Andrzej Pawelec

This article focuses on Yitzhak Katzenelson – a pedagogue, playwright and poet from Łódź – and his work on the epic poem The Song of the Murdered Jewish People written in Vittel and published in Paris in 1945. The Vittel internment camp for foreigners served as the first destination for Polish Jews with travel documents from Latin American countries, obtained primarily in the Warsaw ghetto in the so-called ‘Hotel Polski Affair’. Their final destination was Auschwitz, where they perished on arrival in May 1944.

I would like to suggest that the cognitive perspective on language, developed for over half a century, has been challenged in an unparalleled manner by Daniel Dor (2015). He points out that competing schools of linguistics (formalists, functionalists, pragmaticists) all share Chomsky’s original assumption that linguistics is part of Cognitive Science and language is primarily a mental entity. Dor proposes to rethink the status quo in linguistics from an alternative starting point: language is a social communication technology for the instruction of imagination. I believe that this confrontation with mentalism in language study may lead, in time, to a paradigm shift. I also point out – in the context of Charles Taylor’s latest (2016) book – that Dor’s social perspective on language has its limitations too.

Katzenelson’s Song of the Murdered Jewish People is widely recognized as one of the most significant literary documents of the Shoah. Hence, its very limited reception after WW2 is at first glance baffling. We provide the necessary historical background to explain why Katzenelson’s “Lament” was for several decades unwanted and why it still remains difficult to appropriate in translation. To show this in one particular context, we focus on the Polish translation by Jerzy Ficowski. We analyse selected examples of Ficowski’s justly praised poetic achievement to point out the limitations of his declared goal: “My intention was to make the translation invisible, to allow the murdered poet say again the same – but this time, in Polish” (Ficowski 1982: 11).

This article – based on a larger study (Pawelec 2009) – has two aims. The more limited one is to present network models proposed by Ronald Langacker and George Lakoff. I try to show that both ventures rest on manifestly different assumptions, contrary to the widespread view that they are convergent or complementary. Langacker’s declared aim is “descriptive adequacy”: his model serves as a global representation of linguistic intuitions, rooted in convention. Lakoff, on the other hand, offers a developmental model: a fairly general abstract schema is “imagistically” specified and transformed, while the more specific schemas serve as the basis for metaphorical transfers. My wider aim is to offer a preliminary assessment of theoretical justifications and practical potential of network models in lexical semantics.

In this article, I want to put forward the following argument: Cognitive Linguistics – after a long hegemony of Chomskyan formalist linguistics – has offered models of language as “motivated” by general and prior cognitive abilities; as such it has been able to provide representations of a much wider range of linguistic phenomena (both grammatical and lexical); however, the “human face” of Cognitive Linguistics is that of a generic human being rather than that of actual people: members of particular social communities in which languages develop through “figuration” and “articulation”.

In this essay we offer a preliminary discussion of Biermann’s phenomenally successful rendering of Katsenelson’s elegy. First, we place Biermann’s attempt in a wider historical and biographical context to throw some light on his motivation to grapple with the text written in a language he did not know (Yiddish) and thus was forced to rely on a literal version provided by a native speaker. Second, we provide some examples from the work in question of Biermann’s more general attitude to translation, as epitomized by the Yiddish phrase he likes to quote: ‘fartaytsht un farbesert’ (translated and improved). We conclude that Biermann’s adaptation should be assessed first of all as an act of cross-cultural communication rather than according to the criteria of strictly textual equivalence.