How exactly did Adam Zagajewski, the Cracovian exile from postwar Lvov, become the “Poet of 9/11”, as Newsweek hailed him on the tenth anniversary of the infamous terrorist attack? And why has the poem lingered on in the years that follow, comforting readers in the aftermath of all kinds of disasters, private and public, natural and manmade? This essay traces the history behind the poem’s debit in English translation on the final page of the New Yorker magazine’s first issue after the attack. It follows its subsequent afterlife as one of the best-known contemporary poems in the English language, as witnessed by its countless appearances in everything from anthologies to sermons, pop songs, and personal websites in the last eighteen years.

While presenting a wide range of cultural, historical and political factors which have influen-ced the Polish and the American reception of Miron Białoszewski’s A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, this article tries to assess the role played in its reception abroad by the fact that the original text existed in several versions (censored and uncensored) and, on its way to print, got fitted out with multiple paratexts (introductions, prefaces and afterwords). Interestingly, there seems to be a connection between these fringe texts, the shaping of the translation as shown by choices made by the translators and editors, the evolving model of what is believed to be the right and proper handling of historical traumas, and the politics of remembrance in diverse historical settings and cultural imaginaries. An in-depth analysis of the details of translation and editorship opens up a series of broader questions about the status of a literary text functioning as evidence of traumatic historic events and the mechanisms of its reception by those directly affected (the family circle) and the people outside (with special attention being paid to the tension between the private and the public, and the normative versus the non-normative).

This article deals with the function of proper names in Olga Tokarczuk's novel Anna In w grobowcach świata [ Anna In in the Tombs of the World] and the short story collection Opowiadania bizarne [ Bizarre Stories]. In either case we are confronted with a stunning diversity of imaginary worlds described with erudite care and, by implication, a high level of strategic control. While drawing on a vast pool of well attested names from both Western cultural history and non-European mythologies, she also creates apellatives based on attributes highlighted in the storytelling (the stories themselves are often the product of her magical imagination). Invented or real, all proper names in Tokarczuk's narratives are handled in such a way as to display to the full their semantic, pragmatic and aesthetic qualities. Also, it seems, their placement in the text and their effect on the reader's reactions during the process of reading are carefully planned. what this article tries to demonstrate is that in Tokarczuk's art of fiction the creative transformation of proper names, their reinterpretation and contextualization functions as a complement to the imaginary worlds, rooted in bizarre, meta/genre creativity.

This article discusses Grzegorz Uzdański’s verse novel Wypiór (2021, the title is a pun on the word ‘upiór’, Pol. spectre) which is multifaceted commentary on the Romantic tradition and the ‘Romantic paradigm’, epitomized in the figure of Adam Mickiewicz transformed into a vampire. The pop-cultural frame invites the reader to pursue all kinds of links between Wypiór and the gallery of the living dead, ghosts and spectres in Mickiewicz’s stories (conceived both as characters from the past and a metaphoric projections of the Romantic poet). The article compares the references and allusions in Uzdański’s novel to Mickiewicz’s own text as well as the text of another contemporary comic horror novel, Ale razem z naszymi umarłymi ( But Not Without Our Dead) by Jacek Dehnel. The analyses, which rely on a methodological toolkit inspired by Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, offer a more accurate reading of Wypiór and highlight its place in the contemporary reception of Romanticism with its predilection for haunting, ghosts or persistent spectral presence.

This article discusses Olga Tokarczuk's idea of the historical novel formulated in her metacritical reflections. It focuses on the concept of conjecture which she herself finds crucial to her writing practice. Tokarczuk stresses the cognitive value of this method which allows her to bring in voices that have been drowned out with their stories and to recover the material, sensual experience of a bygone world. This reading of the Books of Jacob draws on her double-track definition of conjecture to analyze her writing strategy aimed at method this makes use of this double he with stories that have been left out in the past and to fill in the gaps and revise the distortions of the standard, 'written' historical narrative. The affirmation of the value of historical knowledge, tempered by the awareness of its limitations, situates Tokarczuk's fiction within the aesthetic of contemporary neo-historical novel.