“I think that poets and, more broadly, all artists have some certain cognitive impatience in them”: An Interview with Professor Jerzy Kandziora about Stanisław Barańczak, Conducted by Karolina Król

Karolina Król; Jerzy Kandziora

doi:10.18778/2299-7458.09.19

Authors

Karolina Król
Jerzy Kandziora

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2299-7458.09.19

Keywords:

Stanisław Barańczak, poetry, illness, God

Abstract

The interview covers the subject of Stanisław Barańczak and his works. Pondering on the way the poet pictures the existence of God in his poems is an important part of the text. Another crucial subject is the way Barańczak deals with his illness and portrays it in his poetic works. In the interview Jerzy Kandziora – an exquisite reasercher of the poetry written by Barańczak and Jerzy Ficowski − mentions his private relationship with both Barańczak and his wife.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

Karolina Król

Karolina Król – a student of Polish philology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. In 2019, she became a laureate of the ‘Best Student Grant’ programme and she carried out the project titled “Czesław Miłosz and Stanisław Barańczak: Parallels and Splits as Exemplified by the Reception of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann in the Works of the Two Poets.” She is interested in the 20th- and 21st-century poetry as well as works centred around the issue of the Holocaust.

Jerzy Kandziora

Jerzy Kandziora – habilitated doctor, professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. His research interests focus on authors and literary phenomena entirely or partially burdened by an experience of the totalitarian system, settling accounts with the discussed system; authors, whose works require familiarity with the political contexts of post-war communism in Poland in order to be fully understood. Kandziora devoted his first book Zmęczeni fabułą [Tired by Fiction] (Wrocław 1993) to the diary-like autobiographical prose of Brandys, Konwicki and Woroszylski. The majority of the analysed works were either published outside Polish official system or in the West. Stanisław Barańczak, a poet representing the generation of 1968, since 1981 an émigré writing in the United States, is the protagonist of the monograph Ocalony w gmachu wiersza [Saved in the Edifice of the Poem] (2007). Jerzy Kandziora’s latest book Poeta w labiryncie historii [A Poet in the Labyrinth of History] (2018) examines the literary roles of Jerzy Ficowski (1924–2006), distinct poet and scholar of the works of Bruno Schulz, whose creative activity is permeated by the spirit of freedom and intellectual independence. Kandziora’s output also includes the bibliography Bez cenzury 1976–1989 [No Censorship 1976–1989] (1999; co-authors: Zyta Szymańska and Krystyna Tokarzówna), which he supervised. Covering literature, publishing and theatre, it registers the books and magazines (plus their content) put out by underground publishing houses in the People’s Republic of Poland. The work received the Aleksander Brückner Scientific Award of the I Department of Social Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences in literature and philology.