Climbing with Conrad : Jan Józef Szczepański’s mountaineering stories

Abstract

Jan Józef Szczepański, who is well known as a Polish “Conradian” author and translator of Conrad’s novels, was also a mountain climber. In his mountaineering stories, along with traces of the Conradian model of ethics, we also find the liminal experience of the “visible universe” to which Szczepański tried to “render the highest kind of justice”. This article examines the work of both authors in order to discover the parallels that can be drawn between the experience of climbing mountains and sailing the seas.