Kazimierz Jaworski contributed to a great extent to popularising Yevhen Malaniuk’s poetry in the interwar period. Most of Jaworski’s translations of Malaniuk’s poems into Polish were published in the years 1933–1937 in the magazine Kamena in Chełm. The poet from Lublin undertook to translate less popular poems, unknown to Polish readers. He opted not to work with the Ukrainian poet’s patriotic works, familiar to Polish literary circles, and chose poems of intimate and existential nature instead. From the two collections which were known in Poland, Earth And Iron (1930) and The Earthly Madonna (1934), he selected poems which in a special way correlate with his own lyrical works from the To a Red And White Mistress (1924) collection. What deserves special attention among Kazimierz Jaworski’s translating techniques is his exceptional diligence in choosing suitable Polish semantic equivalents and in rendering an appropriate rhythm of poems. Most of his translations can be described as adequate. They are not absolute, but they convey the originality of a given work through preserving the form and contents of the translated poem in the most faithful way possible. Jaworski’s translations show his inclination to poetise and dynamise the text. The translator readily uses his own metaphors and expands phrases with emotionally charged elements. Kazimierz Andrzej Jaworski was also a tireless propagator of information concerning the most recent translations of Yevhen Malaniuk’s poetry as well as the publishing activities of one of the most valued representatives of the Ukrainian immigration in Poland.

The Koran became an inspiration to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), made obvious in many of his works, such as Imitations of the Koran, The Prophet, and In a Secret Cave. Pushkin studied the translation of the Koran carefully and used many verses of its Surahs in his texts. Many of his contemporary poets and followers were influenced by his poetry, like Ivan Bunin (1870–1953), who continued the traditions of Pushkin. Bunin repeated many thoughts from Koranic discourse and placed them in his poems that were full of faith and spirituality. He wrote many of them at the beginning of the 20th century1, before his emigration to France in 1918, for example: Mohammed in Exile, Guiding Signs and For Treason. It has been noted that Bunin was quoting verses from the Koran to create an intertextual relationships between some Surahs and his poems, showing a great enthusiasm to mystical dimension of Islam. We find this aspect in many works, such as The Night of al-Qadr, Tamjid, Black Stone of the Kaaba, Kawthar, The Day of Reckoning and Secret. It can also be said that a spiritual inspiration and rhetoric of Koran were not only attractive to Pushkin and Bunin, but also to a large group of Russian poets and writers, including Gavrila Derzhavin, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Tyutchev, Yakov Polonsky, Lukyan Yakubovich, Konstantin Balmont, and others.

Baudelaire’s Catholicism seems difficult to interpret, therefore some authors declare the poet a Satanist. In my opinion, this is rather problematic to call Charles Baudelaire a Satanist. It is very debatable and doubtful, but there are several reasons for this. In the collection of poetry entitled “Les Fleurs du mal” (“The Flowers of Evil”), Baudelaire gave a voice to the Devil many times. He wrote a scandalous poem “Litanies de Satan” (“The Litany of Satan”). In fact, Satan tempts us and leads us, after all he is closer to man that God! Was Baudelaire a Satanist? It is question to be answered.

The article deals with the contemporary translation of Tadeusz Różewicz’s poems into Russian. Regardless of the fact that some of his poetry had already been translated and published, new times and new readers need new translations. The considerations presented in the article refer precisely to them. Taken into account were primarily the translations of a generation of contemporary translators for an international competition on the translation of Różewicz’s poems, announced in 2013 by the foundation ‘For your freedom and ours’. The translations of three poems by the Polish poet have been considered: Words, In the light of flickering lamps and Such is the master, works frequently chosen by the winners of the said competition. In particular the analysis regards the saturation of the poems with cultural realities and inter-textual elements. Therefore, comments and some translators’ notes accompanying the translations were taken into account, ones defining their approach to the translation and the translated text itself. The considerations confirmed the need to activate the cognitive function of translation in modern translations – the purpose of the mentioned comments – but also to pay attention to the problems of translating free verse into Russian.

This essay (given at the PENClub Polska) deals with the relationship between constitutional matters and poetry. The essay takes a closer look at the poetry of Adam Zagajewski, Marcin Świetlicki, Julian Tuwim and Adam Bieszek. “There is nothing on us in the Constitution” – Marcin Świetlicki angrily declaims the bitterness of civil rejection in the poem “Under the volcano”. However, the poet is not right. The Constitution sometimes means more than it says directly. If it is silent about something, that does not always amount to rejection, as Świetlicki claims. The two first parts of the essay explain why the poet could have made such a mistake as to his presence in the Constitution. The third part expounds the change that is taking place in Poland: the rejection of the foundations of the Constitution without changing its text.

This article traces the concept of Place in the poetry of exiled Palestinian poet and literary critic Yūsuf Šihāda,1 now a Polish citizen. The article analyzes Place as the objective correlative through which one can discern the ensemble of the intricate existential relationships in the poetry of this exiled Palestinian intellectual who is torn between its complexities. The Slavic Place and place in general in his poetry constitute the backdrop to understanding the hidden meanings, the existential dilemmas, the entangled human relationships between East and West, and the moral stance the poet reflects in his work. Šihāda’s poetry is based on the poles of open-closed and inside-outside. It reflects loss, wandering, and emotional, intellectual, psychological, humanitarian, and existential alienation. Analysis of the types of place in his poetry – the polar, the intimate, the border, and the utopian - indicates that the poet’s voice has become the voice of the minority, and through the dialectics within the different types of places, he portrays his own crises and those of his people, the various restrictions placed upon them, their dreams of a free, unfettered life, and their yearning to live in an intimate place where they can unite with the universe.

Vasyl Stus is the Ukrainian existential poet, who used aesthetic of surrealism and expressionism. This text presents surreal elements in the Vasyl Stus’s poems which are connected with the idea of hell. Author gives examples of different images of hell in European culture and literature and also analyzes the surrealist poems of Vasyl Stus from his book Merry Cemetery.

The paper is concerned with the most fundamental compositional divide to be found in lyrical discourse, consisting in that the latter one is normally split into an empirical part, presenting the author’s concrete experience, and a focal part, where the author discovers some signifi cant truth or/and changes her attitude towards the world. It is claimed in the paper that, more generally, one of the specifi c linguistic properties of focal fragments is their higher and/or specially underscored informativity, and, in particular, one of the means recruited to emphasize it is inverted word order.