The subject of the present paper is the rhetoric of paradox and irony in Stanislaw Baranczak’s late literary critical achievements. The paradox proves specially privileged rhetorical trope in his 1980s critcism and is used as an effective tool in describing problems of linguistic literary culture in the Polish People’s Republic. Irony, by contrast, is a basic mode of an essay dated 1990s which polemizes with standardised unilateral language of interpretation. The two rhetorical mechanisms turn out to be subject to the imperative of responsibility for the word – the context the author formulates for investigating their meaning. Moreover, the self-parodistic essay Who really were “the two steady gentlemen” or: the front of the fight for ifs, or: Slawinski finally amended encourage to question for a deeper sense of autoirony and “casting under suspicion” even one’s own critical language.
The problems discussed in the article pertain to music-literary relationship. The arts dialogue is approached here as based on the interpretation of Stanislaw Baranczak's poem From the window on some floor this Mozart's aria. The reading of the poem is subject to music reception style, thus musical expectations from a literary text which induces the reader to make musical retorts - musical unequivocals. Mistrust of meanings closed in words leads to anagrams (F. de Saussure's theory) and to the search of order set by the classical harmony. The intertextual parallel drawn between the poem and the lyrics of Non so piu from Mozart's The Wedding of Figaro shows interdisciplinary solutions to be found at the crossroad of the poem, music, Italian aria's text and its Polish translation by Baranczak.
The article approaches the problem of Polish reception of Philip Larkin, one of the most influential 20th-century English authors. The image of the poet is shaped principally by two translations: one by Stanislaw Baranczak (1991) and the other by Jacek Dehnel (2008), both of which contributed to important literary critical debates in Poland and diversified the reader's perception of Larkin influenced by Jerzy Jarniewicz and Czeslaw Milosz. The article presents a case study of one poem from High Windows collection, The Building, accompanied by a comparative analysis of two different translation strategies and extra-textual factors which modulated distinct poetological shapes of the renderings. As a consequence of the translators' choices, the Polish Larkin bifurcates into two images: Baranczak's metaphysical and 'brightened' version, and Dehnel's skeptical and a more subversive one.
In the article a short description of the history of Polish palindromes is presented. The presentation is illustrated by palindromes from books by Julian Tuwim, Stanislaw Baranczak, Jozef Godzic, Edmund John and some from publications about charades. The palindromes by Tadeusz Morawski, co-author of the paper are also presented. T. Morawski is currently the leading inventor and propagator of Polish palindromes. He published six books in the years 2005-2008 and administers his own web-site .
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