Issue 25 English Version

Issues in English

Publication date: 01.08.2013

Description

The English-language electronic version of Przekładaniec was made possible by a grant from the National Programme for the Development of Humanities 2012-2013 awarded by the polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

Licence: None

Editorial team

Secretary dr Zofia Ziemann

Editor-in-Chief dr hab. Magda Heydel

Issue content

Miłosz’s American Alphabet

Anna Kołodziejczyk

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 7-27

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.013.1202

This article presents a selection of Czesław Miłosz’s comments on American culture, economy and politics during his diplomatic service in the United States in the years 1946–1950. They were formulated in his postwar correspondence and in a series of articles entitled “Life in the USA,” which he published in Odrodzenie under the pseudonym of Jan M. Nowak from 1946 to 1947.

PDF

Miłosz’s Non-existent Book about America in the 1940s

Piotr Pietrych

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 27-44

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.014.1203

This paper sketches Miłosz’s (non)-existing book on America, consisting of his numerous articles and columns written during his fi rst stay in the United States from 1946 to 1950. They were published in the Polish literary press, often under pen names (such as “Jan M. Nowak” or “Żagarysta”). The book is a signifi cant record of the period: the political transformations at the beginning of the Cold War and the Anti- Americanism that was gaining popularity among European intellectuals in the late 1940s.

PDF

A Fly Trapped in Amber. On Czesław Miłosz’s America and His Imagination

Tomasz Bilczewski

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 45-58

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.015.1204

This article aims to examine selected historical contexts of Miłosz’s encounters with America. Its purpose is to demonstrate that the poet’s attitude towards the country where he spent many years of his adulthood and creative life was full of confl icts, paradoxes and contrasts. Early readings, a boyhood passion for discovering the laws and secrets of nature, and Romantic and modern literary traditions signifi cantly infl uenced both Miłosz’s perception of American landscapes and American culture, shaping new landscapes within him. The transformations of the speaking “I,” which the reader witnesses through Miłosz’s experiences with the New World, allow for an understanding of how his unique spatial imagination developed. This article also attempts to indicate areas where Miłosz searches for a solution to his disintegrated imagination, particularly in its religious dimension, while tackling the challenges and crises of modernity.

PDF

Miłosz’s Biology Lesson

Dariusz Czaja

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 59-79

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.016.1205

Over the years Visions from San Francisco Bay (1969) has proven to be essential both to Miłosz’s life and to his writings. It was there that he formulated, for the fi rst time with such a force, the theses that would later reappear regularly in his essays and poetry. One vital aspect of the intellectual construction outlined in Visions was the concept of Nature. Miłosz proposed a “presentistic” approach, arguing for the concept of Nature as an indispensable element of contemporary thought. His reflections were restricted to motifs closely related to his theses about Nature: Nature and beauty, human/animal relations, and the theory of evolution.

PDF

Whitman and Miłosz’s America

Joanna Zach

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 81-89

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.017.1206

This paper investigates the ambiguous process of Czesław Miłosz’s integration into America (both its nature and culture) in the context of his literary commitments and “private obligations” to American poetry. It was a long and painful process, a constant struggle with the state of exile, feelings of homelessness and uprootedness that fi nally showed the poet the “new identity” of the modern man, bound to recognise his unstable, tenuous position in space and time. According to Miłosz, America was a testing ground for all mankind, and the very core of American literature had always been the question: “Who am I?” Thus, Miłosz’s serious involvement in American history and culture gave him a new perspective on global civilisation; it helped him to recreate his own identity and to strike a balance between homelessness and belonging.

PDF

Miłosz: On Circuit

Jacek Gutorow

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 91-108

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.018.1207

This paper undertakes a critical examination of Czesław Miłosz’s negative responses to contemporary art in general, and American modernist poetry in particular. It focuses on Miłosz’s interpretations of Cézanne’s statements and Wallace Stevens’s poems, and concludes that the Polish poet’s inability and unwillingness to appreciate contemporary art results from his recognition and approval of mimetic representation as the only strategy which guarantees rationality, certainty, a sense of metaphysical hierarchy and which is informed by them. Quoted are Miłosz’s somewhat angry reactions to the concepts of abstract, non-fi gurative art as well as his words of admiration for the representational moment apparently inherent in both poetry and painting. Parenthetically, the paper points to Miłosz’s repressed feelings of existential and epistemological ambivalence, arguably the most valuable aspect of his work.

