If translation is not envisaged as an exercise in hermeneutics, if its principal preoccupation is not a text’s meaning but its expressive energies and experiential capacities, what are we to understand by the notion of understanding? Understanding presupposes something to be understood, or misunderstood, presupposes that there is a reality of text. But if literary translation is expressly a mode of textual interference, designed to phantomize textual reality, then understanding a text becomes a rather different proposition. Two factors are of special importance in this re-definition of understanding: the nature of the translational reading experience, and the inherent lability of the source text. If reading-for-translation is to resist the lure of comprehension and of the signified, is to resist surrendering itself to the metatextual, then it must re-imagine itself as an existential adventure, as an act of inhabitation, in which signifying is ‘desemiotized’ and thus becomes a matter of senses rather than meaning. At the same time, it must engage with, if not promote, the natural changeability of the text-to-be-translated. In these circumstances, ‘to understand’ is more closely akin to ‘come to an understanding with’; that is to say, understanding in translation is much more to do with a nominative/vocative relationship with text than with an accusative one. And this, in turn, entails a re-definition of the literary.

I shall outline Marinetti's political studies in 1895-1899 and preparation for a professional career as a politician. During his early career as a writer (1900-1908) he was a close observer of political developments in Italy and Europe and pursued a project of bringing together the avantgardists of the ideal and the real world, the Syndicalists of mind and brawn, largely following a model set by the Anarcho-syndicalists and Post-Symbolists inFrance. This utopian ideal formed the backbone of the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism of February 1909 and the First Political Manifesto of March 1909. Marinetti planned to stand in the local elections in Piedmont with an anarcho-syndicalist programme of a nationalistic bent and worked feverishly on setting up a Union of Revolutionary Forces (May 1910). This gave rise to the lecture “The Necessity and Beauty of Violence” (June–July 1910), which set out the key demands of Futurism as a political movement.
Following his disillusionment with Italian Anarchism in 1913, Marinetti engaged in the Interventionist debate of 1914-15 and turned Futurism into a political movement, first through his propaganda activities during the Great War and then with the foundation of the Futurist Political Party (1918) in the immediate postwar period. In 1919-22, members of the Futurist movement (with Marinetti at their helm) sounded out alliances with two new political forces: the Fasci di Combattimento and the Communist movement. Marinetti's vision of a "proletariat of geniuses" who would form a "Board of Initiatives" outlined a new type of artist-politician who could overturn the political culture of the 20th century. However, the November elections of 1919, Mussolini's shift towards the hard Right and the Communists' departure from a Gramscian theory and praxis made Marinetti's house of cards collapse. In a volte-face of 1920 he withdrew from politics and developed a new policy: “Fascism operates politically, […] Futurism, on the other hand, operates in the boundless domains of pure imagination.” This brought to an end a project that had aimed at an aesthetization of politics and a politicization of arts. In the end, the Futurist avant-garde was more successful within the cultural establishment (whom they despised) than with the revolutionary forces of the political Right or Left (whom they courted for years). Marinetti had to accept in no uncertain terms that the two domains of Aisthetika and Politika could not easily be conjoined. At least for a while, one of the greatest misunderstandings in the Futurist movement had been settled.

In this paper, we focus on the role of reception barriers in the Czech reception of the Polish School of Literary Reportage. Literary reportage, as it is understood by Polish tradition, is only slightly represented in the Czech environment. Today, however, translations into Czech appear more and more. This brings a number of stimulating impulses both in the translation process, as well as in the field of reception and interpretation of translated texts. For example, the genre specificity and distinction of the literary reportage is manifested, leading to various misunderstandings among Czech recipients, both readers and literary critics or historians. On the other hand, these misunderstandings in the final consequence lead to a reviving interest in the Polish reportage tradition. Genre strangeness (Czechs perceive a literary reportage rather through the prism of such genres as travel journal, essay or diaries; the crucial problem for them is the position of a reporter in the text and his author's gesture, or the balancing on the boundary of objectivity and subjectivity) has paradoxically also its positive aspect – for reader, this strangeness becomes attractive, requires a re-evaluation of deep-rooted genre boundaries, and in the final consequence helps to break down cultural strangeness.

The issue of Cold War has been gaining in popularity. It has become the subject of research of both academics and those not directly involved in studying the field. This paper aims at presenting an aspect of the conflict between the ‘red camp’ and the ‘western society’ that broke out in Poland in the late 1940s and lasted for decades. It will focus on the unknown side of the ‘clash of the Titans’ – the invisible, cultural front of the conflict with direct reference to espionage and invigilation of British citizens in Poland during the years that followed WW II. This paper will be devoted to severe ‘misunderstandings’ of Eastern/Western mentalities that were part of the propaganda struggle at the time. One of the victims of the widespread confusion was the first head of the British Council in Poland, George Bidwell, who in the atmosphere of international scandal, renounced his British citizenship, and adopted Polish ‘socialist way of life’. Distorted images of the West produced and disseminated in Eastern Europe by communist propagandists were to substantially alter the picture that was being painted by the representatives of the West, e.g. the British Council. Misunderstanding and forever told lies were key factors in shaping Polish opinion about the West. On the other hand, a number of Britons in Poland were far from being innocent in their intentions, which this paper is going to shed light on.

