literary translations and stages of their existence in the ......translatologica: a journal of...

TranslatoLogica: A Journal of Translation, Language, and Literature, 2 (2018), p.49-73

Paweł Marcinkiewicz University of Opole

Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry

ABSTRACT

John Ashbery made his debut in Polish translation in 1976, in the Warsaw-based literary magazine Literatura na świecie [Literature in the World]. Since then, the New York writer has become one of the most popular and most important American poets in Poland. Yet, for some reason, his recent translations into Polish go unnoticed by both critics and readers. In fact, Ashbery’s existence in the Polish language could be divided into three phases: the phase of mimicry, the phase of conflict, and the phase of diffusion. During the phase of mimicry, which is quite typical for the early existence of translated literature in the receiving culture, historical importance and literary quality of the translated author are not recognized, and he or she reaches the reader in a package of literary stereotypes typically attached to his or her native culture. The phase of conflict is reserved for the canonical authors, who often enter the foreign language in series of translations, over a long period of time. Such an author starts a conflict between the ideology represented by his/her texts and the ideology of the literary culture, dominating in the receiving language. The translator’s main goal is initiating and sustaining the above conflict, which is a means of critique and – in a broader perspective – a change of his or her own literature and its ideological undertone. The phase of diffusion manifests itself with a more intense presence of the translated writer on the book market of the receiving culture, which changes the readerly perception of his or her works: no longer does the author sound foreign, but his or her style resembles local patterns of literary tradition. Ashbery’s translations into Polish went through all the above phases. However, his position within the polysystem of Polish literature is not final, but it is based on stereotypes formed during the phase of conflict. Thus, there is a chance that we will rediscover Ashbery’s poetry in the Polish language in the future and the cycle of his reception will get repeated.

KEY WORDS

translations of American literature into Polish, ideology, Polish translations of John Ashbery’s poetry, communist era in Poland, contemporary Polish poetry


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1. Introduction

When we analyze the ideological motifs for the emergence of John Ashbery’s poetry in the

Polish language – including actions of translators, publishers, and academics aimed at

starting a conflict in the aesthetic and ethical spheres in order to establish new means of

artistic expression – we must come to a conclusion that the case of the New York school

poet repeats a paradigm typical of the earliest renderings of Anglo-American literature into

the language of the largest Slavic country in Central Europe. Following the publication of

Adam Mickiewicz’s version of The Giaour in 1835, the role of Anglo-American literature in

Congress Poland was to propagate the ideals of freedom that emanated from the

Declaration of Independence. The first American writer whose works hit a real nerve in

Poland was Washington Irving, translated by Ksawery Bronikowski (1796-1852), a journalist

and activist involved in a lifelong struggle for Poland’s liberty against the Russian Empire.1

The Polish collection of Irving’s short stories – Nadzwyczajne przygody człowieka

osłabionych nerwów. Z dzieł P. Washington Irving, Amerykanina, wyjęte. Z portretem autora

[Unusual Adventures of a Man with Weak Nerves. Selected from the works of Mr.

Washington Irving, an American. With a Portrait of the Author] – was based on the two-

volume edition of Tales of a Traveller. By Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, published in London, in

1825. What must have been most appealing in Irving for the Polish reader – except for his

face of a romantic sage presented in the eponymous portrait – was the American writer’s

apotheosis of travels, full of surprising adventures and mysterious events, in magical settings

of provincial Germany and Italy. In the 1820s and 30s travelling was getting more and more

difficult for the citizens of Congress Poland, especially for intellectuals, like Ksawery

Bronikowski, who were considered suspicious by the Tsarist regime. Bronikowski was a co-

founder of “Związek Wolnych Polaków” [“Association of Free Poles”], a secret organization,

aiming at regaining independence of partitioned Poland. Later, he was a vice president of

Towarzystwo Patriotyczne [Patriotic Association]. For his subversive activities, Bronikowski

was imprisoned in 1824, and he emigrated to France in 1831, where he collaborated with

the influential conservative political camp “Hotel Lambert.” When he died in Paris in 1852,

1 Irving’s first Polish translations were published anonymously, but the translator’s name was revealed thanks to the efforts of Karol Estreicher (1827-1908), nicknamed the “father of Polish bibliography.” His monumental 36-volume work is now available online at https://www.estreicher.uj.edu.pl/home/.


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he was the Director of the Polish School and the Editor in Chief of the Polish publishing

house “Pamiętniki Polskie” [“Polish Memoirs”] (Więckowska, 1989, p. 468-470).

I give a detailed account of Bronikowski’s biography not only to stress the relationship

between American literature and the ideals of freedom cherished by its translators, but first

of all to prove that ideology – including the translator’s own system of values – has always

been the most important level of translation, determining his or her very interest in foreign

authors. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ashbery was published in translation behind the Iron

Curtain, in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania. In Poland, the government-controlled

media was subject to censorship, yet Ashbery’s poems were let through since they

apparently did not contain timely political references.

In literary magazines, Ashbery was published with other New York School poets, such as

Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, who helped the younger generation find a non-political

stance, suspicious of all power discourses.

2. The first appearance of Ashbery in Polish: the phase of mimicry

The first presentation of John Ashbery’s poetry in Polish translation was published in the

Warsaw-based literary magazine Literatura na świecie [Literature in the World] in June,

1976. In the two decades immediately preceding World War II, the translator of canonical

literature was often – as Jerzy Jarniewicz has it – the “ambassador” of great writers he or she

introduced to Poland (Jarniewicz, 2012, p. 24). However, the reality of the postwar era,

when People’s Republic of Poland was under the Soviet occupation, modified the role of the

translator and readjusted the place of translations from English in the polysystem of Polish

literature. First, because of the conflict between the Eastern and the Western blocs,

translating from English was often perceived as a dissident activity, endangering the

translator to all sorts of persecutions, from invigilation to censorship, since American

literature and Americanness in general became synonymous with democratic traditions.

Second, translations of American authors became inspiration for Polish writers, replacing

earlier aesthetic models – Russian, German, and French.