PDF

Miłosz and Twentieth-century American Avant-gardes

Paweł Marcinkiewicz

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 109-131

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.019.1208

Miłosz was an avant-garde poet who consequently realized his program of rejuvenating mid-twentieth-century Polish poetry: he wanted to cure the maladies of Romantic and nationalistic discourses in order to prevent poetry from addressing important contemporary issues. Although he fi nally became very critical of avantgardes, his initial, restoring impulse came from the Poundian need to “make it new.” Miłosz’s great poetry of the 1970s developed Pound’s formal inventions, particularly the “ideogrammatic method,” thus generating meanings in the poem by setting its fragments against one another. The Polish poet often criticized the achievements of the New York School poets, yet he admired their artistic freedom. He realized, however, that he himself could not contradict the “poetics of rescue” he had been following for years. The world presented in Miłosz’s late poems is not obvious. Its most astonishing feature is the perspective from which the narrator addresses the reader: the timeless space, where the dead meet the living, has nothing to do with a picture of the world based on mimesis. Miłosz’s “second space” has a lot in common with the “real reality” designed by surrealists, which John Ashbery evokes in his recent poems. Both poets reach a similar mystical point where the word touches upon the mystery.

PDF

"A Discarded Tire by the Road": Miłosz Settles up with Ginsberg

Jerzy Jarniewicz

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 133-145

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.020.1209

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.

PDF

Songs of Ecstatic Despair. Miłosz and the Counterculture

Marcin Jaworski

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 147-157

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.021.1210

This article discusses the relationship between the American counterculture of the 1960s and Miłosz’s poetry created during that time in Berkeley. The poet observes the student revolt through his own experience with history, including his leftist sympathies. He is critical both of the naïve hippie postulates and Herbert Marcuse’s new version of Marxism. However, he treats counterculture as a symptomatic response to vital problems of the Western civilization in the second half of the twentieth century. He reflects upon the influence of art on power, totalitarian as well as democratic. He sees the necessity of commitment, though he asks about its form and effects. Countercultural experiments coincide also with Miłosz’s own search for “a more capacious form” and with the epiphanies described in his poems.

PDF

How Much Can One Say? Confessional Poetry and Confessionalism of Poetry

Przemysław Michalski

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 159-170

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.022.1211

This essay sets out to examine Miłosz’s attitude towards confessional poetry, or rather, to examine his stance on confessionalism as a seemingly inseparable element of any poetic utterance. By means of such terms as decorum, referentiality of poetic language and its usefulness, I try to show why Miłosz preferred to stay away from overtly confessional modes of poetic utterance, which draw too heavily on the poet’s own experiences and may result in blurring the distinction between biography and literature. One reason why the poet so intensely disliked excessive confessionalism is that its main purpose is to describe the emotions of the speaker, whereas he felt that the main task of poetry is to celebrate the dazzling beauty of the outside world, whose existence transcends and surpasses the insignifi cantly small inner world of a troubled psyche. Last but not least, the notion of the usefulness of poetry, in his understanding of the term, is that it makes it possible for poems written in diverse countries and epochs to intensify the contemporary reader’s sense of belonging to the great family of the human race.

PDF

"For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come." Friends United by Exile: On the Correspondence of Czesław Miłosz and Thomas Merton

Jean Ward

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 171-184

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.023.1212

This article discusses the decade-long correspondence of Czesław Miłosz and Thomas Merton, published fi rst in a Polish translation in 1991, and only later, in 1997, in the original English. Though Merton offered to write in French, a language that Miłosz at the time knew much better than English, Miłosz chose to use the latter. The article concentrates on Miłosz’s side of the correspondence, comparing the impression of struggle and incomplete command that his letters evoke in the original version with the linguistic elegance and control implied by the Polish translation. The article suggests that Miłosz’s slightly foreign English is a kind of refl ection of the theme implied by the English title of the correspondence, Striving Towards Being. Moreover, the article argues that writing in English, despite the constraints that it imposed, enabled the Polish poet to discover a childlike freedom of expression and to meet his “correspondent,” a fellow-sufferer from spiritual homelessness, in sympathetic understanding, though the external experience of the two was very different. Paradoxically, each partner, in his search for someone who “spoke the same language,” found what he sought in a person who, in the literal sense, did not.

