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Biographical note: Adam Czerniawski was born in Warsaw in 1934. Now lives in Wales. His publications in Polish include poetry, essays and short stories. His English publications include translations of poetry by Jan Kochanowski, Cyprian Norwid, Wisława Szymborska and Tadeusz Różewicz, his own memoir Scenes from a disturbed childhood and essays on poetry and philosophy.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844714834
ISBN: 9781844714834
Author: Adam Czerniawski
Title: Firing the Canon
Series: Reconstruction
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CSBH
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 01-Jan-10
Extent: 228pp
Height: 228 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight: 342 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: NP
Price: GBP 14.99
Price: USD 21.95
Rights: World
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Short
description/annotation: A collection of essays predominantly concerned with modern poetry, with problems of translating poetry, and with the relationship between poetry and philosophy. There is also some material dealing with music, the visual arts and religious belief.
Main description: This
book is not for the general reader, but written
in a direct, personal manner, should also interest
those who are not specialists in the subjects
discussed. Covering 200 pages, the essays are
predominantly concerned with modern Polish
and modern English language poetry, with problems
of translating poetry, and with the relationship
between poetry and philosophy. There is also
some material dealing with music, the visual
arts and religious belief. Discussions cover
the poetry of Norwid, Różewicz,
Szymborska, Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Gerald
Manley Hopkins and TS Eliot, the philosophy
of Heraclitus, St Anselm and Roman Ingarden,
and the paintings of Vermeer and Edward Hopper.
Table of contents:
Contents
Author’s Note
Biographical Note
I
Celebration
Polish Poetry in the West, or the Canon That Fired Late
Hamlet or Fortinbras?
Poetry in the next Millennium
II
Before and after Babel
Translation of Poetry—Theory and Practice
The Perils of Self-Translation
III
Choosing a Favourite Poem or De Amicitia
The Poet-Administrator’s Farewell
In Memoriam Z.H.
St Anselm and I: Ontology, Coincidence and the Fortunate Isles
Cyprian and Emily
A Monologue about a ‘Dialogue’
A Dutch Master for Our Times?
IV
Holy Heraclitus
The Particular Imagination
Theme and Variations:
(i) Poetry and Prose
(ii) Poetry and Nonsense
(iii) Words for Music Perhaps
(iv) Art Thou Translated?
(v) Poetry and Everything
Absurdity and Poetry
Where Is the Music?
Literary Truths
Notes
Index of Names View excerpt as PDF:
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Excerpt from book:
Author’s Note
These essays are predominantly concerned with modern Polish and English language poetry, the problems of translating poetry and the relationship between poetry and philosophy. They bear various degrees of relationship to material published previously in Bête Noire, Cogito, Metre, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Nation Review, SHop, The Independent, The Irish Review, Thumbscrew, Tiferet and as preface to Roman Ingarden’s The Work of Music and the Problems of its Identity; also to a lecture given at The International Academy of Philosophy in Lichtenstein.
Unless otherwise indicated, the translations of Polish poetry are mine, some prepared especially for this book, the remainder published in Jan Kochanowski, Treny, Legenda, Oxford 2001, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, Selected Poems, Anvil Press Poetry, London 2004, Tadeusz Róz.ewicz, They came to see a poet, Anvil Press Poetry, London 2004, Wis˘awa Szymborska, People on a Bridge, Forest Books, London 1996, The Burning Forest, Modern Polish Poetry, Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle 1988 and Leopold Staff, An Empty Room, Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle 1983; translations of my own poetry are by Iain Higgins in The Invention of Poetry, Salt Publications, Cambridge 2005.
I have completed editing this volume for publication during my recent stay at Heinrich Böll’s Cottage on Achill Island in Ireland. My thanks to the Heinrich Böll Association for granting my request to work there. I also took the opportunity to browse through Böll’s war-time correspondence written on active service in the Wehrmacht. It was heartening to read in his letter dated 17th July 1940 from the Polish city of Bydgoszcz, where Nazi atrocities had been particularly horrendous, that ‘One sees clearly in the eyes of these people that they are predestined for revolution, and it is evident that it will be a long time before they give up hope of being once again free one day’.
My thanks also to the poet James McCabe, who first pointed me in the direction of the Heinrich Böll Cottage.
A.Cz.
Monmouth, Wales – Alby Hill, Norfolk
March, 2009
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