In Quest for the Meaning of a Work of Art (On the Examples of Texts from Two Distant
Cultures)

The present article is an attempt to visualise the process of perception of a literary work on the basis of two theoretical concepts, separated by chronological as well as geographical distance. The first one is based on the idea of aesthetic experience understood as an effect of sahṛdayatā, formulated by Abhinavagupta in his work titled Abhinavabhāratī as well as on his observations on the relationship between the art work and a spectator, formulated in a passage from Dhvanyālokalocana. The second – on the concept of perception of a work of art, formulated by Roman Ingarden, in the first decades of the 20th century.
The exemplary part of the article will focus on the place of word and image in literary works, with an attempt to depict their primary functions, on the example of Agyeya’s Goldfish, and Laughter by Tadeusz Różewicz – two artistic creations belonging, just as the two presented aesthetic theories, to the same two, apparently disparate cultures.
 

Emotions and Psychological States According to Bharata-Muni’s Natyaśastra

The main objective of the paper is an attempt to approach the rasa theory analytically, taking as a point of departure the metaphor of “clothing of the actor’s soul into the body of gods” called by Bharata-Muni in XXIII Lesson of the Nāṭyaśāstra. He applies this metaphor to explain the subjectivity of the actor’s soul regarding his stage appearance assumed along with colours, make-up and costume, which Bharata considers as the representation of the action of living beings (gods), forming the divine body which actor’s soul clothes. Interpreting the rasa theory in the light of the invoked metaphor is based on Bharata’s description suggesting the coherence between the theory of stage representation (abhinaya), the theory of emotional states (bhāva) and the rasa theory, according to three levels of the experience: bodily, emotional and subjective.
 

The article is exploring the concept of authorship in early (10th–11th century A.D.) classical Persian epic poetry, on the examples of its three representative works: Ferdousi’s Šāhnāme, Asadi’s Garšāsp-nāme and Gorgāni’s Vis-o Rāmin. As the analyzed passages show, all three authors, in spite of their works being based on the existing, traditional sources, have a strong sense of their individual authorship. They understand their role as saving pre-Islamic Iranian patrimony from oblivion, as a modernization of literary language and style and finally, as a search for their personal fame. An attempt at discovering inner senses of the inherited literary material, beyond its external meaning, seems to be another aspect of authorial creativity, as perceived by Ferdousi and Gorgāni.

 

The analysis of the notion of vijnānātman in the context of the advaitic interpretation of the relation between absolute and relative subject.

The topic of the presented article is to show the relation between two dimensions of the reality, one of them is denoted by the term akṣarātman, and the other by the term vijānātman. The term vijānātman occurs only twice in the classical Upanishads. We can find it in the Praśna. That analysis is carried out by the using the hermeneutical methodology. All consideration are based on the main text of Praśna with some additional remarks to the other texts belonging to the line of Atharvaveda, to the Muṇḍaka and to the Māṇḍukya. The leading idea of the Praśna and Muṇḍaka, they are according to the Śankara closely related, are the deliberation between parā and aparā vidyā and the special stress which is put on the describing details concerning yogic procedures.
The main aim of that article is to show how the philosophical concepts have been developing. In which way on the base of the introspective experiences have been built upanishadic view of the world and in which way that view had been adopted to advaita thought.
 

Leszek Dunin Borkowski: 19th-century Galician Explorer of Old Indian Literature

The article presents Leszek Dunin Borkowski, the unique personage from the bygone Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. Borkowski was a Polish writer, poet, publicist and politician who took active part in the November Uprising in 1830, and who – after its fall – arrived in Königsberg, Prussia, where he studied Sanskrit language and literature under Peter van Bohlen, renown German Orientalist of the period, himself a pupil of A.W. Schlegel and F. Bopp. When the Prussians discovered that the student of Sanskrit is a rebellious citizen of the Austrian monarchy and that his presence in Prussia was illegal, they forced him to return to Lemberg (Lviv). Undeterred, Borkowski followed his interest in Sanskrit culture and literature for many succeeding years. His continued explorations in the field resulted in publishing two indological essays. In the one titled Setka Bhartiharis’a (Centuries by Bhartṛhari, 1845), Borkowski interpreted chosen excerpts for the collection of Sanskrit poems known as Three Hundred Poems on Love, Right Conduct and Renunciation ascribed to the poet Bhartrihari (~5 c.). In the second work: O najdawniejszych zabytkach pisemnych (On the Oldest Written Records, 1850) he probed into Vedic literature, which he saw as the oldest testimony of human ideas about God and transcendence. The article introduces the reader to the writings of the Galician intellectual who, to all probability, was the first in the region to undertake a scholarly investigation of Old Indian Literature.
 

Draupadi’s image in the Mahabharata as the Stereotype for Physical Beauty of its Female Heroines

The article is an analysis of the stereotyped image of physical beauty of the heroines of Indian epic Mahabharata. The features of the character of main plot, Draupadi, are compared with these of minor female characters of this epic. Draupadi’s image is shown in many fragments coming from different books of the Mahabharata but the descriptions of the heroines of sub-stories, even if not so numerous are strikingly similar. The characters of sub-stories chosen for this comparison are Śakuntala, Damayanti, Lopamudra, Sukanya, the unnamed woman of frivolous behaviour and Savitri. The comparison of images of the female characters allows to check the potential influence of the image of the main female character on the range of other images of female beauty as shown in the Mahabharata. The question of probability of this potential influence is posed and discussed in detail.

 

Translation of literature is not only a linguistic challenge, but it means also the ability to find readable equivalents describing an existential experience in foreign culture code. The article raises issues of translation in relation to Arabic literature, which in the cultural perspective is relatively distant to a Polish reader. In the first part, the authors mention the most important examples of translations of Arabic literary works into Polish ranging from baroque to modernity. They draw attention to the main trends that Polish translators followed and point to the basic problems, which they had to face. The second part of the article refers to the authors’ own experience in translation. It presents the short analysis of the phenomena, which are, in their opinion the biggest challenges in translational work on the Arabic literary texts.
 

In theory of suggestion, the metaphor of the mask and the face is used to better define the only concept of suggestion. I use here the metaphor as a starting point to tie the theory of suggestions to the theory of the sublime. The analytic material provides me with 15 English translations, 15 Polish translations, 2 Latin translations, 2 German and 2 Swedish and Greek and Hebrew versions of Psalm 139. When analysing the translations I use a concept of the dominant semantic domain as references of metaphors in a given text. In Psalm 139, there are several important terms to know. According to my analysis of the dominant domain of reference for the metaphors used in the text, it is the experiential domain, defined by senses other than sight. Knowledge does mean meeting with the presence, of which can be illustrated by the metaphor of the face and that feeling is overwhelming, corporeal, visceral, and tangible. An important argument and analysed text in this article are drawn from a poetic paraphrase of Psalm 139 by Jan Kochanowski.
 

Gustav Herling-Grudzinski and Jews (Reconaissance)

The article concerns “Jewish” topics in the writings of G. Herling-Grudziński. It contains a record of almost all his remarks on the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and Judaism (always introduced in connection with Christianity) in dealing with this subject essays and diary records. It shows reflections in what form the issues came to the stories and short novels author of A World Apart: A Memoir of the Gulag. The collected material provides no basis for predication that sensitivity to the Jewish question indirectly reveals relationships with this part of the writer’s biography, which is associated with his concealed Jewish origins.