Czy poezja jest przekładem?
Is Poetry a Translation?

St. John of the Cross in the Polish Translations of Federico García Lorca and Juan Gelman

Summary/Abstract: The article points to the inspirations of the mystical poetry of St. John of the Cross in two 20th-century Spanish language poets, Federico García Lorca and Juan Gelman, in whom it takes a special form of intertexts. The poets refer to others’ words out of a sense of the inadequacy of language and the inexpressibility of feelings that accompany them after the loss of their loved ones – loneliness, despair, abandonment. At the same time, the act of “rewriting” earlier texts as an expression of apophatic theology is present in St. John himself. An analysis of Lorca’s Polish translations, as well as of Gelman’s experimental poems, leads to the conclusion that the complex web of diachronic intertextual references poses a difficult challenge to the translator and requires extensive historical literary and cultural competence.

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