Komparatistická středa (prof. dr hab. Joanna Orska: “Re-queering of Translation” – with Special Reference to the Poetry of Frank O’Hara)

I address the problem of the reception of translations from the poetry of the New York School. In the late 1980s and early 1990s in Poland this reception was determined by issues of political transformation, which precluded the possibility of reading O’Hara’s poetry in relation to queer studies. O’Hara’s works, whose style and strategies largely depend on camp stylistics, present a distinctly queer character. Through the setting of Piotr Sommer’s translations in Twoja pojedynczość (1987), the metatexts collected for the publication of O’Hara’s poems in the New York issue of “Literatura na Świecie” (1986: 7), and finally through poetic allusions in the translated poet’s texts, this element was exposed in a sufficiently expressive way. Neither in the 1990s nor later has the ‘queer orientation’ of O’Hara’s poetry shape the Polish reception of his work in any way.

Reading: https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/przekladaniec/article/requeerowanie-przekladu-ze-szczegolnym-odniesieniem-do-franka-ohary