In his essay “Art as Device” Viktor Shklovsky famously coins the term estrangement, which points to the ability of literature to renew one’s perception of the world. Shklovsky argues that habitual perception “accounts for much discord in mankind” because it is governed by the “law of economy of mental effort,” which helps human minds and bodies preserve valuable resources. This mechanism impairs people’s ability to understand each other and, importantly, numbs one’s perceptions of atrocity and violence. In this paper I argue that Shklovsky’s theory of energy preservation acquires a different meaning in his post-revolutionary writings. His book Knight’s Move, written largely between 1919 and 1920, a period of great famine which killed millions of people, engages with the issue of misunderstanding in two different ways, both of which commenting on important social and political issues of the time. Firstly, it discusses early-Soviet attempts to provide a scientific rationale for controlling the diets of citizens through the redistribution of food and food rationing. Secondly, it argues that famine endangers traditional knowledge about food, with people losing the ability to understand their bodily needs. Shklovsky points to a serious lack of dialogue between scientists calculating nutritional norms and the government providing actual food rations, which marks the ultimate limit of empathic understanding.

The paper critically analyzes the Czesław Miłosz’s literary unmasking, available only from the double perspective of his contradictory receptions, Polish and American. Miłosz’s translations of his own poetry into English allow for the author to stimulate misreadings in a seemingly controlled manner. The nomadic quality of Czesław Miłosz’s verses, however, allows for a reconsideration of the notion of self-translation in the context of his own need for a ‘selfsituating.’ Operating between fictional and factual narratives so as to ‘situate’ himself, Miłosz navigates amidst the modernist and the confessionalist traditions, between literature as an artificial construct and as an authentic voice. Thus, to get a better grasp of the self and the world, Miłosz remains in intellectual motion, plays with expectations, and constructs new selves. We must thoroughly consider the effects of Miłosz’s mobility; that its authorship emerges on the brink of reception and construction; or, reader’s expectation and authorial whim.

The aim of this presentation is to discuss the problem of incomprehensibility in the poetic works by Tymoteusz Karpowicz and Krystyna Miłobędzka. Both representatives of the postwar avant-garde used various techniques in the field of language (e.g. amphiboly, ellipsis, anacoluthon, polysemy) with the purpose of intentional hermetisation of the text, which makes the relation with a reader peculiar and complicated. Incomprehensibility seems to be a part of the poets’ artistic statements, which might be seen as two comparable versions of the wider avant-garde project focused on renewing the poetic language. This transgressive project could be called – after the title of Karpowicz’s book on Leśmian – the “impossible poetry” (“poezja niemożliwa”). The presentation is concentrated on studying the experiments in the field of lexis, syntax and imagery, which are purposed on achieving the effect of incomprehensibility. Interpretations of chosen texts or their fragments are pictured in the more general contexts like the C.K. Norwid’s thought, the history of avant-garde movements, reader-response theory and the reflections of i.a. Peter Howarth and Marjorie Perloff on the modernist poetry. The author aims to resume the debate on the boundaries of expressibleness, communication and interpretation in the context of Karpowicz’s and Miłobędzka’s poetry.

My paper will explore the mysterious success of the 1837 translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet by Nikolai Polevoi. Polevoi heavily edited Hamlet shortening the play to a quarter and introducing many lines and emotions that did not exist in the original. In Polevoi’s interpretation the Danish prince acquired features of a Russian intelligent helpless before political reaction, battering himself for his helplessness and devoured by his own ruminations. And yet the stage version of Polevoi’s Hamlet conquered the Russian scene for the rest of the 19th century. Many lines from Polevoi’s version became Russian catch phrases despite there being no Shakespearian equivalents for them. Herzen and Dostoevsky wrote ecstatic letters about it. The most influential critic Belinsky cemented its popularity with his rapturous reviews. Turgenev further contributed to popularization of Hamlet in Russia as a “superfluous man” based on Polevoi’s translation leading to the emergence of Russian Hamletism. My paper will try to establish the role of both the state’s as well as the translator’s own censorship in Polevoi’s Hamlet drawing attention to censorship’s productive potential.

One of the characters in The Loser by Austrian prose writer and playwright Thomas Bernhard says:
One misunderstanding casts us into the world of misunderstanding, which we mustputup with as a world composed solely of misunderstanding and which we depart form with a single great misunderstanding, for death is the greatest misunderstanding of all, so Wertheimer, I thought.
In his address, the Author will show the literary representations of misunderstanding and incomprehension in Thomas Bernhard's prose, for whom incomprehension /incomprehensibility was at the same time an artistic strategy. In Bernhard' prose the logical and certain must give way to the doubtful and the unsettling – that is to misunderstanding and unseriousness. The logic and readability of the world are suspended, and that state is constantly staged. The characters see uncertainty, misunderstanding and incomprehensions everywhere – in their lives, but also in science, which they devote themselves to completely. The author will show how the Austrian writer invalidates a classic, post-Cartesian subject.
Exposure to misunderstanding / incomprehension frightens and paralyses the characters but concomitantly opens the gap, which is also a chance, as it wakes them up from lethargy, from the level of Das Man (to refer to the Heidegger’s vocabulary), from perceptual routine.
Just when there is a cut, a break in signifiant, the opportunity of binding reveals itself. The movement of binding (which is usually covert) becomes visible, reveals itself when it ceases. Experiencing –disruption – as the Author will try to demonstrate – is in Bernhard's books a source of taking on a new perspective, going beyond the habitual way of looking, thanks to which his characters gain an opportunity to reject the worn-out, dingy suit – a form of life – that has been dropped for them “from the hanger of the world”; they can “see it inside out” giving “themselves a chance to make our own world out of not our world, and that means they can transform themselves so as not to get clotted in one (oppressive) shape.