PDF

Miłosz-Merton: A Binary Star

Aleksander Gomola

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 185-198

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.024.1213

During his life in America Czesław Miłosz met many people but few of them were more important than a man whom he saw only twice – Thomas Merton. Miłosz and Merton corresponded regularly for almost ten years (1959–1960) and their letters, published in Polish and English, show two great minds involved in a deep and sincere dialogue, revealing their most intimate thoughts as well as fears and hopes. Close to each other, they nevertheless remained independent in their thinking. This article presents their exchanges on political issues such as the Cold War, the Civil Right Movement or communist Russia. It also describes how each of them perceived the changes in the Catholic Church initiated by the Second Vatican Council. Interesting parallels in their biographies are also mentioned.

PDF

Translation’s Deceit: Czesław Miłosz and Negro Spirituals

Katarzyna Jakubiak

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 199-220

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.025.1214

This article discusses the politics of translation of eleven negro spirituals, which Czesław Miłosz produced in 1948, while working as a cultural attaché of the Polish embassy in Washington D.C. Initially, Miłosz intended to publish all of these translations in the Polish literary weekly Nowiny Literackie. Although only a few of these translations appeared in the weekly, the article proposes that Miłosz’s project played a role in opposing the Soviet cultural and political domination of Poland after World War II. Drawing parallels between research on slavery and the analysis of power structures in post-war Poland presented in The Captive Mind, the article argues that Miłosz’s translations were driven by the “ethics of deception” akin to resistance strategies inscribed in the original contexts of production of negro spirituals. The article relies on theories of translation developed by deconstruction to question the traditional hierarchies between “translation” and “the original,” and, consequently, to complicate Miłosz’s position as “a translator” of spirituals. Since spirituals are improvisational by origin, specifi c examples of Miłosz’s translation choices demonstrate that his role in the translation process was participatory and creative rather than imitative. Thus the article concludes that the translation of spirituals enabled Miłosz both to be and not to be the author of these texts, a subversive move in the Soviet-dominated system, where direct expressions of longing for freedom (only implicitly voiced in the spirituals) may not have been welcome. This interpretation is consistent with Miłosz’s other early works, which draw parallels between Polish post-war and slavery/colonial experiences, and adds to current debates on the possible convergences between post-Soviet and postcolonial conditions.

PDF

Czesław Miłosz’s Polish School of Poetry in English Translation

Mira Rosenthal

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 221-228

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.026.1215

Examining the ideological underpinnings of the anthology Postwar Polish Poetry, this article considers the impact of Czesław Miłosz’s translatory choices on the rise in popularity of Polish poetry in English translation in the 1960s and its infl uence on contemporary American poetry. Postwar Polish Poetry by and large introduced Polish literature to the Anglophone audience. The analysis of the paratext (translator’s preface, author biographies, jacket copy) and the translations foregrounds Miłosz’s translatorial, poetological, historical, and political concerns. The article focuses on delineating the anthology’s role in shaping the historiography of Polish poetry for the Anglophone reader and touches on the political commentary embedded in Miłosz’s poetological choices. The overwhelmingly positive reception of the anthology reveals, in turn, the needs of American poets during the political upheaval of the 1960s to seek poetry outside their own tradition. Finally, the article argues that the subtleties of the anthology’s framing of Polish poetry cannot be overlooked, for it continues to exert infl uence on the canon of Polish literature as it develops in English translation.

PDF

America – Russia. Miłosz’s Perspective

Monika Wójciak

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 229-243

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.027.1216

This article considers Russian themes in Miłosz’s writing, especially in his work written in the USA. The transoceanic perspective gave the Polish poet keen observations and insight into Russia; his opinions resulted from systematic and thorough studies. The article also discusses migration, exile and empires – issues central to Miłosz – by contrasting and comparing the Polish Nobel Prize winner and the Russian Joseph Brodsky.

