Pamiętnik Literacki 3 / 2010

Text File

Pacukiewicz tries to prove that Joseph Conrad’s The Inn of the Two Witches is the intentional travesty of Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Both texts reveal a few similarities within the plot: the names of Moorish sisters in Potocki’s work (Emina and Zibelda) correspond to the names of the two witches, namely Erminia and Lucilla found in Conrad’s story, a small inn somewhere in the Spanish mountains, brigands and, finally, the  manuscript – a starting point of the stories.

However, what distinguishes Conrad’s narrator from that of Potocki is a different way of using the original manuscript as the source of the stories in question. Moreover, in Potocki’s text the manuscript is quoted as a literal translation from Spanish, while Conradian narrator “redrafts” the manuscript because he finds it “dull”.

According to Michel Foucault, it can be proven that Potocki’s and Conrad’s texts are based on the same kind of material, yet they represent different episteme. In the former we find the  classical Order of discourse with literature being its exclusive point of reference. In Conrad’s story we see how this classical Order is transformed by the presence and emotions of Man seen as a source of the truth.

Text File

In this paper we intend to show how the industrial revolution was brought upon a new world, which almost immediately was to become a literary myth. This idea is to be proved on the examples of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Delight (1883), and Władysław Reymont’s The Promised Land (1898). Moreover, we are of the opinion that in these three novels the realistic depiction of the machine society and the alienation it conveys is constantly balanced by an epic narrative, which builds up awe and admiration for it, especially for the “men of industry” as heroes of a new conquest.

Text File

The article is an attempt to interprete Czesław Miłosz’s rich literary creativity in the context of romantic tradition, especially Adam Mickiewicz’s literary heritage. The methodological tool which allows to analyse Miłosz’s ambivalent attitude to Mickiewicz is Harold Bloom’s theory of poetry which relies on the struggle of a “born late” poet against powerful percursor poets. Discussing “agon ephebe” in one of his most famous book The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom presents six revisional stages in which a “strong poet” tries to free himself from the influence of the “Father-poet,” and to use him to sanction his own autonomy and original position. Numerous biographical iterations and literary similarities between the two poets in question started a turmulous relationship resulting in pathetic polemics which exemplifies Bloom’s theory.

Text File

The author uses the methodological tools as gender studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism (J. Butler, J. Kristeva, R. Barthes) to interpret Witold Gombrowicz’s two dramas. In this view, Ivona Princess of Burgundia and History prove to be the cultural distance analysis presented in the dramatic form which reveals its plight, normativeness, and identity claims. The dramatist puts on the social processes of identity creation which stem from a series of exclusions of what is regarded as standing out of norm. Gombrowicz nonetheless is not confined to show that the sex, generally seen as something primal, innate and invariable, is a mere cultural construct and discursive form. Rather, he suggests a possibility of subversive conversion of identity forms and alternative forms of self-creation and experience.

Text File

The article presents the figure of Jevhen Malanyuk, a Ukrainian poet, who since the year 1920 till the end of WW II lived and produced poems in the Polish Republic, and was translated, among others, by Józef Czechowicz. Stanisław Stempowski and Jerzy Stempowski were among his closest friends. Worth noticing are Malanyuk’s political commentaries, i.e. articles published in Polish press. A separate issue is Malanyuk’s postwar cooperation with “Culture” (“Kultura”) issued in Paris. In the article the author makes use of excerpts from unpublished to date Malanyuk’s correspondence with Jerzy Giedroyc.

Text File

Translating Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve into Ukrainian, Wiktor Humeniuk had to resort to other than the Polish poet versification system, since syllabic verse, of which majority of the original text is build, in Ukrainian in 19^th century was totally superceded by syllabic-accentual verse. The translator utilised the form being the closest to 13 (7 + 6) feet line, i.e. Ukrainian iambic 6 feet line. The latter, contrary to Mickiewicz’s 13 feet line, has no tradition in Ukrainian drama, and it came into use in lyrical and narrative pieces no sooner than in 20^th century. As a result, the line in question could be used neither to mark the stylistic differenciations nor to settle such connotations and semantic associations that are introduced into the original text by the Polish line. In his rendering Humeniuk attempted to compensate this constraint with the change of rhyme types, and with almost equilinear translation of the stychic 13 feet verse which provided for preserving a specyfic type of corellation between verse and syntax. To continue, the translator changed the irregular syllabic verse with 8 syllables in its core present in some parts of Forefathers’ Eve into 4 feet trochaic line, and simultaneously omitted a vast number of repetitions and parallelisms which broke the connection of the original text in the whole Part II and in some fragments of Part IV with folk poetry style.

Text File

Translations of Wisława Szymborska’s poems analysed by the author call for the necessity of mitigation of Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa’s categorical view that cultural issues are totally untranslatable. References to Polish culture, history and tradition may prove to be “difficult to translate” or “partially translatable”, thus they cannot be referred to as “absolutely untranslatable” since the translator has a number of various methods at his/her disposal to manage the ignorance of the target receivers. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh usually resort only to domesticating which is sometimes a fruitful approach, however in most cases it partially or totally omits the original meanings and their “Polishness”. It seems that the best recipe is the adjustment of translation strategy to the original text and the unavoidance of foreignizing method as in some translations by Adam Czerniawski, Joanna Trzeciak, Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire.