The aim of the paper is to discuss the problem of different (mis)understandings of the notion of narratology in Polish literary studies. Since the early 70s. when the term started being used, it referred predominantly to its French semiotic origins. Although some Polish scholars continued the attempts to unveil the universal grammar of literature, the main focus of Polish narrative studies in the 70s., 80s. and 90s. was the level of discourse, not story. Polish narrative studies explored therefore realms not labelled, to a certain moment, as narratological. The labelling of those accomplishments did not change with the global evolution of narratology’s scope of research. This leads sometimes to a (mis)belief that narratological studies do not have a strong tradition in Polish literary studies. A further complication is the opposition between the so called formal and contextual narratology and the place of Polish narrative studies within this divide.

In my paper I would like to reflect upon the ways in which the idea of misinterpretation as a positive phenomenon/force in literature and literary criticism can be reconciled, on a more philosophical or theoretical level, with the main tenets of the so-called strong intentionalism - that is, the belief that the meaning of any speech act or literary work is necessarily synonymous with the authorial intention. It is often assumed that the intentionalist approach to text/language (as practiced by critics such as Walter Benn Michaels) altogether rejects the productive potential of literary misreadings - a reading based on a gross misunderstanding of the author’s intention can ultimately amount to little more than a wasted effort; and unless we accept that misreading is basically a production of new meanings (rather than a failed attempt to discover the ones that are already there) we can ascribe little positive value to interpretations that have been „proven wrong”.
I would like to show that, quite contrary to these intuitions, only by rejecting the idea of reader-as-co-producer and adopting an openly intentionalist stance we are be able to see the inevitability of misreading for what it is, namely: the necessary basis for every modern, inclusive speech community. Embracing the fact that misinterpretations cannot be completely eliminated, yet resisting the urge to include them in the process of meaning-production, can be in turn seen as a litmus test for any language-oriented progressive movement or political action.

Themes of misunderstanding and miscommunication are commonplaces in the work of Daniil Kharms, a twentieth-century Russian writer who has been called the last of the Soviet avant-garde. A frequent motif in Kharms' prose is the re-appropriation of really-existing historical figures, from Archimedes to Nikolai II, as fictional characters. Kharms’ decidedly ahistorical treatment of these figures is a "miscommunication" of history, and critics often reduce his historical characters to floating signifiers, fully divorced from their ‘real’ existences. Yet Kharms repeatedly makes an active choice to engage with historical narratives. Examining his Komediia goroda Peterburga (1930), Istoricheskii episod (1939) and other historical narratives, my paper will consider Kharms’ lasting tendency to create through deliberate "misunderstanding" of history. It will argue that Kharms’ (a)historical fiction demonstrates consciousness of the historical tradition and his place within it, rather than a simple disregard for historical fact. Ultimately, Kharms' radical miscommunications of history would create space for his work between the genres of historical record, literary text, and personal narrative.

Misunderstanding could be considered as one of the most important construction rules of Lewis Carroll’s „Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and „Through the Looking Glass”. It could be treated as a factor which activates the action of the dylogy but also builds the main character’s identity. Alice in this world is a stranger, who is constantly surprised by the world around. The same status – the status of a stranger – belongs both to the narrator and the reader, which makes the misunderstanding the main communication rule. In the consequence, any translation must respect misunderstanding as meaningful. I would like to explore how it affects Polish translations of „Alice”.

In this essay, I hope to clarify the circumstances in which Kazimierz Wyka and Stefan Napierski, two well-established and respected literary critics, published texts which criticised Bruno Schulz in the monthly magazine “Ateneum” No 1/1939. Schulz's prose works were already widely known as difficult, but there was no doubt as to their merit; the writer's high position seemed to be indisputable, and yet Wyka and Napierski still tried to consciously destroy Schulz’s legacy. Their articles can be considered masterpieces of ill will and malice. The importance of this attempt was noted by Włodzimierz Bolecki (Poetic prose model in the Polish interwar period) and Michał Paweł Markowski (Polish Modern Literature: Leśmian, Schulz, Witkacy); at present it is necessary to methodically research the system of dirty tricks of failed understanding Schulz’s stories as a form of “poetical misunderstanding”.

