Miłosz Festival

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Event type: All Fair Pasmo OFF Gala Discussion panel Debate Workshop Meeting Lecture Concert

All days 06-08 Jun 2019

Thursday 06.06.2019

Friday 07.06.2019

Saturday 08.06.2019

19:15 Thursday, 06.06.2019

Debate: Vita Activa’19

Host: Krzysztof Czyżewski / Guests: Tadeusz Sławek, Karolina Wigura / Translation to English

Debate

Pałac Krzysztofory, Sala Miedziana (Rynek Główny 35)

The event will be translated to English.Host: Krzysztof CzyżewskiGuests: Tadeusz Sławek, Karolina WiguraTime: from 7:15 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.Venue: Krzysztofory Palace, Copper Room (Main Square 35)It is hard to say why Czesław Miłosz entitled his novel Zdobycie władzy (The Seizure of Power) if he believed that its French title La prise du pouvoir was better. What if today we were to think about “seizing power”, in the sense of regaining it for ethical thinking and “promise politics”, as Hannah Arendt understood it? This is not what Miłosz’s novel itself deals with, which finds affinity in the tragic historical tangle of 1944–1950s in Eastern Europe with the mercilessly pessimistic vision of earthly power presented by Thucydides in The History of the Peloponnesian War. At the same time, however, Miłosz, like the protagonist of the book, Professor Gil, a translator of Thucydides, seeks an alternative to historical determinism and does not let the temptation of nihilism take control of his life. For Professor Gil, there is only one important question that is worth asking: “can one be free from sadness and indifference?” It opens up to humanity the perspective of an active life which restores the proper meaning to words such as “happiness”, “truth” or “politics”. How does one “seize power” for good in times of consumer hedonism, truth and politics degraded to a power struggle?

18:15 Friday, 07.06.2019

Debate: The power of poetry, the power over poetry

Guests: Anna Kałuża, Magdalena Piotrowska-Grot, Paweł Próchniak

Debate

Narodowy Stary Teatr im. Heleny Modrzejewskiej (ul. Jagiellońska 1)

Guests: Anna Kałuża, Magdalena Piotrowska-Grot, Paweł PróchniakHost: Piotr ŚliwińskiTime: from 6:15 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.Miejsce: Helena Modrzejewska National Old Theatre at Jagiellońska 1The invited guests will discuss the phenomenon of strong idioms dominant in the Polish poetic tradition, which fought with each other for years for power over our reading tastes. Disputes between avant-garde and classicising poetry fertilised practically the entire 20th century in Polish and world poetry. Czesław Miłosz himself was an active participant in the conflicts of old, which seem to have never expired and still hold a powerful polemic material in themselves, constantly returning in contemporary Polish poetry in changing forms and in changing social and political contexts. The desire to gain power is not only a political or social domain. The expansion and amplification of the will to power are also manifested in the literary hierarchy, or more broadly in culture understood as the space of aesthetic disputes. The debate will serve to name the impulses that cause poetic languages to seek literary domination.

16:00 Saturday, 08.06.2019

Translation debate

Host: Paulina Małochleb

Debate

Narodowy Stary Teatr im. Heleny Modrzejewskiej (ul. Jagiellońska 1)

Going beyond questions about the role and place of a translator in the face of the translated text and its function on the book market, already exhausted in discussions, the panel participants will talk about translation as a mediation between different literatures and cultural codes alien to each other. They will try to think about translation as a domain of gaining power: what role does a translator play in relation to foreign literature? Are they a mediator, a midwife, or a dictator? How do the texts they translate affect the shape of literature? Do they build, demolish and change hierarchies? Can translation reverse the direction of thinking, influence cultural memory, prevent amnesia? When does translation become a field of struggle not only against the limitations of language, but also against social conventions and political ideas? How does a translator behave in such situations? Do they have to surrender to the situation? Where does one look for other solutions?Translation seems to be a key, fully-fledged literary genre today. Without it, we remain victims of the closed world of our own linguistic habits and, consequently, of cultural mythologies, which in the contemporary world are responsible, among other things, for the tight barricading within one’s own, native identity. Translation always opens up a new and surprising universe in which this identity has a chance to penetrate into what is different. And only that which is different saves us from a state of stagnation in our own fear-induced experience of infinite diversity and complexity of the world.Guests: Magda Heydel, Isabelle Macor-Filarska, Jerzy JarniewiczHost: Paulina Małochleb Time: from 4:00 p.m. to 5:15 p.m.Venue: Helena Modrzejewska National Old Theatre at Jagiellońska 1