Jerzy Jarniewicz

This article discusses Czesław Miłosz’s ambiguous relationship with American beat
and confessional poetry as well as with the counterculture of the 1960s. It focuses
on one of Miłosz’s late poems dedicated to Allen Ginsberg, published in Facing the
River in 1994. The poem, though ostensibly about Ginsberg, is in fact one of the most
confessional poems the Polish poet has ever written, presenting his own life as a failure,
“a discarded tire by the road,” and setting up Ginsberg as an exemplary wiser poet,
“who persisting in folly attained wisdom.” On the one hand, it seems diffi cult not to
see Miłosz and Ginsberg as two very different personalities. On the other hand, Miłosz
saw Ginsberg as the true heir to Whitman, whom he himself had always admired.
The discussion of the poem reveals that Miłosz uses Ginsberg as his own antithesis,
a Yeatsian mask or a Jungian shadow, representing everything that the Polish poet, with
his admitted contempt for any trace of weakness and mental instability, has never been
or valued.

A DISCARDED TIRE BY THE ROAD. OR MIŁOSZ SETTLES UP WITH GINSBERG

The article discusses Czesław Milosz’ ambiguous relationship with American beat and confessional poetry, and with the counterculture of the sixties, focusing on one of his late poems dedicated to Allen Ginsberg published in Facing the River in 1994. The poem, though ostensibly about Ginsberg, is in fact one of the most confessional poems Milosz has ever written, presenting his own life as failure, “a discarded tire by the road”, and setting up Ginsberg as an exemplary wiser poet, “who persisting in folly attained wisdom”. Seemingly, it is hard to think of two more different personalities than Miłosz and Ginsberg. On the other hand, however, Ginsberg was to Miłosz the true heir to Whitman, whom Miłosz has always admired. It is argued here that in the poem discussed, Ginsberg served Miłosz as his antithesis, a Yeatsian mask, or a Jungian shadow, representing everything that Miłosz, with his admitted contempt for any trace of weakness and mental instability, has never been or valued.

The article examines Catherine Anyango’s and David Zane Mairowitz’s graphic novel Heart of Darkness as an illustration of the differences between the unique possibilities of verbal and visual media. Conrad’s metaphor of Marlow’s story as a misty halo, interpreted here as an autotelic commentary on the text’s elusive meaning, is the starting point for a discussion of visual representations of indeterminacy, which Conrad conceptualizes in visual terms, equating understanding with seeing. Another issue raised is the place of the narrator in visual arts, made problematic by Conrad’s use of two narrators and the story-within-a-story device. It is also argued that the graphic novel, though a sequential medium, makes use of spatial juxtaposition of images, which is not only a source of metaphors, but also creates the effect of simultaneity unavailable to verbal arts.

The article addresses the problem of cultural transfer, first, by defining its conditions, and, secondly, by asking about the criteria by which we can measure its success. Among the latter, one can mention the impact of the translated work on the target language literature, the critical reception of the work, and on its author’s presence in the public space of the foreign culture. The successfully transferred work becomes an element of “world literature,” constituted differently in different cultures. The article discusses these issues by analyzing specific examples of translations of contemporary Polish literature into English and various forms of their presence in the Anglophone world. Special attention is paid not only to the influence these translations have on the literature of the target language, but also on the ways in which they are in turn affected by their new cultural and linguistic environment. Cultural transfer is thus seen as a process of multidirectional osmosis, in effect of which both the translated work and foreign literature are modified.

Among various forms of concrete poetry, I have identified two main types. The first one, which was born as an attempt to transgress national languages and create a universal code, by its very definition questions the sense of translation. Yet it does not nullify it, concrete poetry of this type still needs translators as “conveyers”, who select poems and anchor them into new cultural contexts. Since the shape of the poem remains mostly intact, translation is no longer an interlingual activity, but an intercultural one. In the case of the second type of concrete poetry, which I call paronomatic and which due to its metalinguistic complexity renders the poems untranslatable, translators can be redefined as “exegetes”, offering descriptions and interpretations of the poems. The article discusses in detail selected examples of the two types of concrete poetry in translation, demonstrating the variety of the translator’s tasks.