“Modality” is a term by N.S. Struever, who uses it for underscoring a zeal of Renaissance writers for seizing contradictions and incompatibilities of real world in the single artificial body of text. Such genres as dialogues and utopias let writers be ambiguous and express ambiguity of reality within the space of text, during reader`s perception of it, without any possibility to follow certain author`s opinion or conclusion. This method leads frequently to misunderstanding and bewilderment, for example in A.F. Doni`s discrepancy, when the page headers in his book “The Worlds”, that contains a dialog between sage (on left page) and madman (on right page), are reversed – so, sage`s opinion is marked as madness, and madman`s one vice versa. All in all, this paradoxicality of Renaissance literature did not lead to misunderstanding between writers and within intellectuals coteries; conversely, they appreciated an ability to be ambiguous via rhetorical skills, puns, quibbles and composition, as a way for text`s superiority over reality, because only such a text can consider the whole ways and possibilities, even unrealized and incompatible; such kind of poststructuralist hypertext was expressed in Renaissance in the concept of cornucopian text, juxtaposed (by T. Cave, S. Greenblatt, K. Shape) with theories by R. Bart, J. Derrida, M. De Certo, because these theories, unpredictable relevant, let us understand a lot in paradoxical and unobvious, but surprisingly similar to poststructuralism, author`s intention of Erasmus, Montaigne, More, Ronsard.

The paper will focus on the “verbivocovisual” aspect of Edwin Morgan’s concrete poetry and “written through” experiments. I am interested in the way the poetic pieces present themselves as: “visual” in that the constructivist scheme produces its own meanings, but also brings out the material aspect of the word, its plasticity; “verbi,” in that the poet plays an incessant game of (r)(d)econstruction of meaning; and “voco” (“musical” or “sound”), which in verbal performance frequently introduces and/or strengthens the texts’ morphodynamics. The analysis will proceed from what “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry” calls “advanced level isomorphism” in which geometric form and mathematics of composition predominate towards the poems in which the emphasis is placed on organic form and phenomenology of composition.
Great emphasis will be put on the issue of multifarious dialogism of Morgan’s creative design; this dialogism can be seen in his often surprising cross-cultural and deeply engaging intertextual references, but it is even more explicit in his crossing the borders of English towards Scots, in total immersion in computer language, in convergence of many languages. The lateral perspective of looking at things combined with multi-level dialogism play crucial role in the construction as well as reconstruction and deconstruction of meaning of words, phrases, or concrete constellations. The suspension of the referential function of the sign (games of the signifier and the signified aimed at the “ungrounding” of meaning), combined with the employment of the principle of repetition and difference lead to (d)(r)esemantisation or (d)(r)ecategorisation of words and phrases.
The author will attempt to show that Morgan’s poems are not only about written words or letters, but first and foremost the empty slots between letters and words, waiting for the reader to activate the hidden potential meanings of words and phrases. The reader is expected to pursue a processual interpretation of the category of visible / invisible, audible / inaudible, featured / non-featured, present / absent. Clearly, Morgan employs the technique of anamorphosis due to which the meanings of overt and hidden text may be questioned, de-constructed / re-constructed.

The relatively wide-reaching debate on the alleged incomprehensibility of the contemporary poetry has over the last few decades become one of the defining subjects of the Polish literary criticism. Constantly reinforced by the mainstream media, the idea that a contemporary poem is by default opaque and inaccessible has been deeply internalised by many readers, academics and non-academics alike. When faced with such assumptions, it is understandably easy to act as if the unintelligibility of the literary work was a universal idea, a uniform principle that stays basically the same across the whole spectrum of authors, formal strategies and political views.
In my paper I want to point out that poetic incomprehensibility as a formal strategy can be used to achieve a variety of both aesthetic and political goals, some of which are not only incompatible but openly contradictory. I compare and contrast the poetry of select contemporary Polish authors, from Andrzej Sosnowski to Tomasz Pułka, to show how the very idea of understanding poetry can shift along the political generational lines. I then propose that we differentiate between the strategy of opaqueness as „pleasurable noise” and the concept of glitch as a self-reproducing flaw in the fabric of language.

Everyday conversations are being received in many different ways by the interlocutors in presence; they are making sense of it, they are diverging, silencing, diverting it, appropriating it, etc. This phenomenon is signifying in that it reveals the diverse ways in which social norms are “decoded” (Hall, 1980) and interiorized – or not – by the individuals. However, this particular reception process is a question that has been not much explored in social sciences nor in cultural theories. By studying a specific material, that of conversation narratives, we can access to that reception process. Twenty persons from diverse social backgrounds reported all the conversations they had the past seven days in a debriefing with the researcher. This paper present a particular form of conversation’s reception, that of “resistance in omission”, in which we chose to not express our opposition to a conversation issue, matter or subject. This omission constitutes a lively resistance zone in someone’s inner discourse but is also contributing to a misunderstanding of the “temporary consensus” (Goffman, 1959) of the interactional moment. We will see how these kinds of day-to-day choices in interaction is a productive way to nourish and sustain the conversation’s ambiance, its esthetics, but also the normative and creative power of its participants.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Washington : Anchor Editions.
Hall, S. (1980). « Encoding/Decoding ». In Culture, Media, Language, London : Hutchison, p. 128-138.