Ashbery’s first Polish appearance was a part of Piotr Sommer’s mini anthology

“Współcześni poeci amerykańscy” [“Contemporary American Poets”] and thus was rather

scanty: a single lyric, consisting merely of 10 lines, accompanied by a black-and-white, half-a-


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page photograph of the poet. The date of publication seemed symbolic2, as in June, 1976,

the ideology of socialism revealed its true face of aggression and, at the same time,

helplessness. Censorship could no longer prevent voices of aesthetic distinctness and ethical

ambiguity from entering the polysystem of Polish literature. Ashbery’s poem – “A Vase of

Flowers” – opens the mini anthology, and – although it seems to be a tribute to Jane

Freilicher’s paintings3 – it relevantly shows the ideological tensions of those turbulent

times4:

Wazon jest biały i byłby jak walec Gdyby walec szerszy był u góry niż na dole. Kwiaty są czerwone, białe i niebieskie. Wszelki kontakt z kwiatami jest zabroniony. Białe kwiaty wyciągają się w górę Do bladego powietrza własnych zależności Popychane lekko przez czerwone i niebieskie. Gdybyś była o te kwiaty zazdrosna, Proszę cię daj spokój. Są dla mnie absolutnie niczym (Sommer, 1976a p. 178).

Below, I give a word-for-word translation of Sommer’s rendering:

The vase is blue, and it would be like a cylinder If a cylinder were broader at the top than at the bottom. The flowers are red, white, and blue. Any contact with the flowers is forbidden. The white flowers stretch themselves upwards Towards the pale air of their own dependencies Pushed lightly by the red ones and the blue. If you – my mistress – were jealous of those flowers, Please, take them seriously, For me, they are absolutely nothing.

2 I refer here to the so called “June 1976” – a series of strikes and riots that took place in People’s Republic of Poland when Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz announced a radical rise in food prices. Hundreds of workers were brutally pacified and arrested in Radom, Ursus, and Płock. 3 Jane Freilicher (1924-2014), one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century, was the poet’s friend since the day he started living in New York in the summer of 1949 (Roffman, 2017, p. 4). 4 For the needs of the above analysis, I quote the original version of Ashbery’s poem: “A Vase of Flowers”//The vase is white and would be a cylinder/If a cylinder were wider at the top than at the bottom./The flowers are red, white and blue.//All contact with the flowers is forbidden.//The white flowers strain upward/Into a pallid air of their references,/Pushed slightly by the red and blue flowers.//If you were going to be jealous of the flowers,/Please forget it./They mean absolutely nothing to me.// 1962 (written in 1959) (Ashbery, 2008, p. 924).


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The red, white, and blue flowers in a white cylinder of a vase create an austere, quasi-

futurist, mechanical environment, simplified and devoid of details, like Piet Mondrian’s

compositions. However, the “flowers,” with whom “any contact is forbidden” take on an

allegorical meaning, bringing to mind surreal “flowers-prisoners” or “flowers-convicts,”

closed in an oppressive reality. The meaning of the colors borrowed from the Mondrianian

palette also has an allegorical undertone: the “white flowers” (innocent and passive) are

pushed by the “red ones” (politically hot) and the “blue” (in military uniforms). However, the

allegoricalness of the flowers is paradoxical, aimed at creating a semantic dissonance rather

than metaphorically elucidating reality. On the one hand, the flowers “mean absolutely

nothing” to the speaker, yet, on the other, they are objects of his focused attention and

scrutiny, or even invigilation. What is important, the commitment of the poem I’m trying to

stress does not dominate over its character of a disinterested game or play. The only true

engagement of “The Vase of Flowers” is the speaker’s communication with the Ashberian

pronoun “you” which, for the poet, is paradoxical and problematic: as much as a sign bulging

with presence, it may be a placeholder of absence (Vincent, 2007, p. 149).

Obviously, the Ashberian play has a deeper meaning. The mystery of flowers depends on

their vague, allegorical sense, exemplifying what Marjorie Perloff calls the “Rimbaudian

tradition in Anglo-American literature” (Perloff, 1999, p. 157). The semantic indeterminacy

of Ashbery’s poem is typical of all writers trying to debunk realistic conventions. As a result,

the poem’s senses oscillate between referentiality and compositional game, and its

particulars do not cohere into a logical configuration, because they often resemble the

abstract arguments of music: it is not possible to decide which associations are relevant for

interpretation and which are not. According to Perloff, this fundamental undecidability is the

core of the poetic of indeterminacy started by Arthur Rimbaud and first transferred into

English by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.5 By the token of its programmatic undecidability,

Ashbery’s poetry was an important alternative to the dominating ideological conflict in the

Polish sociopolitical environment of the late 1980s: polarization between the propaganda of

the totalitarian regime and the anti-communist nationalistic impulses, which subordinated

5 Perloff’s notion of “indeterminacy” brings to mind John Cage’s lecture “Indeterminacy,” delivered at the Brussels Fair in 1958. The lecture was composed of stories to be read like “odd bits of information… at the end of columns in a small-town newspaper” when one “jumps here and there and responds at the same time to environmental events and sounds” (Lo Bue, 1982, p. 69). It seems that the New York School poets’ indeterminacy similarly includes the “operations of nature,” meaning all events that happen during the poem’s composition.


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the individual freedom to the struggle for political independence. “A Vase of Flowers” gave

the reader a chance to achieve the kind of freedom that was postulated by Joseph Brodsky

in reference to the literatures of the countries conquered by the Soviet Empire: intellectual

and spiritual detachment from hot political topic by creating an independent world of

aesthetic values, which could protect literature from being blinded by timeliness (Toruńczyk,

2009, p. 130). The main goal of Brodsky’s strategy of “detachment” consisted in avoiding

gestures typical of fiercely anticommunist and allusive literary productions, since those

gestures diminished artistic values of literary works. This is why subtly lyrical and enigmatic

poems, such as Ashbery’s “A Vase,” were attractive to Polish readers in 1976.

Piotr Sommer’s translation sounds precise and succinct, and the only detail that seems

odd is the Ashberian “you” which – quite unfortunately – takes the feminine gender in

Polish: “Gdybyś była o te kwiaty zazdrosna” [“If you – my mistress – were jealous of those

flowers”]. Clearly, Sommer tries to adapt his translation to the patterns of love poetry

dominant at the end of the twentieth century, but since Ashbery criticism was still

underdeveloped in 1976, the translator’s procédé is fully justifiable. What seems more

puzzling is Sommer’s choice of the poem for his mini anthology. Ashbery wrote “A Vase of

Flowers” in 1959, and the poem was not included in any of his books. Only recently, in 2008,

“A Vase” was reprinted in the over thousand-page volume of Collected Poems 1956-1987.

This fact is quite important: in 1976, Ashbery’s seventh volume Self-Portrait in a Convex

Mirror won the triple crown of literary prizes – the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and

the National Book Critics Circle Award – and the poet’s career reached its climax. Many

critics expressed praise for the volume, and especially for its monumental title poem, which

John Roussell called “the most intelligent thing of its kind ever written” (Roussell, 1990, p. ii).

