Drawing from the image of the shtetl shown by Eva Hoffman in her Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews, the paper discusses the imaginary topography of the Jewish past in which shtetl plays an important role of the nostalgically reproduced and idealized space of an almost ideal community. Even before the Holocaust the space of shtetl undergoes various matphorizations and allegorizations in the writings of American Jews only to become even more strongly de-realized in the process which Rebecca Kobrin calls “shtetlization” in which even big cities like Warsaw or Lublin are transformed into places enlivening the silences which they have left behind.
The article discusses Stanisław Barańczak’s idea of the possibility of improving the original in translation as a crucial aspect of his poetic agenda both before the 1989 change of the political system in Poland and after it. This aspect of his poetics is linked with his frequent recourses to normalization as a way out of, in his eyes oppressive, rule of the idiotic clownery and chaos of the surrounding reality regardless of its actual political or social significances. Hence the ambivalence in Barańczak’s vision of normality which, paradoxically, can be seen as either negative or, litotetically, as non-negative.
JavaScript jest wyłączony w Twojej przeglądarce internetowej. Włącz go, a następnie odśwież stronę, aby móc w pełni z niej korzystać.