Among Witkacy's most pronounced obsessions was his own theory of art. Called “pure form,” it was first outlined in three full-length theoretical works around 1920, and then became an ever more encompassing figure both in his criticism and plays. The author abandoned the program in 1925, switching to portraiture, novels, and philosophy. My contention in this paper is that part of the reason for this is the excessive nature of the concept: “pure form” actually primarily means a parts-whole relationship, i.e. form. To a large extent, Witkacy borrowed his idea of art from his father, and the excessive classification (“pure”) can be read as a mark of his attempt to make a name for himself, but the project is caught in an Oedipal double bind. The exit of this double bind comes about by a self-misunderstanding which takes the form of abandoning art (according to his own definition) to make art (novels, portraiture, and a play). In this sense, I argue that the concept of pure form becomes a sinthome, a structual obsession in itself meaningless which can stand in for a foreclosed Oedipal stage and allow for the inscription of the subject into language.

The aim of my presentation is to analyze the reception, that is – attempted understandings and resulting misunderstandings – of the life and works of Maria Komornicka. I will focus on the ideas of two scholars and writers – Izabela Filipiak and Brygida Helbig-Mischewski. Both authors refer to the previous interpretations offered by Maria Janion and Edward Boniecki, while at the same time presenting their own conceptions.
Filipiak’s interpretation – as testified in particular by her study Obszary odmienności. Rzecz o Marii Komornickiej, Warszawa 2006 [Areas of alterity: On Maria Komornicka] – strongly relies on queer theory, while Helbig-Mischewski presents a more independent interpretation based on gender studies and anthropological, psychoanalytical and sociological reflection.
Interestingly, both authors use both the form of an academic study (Filipiak’s Obszary odmienności… and Helbig-Mischewski’s Strącona bogini. Rzecz o Marii Komornickiej, Kraków 2010 [A Dethroned goddess: On Maria Komornicka]) and literary or paraliterary styles of writing (?) (Filipiak’s drama Księga Em, Warszawa 2005 [The book of Em] and essay Moje życie z Marią, Warszawa 2005 [My life with Maria], Helbig-Mischewski’s novel Inna od siebie, Warszawa 2016 [Different form oneself/herself]). In my presentation, I will analyze, first, how the authors employ these forms to capture and understand the life and writings of Maria Komornicka and, secondly, what misunderstandings result from this strategy.
In the final part of the speech I will present an interesting thesis of Helbig-Mischewski, who suggested that in Komornicka’a works one may find traces of anorectic experience. Does this interpretation shed new light on Komornicka’s writings? Or is it rather another misunderstanding (the lack of understanding) of her works and the problem of anorexia itself and its literary representation? These two questions will be among the questions considered during my presentation.

The paper discusses two aspects of (mis)understanding in translation: in literary texts and in the process of reception. Unlike a linguistic error being an isolated, incidental phenomenon, communication disturbed by a number of interlingual misunderstandings may become a matter of system: a mechanism inscribed in the poetics of a literary work. Mistranslation performed by an incompetent translator/interpreter, depicted in prose or staged in a theatre play, is a motif with a long tradition. It is a source of humour, as in one of the comic plays by Plautus, or in the novel Everything Is Illuminated by J.S. Foer. For Foer, the interpreterʼs linguistic failure paradoxically enables the protagonists to realize intercultural differences and to comprehend unfamiliar mentalities shaped by the traumatic past. Thus, interlingual misunderstanding constructed in a literary work may have various functions: it provides comical effects, emphasizes and valuates cultural differences, helps “domesticate” the alien.
Another aspect of translational misunderstanding concerns the reception of a literary work by foreign readers, as demonstrated by The Crimean Sonnets by Mickiewicz in early German translations. This masterpiece of Polish Romanticism was translated according to the poetics of the Biedermeier and construed as an expression of admiration for idyllic landscapes and the Orient. The translatorsʼ miscomprehension of the original has influenced its German reception until now, suggesting an interpretation of the Sonnets unexpected by Polish readers.

Since 2013 we have been using experimental strategies to transfer into to context of Polish culture chosen works of American avant-garde from the fields of electronic literature, uncreative writing, conceptual literature, procedural writing, flarf and related genres. These works include art by Kenneth Goldsmith, Nick Montfort, Steven Zultanski, Steve Kotecha, Lawrence Giffin, Amaranth Borsuk, Guy Bennett, Yedda Morisson, Scott Rettberg and other authors. In our pursuits, we have used various platforms and tools, both digital ones like Google Translate, Amazon Mechanical Turk, various programming languages (Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl), as well as analogue, that is traditional books. The chosen American texts, dating from the 90s to present day, very often reflect the artists’s response to the development of digital media and their impact on writing practices, as well as their reaction to the popularity of creative writing courses in the USA. Both contexts are poorly understood in Poland, which is considered a half-peripheral country in terms of development of digital media and has a different literary writing tradition, in which creative writing courses have little presence and impact. Given this completely different context, meaning a lack of a lexicon to speak of these works and no parallel community of critics and artists, it is not surprising that the transfer of American avant-garde works into the Polish language and culture encounters a challenging context of reception. In this paper we will consider the reception of American avant-garde works in Poland. We will analyze reviews, papers, online discussions, emails, but also remarks and questions recorded during events organized by the publishing house or scientific conferences.

