Anne Carson's essay „Variations on the Right to Remain Silent” is about untranslatability in the context of literature, history and painting. According to Homer's Oddysey authoress shows untranslability as a imposibility to translate one language into another and in the big picture as a – sacred, inaccessible, remained silent – knowledge of gods contained in word, which can't be translated. Bringing in the idea of cliché, took from French to English without any changes, she uses it as a image of stereotypical thinking and violence of convention (mainly institutional). The inquisitorial process of Joan of Arc is a example of untranslatability of mystical experience. Bacon's paintings, specially series of portraits of the screaming pope, expose another aspect of titular silence (which means also rejection of speaking, cooperation and interpretation): scream painted without any sound. The methods of disturbing the coherence of story on the painting is also very important here: randomness of painter's acts, white arrows, which guide the attention of spectator or splashes of paint. Translation projects of Hölderlin shows the subject of translation in connection with madness. The figure of German poet separated from the world, who is working on translations of Sophocles and trying to find the words „living enough”, is example of impossible (and non-accepted) project of using the language different from conventional. All those figures, which Anne Carson describes in her variations inspired by music and painting, move against violence of language, which is the cacophonous collection of cliché. Untranslatability of their works is about their genius.  

The article focuses on the issue of describing a work of art in an essay. The paper presents the form of ekphrasis and the method of interartistic analysis, as well as underlines the efficiency of the translatological perspective (e.g. intersemiotic translation) in the study of the phenomenon of ekphrasis. As a starting point for the analysis and interpretation of fragments of Herbert’s and Herling’s essays, the article brings closer the very work of art, Guidoriccio da Fogliano at the siege of Montemassi, from the perspective of art history. Next, it discusses the verbal accounts of the painting put forward by Herbert and Herling, examining their contents and poetics and paying attention to the character of the description they propose. For the description may focus either on the subject or on the viewer, either on the representation itself or on its connotations. Accordingly, it is suggested that the corresponding modes of ekphrasis should be labelled ‘denotational’ and ‘connotational’. The aim is to present concrete realizations of ekphrasis and characteristic modes of perceiving and writing about a work of art as well as to show how the subjective perspective of the observer (describing, commenting, interpreting) and the idiomatic style of expression are manifested.

Invisible Cities(1972) is – despite the title – the most visible book of Italo Calvino. Calvino included visibility in his literary testament, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, as one of the fundamental values of literary creation. The author often emphasized the significance of visibility in his writings and accented its close relation with exactitude, another value that he felt important for the next millennium. Translated into Polish by Alina Kreisberg, the book was first published in 1975 and twice republished in 2005 and 2013. The translator, who considers the book a record of an inner journey “around one’s head”, openly admits to having modified the various details of Calvino’s images, recognizing that in Polish some terms would sound too exotic, encyclopedic, and elitist. Especially noteworthy are her translations of architectural and art historical terms, sometimes leading to a change in the style characteristics of buildings evoked by Calvino’s text. The translator’s decisions make the images of Invisible Cities even more surrealistic and mythical

The article deals with the complex issue of the interrelation of the elements of the linguistic texture with the elements of sense produced thanks to the decoding of the graphic layer. The departure point for the argument will be the concept of conceptual blending from the area of cognitive linguistics. This concept describes the blending of two semiotic spaces, here the iconic space and the symbolic space, to create a new emergent space, which escapes unequivocal interpretation, especially if a given text intensifies the role of its graphic form. The analysis of such an emergent space will be understood as a typographic analysis of glyphs, their interdependencies, patterns and, ultimately, their relations with the meaning decoded in a given language. The interpretative act will proceed according to poststructuralist premises, based mainly on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, who applies the term dissemination to describe the radically ambivalent character of sense production, not limited to semanticism, but taking into consideration all aspects of the textual tissue (graphic, phonetic, syntactic etc.). To describe the specific interpretative state of a reader/translator, who, faced with the totality of an experimental literary work, cannot prioritise various possible ways of interpretation, the study applies the term apophany, borrowed from the thought of the German psychologist, Klaus Conrad, namely, a stage of development of schizophrenia, which entails a specific experience of abnormal meaningfulness. Examples of a translator's apophany can be found in the analysis of the Polish translation of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (clusters of letters, punctuation) and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (the undecidables of the syntagmatic aspect of sentences).

