In 1927, Tadeusz Dębicki, a twenty-five-year-old Pole living in Antwerp, joined the crew of the cargo ship Mateb as an officer. The ship would embark on a month-long journey to Africa. Its route followed the Moienzi Nzadi named in the book’s title: “the river that draws its source from all other rivers” [MN, 35]1 in the Belgian colony of the Congo.
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The early nineteenth century witnessed sweeping and revolutionary developments in our modes of transportation. In 1825, the world’s first railway line went into operation in England, and between 1840 and 1860, dynamic railway projects were already underway.
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A Three-Part Model for Free Verse:
Polish criticism has traditionally applied a structuralist reading to the avant-garde poetry developed, for the most part, through the Kraków-based poetic programs of Przyboś and Peiper. (...)
From the Notes of a Scholar of “Micro” Forms
I was not a writer to begin with; I was a listener. In those early decades of the century, reading and writing were not common experiences. Oral storytelling was the basis of fiction. (...)
W.,
A Comma in the Time of Writing
to nie jest
to byłoby
gdyby zdążyło być każdym
w każdej (tej, już tamtej) chwili[1]
(that is not / that would be / if it were on time to be every one / at every (this, no that) moment)
The poem that opens Krystyna Miłobędzka’s book of poetry Imiesłowy is ruled by pronouns. (...)
More or less at the same time, towards the end of the 1950s, European and American artists began to use the device of repetition on a scale previously unmatched. Creators of Pop Art used techniques of multiplication and reproduction of industrial and pop culture images; the Situationists challenged audiences to grasp the vast array of phenomena in which the new economy of the spectacle was revealed; the art of critical appropriations made an effort to redirect its symbolic capital in the direction of constructive social change. (...)
Self-referentiality is an important component of Urszula Kozioł’s poetry. Kozioł develops this aspect of her work in both her smallest works in such cycles as Pestki deszczu (Rain Seeds) or Wyrywki (Chance) and in self-contained longer poems. (...)
One recognizable trait of Urszula Kozioł’s poetry is undoubtedly her self-reflexive attentiveness, her particular sensitivity to the material nature of the word and tendency to showcase the active nature and consciousness of writing, which has been transposed onto the metaphysical orientation of her work, intensifying with the continued output of her books over the years. (...)
Stefan Szymutko, as can be judged from declarative statements found in some of his writings, never wanted to be a “literary theoretician,” understood (very selectively and unfairly) as someone who in Heideggerian terms “talks away” the work of literature, keeping its truth from being voiced. (...)
Intersemiotic translation, alongside intra- and interlingual translation, was one of the three types differentiated by Roman Jakobson in his famous article “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” and was meant to encompass a translation situation in which a transfer takes place between two different semiotic systems – natural and machine language, literary text and image, image and sound, etc. (...)