Among the many things that Richard Rorty is infamous for, a chief place is reserved for his readings of other authors, from Plato, Kant, and Dewey to Nabokov, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Foucault, and a number of others. They are widely considered to be distortive, and have provoked ire among some and satire among others. Daniel Dennett, for instance, himself one of the victims of Rorty’s interpretations, has proposed to distinguish a certain “Rorty Factor,” which he defined thus: “Take whatever Rorty says about anyone’s views and multiply it by .742 to derive what they actually said.”
While Rorty’s interpretive extravagances are legendary, it is little known that behind them there is neither shoddy scholarship nor frivolousness, nor, as some suggest, a view that since all reading is misreading, then anything goes. Rather, what animates them is a hermeneutic theory which, without abjuring the notion of correctness of understanding, extols misunderstanding as an indispensable interpretive instrument and, in fact, a virtue. In this paper, I am going to sketch the conceptual geography of that theory and show its relevance for the study of historical and intercultural hermeneutics.

Contemporary youth literature has developed a new type of hero of the consumer society – a representative of the “Generation Nobody”, who feels lost on the communicative and axiological levels.
A teenage hero (here: of realistic novels of manners), adrift in his life, becomes entangled in difficult intergenerational dialogues, which often results in disagreements with adults (e.g. severing relationships with family) and social isolation. Conflicts between the characters, especially in the case of children and adults, are caused by, among others, lack of acceptance, lack of empathy on the part of a parent, indifference, misinterpretation of the intentions of the speaker, and “atrophy of the willingness and ability to feel compassion, use of inappropriate/ different language codes” (cf. A. Sadecki, “Teoria umysłu a nieporozumienia bohaterów w prozie Czechowa (zarys)”, Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, LVII z.1).
I refer here to: 1/. the concept of interpersonal communication, which is a multi-faceted phenomenon, where communication behaviour is an expression of the human value system of an individual, and 2/. narratological perspective (including cognitive narrative); also, cognitively conditioned research on reception of literature.
The strength of the narrative of these novels, resulting from misunderstandings in communication between the characters, is: 1/. its focus on the psyche of the child and youth heroes and reflection of their inner states with emotional tensions (e.g. through thoughts, mental images, imaginative patterns, and sensual experiences), and 2/. introduction of a self-reflective type of narrative (e.g. the heroines write letters to themselves and they keep diaries and blogs, e.g. www.zamknieta.pl).
From the rich set of contemporary literary works for young readers addressing the issues of disagreements and conflict between generations, called literature of anthropological sensitivity, initiation, and the “Net Generation”, promoting the principle of the “game of values”, “seeking lost order and self”, and exposing the theme of meeting yourself and the Other, I choose to interpret and discuss e.g. Tabu by Kinga Dunin (1998) (here: different outlooks on life), the novel Samotni.pl by Barbara Kosmowska (2012) (here: coming to terms with the past); Most nad Missisipi by Ewa Przybylska ( (2012) (here: communication indifference); Ma być czysto! by Anna Cieplak (2016) (here: social differences), and Fanfik by Natalia Osińska (2016) (here: gender differences).

A preliminary thesis concerns he return of the story to Polish dramaturgy. Story impossible to tell.
Analysis of texts of Szymon Bogacz and Karolina Maciejaszek is going to show the relation between the narration and the misunderstanding in cultural and historical context of Polish society. One of the drama concerns the history of The Independent and Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarność and the second shows part of the history of the camp for Polish children in Litzmannstadt ghetto.
Conducted analyses will show that narrative fragments inserted into dramatic text are staying lined with the sequence of form of contact, which are breaking story, and making it incomprehensible or even impossible. The misunderstanding is one of these forms of contact (between speaker and listener), but also is a significant shift of dramatic construction. Mistakes and misunderstandings among characters let us see the network of problems, which are related to storymaking. In this context it is very important that stories concern the past (private, national).
Analysis of dramatic works in context of misunderstanding is a way to explore the structure of the drama, the constuction of depicted world etc. But at the same time this review let us inquire about significant form of story in the modern drama and functions of it. The autor also wants to find answer to two questions:

• what dramatic structures of this type are used for
• why they are one of the most popular models of drama.

When in 1472 Philippe de Commynes abandoned the Duke of Burgundy to enter into the service of the French King, his decision to change sides was notable but not unusual. However his refusal to speak of this transfer of loyalties in his Memoirs – it occurs literally in between two chapters – created an obvious biographical lacunae that the subsequent historians tried to fill in. In my paper I would like to analyze how Commynes’ silence – his choice not to mention certain things – was (mis)understood as a manifestation of something ‘unspeakable’. Consequently the 16th and the 17th century historians felt the need to come up with plausible explanations which, on the one hand, could have been told but, on the other, were sufficiently suggestive. For example, at the end of the 16th century one historian has claimed that Charles alienated Commynes by beating him with his boots. This legend took root and was elaborated in many texts (it can be found even in Walter Scott’s novels or D’Israeli’s writings), turning into a narrative equivalent of Commynes’ treason: it is essentially incomprehensible, darkly suggestive and definitely offensive. In other words, it does not reconstruct the actual occurrence (as it will be expected from the 19th and the 20th century historiography) but imagines another situation which could equally account for Commynes’ deliberate silence.

In my essay I would like to analyse problem of misunderstanding in poetry as a strategy in poetic communication derived from avant-garde traditions frequently exploited in newest poetry. I would like to elaborate some examples of poetic texts written after 1989 by poets from different generations (Andrzej Sosnowski, Kacper Bartczak, Tomasz Pułka, Piotr Przybyła) whose hermeticity not only oscillates on the very edge of the error, but essentially – opens new areas of interpretation.

