Genezy – lektury
Review of M. Antoniuk „Słowo raz obudzone”: Poezja Czesława Miłosza – próby czytania [‘The Word Once Awakened’: Reading Czesław Miłosz’s Poetry], Księgarnia Akademicka, Cracow 2015.
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Review of M. Antoniuk „Słowo raz obudzone”: Poezja Czesława Miłosza – próby czytania [‘The Word Once Awakened’: Reading Czesław Miłosz’s Poetry], Księgarnia Akademicka, Cracow 2015.
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Review: B. Śniecikowska, Haiku po polsku: Genologia w perspektywie transkulturowej [The Haiku in Polish: Genealogy from a Transcultural Perspective], FNP, Toruń 2016
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Kmiecik presents Aleksander Wat’s hitherto unpublished Dziennik bez samogłosek [Diary without Vowels], which was written in code. The passages discussed in this article are based on the “original typescript” kept in the writer’s archive at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. They are reproduced in two versions: 1) the genetic one, which is closest to the archived material (this version skips the vowels and reproduces Wat’s syntax, punctuation, typographical errors, stylistic and lexical slips); and 2) a decrypted version (the vowels have been added and typographical errors have been corrected while preserving the original syntax and punctuation). This commentary attempts to read Wat’s code in the spirit of Adam Dziadek’s somatic criticism – as a model of “speed-writing” conditioned by Wat’s painful illness and marked by his somatic experience.
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Kluba presents the transcript of “Białoszewski’s Lesson,” a hitherto unknown poem by Zbigniew Herbert. Key to understanding this work – a draft of which survives in the poet’s archive – is the relationship between semantics and ethics. Kluba reads “Białoszewski’s Lesson” as a unique reflection on the poet’s duties and powers in a situation that Herbert diagnoses as a state of “semantic collapse”. The poem is part of Herbert’s opposition to this state, which marks his essays in the 1990s. But its actual goal is not so much to analyse the barbarization of language – it is to reflect on the helplessness of poetry in the face of this phenomenon.
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The goal of this article is to point to the future as a forgotten and understudied but still essential reference point for studies on memory and affects. Bringing B. Massumi’s notion of ‘past futures’ to bear on contemporary Polish literature, Tabaszewska demonstrates that concrete visions of the future are able to change our memories and impact our interpretation of the present. This means, therefore, that the future is – just as the past – the domain of affective politics, the more liable to be manipulated as the future, unlike the past, is always only possible, never certain.
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Review: K. Wądolny-Tatar, Kołysanka w liryce XX i XXI wieku: Emergencja gatunku literackiego [The Lullaby in Lyrical Poetry of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: The Emergence of a Literary Genre], Wydaw. Naukowe Uniw. Pegdagogicznego, Cracow 2014.
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Exploring the changing position of the village in Polish culture and fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century, Czapliński argues that: 1) the 1990s see a decline in the literary peasant tradition (due to the loss of symbolic and political representation); in its place we get fiction that thematizes the village; 2) in the plot, the double death of the peasant tradition is expressed through the motif of the dying village (depopulation, poverty) as well as the status of the undead (ghosts, spectres) imparted on the village community; 3) only in works of the 2010s, literary representations of the village begin to give rise to new social ties, new methods of production and other narratives.
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This article explores Henryk Bereza’s literary criticism as well as fiction in the so-called peasant tradition. This movement blossomed in the 1970s, and Bereza was the most important critic to tackle this phenomenon. What was the peasant tradition? What debates did it give rise to? What does it signify today?
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This article deals with the experience of the Shoah in the countryside as described from two perspectives – Jewish (victim) and Polish (bystander-witness). A key question is how identity is conceptualized in the face of liminal experience in two narratives, namely Tadeusz Nowak’s work belonging to the so-called peasant tradition in Polish literature, as well as the diary of Melania Weissenberg, a Jew who hid in a village. These different narratives are linked above all by the place, as both are set in the vicinity of Dąbrowa Tarnowska. Koprowska discusses the works of Nowak and Weissenberg as examples of literary responses to the Shoah in a local village context.
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This article explores selected passages from Andrzej Mencwel’s autobiographical essay Toast na progu [Toast on the Threshold] in the context of recent literary and critical texts as well as artistic works that explore – and introduce to a broader public – the question of Polish culture’s peasant roots. Litwinowicz-Droździel focuses on the problems of civilization in Mencwel’s work and on his diagnoses regarding the current state of peasant culture.
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Józef Mackiewicz’s representations of nature frequently include birds, which play a variety of artistic roles. Fitas discusses the most memorable instances of this key motif by exploring Mackiewicz’s journalistic and novelistic works, in particular his novella Faux- -pas ciotki Pafci [Auntie Pafcia’s Faux-pas]. Birds appear as a clear pars pro toto of nature, and they point to the tension between the natural and the human in the real twentiethcentury world, dominated as it is by politics and ideology. Although this article is based on a traditional structural methodology, Fitas concludes by suggesting ways in which it could offer a point of departure for future studies based on modern methodologies (e.g. ecocriticism, the natural and the human in Walter Benjamin or Giorgo Agamben).
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Śniedziewska examines Miłosz’s relationship to animals – especially birds – as it can be reconstructed from Dolina Issy and some of his poems. Fascinated with both nature and hunting, Miłosz advocates for two contradictory positions. As soon as he enters the world of hunting – portryed by Schiller as a naive perspective – and begins to observe wild animals, he undergoes a radical change. Śniedziewska argues that Tomasz, the alter ego of the young Miłosz, whose perspective is influenced by the consciousness of the mature poet, never really attains real access to the wild birds’ world. Miłosz’s poems about birds, however, are part of his reflections on the essence of all living creatures. The place where his thoughts about birds intersect in his prose and poems are his remarks on the problem of classification: naming as appropriation.