In his most important books published in the 1970s, e.g. A Map of Misreading (1975), Harold

Bloom championed Ashbery as an heir to the great romantic tradition of verse that

commenced with Emerson and extended through Whitman and Stevens. Therefore, “A Vase

of Flowers” must have seemed woefully unrepresentative of Ashbery’s mature oeuvre when

the poet started to be perceived as one of the pillars of contemporary American poetry in

the mid-1970s.

An important element of Ashbery’s first presentation in Literatura na świecie was –

besides Sommer’s translation – a photograph taken by Jill Krementz, a New York artist

specializing in portraits of writers. In a black-and-white grainy photo of poor quality, we can


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see a close-up of Ashbery’s face in a stylization that the poet himself called a “Mexican

bandit look” (Tranter, 1998, Jacket). Four or five inches long graying hair, combed with a

parting, surround his handsome face of a mature man, with a thick mustache falling down, in

a way fashionable in the 1970s. However, Ashbery’s face is far from being typical: his dark

eyes pierce through the reader, smiling gently, which is stressed by his slightly parting lips. It

is a face of a sage who knows all the secrets of the human soul and understands his readers

better than they can understand themselves. Quite mysteriously, Ashbery’s face from the

1976 Literatura na świecie is similar to Washington Irving’s face from his first Polish

publication, in 1826.

The context in which Ashbery’s poetry entered the Polish language is a separate

important factor, influencing the early perception of the New Yorker. Piotr Sommer

presented “A Vase of Flowers” in an alphabetically ordered anthology that he entitled

“Współcześni poeci amerykańscy” [“Contemporary American Poets”], containing seventeen

names.6 The anthology was preceded by a brief introduction, in which the translator

confessed that majority of the writers that he had chosen were poorly known in Poland or

even totally unknown (Sommer, 1976b, p. 177). The only well-known poet was Allen

Ginsberg, who was previously translated into Polish by Leszek Elektorowicz, Tadeusz

Rybowski, Teresa Truszkowska, and others. The Polish reader was also acquainted with

Robert Bly (translated by Tadeusz Rybowski) and Amiri Baraka, who used the name of

Imamu Amear Baraka back then (translated by Jarosław Anders).

Sommer sounds rather unconvincing when he tries to explain the rationale of his

anthology: he underlines the obvious fact that most of his authors were born in the 1920s,

except for Dudley Randall, William Stafford, and Reed Whittemore, who were born a decade

earlier, and Imamu Amear Baraka, who was born a decade later (Sommer, 1976b, p. 177).

Yet, it is quite clear that the poets he chooses do not belong to any particular generation or

literary group. Moreover, the Polish translator admits that his goal is not to sketch a

comprehensive panorama of contemporary American poetry, but to get his readers familiar

with a few important names. This is also hardly credible, since many poets from the

6 Sommer based most of his selection on the 1962 Contemporary American Poetry edited by Donald Hall. The Polish translator does not mention this fact, which might result from the fear that censorship would not let through a publication from the period of the Cold War.


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anthology were ephemeral literati, soon to be forgotten.7 The last poet Sommer mentions by

name in his introduction is Frank O’Hara, and the only fact that the Polish reader learns

about the author of “Biotherm” ten years after his death is that he died in a car accident

(Sommer, 1976b, p. 177). John Ashbery is not mentioned in Sommer’s introduction at all.

This is exactly the situation I call the “phase of mimicry,” which is typical for the early

existence of translated literature in the receiving culture. Initially, historical importance and

literary greatness of the translated author are not recognized, and he or she reaches the

reader in a package of literary stereotypes and ideological conceptions attached to his or her

native culture. It seems that the main goal of Sommer’s anthology was not to get the Polish

reader acquainted with popular or important American poets, but to get any of

contemporary American poets published, taking advantage of an opportunity to compose an

“American” issue of Literatura na świecie, which the communist authorities tolerated from

time to time, since it gave foreign observers and intellectuals an illusion that Poland was a

free country. Such an issue devoted to Western literatures was usually published at a price:

in exchange for a gasp of artistic freedom, several following issues of the magazine had to

deal with literatures of the Eastern Bloc. Otherwise, it would be difficult to imagine any

coherent basis of ideological or aesthetic values, enabling the editor to present the fierce

experimenter John Ashbery, together with the black nationalist Amiri Baraka and the

fundamental Christian Denise Levertov.

Independently of Sommer’s anthology, the issue of Literatura na świecie contains works

of such American writers as Thomas Pynchon, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, William Styron,

and Mark Twain. Additionally, the magazine brings out essays by Anglo-American critics on

various aspects of contemporary American literature, for example Robert Daly’s review of

contemporary American poetry, Mathew Winston’s discussion of Thomas Pynchon’s

conspiracy theories, or Tonny Tanner’s study of the post-war American novel. Also, several

academic papers by Polish scholars appear there, including Maria Teresa Aniśkowicz’s

account of Richard Brautigan’s literary development or Zbigniew Lewicki’s analysis of Joseph

Heller’s fiction. In this disorderly context, with his penetrating eyes of a visionary looking at

the reader from Jill Krementz’s photograph, Ashbery must have been perceived as another

7 At least this is what happened to Dudley Randall, William Stafford, and Reed Whittemore, whom Sommer championed as important American poets born in the 1910s.


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American eccentric, who wrote lyrical grotesques in the spirit of Gertrude Stein and Williams

Carlos Williams.

As for the main ideological message emanating from the pages of the American issue of

Literatura na świecie, it was concurrent with the fundamental stereotype about

Americanness present in Polish culture from Emerson, who warned his readers against being

“subdued” by their “instruments” and advised “[reading] God directly” (Emerson, 1969, p.

44). Accordingly, the object of literary understanding was not the text but the world, and the

American authors presented by various translators gave an example of aesthetic variety and

ethical freedom, which opposed rigid schematism typical of the Polish literary scene,

controlled by the Communist apparatchiks from PZPR – the Polish United Workers’ Party.

When democratic opposition started to emerge in the 1970s, American poets were

perceived as allies of the so-called “Nowa Fala” [New Wave movement], engaged in social

criticism in the spirit of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes.8 This is exactly the gist of

the phase of mimicry: the dominant ideology of a foreign literature, perceived as a set of

stereotypes, manipulates our reading of a particular foreign author, who assimilates with

other authors from the same language and time.