„Różne wersje Homera” to jeden z esejów z tomiku Polemiki (Discusión, 1932) Jorge Luisa Borgesa.
Argentyński pisarz, niezmiennie inspirujący kolejne pokolenia badaczy literatury, rozważając kwestię różnic w przekładach na język angielski wybranego fragmentu Odysei i uogólniając obserwację na przekład jako „zasadniczy problem literatury”, przewrotnie zakłada, że teksty oryginalne „pełne są błędów spowodowanych przez próżność, przepełnione są lękiem przed wyjawieniem procesów myślowych, które wydają się niebezpiecznie powszechne, naznaczone są wreszcie wysiłkiem, zmierzającym do tego, by utrzymać nietkniętą i centralną pozycję nieograniczonej rezerwy cienia”. Rozbieżności pomiędzy dziesięcioma przekładami z Homera to „długa eksperymentalna loteria błędów i afektacji”.
Oryginał jest zapisem procesów myślowych, przebiegających w akcie kreacji, przekład – „zdaje się być stworzony dla ilustrowania rozważań natury estetycznej”. Oryginał wciąż się „staje”, jest dynamiczny, przekład go unieruchamia. Stąd mogą wyniknąć nieporozumienia, ponieważ przekład zawsze jest interpretacją, wyborem. Szczególnie ostro widać to w sytuacji tłumaczenia tekstów literatury dawnej, które przenoszą czytelnika w inną rzeczywistość. Zdaniem Borgesa łatwiej oddać wiernie w przekładzie zamiary Homera , niż jego tekst. Dzisiejsze teorie translatologiczne dokładniej opisują rozliczne napięcia pomiędzy tekstem wyjściowym i docelowym. Intuicje Borgesa sprzed osiemdziesięciu pięciu lat zdają się w dużym stopniu aktualne.

“If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.” (Oliver Sacks)
Medical “mistakes”, including translation mistakes, and misunderstandings, including narrative misunderstandings, in medicine can have tragic consequences. Can they correlate with cultural transmission and have a positive, enriching impact on the creation of intelligible reality? In the field of medical metalanguage the first and foremost example is the word pharmakon, which means both poison and remedy. Translation “mistakes” can be a multidimensional source of communication benefits. On the one hand they serve professionals, as the shorter but incorrect forms are often used to rev up communication. On the other hand, they serves the patients. Sometimes a less technical and more intelligible translation is required in order to salvage precision. Beginning with the almost tragic misunderstanding in Hemingway’s “A Day’s Wait,” through living medical language, all the way to Sacks’ “clinical tales” my paper analyzes the above issues in detailed examples, presenting an innovative approach to the subject and applying the theory in practice.

Discourse on translation that derives from hermeneutical and structural traditions present translation as a radically rational process. Translator uses his mind and langue as tools obedient to his will to posses the meaning of the original. Mistake in this terms is beeing seen as a disturbance, meaningless error in the work of the rational mind. Referring to psychoanalytical theory helps to question this kind of speaking and thinking, by showing that the process of translation goes way beyond the rational operations. Thinking about translation in terms of psychoanalysis encourages to ask questions about the translator’s unconscious, relation between translation and translator’s body and his desire. Mistake in this light becomes an act of the subject, who has been suppressed in the process of translation and who demands regaining his pleasure. This pleasure can be derived from the denial of the loss that occurs in translation, or from the manifestation of translator’s presence and creativity the situation when his/her invisibility is beeing highly expected. In my article I will try to explore thinking about mistake in translation in terms of psychoanalytical theory by referring to and depending the thought of the two, grate translation theorists: Lavrence Venutti — „The Translation Unconscious” — and Douglas Robinson — „Who translates?”

When it comes to translations, fragments left in the original language version and double or multiple renderings of a singular fragment are traditionally and commonly perceived either as the evidence of translator’s failure or of the impossibility of the very act of translation. It is so because they disrupt the impression of the stability of meaning, remind of the shifts that occur in the process of translation and hence constitute a certain kind of misunderstanding. Elements of this kind are visible in the early Polish reception of Jacques Derrida’s thought (both in proper translations and in texts on Derrida’s oeuvre, e.g. Maszyna do pisania by Tadeusz Rachwał and Tadeusz Sławek), sometimes even to a point of constituting a distinctive, characteristic poetics. The aim of the presentation will be examining these elements and trying to answer the question whether they are the result of conforming to some of the typical demands concerning translation (accuracy, precision, in this case even at the cost of fluency) or constitute a different type of translation which illustrates or even performs the deconstructive mechanisms of language (and thus harmonize with the tenets of the theory that they represent). The presentation will take into account Derrida’s texts on translation as such and his commentaries on the translations of his books.

