Katarzyna Sawicka-Mierzyńska

The Region in Translation

The article consists of two parts. The first contains a summary and an interpretation of the project “New regionalism in literary studies,” initiated in 2012 by Małgorzata Mikołajczak and Elżbieta Rybicka, joined by researchers from, among others, Białystok, Olsztyn, Katowice and Wrocław. The author looks at both external reception, analyzing reviews of the publications that are the aftermath of the New Regionalist conferences, and internal one, i.e. self-diagnoses formulated by its participants. One of the conclusions is the postulate to strengthen interregional comparative studies, which can be helped by the use of tools developed in the field of translation studies, especially in its cultural variety. The second part is devoted to the Belarusian writer from Podlasie, Sokrat Janowicz, who treated translation as a way to overcome the particular determinants of his own work and Belarusian culture. 

Strategies of Authenticity in Ignacy Karpowicz’s Prose (Sońka and Miłość)

The article concerns two books by Ignacy Karpowicz – Sońka from 2014 and Miłość from 2017, interpreted in an autobiographical context. This context serves not so much to highlight the links between these novels and the writer’s experiences, but to recreate the “strategy of authenticity” used by Karpowicz in Sońka and the “strategy of honesty” used in Miłość. Both constitute a kind of “pact” (similar to the “autobiographical pact”) concluded with the readers by the author. According to Olga Szmidt’s deliberations, one of the inalienable elements of the “discourse of authenticity” is the undisclosed secret, which in Sońka’s case turns out to be the protagonist’s (homo) sexuality. The “strategy of honesty” is based on the assumption that the author does not hide anything from his audience. Both the interpretation of the two books contained in the text and the author’s brief discussion of their reception show that the “strategy of authenticity” seems to be more artistically effective.

“Word, birch bark”: Does Piotr Janicki’s [Dog’s Book] Need an Ecocriticism (and Vce Versa)?

The article presents the work of Piotr Janicki, one of the most interesting Polish poets of the middle generation (born 1974). The author focuses primarily on the 2018 untitled volume of poems, referred to as [A Dog’s Book], in order to recreate the structure of the subject it contains, using the categories offered by the ecocritical discourse, represented by the works of Anna Ubertowska, Rosi Braidotti, Timothy Morton and other. In the course of the analysis, it turns out that an important assumption of Janicki’s poetry is the desire to break the anthropocentric perspective, which would place his work in the trend of “deeply ecological” literature, the task of which is, inter alia, to “infect” readers with new forms of sensitivity and imagination, breaking with the traditionally understood humanism, which places man above non-human beings, and not in a network of relationships with them, as it happens in [The Dog’s Book].