Karina Jarzyńska

The article interprets Antoni Lange’s set of editorial, translational, and strictly authorial practices as an attempt to make Polish culture more globally relevant. It looks at the tools the author used to modify the reader’s imaginary and asks where Lange’s project fits into the map of Central and Eastern European modernism. Of the more than a dozen volumes of anthologies published by the author of the Miranda between 1894 and 1921, special attention will be paid to the series entitled “Epic. The Most Excellent Epic Poems of All Countries and Nations” and the volume “Eastern Carpet,” since they contain literary works that the editor presents as epitomes of relevant cultures. The analysis of the paratexts Lange used to annotate his anthologies will reveal what is transcultural in his approach and what makes it possible to distinguish his project of Miriam’s “Chimera,” which aimed at Europeanizing Polish culture rather than making it worldly (in the sense inspired by Marko Juvan). An important context for the proposed interpretation is also Franco Moretti’s notion of the modern epic, in which the functions of sacred and epic texts undergo a fusion – close, I believe, to the mechanism set in motion by Lange in Poland at the beginning of the 20th century as he tried to revise the local literary canon.

* Tekst powstał w rezultacie badań prowadzonych w ramach projektu „Uświatawianie lokalnego imaginarium: transkulturowa historia eposu w literaturze polskiej XX wieku”, finansowanego przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki (grant nr 2021/43/D/HS2/03369).

The article considers Bible translation as a potentially converting experience for the translator and for the readers. It is a case study of the work of an important Polish literary critic, Artur Sandauer, who in 1977 translated the Book of Genesis and published it with an extensive commentary, becoming a part of a “biblical boom” that happened in Poland from 1965 to 1985 (as a result of the Second Vatican Council). Numerous translations of the Bible were initiated at that time by both religious institutions and lay individuals of various backgrounds. Sandauer, a Holocaust survivor, was one of the last such translators and his attitude towards existing denominations was particularly complicated. The article identifies textual strategies that he uses to challenge the sanctity of the Bible, aiming for spiritual independence of himself and the potential reader. This type of postsecular, literature-oriented biblical translation has the hallmarks of a conversion text, although the change that would be made in the translator and the reader is unstable, and, as such, akin to the status of a modern marrano.

The relationship between the idea of Harold Bloom’s literary canon and the status of his own critic’s oeuvre is discussed in the article. Diverse topics and literary styles cultivated by the author of The Anxiety of Influence were characterised and evaluated from the perspective of their canonicality understood as an aesthetic and social value. According to Bloom himself, the canonical texts also offer the spiritual value with help of such tools as irony and metaphor, provoking the readers to assess their own condition. The article presents the Polish reception of Harold Bloom’s texts and examines the presence of Polish literature in the Western literary canon designed by him. Its weak representation demands response of the critics who could propose their own list of literary works based on criteria equally strong as Bloom’s ones but overcoming his oftentimes colonial, patriarchal and exclusionary influence.