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The following essays are the outcome of the international conference Poetry Translation – Negotiating Imagination. The Quest for Transcendence, which is a continuation of refl ection on the problem of poetry translation undertaken by The Department of Transcultural Literary Studies at Faculty of Humanities (Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw) in 2012 and 2016. The discussion commenced in 2012 with the problem of the quests and negotiations involved in the articulation of poetry in variouslanguages (Tłumaczenie poezji-negocjowanie wyobraźni. Poszukiwania. Ed. A. SzczepanWojnarska, Warszawa: WN UKSW, 2014). In 2016, the main focus was on the sphere of poetic form and the challenges that it has to face in the process of translation, as well as on the challenges that it may pose to the translator (Tłumaczenie poezji-negocjowanie wyobraźni. Poszukiwania formy. Eds. A. Szczepan-Wojnarska, A. Mikołajko, Warszawa: WN UKSW, 2017). In 2019, the main theme of the conference was the problem of poetry in relation to transcendence, and the multiple diffi culties of translating a poetic text which refers to the experience of that sphere. Such experience, present in particular national literatures, evokes traditions and paradigms, conventions and contexts whose understanding reaches far beyond the language code, at the same time aspiring to grasp universal reality. In the process of translation, a community united in the struggle to verbalise transcendence is revealed in individual languages. This collection of articles aims simultaneously to present a variety of issues and the community of researchers that are united by the same reason. The conference was honoured with the presence of an eminent scholar Sir Professor Michael Edwards who delivered remarkable lecture The Charitable Work of Translation included in this volume. Some of the essays are written from theoretical perspective such as speech acts and genres theory (Dobrzyńska), un-translability and conceptual framework (Kliszcz, Komorowska), landscapes and transcendence (Ecke), Unamuno’s anthropology (Gołębiewska). Some of them, however, are devoted to history of literature and particular poets such as: Adam Asnyk i Sta nisław Korab-Brzozowski (Nieukerken), Bolesław Leśmian (Nalewajk), Jerzy Liebert (Grigorova; Masi; Papierski), Marina Tzvietajewa (Józefi na Piątkowska), Zbigniew Herbert (Szczeglacka-Pawłowska), Czesław Miłosz (Szczepan-Wojnarska), Andrzej Busza (Skolik), Wojciech Kudyba (Kucharczyk), and Cristina Campo (Ślarzyńska). The volume includes also translation of one of the Jerzy Liebert’s poems by Jean Ward.

 

All the articles examine the role of translation in development of human qualities,virtues and in discovery of capacity to experience transcendence. The question, to what extent is this role vital, remains open.

 

→ Issues EN / 1 (5) 2019/2020