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Polish writer and translator Władyslaw Orkan was one of the greatest popularizers of Ukrainian literature in Poland at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He translated and edited a selection of Ukrainian novellas Młoda Ukraina, published in 1908. Ukrainian motives also constituted a significant element in his own work (Kostka Napierski, 1925). The paper discusses Orkan’s translations and metatexts (prefaces, introductions) in the context of postcolonial criticism. Numerous texts describing Polish-Ukrainian relations have shown essential postcolonial legacy recognizable in Polish writing on and about Ukraine (see. esp. Skórczewski 2013, Bakuła 2014). Orkan’s strategies in translation were influenced by his personality and the need to speak for Ukrainian literature in Poland. As writer he was a lonely figure because he was one of the first Polish writers of peasant origin who wrote about rural life and presented values hitherto absent from Polish literature. By raising Ukrainian literature to the status of a national one, Orkan proved that there was a separate national Ukrainian culture. Accordingly, he may be said to have contributed to the process of de-colonizing Ukraine for the Polish reader.
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Czapliński offers a microsynthesis of Polish literature dealing with the expulsion of Jews from Poland in 1968. Three historical regularities determine this literature’s development: 1) the number of texts dealing with March 1968 has steadily grown over the years (signalling that the moment represents a key event and continues to be a central puzzle of modern Polish history); 2) the importance of fiction is on the decline while the literature of testimony (diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, interviews, quasi-documents) are playing an increasingly prominent role; 3) at the turn of the ‘80s and ‘90s, the dominant narrative pattern changed from the tragic to the melodramatic. Czapliński discusses both models as ways of presenting the birth, decay and (possibly) regeneration of the social bond. The crucial difference between them concerns the possibility of continued Polish-Jewish relations.
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Tomczok offers a close reading of Tadeusz Borowski’s short story “Farewell to Maria” [Pożegnanie z Marią] in the context of works by Jan T. Gross and Raul Hilberg. She reveals the ideological potential of Borowski’s text and its ideologemes, highlighting above all the Poles’ fears and desires in relation to the Holocaust and the people inside the Warsaw ghetto as it was being liquidated. She also considers the influence of these ideologemes on contemporary Polish literature (Marcin Wroński’s A na imię jej będzie Aniela [And Her Name Will Be Aniela], Warsaw 2011; Krystian Piwowarski’s Więcej gazu, Kameraden! [More Gas, Comrades!], Warsaw 2012). The most ambiguous moment of “Farewell to Maria”, from an ideological point of view, seems to be the culminating point with the motif of yearning for soap and the figure of Mischling. Reflecting on the work of contemporary ironists, Tomczok explores the fact that Borowski remains understudied and quasi-witnesses’ fantasies about being perpetrators of the Holocaust.
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Review: Dorota Sajewska, Necroperformance: The Cultural Reconstruction of Theatre [Nekroperformans: Kulturowa rekonstrukcja teatru Wielkiej Wojny] (Warsaw: Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego, 2016)
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This paper is dedicated to the maps of Stanisław Pachołowiecki (2nd half of the 16th century) printed in Rome by Giovanni Battista Cavalieri in 1580. In August 1579, the Polish-Lithuanian army retook the city and the voivodeship (principality) of Polotsk from Russian hands. Pachołowiecki, a cartographer working for Stephen Báthory, prepared maps depicting the Siege of Polotsk, the whole principality of Polotsk and plans of six other fortresses and cities conquered by Báthory’s army. This study presents an answer to the following question: What means were used in the development of the new geographic knowledge by people engaged in the preparation and use of Pachołowiecki’s atlas? Jakub Niedźwiedź takes a closer look at the application of rhetoric, mainly figures and tropes drawn (or translated) from literature into the cartographic text.
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This essay explores Conrad’s assessment of the moral state of Europe as well as post- Enlightenment European divisions, as reflected in the writer’s treatment of the theme of patriotism in his short story Prince Roman. The story’s unique, seemingly “un-Conradian” features are discussed in the context of the influence of Polish Romanticist ideas on Conrad. The motifs of unselfishness and sacrifice for a “greater cause” recurring in Prince Roman are shown as determinants of the quality of the protagonist’s moral choice.
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The article concerns very typical issues of Ludmila Ulitskaya’s prose, namely childhood and maturity as well as relationship between human and things (objects). In the novel entitled The Big Green Tent the process of moral development is described. It involves, among other things, sudden events of crucial and initiatory character, which have the features of special ritual. During rituals the heroes are submitted to physical and mental resilience tests. There are some objects inherent to heroes’ initiation. In the novel they go beyond the inanimate matter, which is passive and submitted to human will. They are personified, have their own history and what is most important they are the driving force, the initiators of turning points which affect heroes’ future. Those objects are: a camera, skates and a knife. Revealing the objects’ “agency” is one of main aims of the article. Agency of above mentioned objects manifests itself by the way they influence heroes’ behavior, interfere in their future and play significant role in heroes’ development to maturity.
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The article presents an attempt to answer the question whether Polish-Croatian translation school can be discussed within the framework of literary translation. Features of the potentially existing school are discussed, namely, the conditions of formation and functioning, chronological and geographical scope, accomplishments in the area of translation and translation studies, as well as the impact on the contemporary translation practice and teaching translation. There are several arguments in favour of the existence of the Polish-Croatian translation school. For example translators from 60s and 70s used a specific strategy for translating culturally marked elements (terms specific for a given culture, that are not present in the other) defined here as didactical source-orientation. Although neither their traductological discourse nor the ideal of a translator-popularizer (meaning that they weren’t only translators but also authors of guides, organisers of cultural events, etc.) differs broadly enough from the Polish equivalents to advocate distinctiveness of those translation schools.
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