Abstract: | W.T. W. Writer-idol. Witold Wirpsza in Stanisław Barańczak’s works
The outline discusses Stanisław Barańczak’s fascination with Witold
Wirpsza’s works. Its clearest symptom was his infection with Wirpsza’s
‘stylistic tissue’, which is something Barańczak himself admitted. This
infection is clearly visible in the first three collections: Facial Corrections
(Korekta twarzy), Without Stopping for Breath (Jednym tchem) and Morning
Journal (Dziennik poranny). The key sources of references and inspirations
for these collections were Wirpsza’s poems from the collection Superstitions
(Przesądy) and the digressional poem Faeton. The article demonstrates how
Stanisław Barańczak presents the readers with a specific ‘key to Wirpsza’ in
his works of literary criticism. According to the author of The Diffident and
the Proud (Nieufni i zadufani), literary criticism was unable to cope with
Wirpsza. What pushed the young poet from Poznan to remodel the reading
of Wirpsza’s poetry and to make significant changes to contemporary
poetic tendencies was the collection Superstitions (Przesądy) published by
Wirpsza in 1966, one year after his essay collection Game of Meaning (Gra
znaczeń). Barańczak assigned Wirpsza to the language poetry movement.
In his later accounts of reading, Barańczak the critic suggested that there
was a ‘deep gap’ between Wirpsza’s achievements from various periods of his work. He claimed that Wirpsza was first a political poet, and he
wanted to perceive the later stages of the life of the ‘poet-idol’, generally, as
undergoing ‘rapid and dramatic changes’: one of the socialist realist poets,
experimenter, a difficult poet, original theoretician accused of creating ‘art
for art’s sake’ and ‘excessive hermeticism’ and finally an ‘emigrant’ who
turned out to be a political writer, only to become, finally and unexpectedly,
a religious poet. |