Text File

The motives of labirynth, forest, and desert are present in a number of old Polish literature texts: in The Chronicle of Gallus Anonymous, in Jan Kochanowski’s literary works, and in baroque poetry in which woods and forested places come into view in dreams and desires of desperate and embittered characters (Chełchowski). The poem Willaneczka tells about love that comes true outside the then social norms, similar in this respect to that of 17^th century French libertine poetry, happy and sensuous, and perhaps also looking for a shelter, a haven. The topos of the four scourges of court, i.e. jealousy, obloquy, intrigue, and unctuousness is voiced in somewhat later composed Elżbieta Drużbacka’s Praise of Forests […] as well as in literary pieces by Wacław Potocki, and Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski. In Polish baroque poetry forests are seen as “holy,” while wild and secluded areas as happy, in time, however, especially in medieval tradition, they become horrible places (locus horridus), similar to the desert, which in their metaphorical functions prove to have positive meanings. Later, e.g. in Drużbacka’s poetry, a garden labirynth also becomes a pleasant place and evokes neither negative associations nor has weighty emotional connotations.

Text File

Aleksander Wat showed his avid interest in Russian literary process. The interests focused mostly on 20^th century literature, though Wat knew older literature very well (he translated, inter alia, Dostoyevsky into Polish). In his recollections and commentaries, essays, diaries, and letters, a lot of space was dedicated to Russian writers. The article contains and comments upon the two writers on whom Wat focuses the most in his aforementioned scattered fragments – Boris Pasternak and Ilya Ehrenburg.  Concentrating on one of the most famous Russian 20^th century novels – Doctor Zhivago, Wat shows the novel’s “technological” awkwardness, however he highlights its prominent function in understanding Russian history in the last century. Attention is also paid to Ilya Ehrenburg (whose few books Wat translated into Polish), depicted from the perspective of the choices Ehrenburg made in his life and his ability to conform to the requirements of the current political situation. The criterium for reflections here is the ethical dimension of Ehrenburg’s actions and papers.

Text File

The text is an analysis of a book by Katarzyna Lukas on German translations of Adam Mickiewicz’s works. Lukas regards image of the world and literary convention as main factors that affect the shape of world literature canon.

Text File

The text is an analysis of a book by Katarzyna Lukas on German translations of Adam Mickiewicz’s works. Lukas regards image of the world and literary convention as main factors that affect the shape of world literature canon.

Text File

In her book Miłosz and Mickiewicz (Miłosz i Mickiewicz), Lidia Banowska reveals the poetic roles Czesław Miłosz assumes when he refers in his poetry to Mickiewicz’s tradition. The roles include a poet-prophet vision and a prophetic conception of poetry in Miłosz’s prewar literary creativity, the emergence of ironic elements in pieces composed during WWII, the motif of attachment to the land of childhood observed in those produced on emigration, and finally – religious themes. Proving the exposition of Miłosz’s consistent links with Mickiewicz’s poetry and biography and attributing a metaphisical sense to them, Banowska discerns a common ground of their writings visible in, inter alia, their religious interests, their attitude to acceptation of the being in all its forms, and in their belief into the reality of poetic call.

Text File

The rewiew of the book written by Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn is devoted to the art of the famous Lithuanian painter and composer M. K. Čiurlionis and his relationship with the Polish culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, especially artistic connections with Polish Romantism (J. Słowacki) and Modernism in Polish Literature.

Text File

The text holds a discussion about a collection of conference papers on dialogue in drama. It shows the diversity of the book’s themes and also concentrates on the accuracy (or erroneousness) of presented methodologies, as well as highlights the importance of the volume as it resumes the problem paramount to drama research, however difficult and not taken up for a long time.

Text File

The review discusses the book on the category of “internal text”. The category in question, proposed by Przemysław Pietrzak, problematizes the literary theory discussions about text–language–outside-the-text relation within the framework of the contemporary novel poetics.

Text File

The review discusses Tomasz Mizerkiewicz’s book on the issue of modern comedy, analysed as based on Polish 20^th and 21^st c. prose and poetic texts.  Mizerkiewicz proposes a new, historical approach to the aesthetic category in question, and in the “comedy studies reflection” he sees an interpretative key and methodological medium to understanding literary history and experience which gave birth to it.

Text File

In the review of Violetta Wejs-Milewska’s book on the writers working at Free Europe (Wolna Europa) Polish broadcasting station, Wacław Lewandowski criticises the research method adopted by Wejs-Milewska, points out plentiful content errors and proves that the study in question fails to meet the academic research requirements.

Text File

The review of The Horizons of Contemporary Slavic Comparative Literature Studies is a description of selected papers contained in the volume in question and a discussion with certain proposals touched in it. The reviewer questions the position that Slavic comparative studies occupies in the world comparative studies, the analysis of the phenomena that occur in those literatures in isolation from other literatures, and sometimes overappreciation of “interliterariness theory” by a Slovak scholar Dionýz Ďurišin. Undeniable value of the book is a set of information on the state of comparative studies in Slavic countries, on the subjects of undertaken investigations and future research plans.

Text File

Text File

Text File

Text File

Text File