Ashbery’s next appearance in Literatura na świecie was only nine months later – in the

issue 3(71) 1977, in a brief presentation “Sami siebie” [They Themselves] – but it

foreshadowed a significant change in his reception in Poland. What is important, Ashbery

was not shown as a poet or writer, but as an amateur cartoonist, the author of a miniature

self-portrait drawn as a dedication for Burt Britton, who worked in the Strand Bookstore,

one of the most famous bookstores in New York. Britton had a peculiar hobby: he asked

novelists and poets invited to the bookstore for weekly readings to draw self-portraits for his

album, which he published as an art book entitled Self Portraits, in 1976. The half-page

anecdote about Britton’s project – published as an intro to a set of 9 pictures – was meant to

warm up the image of the Unites States of America which was still labeled by the communist

authorities as the greatest enemy of the Eastern Bloc. On top of that, the editors of the 1977

issue of Literatura na świecie broke stereotypes about a literary magazine published behind

the Iron Curtain. The whole presentation – with 9 drawings of writers, including John

8 This problem was highlighted by Polish critic Jerzy Kwiatkowski in his essay entitled “Stanisław Barańczak,” published in Pochwała poezji. O poetach polskich XX wieku [In praise of poetry. About Polish poets of the twentieth century]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, p. 327-345.


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Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, John Barth, William Gaddis, Lois Gold, Stanley Kunitz, Maurice

Sendak, John Updike, and Kurt Vonnegut – created an illusion that censorship did not exist in

Poland.

In comparison with the previous presentation in Sommer’s anthology, the most important

change was Ashbery’s literary status. Although peculiarities of his style were yet

undiscovered by critics, the New York poet was recognized as one of the greatest American

writers of his time, on a par with the authors well-known by the Polish audience, such as

Updike or Vonnegut. Interestingly, Ashbery’s self-portrait contained a surplus meaning,

which was difficult to decipher both for the editors of the magazine and the Polish reader.

The poet’s face, slightly caricatural, is rendered skillfully, proving that, as a teenager,

Ashbery wanted to be a painter, and he went to an art class for children at the Rochester art

museum (Ashbery & Ford, 2003, p. 25). The most striking detail is that the head is seen from

a peculiar perspective: it is slightly turned left and shown from a point below the center of

the composition. Obviously, the perspective mocks the famous painting of the sixteenth-

century Italian painter Francesco Mazzola, also known as Parmigianino – “Self-Portrait in the

Convex Mirror” – which was a direct inspiration for Ashbery’s most famous collection and its

eponymous poem. As Ashbery recollects in a conversation with Mark Ford, he worked on his

“Self-Portrait” from February 1973, when he saw the copy of Mazzola’s painting in a display

window in a bookstore in Provincetown, for the whole year (Ashbery & Ford, 2003 p. 57).

The ironically mocking drawing, in which the poet sees himself as Parmigianino, is signed

with a date: December 11, 1973. This was the moment when Ashbery must have finished the

work on his long poem and was reading its fragments to his audience at Strand Bookstore.

The double meaning of Ashbery’s “self-portrait” must have been clear for American readers

of Britton’s album in 1976.

3. The phase of conflict

The next phase of the translation’s existence in the target language could be defined as the

“phase of conflict.” Of course, not all translated authors get to this phase, because their vast

majority stays at the more neutral level of reception, which is the phase of mimicry. The

phase of conflict is reserved for the canonical authors, who often enter the foreign language

in series of translations, over a long period of time. Perhaps the very “seriality” of their


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existence in renderings by various translators – axiological/ideological and aesthetic

difference from the dominating discourses and ability to yield multiple interpretations – is

the most crucial feature of authors entering this phase.9 In the case of John Ashbery, this

phase was initiated by his next appearance in Literatura na świecie, eight years later, in the

issue 9 (158)/1984. The very cover of the magazine seems to be symbolic: not only is it

intensely red, but also contains surrealist details, such as the image of a winged nib, which –

like a bird of prey – tries to destroy the word “literature” in the magazine’s title. This is

exactly how the phase of conflict functions: the author chosen for translation – very often

controversial, but at the same time enjoying critical acclaim and readers’ approval – enters

into a struggle between the ideology represented by his texts and the ideology of the literary

culture, dominating in the receiving language. The translator’s main goal is initiating and

sustaining the above conflict, which is a means of critique – and in a broader perspective a

change – of his or her own literature and its ideological undertone. Here, translation is a tool

whose aim is a transformation of the domestic system of values, determining the

relationship between literature and social life.

On the back cover of the 1984 “red” issue of Literatura na świecie, the reader finds names

of the most important contributors to the magazine, all of them in fancy fonts, resembling

autographs: Harry Mathews, John Ashbery, Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick, and

Gilbert Sorrentino. The most significant contrast between the phase of mimicry and the

phase of conflict consists in the fact that, in the latter, the format of the translated author

has already been recognized and he or she has been placed in the proper literary and critical

contexts. In the case of John Ashbery, it was the context of postmodern avant-garde in

American visual arts and literature, initiated in the 1950s by abstract expressionists and the

New York School poets. Ashbery met Harry Mathews in 1956, in Paris, and together they

edited an experimental literary magazine Locus Solus (Ashbery & Ford, 2003, p. 57). Later,

Mathews became a member of an experimental literary group OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature

potentielle usually translated into English as Workshop of Potential Literature), which was a

loose association of mainly French writers founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and

9 I understand the concept of “series of translations” after Agnieszka Adamowicz-Pośpiech as a form of “retranslation” (Adamowicz-Pośpiech, 2013, p. 38). The difference between the two notions is that “series” implies simultaneous analysis of all of its constitutive elements while “retranslation” focuses the reader’s attention on the last element of the series, treating it as the aesthetic peak. Thus works existing in “translation series” invite the reader to a special kind of interpretation, focusing on stylistic variety.


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François Le Lionnais. Its most famous members included Marcel Duchamp, Georges Perec,

and Italo Calvino. As for Raymond Federman and Ronald Sukenick, both of them were

unconventional writers, often very radical in their formal endeavors. Gilbert Sorrentino was

most versatile of them, writing novels, poems, and criticism.

