Pamiętnik Literacki 3 / 2011

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The article aims at reinterpreting Bolesław Prus’ novel Pharaoh made with the use of religious and anthropological contexts. The basic events of the plot were presented as  mythological categories: as a fight between twin deities (Osiris and Set), making an offering, miraculous ressurection, and restoration of order. In this manner Prus presents a genetic and functional dependence of old cultural institution (such as politics, monarchy, army, arts, science, economy) on ritual-religious system.

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The article’s main goal is an attempt to reflect on the attitude of socialist realism criticism to avant-garde movements. The starting point was Wiktor Woroszylski’s sketch Batalia o Majakowskiego (Struggle for Mayakovsky) which launched a subsequent fervent discussion about the condition of contemporary Polish poetry, and brought up a question regarding the limits of sovietization of Polish literature. Following the ambiguous process of Mayakovsky’s canonization in the Polish press of that period, the author’s main focus is to present the distortions made to the understanding of the term “avant-garde,” as well as to answer the question why the figure of Mayakovsky was to have become the most vital point of reference for Polish literature.

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The paper focuses on the experimental work of Stefan Themerson (St. Francis and The Wolf of Gubbio or Brother Francis’ Lamb Chops. An Opera in 2 Acts. Text and music by Stefan Themerson, drawings by Franciszka Themerson. De Harmonie – Gaberbocchus Press. Amsterdam–London 1972) and the question of intermediality in general. An interpretation of the “semantic opera” (written in 1954–1960, as a continuation of Semantic Divertissements <1962> and factor T <1956>), places Themerson’s idea in the context of aesthetics of intermediality. The author signals a terminological confusion connected with the understanding of St. Francis and The Wolf of Gubbio (semantic opera; hybrid work; intermedial work etc.) and argues that an aesthetics of intermediality appears to be an important and inspiring context for the interpretation of Themerson’s text and life. In this case, considerations on the subject of textuality show, on the one hand, different relations between literature, painting, music and theatre (artistic intermediality), and, on the other hand, the phenomenon of intermediality as aesthetics of existence.

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The article analyses Miron Białoszewki’s late poetry (1976–1983) in the context of Oriental genres: lyrical haiku and satirical senryū. The author begins with the problems of zen poetry, then proceeds to discuss numerous but largely unfound proposals to link Białoszewski’s poetic output with haiku. Scrutinizing Białoszewski’s miniatures, Beata Śniecikowska takes into considerations the lucid sensual arrangements, the attitude of the lyrical “I,” irony, gnomicity, and linguistic, graphic, and instrumentational conceptism. The points of reference of the analyses are Japanese haiku and senryū as well as haiku by Jack Kerouac – a figure also connected with Zen Buddhism. Śniecikowska concludes that in Białoszewski’s late literary creativity one finds a set of poems of close-to-haiku modality, however less rigorous and perceptibly deriving from avant-garde tradition. The researcher facetiously refers to them as “mironū.”

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The problems discussed in the article pertain to music-literary relationship. The arts dialogue is approached here as based on the interpretation of Stanisław Barańczak’s poem From the window on some floor this Mozart’s aria. The reading of the poem is subject to music reception style, thus musical expectations from a literary text which induces the reader to make musical retorts – musical unequivocals. Mistrust of meanings closed in words leads to anagrams (F. de Saussure’s theory) and to the search of order set by the classical harmony. The intertextual parallel drawn between the poem and the lyrics of  Non so più from Mozart’s The Wedding of Figaro shows interdisciplinary solutions to be found at the crossroad of the poem, music, Italian aria’s text and its Polish translation by Barańczak.

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The problems discussed in the article pertain to music-literary relationship. The arts dialogue is approached here as based on the interpretation of Stanisław Barańczak’s poem From the window on some floor this Mozart’s aria. The reading of the poem is subject to music reception style, thus musical expectations from a literary text which induces the reader to make musical retorts – musical unequivocals. Mistrust of meanings closed in words leads to anagrams (F. de Saussure’s theory) and to the search of order set by the classical harmony. The intertextual parallel drawn between the poem and the lyrics of  Non so più from Mozart’s The Wedding of Figaro shows interdisciplinary solutions to be found at the crossroad of the poem, music, Italian aria’s text and its Polish translation by Barańczak.

