Pawel Marcinkiewicz – författare

There are many similarities in the development of urbanism and literature in the last two hundred years, resulting from a correspondence between modes of city-planning and modes of literary expression. The symbolic city, connected to the transcendental sphere of myth, evolved into the allegorical city that was transcendentally disconnected. In literature, initially there was no distinction between the symbol and allegory, but for nineteenth-century writers both were antithetical. Later, the symbol and allegory were merely ornaments, embodying a nostalgic drive for the unity of a subject and the products of its perception. Robinson Jeffers’s poetry, like the early twentieth-century city, relies on the symbol while A. R. Ammons’s poetry, like the late twentieth-century city, is allegorical in its essence. These similarities are not coincidental, but prove that the city and literature belong to the same socio-cultural sphere.

This book deals mostly with American avant-garde literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the present-day practice and politics of its translation into Polish, trying to answer the following questions: What are the meaning and the limits of avantgardism? What is the rationale of literary translations and what is their life-cycle in receiving literary polysystems? Furthermore: What is the importance of translation in shaping the politics of meaning – our collective textual practices determining our epistemological perspectives in literature and beyond? And finally: What are the consequences of implementing foreign modes of thinking and making politics in the receiving culture, both in the social sphere and in writing?