Comparative and Translational Challenges for Contemporary Polish Literary Studies in the Context of Polish-Ukrainian Relations

Abstract

This article proposes that the concept of contemporary Polish literature’s literary canon (including recent literature) should be defined in a relational manner, accounting for this canon’s communicative function in international relations—in this case, Polish-Ukrainian relations. The canon encompasses a time-tested collection of literary texts and a set of books that facilitate understanding of the literary past while creating a specific place for mutual understanding in our place and time, indicating the existence of an anthropological community. In this sense, the literary canon should expand successively. Translations and translation research are key contributors in this formation, and it in turn fosters comparative studies, which are among Polish literary studies’ most important challenges. A comparative reflection on national literatures — including Polish and Ukrainian — in the context of the borderland experience, viewed through a contemporary lens, requires addressing questions about whether, and if so, what models of coexistence have been developed; what their artistic representations entail; and what place the individual occupies within them. Do these cultures remain separated, in a state of conflict, or in a positively understood form of contact? Is collaboration between them possible, and if so, on what grounds? Does it stem from processes of assimilation and integration imposed by a dominant group and its language, or from dialogical integration grounded in partnership and mutual respect? This example – one among many – clearly demonstrates that any reading of contemporary Polish literature is incomplete without reference to the Ukrainian context, just as earlier it would have been impossible to fully understand selected poems by Bolesław Leśmian, essays by Jerzy Stempowski, prose by Leopold Buczkowski or Włodzimierz Odojewski, or the poetry and fiction of Józef Wittlin without that same context. Without reference to the works of Yevhen Malaniuk and the legacy of the “Executed Renaissance,” the poetic and ideological dimensions of Józef Łobodowski’s writings would remain obscure; without engagement with Yurii Andrukhovych’s oeuvre, the prose of Andrzej Stasiuk would lose part of its depth.