PDF

Czesław Miłosz as a Translator of the Poetics of Grammar and Language Asymmetries in the Poems of Herbert, Różewicz and Szymborska

Brigitte Schultze, Beata Weinhagen

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 245-266

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.028.1217

This article discusses Czesław Miłosz as a poet-translator of the poetry of his younger colleagues: Herbert, Różewicz and Szymborska. The comparative analysis focuses on features largely neglected in translation studies, such as Polish-English linguistic asymmetries and the poetics of grammar, that is, the functions of defi nite, indefi nite and zero articles, verbs and their aspects, personal pronouns as well as the auxiliary verb jest/is. Whereas some of these items cannot be translated adequately because they cause aesthetic loss in any translation, others allow for adequate, sometimes even “optimal” translation.

PDF

Working on the French Edition of Ziemia Ulro (The Land of Ulro)

Zofia Bobowicz

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 267-270

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.029.1218

The first Polish edition of The Land of Ulro appeared in France in Maisons Laffi tte in 1977, published by Instytut Literacki. The preface to this edition was written by Father Józef Sadzik, a philosopher specializing in Heidegger, and the director of the Pallotine Centre for Dialogue in Surcouf Street, Paris. Following his advice and encouragement, Miłosz, who had been connected to Father Sadzik through a long-standing friendship and mutual respect, began to translate the biblical texts which Sadzik had scrupulously published in Editions du Dialogue (in August 1980 the latter died suddenly of heart failure, holding photocopies of The Book of Job, never to witness the Solidarity victory in Gdańsk, nor his friend’s receipt of the Noble Prize).

PDF

(Not) New Miłosz in Slovenian

Michał Kopczyk

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 271-280

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.030.1219

This paper discusses a selection of Czesław Miłosz’s poetry published in Slovenia in 2008. First, it briefly describes the Polish Nobel Prize winner’s works present in Slovenia. Next, it focuses on their most important translations. This evaluation highlights the multigenerational aspect of the selection: it compiles most of the translations of Miłosz’s poetry (made by seven translators) which have appeared over the last three decades. The various techniques and approaches adopted by the translators define the poet’s current image in Slovenia. Last but not least, the article presents Jana Unuk’s essay, which closes the selection. Unuk perceives Miłosz primarily as a poet of paradoxes and private experience who constantly returns to the questions of God, religion and eroticism. The popularity of the individual and the existential dimensions of Miłosz’s works is a result of the Polish poet’s peculiar sensibility, which largely derives from his generation.

PDF

Excerpts from a Panel Discussion Held on 13 May 2011 in Kraków during the Second International Miłosz Festival

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 281-296

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.031.1220

PDF

Miłosz in Copenhagen

Niels Hav

Przekładaniec, Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz, Issues in English, pp. 297-300

https://doi.org/10.4467/16891864ePC.13.032.1221

PDF

Files to download

Spis treści UNKOWN Strona redakcyjna UNKOWN

Słowa kluczowe: American culture, economy, politics under President Truman, the image of the United States in Polish postwar press. Miłosz vis-à-vis America, Miłosz as a foreign correspondent, Miłosz in America, European Anti-Americanism in the 1940s, post-war literary life in Poland, Miłosz, America, spatial imagination, religious imagination, human/animal relations, theory of evolution, Miłosz, anthropology, Nature, exile, the lyrical “I” and the “I” of dithyramb, finding a home in homelessness, ambivalence, modernity, abstraction, reality, Miłosz, avant-garde, Pound, ideogrammatic method, synecdochic space, Ashbery, scenic mode, unheimlich, “really real”, Czesław Miłosz, Allen Ginsberg, counterculture, beat poetry, confessional poetry, Czesław Miłosz, counterculture, engaged literature, Marxism, epiphany, Miłosz, poetry, confessional, decorum, referentiality, Miłosz-Merton correspondence, exile, spiritual homelessness, writing in a foreign language, Miłosz’s English, Czesław Miłosz, Thomas Merton, 1960s, Second Vatican Council, Czesław Miłosz, negro spirituals, translation, ethics of deception, social realism, postcolonial, Czesław Miłosz, Polish school of poetry, Postwar Polish Poetry, poetry translation, American poetry, Czesław Miłosz, Joseph Brodsky, America, Russia, comparative analysis, Miłosz, poetics of grammar, language asymmetries, translation of Różewicz, Herbert, Szymborska into English., Czesław Miłosz, Polish-Slovenian translation, selection of poems

Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz

Issues in English Next

Issue content

Files to download

Issues in English