„Tight braid of counterpoint.” Stanisław Barańczak’s poetry and experiencing border

Abstract

The article attempts to familiarise the reader with Stanisław Barańczak’s poetic presentations of experiencing border and limit. It synthesises the set of various sorts of limits faced by the human from Barańczak’s poems. Moreover, the analyses and interpretations in the article aim to make evident the characteristic way in which the author of Surgical Precision (Chirurgiczna precyzja) presents the border between existence and eschatology and, more specifically, the way how Barańczak nullifies this border between dimensions in his poetry. His poems are not devoid of metaphors inspired by eschatological considerations and the functions these references serve are worth a closer look. Firstly, there are the most obvious sociopolitical connotations also used by the language of communist propaganda. The most important in the quoted poems, though, are the deliberate references to eschatology that expose the association mechanism and deconstruct the linguistic habits of a Christianity-based cultural circle. Using the ambiguity of specific words and images and creating metaphors based on eschatology-related phenomena, Barańczak familiarises the reader with death and negates the artificial duality of worlds. This is not, however, metaphysical poetry in a classic sense; it is poetry close to human existence and, above all, to all of the numerous fears accompanying people.