Thus, the ideological attack performed by the 1984 issue of Literatura na świecie seems to

have been extremely violent: it entailed poetry, fiction, and critical writing, and it aimed at

re-evaluating cultural and literary hierarchies of contemporary Polish literature, using the

anti-bourgeois shock tactics of the historical avant-garde. In Poland, in the mid-1980s,

literary values were very conservative on both sides of the political barricade. Literary

productions propagated by Jaruzelski’s regime – as it used to be from the 1949 convention

of ZLP (Polish Writers’ Union) in Szczecin when the Soviet social realism was announced the

only legitimate aesthetics – were controlled by the Party’s Central Committee. The most

important writers belonged to the informal group called “Kolumbowie rocznik 20”

(Columbuses born in the 1920s): they were shaped by World War II, during which they

fought for their country’s freedom and socialist future. The group included Jerzy Putrament,

who published his 13 volumes of collected works from 1979 to 1988; Roman Bratny, who

published 18 novels during the decade, most of them bestsellers, in editions of hundred

thousand copies; and Bohdan Czeszko, whose Collected Works, Vol. 1-3, came out in 1983.

However, the object of the attack of the Warsaw-based monthly was not the ideology of

the socialist state based on the idolatry of the Soviet Union – the state, which was already

shaking in its foundations. The true enemy of the American avant-garde was the model of

literature propagated by the Polish samizdat, sponsored by the western governments and

various human rights foundations – the so-called “drugi obieg” (second circulation). The

Polish samizdat published authors living in Poland, such as Andrzej Kijowski, Andrzej

Szczypiorski, Jan Józef Szczepański, Kazimierz Orłoś, or Julian Stryjkowski, but also émigré

writers, including Czesław Miłosz, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, Adam Zagajewski, Stanisław

Barańczak, or Zbigniew Herbert. It would be difficult to find a common denominator for all

the above authors, but it seems that they belonged to the post-romantic tradition of

symbolic realism, rooted in the values of Roman Catholicism and based on the scenic style,

which was – as Charles Altieri has it – “a reaction against the Enlightenment strategies for

idealizing reason” (Altieri, 1984 p. 11-12). The post-romantic provenience of the samizdat

authors was due to the fact that an effective critique of communism required a full


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understanding between the writer and the reader on the socio-cultural level, rooted in the

experience of oppressive reality. In the sphere of ideology, the samizdat authors were not

superficially anti-communist, but they were Roman-Catholic transcendentalists. The writer

as a sage and servant of his nation was connected with the mystical reality of the Creator,

and he got involved in the public sphere, fighting for his nation’s freedom. This tradition was

the real target of the 1984 issue of Literatura na świecie. The presentation of radically

innovative writers, representative of American postmodernism, was an act of dissidence,

aimed at initiating an artistic revolution at home. Polish poetry of the 1980s lacked anti-

illusionistic lyricism, showing how the rhetoric controls the reader. American avant-garde

authors could help Polish writers redefine the primary social role of literature, which should

– according to Altieri – “offer concrete experience and plausible worlds that foster individual

powers of self-reflection without tying the individual to one of the explanatory schemes

competing to dominate the political marketplace” (Altieri, 1984, p. 21).

The presentation of Ashbery’s poetry was quite large for a content of a literary magazine,

and it included seventeen poems. Two of them came from the poet’s most famous volume

The Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and were translated by Piotr Sommer: “As One Put

Drunk into the Packet Boat” and “Worsening Situation.” The remaining fifteen poems were

rendered by Bohdan Zadura: six from Houseboat Days (1977), eight from Shadow Train

(1981), and one from As We Know (1979). All those texts represent Ashbery’s middle period

when he sounded almost like a classic, and he perceived reality as a collective experience,

rooted in history, whose mechanism was essentially explainable. Yet, even those mildly

experimental poems must have been shocking for Polish readers in 1984.

First of all, the earliest Polish collection of Ashbery’s poems lays bare an artificial

character of dignified, moralizing diction, being synonymous with valuable poetry in Poland,

in the 1980s. For the New York poet, the most important aspect of the poem was “play,”

which also meant a more relaxed attitude towards writing. Ashbery describes the working of

the play in one of his most often anthologized poems “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,”

translated in the magazine by Bohdan Zadura:

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. … What’s a plain level? It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play. Play? Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be


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A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, As in the division of grace these long August days Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know it It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters. It has been played once more. … The poem is you (Ashbery, 2008, p. 698).

The “deeper outside thing” is an aesthetic strategy of being lighthearted about writing, as if

the composition of a poem were a game, with the reader not as a rival but an ally, whose

attentive presence is crucial for the poem to succeed. Succeeding here means giving sense

to “the division of grace these long August days/Without proof,” which is a metaphor that

cannot be simply rationalized but has to be accepted and lived through by reading. The

Ashberian play has also a more frolicsome dimension because he – as much as other New

York School poets – invests his poetry with masquerades, parodies, eccentric juxtapositions,

and pseudo-scientific profundities. He and other New York School poets favor verse forms

that are, as David Lehman has it, “at base arbitrary... You could cull lines at random from

books. Or you could scramble the lines in an already written poem to produce a disjunctive

jolt. … Poems didn’t have to make sense in a conventional way; they could discover their

sense as they went along” (Lehman, 1999, p. 4). The variety of the play’s registers also

includes play of sounds, signifiers, and references, whose goal is, to use Roger Gilbert’s

phrase, “to frustrate hermeneutic expectations” (Gilbert, 2007, p. 200). Ultimately, the play

becomes a sense-generating device, working very much like a procedural form, such as

sestina, canzone, or pantoum, which broadens the scope of the poem to include elements

that evade commonsensical logic.

Quite unexpectedly, this type of poetry read extremely well in Polish translations. First,

the poetics of indeterminacy was totally new in the Polish language and that is why

Ashbery’s poems had a mysterious aura around them, sounding like texts of a supereloquent

madman or a supermodern Rimbaud. Second, there were no critical works on Ashbery

available at that time, and readers were quite helpless trying to interpret the author of Self-

Portrait. Third, the earliest Polish translations of Ashbery’s poems were simply great

renderings, containing a decorative tapestry of semi-confessional riffs, self-referential

lucidity, which helped the poem achieve a distinctive form of ethical autonomy and – above


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all – rebellious irony. Bohdan Zadura’s translation of the above quoted “Paradoxes and

Oxymorons” could serve as a good example of Ashbery’s poetic excellence in Polish:

Ten wiersz zajmuje się językiem na bardzo prostym poziomie. … Co to jest prosty poziom? To jest to i coś innego, Co cały system wprowadza do gry. Gry? No więc w zasadzie tak, ale mam grę za coś Głębszego a zewnętrznego, wyśniony wzorzec roli, Jak w tym podziale łaski w długie sierpniowe dni Bez uzasadnień. Z otwartym końcem. Nic o tym nie wiesz, A już przepadła w parze i szczebiocie maszyn do pisania. Rozegrało się jeszcze raz. … Ten wiersz to ty (Zadura, 1984, p. 179).

