Luigi Marinelli

On the basis of reading Szymborska’s poems, Lektury nadobowiązkowe (Non-required Reading) and some auto-thematic reflections from interviews, and referring to – among other things – the conceptions of “ordinary Buddhism” proposed by the French writer Hervé Clerc and “spontaneous enlightenment,” which the Italian scholar of Chán/Zen Aldo Tollini uses in relation to the writing of Luigi Pirandello, the author suggests that the poetic world of Wisława Szymborska is deeply immersed in Zen philosophy. There are some fundamental concepts of Zen thought that shed an interesting light on the general message of this poetry, pointing out many similarities and affinities. This concerns, for example, the ironic and antiphrastic conception of poetic language, the relation between poetry and reality, as well as the method of experiencing the world based on distance and doubt.
 

In his article the author suggests that we should think over four fundamental hypotheses: That one cannot study the history of Polish literature (particularly abroad) without entering onto the field of comparative literature.

Historisising one or more literary works for the needs of a foreign recipient consists, on the whole, in the transposition of linguistic historical and cultural contexts; in other words, it has a lot in common with the normal translation process. It is precisely the history of literature (more than criticism, theory or even journalism and translation itself) that is the privileged field of study of a foreign Polish scholar which allows him to undertake most effective academic, cultural or even political activities. By trying to avoid all forms of ideological Polocentrism, the new Polish literary historiography should therefore strive to emphasize most distinctly the various cultural, ethnic, religious and sex-and-gender oriented elements within the complex and often internally contradictory entity which we refer to as „Polish literature”, emphasizing at the same time the „cultural nature” of a literary work, that is all types of entanglements in culture.

The author’s experience of translating the theoretical and theatrical texts of Tadeusz Kantor – among others the “partituras” of his masterpieces The Dead Class and Wielopole, Wielopole – becomes the starting point for a more general reflection about some theoretical and practical aspects of theatre translation and their relationship with literary translation tout court. The metaphor of (theatrical) translator as a medium and that of translation as the evocation of “voices” – stimulated especially by the “spirits” of The Dead Class and the necessity of their “resurrection” in a new language/culture – is a trope aimed at illustrating the strong link between the literary component of theatrical translation and
theatricality of literary translation. In the author’s opinion it is not a simple tautology, but one of the most important aspects of theatrical translation – which is at the same time endo- and interlinguistic, as well as intersemiotic. Theatrical translators appear indeed not only as the media of “other” voices, but to some extent also as actors of their own texts, since the interplay with the proto-texts and their emotive and communicative goals is achieved through a series of performative elements not far removed from those of an actor on stage.