This paper focuses on Stanisław Barańczak’s elaborate homophonic translation first published in 1991 under the title: ‘Oratorium Moratorium’. In his oratorio, Barańczak interwove multiple creative mishearings of two passages from La Marseillaise, the French anthem, into a polyphonic discussion about the fate of Eastern Europe in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. By putting together different possibilities of misunderstanding the same original, the poet suggested a constructive dimension to his literary project. His multiple ‘phonets’, as he called them represented different voices of Western countries with their distinct political stances after the fall of communism: ranging from naïve optimism, to scepticism, to objection depending on the variant. By opening the original up for those multiple (mis)readings by means of diverse ideological approaches, he treated his homophonic metatranslation as a pluralist platform and forum for discussion about the post-1989 reality. With special reference to ‘Oratorium Moratorium’ and similar projects of the kind, I will argue that Barańczak’s idea of homophonic translation that “liberates us from the obligation of slavish fidelity towards the original and any senses unlawfully imposed by it” coincided with his broader ethical agenda, namely: pursuing multiple individual perspectives against the reign of one totalising discourse.

From the perspective of agnotology, one of the most vexing form of misunderstanding is the lack of understanding stemming from a simple ignorance, which often determines the forms of communication within academic culture, the establishment of academic authorities, the formation and circulation of an assumed canon, etc. The mechanism of ignorance seems to be more important here than the one of reproduction of knowledge described by Bourdieu and Passeron, even though they have similar consequences.
This mechanism can be best described by confronting the conception of the multi-phase structure of the literary work – outlined by Roman Ingarden in 1937, and subsequently developed in his various ontological and aesthetic writings – with the accounts developed in the 40s–60s and in the 80s–90s by, respectively, structuralism and neurophenomenology. Against this theoretical backdrop, Ingarden’s conception seems to be far more fruitful in terms of epistemology. It derives its force mainly from the author’s thoroughgoing analysis of the temporal patterns of understanding of a complex linguistic utterance. This kind of analysis provides insight into the non-linear and non-sequential cognitive processes. What is crucial in this case are not only the retention-protention processes analysed by neurophenomenologists on the example of a simple tune, but also, and above all, language-based cognitive perspectives (the subject’s viewpoints) and what Ingarden calls foreshortenings in the semantic memory.
Ingarden’s analysis has passed nearly unnoticed in the philosophical literature. It was never picked up by American pragmatists or those French structuralists who (like Riffaterre) suggested a similar, temporal account of the text and its understanding, posing an alternative to the spatial conception advocated by Jakobson and Lèvi-Strauss. What is more, it has hardly been invoked in world phenomenology. Hence, it is a small wonder that Ingarden remains absent from both neurophenomenology and front-loading phenomenology, despite their common Husserlian inspirations.
Ingarden, however, referred not only to Husserl but also to Bergson, and the foundations for his research were laid by the studies of the Lvov-Warsaw School. A discussion of these three inspirations, overlooked in the narrative and memory studies, will make it possible to suggest a solution to the neurophenomenologists’ disagreement over the cognitive value of the so-called first- and third-person data, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to rethink the intellectual consequences of misunderstandings based on ignorance. In light of the history of knowledge, these consequences seem to be undeniably harmful.

In my presentation I would like to talk about the positive (creative) impact of communicational misunderstandings in computer-generated virtual worlds. My talk will revolve around one example of an experimental game entitled Goat Simulator which – despite its low budget and purely non-sensical concept – stirred a lot of interest mainly among gamers in 2014. Yet I would like to talk about it from the point of view of aesthetics and history of the avant-garde. Being less interested in “gameness” of Goat Similator, I want to focus on the mechanisms of creating its virtual world that emerges as a product of many communicational processes between human and non-human agents (Latour): algorithms, digital objects, and player inputs. In this complex digital matrix “miscommunications”, caused by faulty design, player’s quirky fantasy, or simply insufficient hardware resources, can paradoxically become creative (generative) factors. Digital worlds emerge out of faulty communication. As an effect, user can actually interact with results of these “miscommunications” – absurd realities in which laws of physics become suspended, objects collide and form improbable hybrids – and randomness is celebrated as an integral part of the aesthetic experience. From this perspective Goat simulator can be considered as an unexpected postscript to the history of avant-garde interest in noise media (Niebisch). After all, the virtual utopia on screen is created democratically by programmers, users, machines, and pure digital randomness.

References:

1. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford University Press 2005.
2. Arndt Niebisch, Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde: On the Abuse of Technology and Communication, Palgrave Macmillan 2012.

If we look at the Polish-German academic landscape from the perspective of literary studies, we will notice that imagological themes are in the foreground. The image of Poles vs. image of Germans in literature is a strongly present theme in Germanic studies. What is important for this paper is that these topics are explored by Polish Germanic studies, but not so much by German centres. German literary studies in Germany still do not offer comparable works of their own. This symptomatic concealment can be explained by post-dependence perspective, which allows to use the notion of Polish and German dependencies in the context of neighbourhood relations. By dependencies I mean all problems currently observed that are fuelled mainly by 19th and 20th century and include the so-called sensitive issues. These phenomena, whose dynamics is co-created by literary texts, cannot be limited to one-sided accounts and they require both Polish and German cultural contexts to be taken into consideration. The post-dependence perspective is also a way of reading newest fiction, which operates with ‘Polishness’ and ‘Germanness’ as labels for communication situations. It’s not only about constructing otherness, but also being confronted with beliefs about one’s own culture, which undergo negotiation. Based on examples from recent Polish and German fiction, I would like to show the ways in which literature negotiates the state of non-/familiarization with neighbourhood homeliness and otherness and their purpose.