Below, I give a word-for-word translation of Bohdan Zadura’s rendering :

This poem deals with language on a very simple level. … What is a simple level? It is this and something different, Which the whole system brings into play. Play? Well, strictly speaking yes, but I consider play to be something Deeper, yet external, a dream pattern of role-playing, Like in a division of grace during those long August days Without justification. With an open end. You know nothing about it, And it is gone in the steam and chirp of typewriters. Someone played it once again. … The poem is you.

Zadura’s translation is faithful, and it preserves all major senses of the original. The most

important meaning in the text is produced by the personification of the “poem,” which talks

to its addressee, and finally metamorphoses into him, making the conditions of speaking its

central thematic concern. What does it mean to “speak” in a text? How does speaking in a

particular text affect other texts? What is the most basic relationship between the text and

the reader? Trying to answer these questions, Ashbery’s poem is “concerned” with language

on a very “plain” level indeed – a level that was rarely an object of poetic exploration or

critical scrutiny in the Polish literary tradition. On top of that, the poem’s aesthetic

dimension is strikingly alluring in Zadura’s translation, not only because it has a very peculiar

title, which is somehow in opposition to its content, but because it does not sound very

much like poetry, using prosaic sentences. Moreover, the text addresses the reader very


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intimately, like a love poem written for him or her, due to the supremely elastic pronoun

“you,” which functions as a point of entry into the poet’s stunning lyrical patterns. Yet,

“Paradoxes and Oxymorons” is totally anti-romantic: the poem mentions neither communist

dictators, nor oppression of those who fought for freedom, nor the end of humanism, and

yet it says something profoundly important. There was nothing like that in the allegorical

Herbert, the metaphysical Miłosz, the paradoxical Szymborska, the Buddhist Krynicki, or

Zagajewski, who was looking for Lwów. Ashbery’s poems were interstellar aesthetic objects

coming from beyond the Polish literary galaxy.

The peak of the phase of conflict was the very next issue of Literatura na świecie

containing Ashbery’s poems, from July 1986, the so-called “blue” number, entirely devoted

to the New York School of poetry. In comparison with the previous Ashbery issue of the

magazine, now other members of the New York School were introduced. Frank O’Hara was

represented by twenty six poems rendered by different translators – mostly by Piotr

Sommer – and the reader could have a feeling that O’Hara was the blue number’s main

protagonist. Apart from his poems, the number contained two essays by O’Hara:

“Personism: A Manifesto” and “American Art and Non-American Art,” and a long interview

he gave to Edward Lucie-Smith a year before he died, in 1965. Moreover, five critical texts

were devoted to O’Hara, including an essay by Piotr Sommer “O krok od nich” (“A Step away

from Them”), which was published as an afterword to Sommer’s collection of O’Hara’s

poems in Polish under the same title the following year.10 The blue number also contained

poems of less known members of the New York School, such as Kenneth Koch (six

translations), James Schuyler (nine translations), and Kenward Elmslie (five translations).11

The next difference was that he red number presented both poetry and prose, and its

scope was the late twentieth-century American avant-garde, while the blue number

presented mostly poetry and criticism. Thus, the main purpose of the blue number was not

just to criticize the Polish post-romantic literary tradition, but also to correct the balance

between the two modes or “poles” of Polish poetry – bieguny poezji – as famous critic Jan

Błoński called them (Błoński, 1978, p. 200). By the “poles” of poetry, Błoński understood two

10 The title was borrowed from the 1956 poem by O’Hara, one of his greatest literary achievements, published in the collection Lunch Poems (1964). 11 It seems rather strange that there were no poems by Barbara Guest, who was artistically most accomplished of the whole group in the 1950s. Guest was also a visual artist, creating collages, and she was an editor of a prestigious magazine devoted to art called ARTnews.


65

stylistic patterns typical of the two most influential Polish poets of the twentieth century –

Julian Przyboś and Czesław Miłosz. The first represented radical experimentation in the spirit

of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes; the second represented more traditional

“voice” poetics, rooted in post-romantic historiosophical symbolism. Towards the end of the

twentieth century, the balance between the two poetic modes was disturbed due to the

growing importance of Czesław Miłosz, culminating in his Nobel Prize in 1980. Also, political

situation in Central Europe privileged socially committed literature, which seemed an

effective means of fighting against pro-Soviet oppressors of political opposition and

apparatchiks who imposed Martial Law in Poland on December 13, 1981. In those

circumstances, the post-romantic and nationalistic poetry inspired by Miłosz dominated the

underground literary scene, and the blue number of Literatura na świecie was a precise

dissident operation, aimed at preserving a necessary balance between arrière-garde and

avant-garde in Polish literature.

The opening gesture of the blue number of Literatura na świecie was undoubtedly

meaningful: it was John Ashbery’s poem “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” translated by

Piotr Sommer. By his reference to Horace’s Ars Poetica, Ashbery reminds us that

postmodernism’s goals and ideals, to a large extent, were inspired by visual arts, where

artistic revolutions occurred a decade or two earlier. Saying that poetry was like painting,

Horace stressed that both disciplines of art must be evaluated by the same criteria, and

painting should not be privileged as more suitable for serious topics. Ashbery’s

argumentation seems to be similar: poetry has to abandon safe paths of post-romantic

realism and express broader, metaphorical meanings, similarly to contemporary painting.

The blue number contains a glossy inset “Trzej malarze” (Three painters), with color prints of

the most important visual artists loosely connected with the New York School poets,

including Willem de Kooning, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers. There are also several black-

and-white prints of the above painters in the magazine, illustrating critical texts or poems.

In one of his interviews Ashbery said that back in the 1950s and 60s “one got one’s

inspiration and ideas from watching the experiments of others” (Kostelanetz, 1976, p. 19-

20). Watching the experiments of others became even more important for the poet when, in

1960, Ashbery accepted Barbara Guest’s offer to replace her as an art critic for the Paris

edition of Herald Tribune. This started a career, in which for the next twenty-five years he

wrote art reviews for such distinguished magazines as Artnews and Newsweek. According to


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David Bergman, while the career may have been accidental, “it has not been insignificant to

[Ashbery’s] development as a poet” (Bergman, 1989, p. xi). As for the presentation of

Ashbery’s writing in the blue number, it was his largest appearance in Polish so far: besides

thirty four poems, two of his essays were translated (“Introduction” to the Collected Poems

of Frank O’Hara and “Things As They Are” about Fairfield Porter’s painting), and an interview

he gave to Piotr Sommer during his visit to Poland in 1980. Additionally, Ashbery’s texts

were accompanied by critical analyses of scholars specializing in his poetry, including

Marjorie Perloff, the author of The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, and David

Shapiro, the author of the first monograph devoted to the New York poet, John Ashbery: An

Introduction to the Poetry, published in 1979. Ashbery’s poems were rendered into Polish by

a larger number of translators: beside Sommer and Zadura, there were a few new names,

including Agata Preis-Smith, Andrzej Szuba, and Jan Zieliński, while Ahbery’s prose was

translated by Andrzej Szuba and Magdalena Konikowska.

