To read what has not been written. E.A. Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and its Polish Translations

The article looks at Edgar Allan Poe’s short story „Man of the Crowd” through its two Polish translations, one coming from the early twentieth century, the other from 2002. The story, dramatizing the interplay between the surface and the depth, the external and the internal, the explicit and the covert, is notable for the quotations in three foreign languages, including ancient Greek. It can be claimed that their function is to suggest that there are “impenetrable” texts, with meanings hidden for those with no knowledge of the code. If Poe’s narrator follows one of the passers-by, it is because the stranger’s face, contrary to the readable faces of other Londoners, does not lend itself to interpretation – his face is written “in a foreign language”. The narrator, driven by the desire to interpret everything he sees, cannot leave the text, which is the stranger’s face, unread. His search for meanings, his inability to accept surfaces, turns into an obsession.

Different lexical choices made by the two Polish translators lead to differing readings of Poe’s story: one accentuates the narrator’s intentional effort to examine and interpret, the other – his intuitive grasp of the meaning of the phenomena he observes. One tends to underline the outward-directed, analytical and penetrating power of the mind, the other – its spontaneous absorptive faculty. The translator’s task is thus like the flaneur’s: just as the latter reads covert stories from the surface of people’s faces, so does the translator read the supposedly hidden senses from the surfaces of the text.

This article treats the utopian idea of landscape gardening from Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Domain of Arnheim as a part of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debate on gardening. Ideas on nature, models of impressionability and aesthetic cathegories represented in that discussion, show many similarities to the vision of nature, garden and art presented by Poe’s main character, Ellison. But much worth noticing is stunning originality of his thought.

Ellison’s new project of art is presented as an attempt to overcome a series of contradictions in which art may be entangled, such as inconsistencies between art and reality, the material and the spiritual, ethics and aesthetics, intellect and intuition, between the beautiful and the useful, the objective and the subjective, the humane and the divine. Ellison’s vision may be also regarded as an attempt to outrun the traditional mimetic conception of art.

Edgar Allan Poe. Identity and Contexts. Introduction to the Reading

The author raises the question of heterogeneous literary identity of Edgar Allan Poe, which is still very problematic. As it is pointed out, the works of Poe were influenced by many different artistic trends like romanticism, classicism and modernism, which Poe modified both in his stories and poetry and shaped his individual polyphonic style, he also assimilated some innovative feature and narrative elements from various modern genres and used them in his works to present his portrait of a man. Being conscious of a growing position of media, Poe transferred several aspects of a press style to his short stories and made them more thrilling. Furthermore, Poe can be interpreted in carnival’s laugh categories, described by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. All these contexts show that still not everything in Poe’s works has been discovered and analyzed.

This article is about three detective stories by Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’. I attempt to describe the composition and plot of each one. I also focus on the main character of these stories, Auguste Dupin, especially on his investigative methods. The analysis of these methods indicates that Poe’s work was a precursor to modern crime stories such as Agatha Christie’s works featuring detectives Hercules Poirot and Jane Marple.

This paper is also an attempt to show the association between Poe's stories and the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle. The analysis shows that the author of ‘A Study in Scarlet’ referred to Poe in many ways. First of all, we can observe numerous similarities between main characters Auguste Dupin and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

This article presents an analysys of the Polish translations of the novels of American writer Edgar Allan Poe made by Bolesław Leśmian, a poet of Polish modernism. Leśmian prepared his translations form French version of the Poe’s prosaic works translated by Charles Baudelaire. The authoress of the article compares the translations of French poet and Bolesław Leśmian and she tries to show the types of the modifications made a Polish poet. While writting his essay Edgar Allan Poe, Leśmian was modeling on the text Edgar Allan Poe: sa vie et ses ouvrage by Baudelaire. The authoress of the article also criticises of Leśmian’s reflexion about Poe and his prosaic works and she ansewrs the queston: if the essay is original. This study presents the Leśmian’s translations in the context of different Polish translations from XIXth and from the beginning of XXth century.

“How to Write a Blackwood Article. Poe as a satirist” places Poe in the tradition of great American humorists (Washington Irving and Mark Twain), challenging thus popular misconceptions about the writer. The detailed analysis of the chosen short story, satirizing the conventions of the 19th century sensational literature, shows interesting intersections between Poe’s parody and his “serious” work. In particular, it demonstrates how the author “deconstructs” his views concerning literature presented in “The Philosophy of Composition”. Thus it suggests that there is more humor and irony in Poe’s short stories and essays than it is commonly believed.

The aim of this paper is to analyse and interpret the motif of the double in Poe’s tales, including “William Wilson”, “Ligeia”, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Oval Portrait”. The article presents the specific understanding and functions of the motif in nineteenth-century literature as well as the cultural context that had introduced it to the literature, that is Romantic philosophy, Gothicism and Fantasticism. While the focus is on various manifestations and meanings of the [i]Doppelgänger[/i] in Poe’s works, other literary examples are referred to, all employing the theme, such as “Devil’s Elixir” by E.T.A. Hoffmann, “The Double” by F. Dostoyevsky and “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” by R.L. Stevenson.

The article raises an issue of Poe’s affiliation to the epoch of romanticism. Portraits of murderers which appear in his extraordinary stories have a lot in common with popular nineteenth-century creations of a noble villain (Schiller, Byron, Hugo etc.) and can be interpreted in categories of anthropology of transgression. Crime leads Poe’s characters to an edge of psychical fortitude which occurs simultaneously as perversion in act of crime and uneasy conscience, so they can’t be described nor as madmen neither as degenerate.