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The article approaches the problem of Polish reception of Philip Larkin, one of the most influential 20^th-century English authors. The image of the poet is shaped principally by two translations: one by Stanisław Barańczak (1991) and the other by Jacek Dehnel (2008), both of which contributed to important literary critical debates in Poland and diversified the reader’s perception of Larkin influenced by Jerzy Jarniewicz and Czesław Miłosz. The article presents a case study of one poem from High Windows collection, The Building, accompanied by a comparative analysis of two different translation strategies and extra-textual factors which modulated distinct poetological shapes of the renderings. As a consequence of the translators’ choices, the Polish Larkin bifurcates into two images: Barańczak’s metaphysical and “brightened” version, and Dehnel’s skeptical and a more subversive one.

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The article discusses Albert Cohen’s irony as one of the important figures of style in the structure of narration of the novel Belle du Seigneur. The figure of irony requires from the reader some mental effort, some collaboration in which he/she joins the author in the act of artistic creation. The starting point of the paper is a thesis that ironic forms lead us to reveal a diversity of ironies with the help of specific processes that relate to the work Belle du Seigneur. Illustrative examples of the ironies in many structural devices depend on the author’s subjective choice on the matter as the effect of its implementation. Even if one of these processes cannot always be clearly distinguishable from each other, it is possible to determine precisely the peculiar character of the irony, and to establish the following general system: parodic reversal, humorous and satirical movement, ironic neologisms, romantic irony, cosmic irony, and many other. They remind us of the famous ironists, such as Cervantes, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Voltaire, etc. The paper also attempts to indicate the function of style that irony fulfills, namely a tension of content and mode of expression joining description to a complex rhetorical design, and a means of giving an idea of overcompensation and deconstruction as well as the presumption of a dialectical meaning.

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Teodor Parnicki’s letters from the collections of the Raczyński Library in Poznań document the writer’s connections with Great Poland. The first letters date back to the end of the thirties when Parnicki strived to organize in Poznań his lectures on Russian literature and the historical novel. The remaining ones written in the writer’s last years address to Wydawnicto Poznańskie which initially made a decision to publish Parnicki’s juvenile piece, i.e. a novel Count Julian and King Roderick (Hrabia Julian i król Roderyk), and followed with a contract for writing three novels, two of which (Dary z Kordoby <Gifts from Cordova> and Kordoba z darów <Cordova from the Gifts>) after 10 years of his literary experiments make up the writer’s return to writing purely historical novel. The letters shed light on some interesting spects of Parnicki’s craft and show his struggle in his last years against the difficult historical matter, worsening the health condition, and increasing loneliness.

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The article addresses a little known and to date almost not investigated issue of perception of the works of art in Białoszewski’s prose. The poet’s notes from his visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest treasured at the Museum of Literature, Section of Manuscripts, and his correspondence with Jadwiga Stańczakowa made way to reveal some interesting aspects of Białoszewski’s visit to Hungary’s capital city, including the circumstances of the recurring visits to the museum. A careful analysis of the notes shows that Białoszewski treated the museum collection quite selectively. The Budapest notes also certify that some characteristic linguistic structures and formulas used later on in Rozkurz (Loss) were noted down before his arrival in Warsaw, completely independent of Leszek Soliński.

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The sketch is a synthetic description of Maciej Nowak’s book The Concept of History in Historical Novels. Teodor Jeske-Choiński, Zofia Kossak, Hanna Malewska. The study in question, the issues of which are focused on the historiosophical significance of the analysed texts, offers an original interpretative work as well as monumental academic achievement of a theoretical character.

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The review discusses Marta Cywińska’s book Manufaktura snów (Manufacture of Dreams) devoted to surrealism in 20^th century Polish poetry. Cywińska compares Polish surrealism with French one and thus omits the alternative tendencies, e.g. Anglo-Saxon tradition or pop surrealism. In effect, the book in question offers a well developed, however fairly limited vision of “surrealism à la polonaise.”

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The review discusses Adam Mazurkiewicz’s book on the evolution of Polish science fiction after the year 1989. The author analyses science fiction in the perspective of literary tradition, genre poetry, and literary communication.

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The review discusses Walter J. Ong’s anthology of articles – a dominating form of his scientific publications – on the changes of a man’s awareness and noetics influenced by the evolvement (technologization) of word carrier. The anthology, prepared by Józef Japola who earlier translated Ong’s seminal book Orality and Literacy, enhances understanding the modern processes of language change in the era of communication dominated by electronic media.

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The review discusses Linda Hutcheon’s book on the issues of parody in art and 20^th century literature.

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