Piotr Sommer must have been aware of the destructive potential of the magazine for

readers on both sides of the political barricade, and he tried to soothe it by printing a brief

note “Układanie numeru” (“Arranging the Issue of the Magazine”) inside the back cover. It

seems that the note was added in the last moment before printing the issue. Probably,

Sommer wanted to assure censorship that the texts he was going to publish do not try to

propagate American capitalism. This was even more plausible because the magazine’s

editor-in-chief, Wacław Sadkowski, was a secret police agent.12 From Sommer’s note, we

learn that the current American issue of the magazine is, in fact, very similar to previous

issues devoted to poetry, especially the one with Chlebnikov’s poems, which were deeply

rooted in Polish literature and culture thanks to a great volume of translations by Anna

Kamieńska and Jan Śpiewak (Sommer, 1986, p. ii). If we cracked this code, it would tell a

simple message to cultural apparatchiks: the blue number simply presented literature, just

like all previous numbers of the magazine. Everything was under control: we still considered

the USA to be our greatest enemy, and Russian experimenters were far more revolutionary

than their American counterparts.

This line of thinking was completely wrong. In 1986, nothing could be controlled, neither

in the sphere of culture in the collapsing People’s Republic of Poland, nor in the Eastern Bloc,

12 Here I’m referring to Marek Nowakowski’s firsthand account published in the Polish edition of Newsweek on July 22, 2007: http://www. newsweek. pl/kultura/wiadomosci-kulturalne/fakty-i-akta,10275,1,1.html


67

which was falling apart. On top of that, the blue number managed to achieve something

totally unpredictable: it won hearts of the youngest generations of readers, who were

twenty or thirty years old and just started their careers as poets, critics, and novelists. Many

of them contributed to the literary magazine bruLion, which rejected the model of the

socially committed literature. The new young writers included Marcin Świetlicki, Manuela

Gretkowska, Andrzej Stasiuk, and Olga Tokarczuk – the most important voices in the Polish

literature of the next decade.

4. The phase of diffusion

When the ideological conflict between the tradition/culture of the original and the

tradition/culture of the translation gradually subsides, a next phase of the translation’s

functioning starts – the phase of diffusion. The conflict ends because of a growing similarity

between the value systems represented by the original texts and their translations. In most

cases, the culture of the source language propagated by the translation gradually transforms

the culture of the target language. An important element of diffusion is appearance of

imitators and continuators of the translated author in the target language. Traces of

Ashbery’s influence were seen in the earliest poetry of his translators, very often

accomplished poets. Piotr Sommer’s volumes from the mid-1980s – Kolejny świat [The Next

World] (1983) and Czynnik liryczny [The Lyrical Factor] (1986) – bear clear resemblance to

the Ashberian dream poetics, where constituent sections of the text are often series of non-

sequiturs. Bohdan Zadura, on the other hand, in his collections Starzy znajomi [Old

Acquaintances] (1986) and Prześwietlone zdjęcia [Overexposed Photographs] (1990), makes

use of syntactical possibilities offered by the Ashberian poem, experimenting with

punctuation and employing lexical elements of the text so that its overall meaning could be

as broad and unprocessed as possible.

Usually, the phase of diffusion manifests itself with a more intense presence of the

translated writer on the book market of the receiving culture, which changes the readerly

perception of his or her works: no longer does the author sound foreign, but his or her style

resembles local developments and patterns of literary tradition. The Polish literary elites

absorbed the ideology and aesthetics of the New York School poets at the end of the 1980s,

and indeterminacy – an oscillation between reference and compositional game – was used


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by a number of Polish poets as the most important meaning-generating strategy. However,

as Charles Altieri has it, for contemporary artists, “it is not enough to ‘make it new’; artists

must also make it culturally resonant” (Altieri, 1999, p. 638). Finding a broader cultural

resonance for his poems, which more and more often speak for contemporaneity, the Polish

Ashbery lost the allure of novelty for Polish readers and critics. Thus, the New York poet’s

later presentations – in Literatura na świecie and other literary magazines and anthologies –

went almost unnoticed.

The most important of Ashbery appearances in the Polish language after the collapse of

the Communist Bloc was the bibliophilic collection of his poems No i wiesz [And You Know]

(1993). The book contained forty-six poems chosen by Bohdan Zadura, and translated by

Bohdan Zadura, Piotr Sommer, and Andrzej Sosnowski. Additionally, Sosnowski wrote an

afterword to the collection, one of several texts he devoted to Ashbery’s poetry. In the

1990s and 2000s, Andrzej Sosnowski was one of the most important Polish poets, who

helped transform the idiom of contemporary Polish poetry from post-romantic realism

based on clarity and transparency towards non-representational, parodic, and

deconstructive poetics. Sosnowski’s poetry quickly gained a high literary status, and he

became a cult personality. This was reflected by numerous literary awards he received and

many editions of his poems churned out by wide-circulation publishers, including Dożynki

[Harvest Home], which came out in Biuro Literackie, in 2006. What is even more important,

Sosnowski’s style became a model for a younger generation of poets, whose presence in

literary magazines and critical texts finally altered the literary scene in Poland. On top of

that, Sosnowski published his own collection of Ashbery’s poems, Cztery poematy [Four Epic

Poems] (2012), which contained the previously published fragments of Ashbery’s longer

poems from his middle period, such as Three Poems (1972) and A Wave (1984).

Apart from the above collections, Piotr Sommer published two influential anthologies of

American poetry, presenting Ahbery’s poetry in a broader context, not only of the New York

School poets, but the whole twentieth century. The first of them was Artykuły pochodzenia

zagranicznego [Articles of foreign origin] (1996), presenting – besides Ashbery – Frank

O’Hara, E. E. Cummings, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles

Reznikoff. The second anthology was O krok od nich. Przekłady z poetów amerykańskich [A

Step away from Them. Translations from American Poets] (2006), and it contained all poems

from the previous anthology, plus seven texts from Ashbery’s more recent volumes,


69

including Can You Hear, Bird (1995) and Your Name Here (2000). The second of Sommer’s

anthologies seems to present a more appropriate context for Ashbery’s oeuvre, with texts

by Kenneth Koch, John Cage, and August Kleinzahler.