The paper deals with the relation between verbal expressions and mental images. As claimed by cognitive linguists, “understanding a verbal message” requires that two kinds of mental imagery are evoked: rich images, which are encoded in individual lexemes, and schematic images, conventionally related to grammatical structures. Based upon this principle, an analysis of a Polish poem and its English translation is carried out in order to demonstrate that a complicated interplay between the two kinds of mental imagery underlies the texts and accounts for their interpretation.

The article compares experience, often raised in contemporary aesthetic theories, of translating image into words, a relationship of the visible and linguistic with a translation technique, as well as museum experience in order to indicate some regularities in the creation of audio description (AD) of works of art, understood as a new way of making artifacts accessible to people who suffer from visual impairment, as well as one of the areas of practice applied in museology, which, by trial and error tries to adapt artistic means of expression to perceptive abilities of a distinct group of visitors. The first part of the publication discusses theories combining a picture with a word, as well as a description of an image in terms from the perspective of AD. Then it analyses two descriptions of the Neoplastic Room in Museum of Art in Łódź: a description by an art historian, Janina Ładnowska, which was created in the late 1980s as a curatorial description and was not made for the blind, and an audio description created by students of the Department of the History of Art of the University of Łódź with the support of the Audiodescription Foundation and the Culture without Barriers Foundation and through consultations with people with visual impairments in the academic year 2013-2014 dedicated to the blind and visually impaired. The article also deliberates an issue of methods of supporting reception of a work of art with multi-sensory experience. The main research questions are: - While creating descriptions, should we look for beauty/moving elements/emotions (all being inalienable characteristics of all art exploring experience) or should we confine ourselves to simple descriptions?; - Should we create simulacra of works of art (such as the much praised by blind people: typhlographics, 3D prints, referential objects that imitate the feel of the original)?

The subject of this paper is audio description (AD) or – more precisely – an artistic AD, by which I understand the AD the language and form of which are adjusted to the product it accompanies, which not only informs about the content of the visual layer of the movie, but is also able to recreate its unique character. The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of some scenes of the film The Intouchables and a Polish AD prepared for the film. The aim of the study was to establish how much the authors of the latter were able to preserve from the original character of the film (and especially from the emotions and humour included in its scenes), how much was lost, and why. Although the AD for The Intouchables is written in a rich and colourful language, it can be classified as traditional. This, in turn, may be a starting point to consider whether giving it a more artistic form has a potential to contribute to a better rendition of filmic humour. The conclusions of the study are part of a wider reflection on the ability of AD to influence the mood of the audience. This is why, the text is additionally illustrated with a number of examples from Polish and foreign ADs (which can be perceived as artistic ones) prepared for various movies of different genres.

The collection of twelve scholarly essays Między słowem a rzeczy-wistością. Poezja Eliota wobec cielesności i Wcielenia focuses on the poetry of T.S. Eliot viewed from the perspective of its reflection on the nature of poetry and the poetic word, especially in their relation to the Word of God and the Incarnation as a dogma of the Christian faith and a reality of imaginative constructs embodied in Eliot’s poetry. The essays seek to discover ‘the Polish Eliot’, and they often refer to various Polish translations of Eliot’s poetry, drawing attention to their linguistic subtleties or a range of different meanings arising from sundry cultural contexts and diverse interpretations. The discussion of Eliot’s poetic output throws light on its religious component often neglected or underestimated in popular reception of his work. The essays successfully engage in a dialogue with philosophy and theology, thus uncovering before the reader the richness and depth of Eliot’s poetry. The book is an important contribution to the study of Eliot’s work as it provides many precious insights for the readers, critics and future translators of his poetry.