipelagos of São Tomé and Príncipe, Maldives, the Gambia, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Their ways of living the global time, as well as embodying significant texts (rather than simply preserving them) stretch far beyond the frameworks created by competing colonial empires, such as the Portuguese or the British one.

(Re)translating Horace into Ukrainian Modernity: From Mykola Zerov to Andrii Sodomora

Author(s): Lada Kolomiyets / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

This article focuses on the history of translations and the reasons for translating the Roman classics into Ukrainian in the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, as illustrated by the case of Horace. Translation practices, as well as the socio-cultural status and habitus of the translator-classicist, have been varied but have intersected in many respects throughout the twentieth century. This article highlights the major developments in the approach to translating Horace throughout the twentieth century. It mostly focuses on the attitudes and strategies of Mykola Zerov and Andrii Sodomora, who are among the key figures in the twentieth-century theory and practice of translation in Ukraine. The first major development comprises the critical debate regarding translation in the 1920s initiated by Mykola Khvyl'ovyi, whose position was supported by Zerov. The article discusses both the translation practice of Zerov and his reader-oriented theory of verse translation. The second crucial point consists of the revision by Sodomora, starting from the 1980s, of a paraphrasing strategy worked out by Zerov. In his retranslation strategy, applied to his earlier translations from Horace and substantiated in his literary essays, Sodomora exhibits a positive reconsideration of the role and importance of literalist precision in translating the Roman classics, as exemplified by Horace. Sodomora’s evolving approach toward higher precision in translating the classics stems from a close reading of the authentic cultural contexts, structural poetics, philosophical messages, and hidden intertextuality of the source texts. Also, it resonates with Walter Benjamin’s model of literalism, which in many respects appears useful when applied to post-Soviet literary conditions in Ukraine.

(Trans)pozycje idei w postjugosłowiańskim dramatopisarstwie oraz teatrze (1990–2020). Perspektywa transkulturowa

Author(s): Gabriela Abrasowicz / Language(s): Polish

The Post-Yugoslav playwriting and theatre production constitutes a space which facilitates observation of the transposition of artistic, socio-political and philosophical ideas. Those phenomenon stems from cultural mobility, the integration of multiple components coming from different cultural backgrounds and involves the creation of new qualities. The fundamental research principles in this case are the perception of culture as a process of exchange and the implementation of the open connection networks model. The discussed artistic projects of playwrights and theatre directors active in the countries of the former Yugoslavia confirm that this phenomenon is still in the nascent stage. Its dynamic formula is a good starting point for reflection on the flows and ideological and aesthetic links that are becoming apparent in the drama and theatre of many European countries.

(Не)могућности књижевности и културе у доба кризе

Author(s): Slađana Rakić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 48/2012

(Опит за) компаративистичен увод в новогръцката поезия от периода 1880–1930

Author(s): Fotiny Christakoudy-Konstantinidou / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 24/2020

The hunger for history of the entire 20th c. has unnoticedly become also a hunger for identities. In this sense, the role of Greek poetry, created at the turn and during the first decades of the 20th c., grows when except through the prism of a spiritual landmark we view it as a carrier of historical memory (because according to Seferis “a part of the past is always alive”) and also as a coordinate system for defining the notion of identity. Through our literary research we are trying to clarify the essence of the various processes that dictate literary production in the last decades of the 19th c. and in the first decades of the 20th c., that is from the moment when Greek poetry became ready to accept the first modernization wave through the work of the poets from the 1880s poetic generation up to point of the attainment of a relative maturity in mastering the ideas of modernism during the 1920s, which subsequently traced the path for the rise of Greek literature to the zenith of international fame through the creations of the authors from the 1930s literary generation.