I would like to complete the list of Ashberian translations into Polish with my own humble

book Oni przybyli, żeby wysadzić Amerykę. John Ashbery i dwudziestowieczne awangardy

amerykańskie [They Came to Blow up America. John Ashbery and the Twentieth-Century

American Avant-Gardes] (2015). My study reads the poet through his complex relationships

with the twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes, casting him as a typical American

continuator of Rimbaudian indeterminacy. My monograph contributes to the corpus of

Ashbery criticism, but it also smuggles sixty-two poems by John Ashbery in a form of

appendix. Interestingly, the poetic appendix went totally unnoticed, and none of several

reviewers mentioned the fact that I published the largest selection of Ashbery’s poems in

Polish so far.

Many Polish poets making their debut at the beginning of the 1990s consciously used the

Ashberian model of the poem, which offered an alternative to the Polish literary tradition. In

the English language, the New York School poets subversively undermined the post-romantic

“scenic mode,” which in the contemporary context was not really poetry but a marketing

strategy colonizing the academy. In the 1990s, the poems of the most daring Polish young

poets, such as Andrzej Sosnowski, Marcin Sendecki, Darek Foks, or Tadeusz Pióro, played a

similar role to the poems of the New York School poets back in the 1950s. They questioned

illusionistic models of lyricism: they did not deal directly with experience, but rather with the

“experience of experience.”13 Transcendental closure was not the poem’s goal, but rather a

point of departure for redefining the self, which, in contrast to the fixed, specular self, was a

diffused nebula of rhetorical gestures. Moreover, linear, cumulative progress of meaning

was replaced with independent, sense-generating whirls—structural units like images or

metaphors—and instead of depth there was a mingling surface. Rather than developing

along a meticulously structured scheme, the poem followed a disorderly, conversation-like

itinerary. In a word, the Polish poem of the mid-1990s could finally do the same things as the

Ashberian poem from the issues of Literatura na świecie published a decade or two earlier.

The Polish poems inspired by John Ashbery, written by the above poets, multiplied the

aesthetics of the original texts, disseminating the ideology of the New York School avant- 13 The apt phrase comes from the title of A. Poulin Jr.’s interview with the poet (Poulin, 1981 p. 245).


70

garde. The phase of diffusion usually means the end of the existence of translation in the

target language – the existence understood as an inspiration and critique of the domestic

culture. Diffusing in the target language, the translation merges with its literature and

fertilizes its literary tradition. Nowadays, Polish translations of Ashbery’s poems belong to

the “pole” of Przyboś as much as original Polish poems by Karpowicz, Białoszewski, or

Sosnowski. However, Ashbery’s position within the polysystem of Polish literature is not

final, but based on stereotypes formed during the phase of conflict. First, the Polish Ashbery

significantly differs from his American original simply because we know only a fragment of

his oeuvre, which belongs mostly to his middle period. Second, we lack the sociopolitical

context of his poetry and we do not understand the specificity of his perception in the USA.

Accordingly, there is a chance that we rediscover Ashbery’s poetry in the Polish language in

the future and the cycle of his reception will get repeated.

6. Conclusions

In Poland, John Ashbery never became a cult figure like his friend Frank O’Hara, whose

volume Twoja pojedynczość [Your Singularity – the final line of O’Hara’s 1957 poem,

“Sleeping on a Wing”] in Piotr Sommer’s translation inspired crowds of imitators, whom

critics called “O’Harists” and who were soon very popular at the turn of the 1980s. Yet,

Ashbery’s poetry was important: it neutralized the ideological conflict between the “pole” of

Polkowski and the “pole” of Świetlicki, when anti-communist nationalistic impulses tried to

subordinate individual freedom to the struggle for political independence.14 Also, it seems

that Ashbery’s influence on Polish poets was deeper than O’Hara’s and it lasted longer, and

it can be seen in anti-mainstream conceptual poetics gaining prominence today.

The history of Polish translations of John Ashbery’s works is, on the one hand, a history of

the fight for individual freedom in a totalitarian state; on the other, it is a history of the fight

for freedom from “freedom,” which means the superiority of individual’s rights over his or

her obligations in relation to a community. In Jean-Luc Godard’s movie Alphaville – one of

Ashbery’s favorite motion pictures – the main protagonist, agent Lemmy Caution, visits the

capital of the galaxy Alpha, ruled by the computer Alpha 60, which prohibited emotions. In

14 Here I refer to Marcin Świetlicki’s poem “Dla Jana Polkowskiego” [“For Jan Polkowski”] and the discussion it started. The conflict between ideologies of Polkowski and Świetlicki was meticulously analyzed by Dariusz Pawelec in his essay “Oko smoka” [“The Eye of the Dragon”].


71

each hotel room, there is the Bible, like today, but when Lemmy Caution accidentally opens

the book, it turns out that it is a dictionary. Surprised Lemmy asks Natasha von Braun, a

rebellious daughter of one of the engineers of totalitarianism, why he found a dictionary

instead of the Bible. Natasha answers: “I thought they were the same.” Ashbery’s poems

teach us that a dictionary is not the Bible: the history of Polish translation of Ashbery is also

a history of non-religious understanding of literature and reality, and it seems that the New

York poet’s critical potential in this sphere will be needed in Poland for a long time.

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University of Georgia Press.

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Vol. 2] Kraków: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich.

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http://jacketmagazine.com/02/3jas.html


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Zadura B. Translator (1984). Paradoksy i oksymorony [Paradoxes and Oxymorons] by John

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179.

Contributor’s Bio: Paweł Marcinkiewicz works as Associate Professor at the University of

Opole and the Higher Vocational School in Racibórz. His interests focus on American poetry

and translation theory, and he is also a poet and translator. Recently he has published a

monograph on John Ashbery’s poetry “Colored Alphabets’ Flutter.” John Ashbery and the

Twentieth Century American Avant-Gardes (Opole University Press, 2012). In 2014, the New

York publishing house Spuyten Duyvil printed his selected poems The Day He’s Gone,

translated into English by Piotr Florczyk. His honors include the Polish Cultural Foundation

Award and the Czesław Miłosz Award. In 2016, his volume of poems Panties Up, Panties

Down (2015) was shortlisted for the Wrocław Poetry Prize “Silesius.”

E-mail address: [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

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