On Jan Twardowski’s indexical biblionyms
The author focuses on the titles of poetic works of the Polish poet Jan Twardowski which he calls indexical, explaining their specific nature as determined by semiotic features of motivation proper to them as poetic text names, on the one hand, and by their role as an integral part of the poetic t...
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Інститут мовознавства ім. О.О. Потебні НАН України
2014
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irk-123456789-1839762022-04-29T01:26:30Z On Jan Twardowski’s indexical biblionyms Yermolenko, S.S. The author focuses on the titles of poetic works of the Polish poet Jan Twardowski which he calls indexical, explaining their specific nature as determined by semiotic features of motivation proper to them as poetic text names, on the one hand, and by their role as an integral part of the poetic text, on the other. Статтю присвячено тим назвам віршів польського поета Яна Твардовського, що їх автор окреслює як індексальні, пов’язуючи специфіку цих бібліонімів з умотивованістю, властивою їм як позначенням поетичного тексту, з одного боку, і з їхньою роллю інтегральних складників поетичного тексту, — з другого. 2014 Article On Jan Twardowski’s indexical biblionyms / S.S. Yermolenko // Мовознавство. — 2014. — № 6. — С. 40-49. — Бібліогр.: 22 назв. — англ. 0027-2833 http://dspace.nbuv.gov.ua/handle/123456789/183976 en Мовознавство Інститут мовознавства ім. О.О. Потебні НАН України |
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The author focuses on the titles of poetic works of the Polish poet Jan Twardowski which he calls
indexical, explaining their specific nature as determined by semiotic features of motivation proper
to them as poetic text names, on the one hand, and by their role as an integral part of the poetic text,
on the other. |
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Yermolenko, S.S. On Jan Twardowski’s indexical biblionyms Мовознавство |
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Інститут мовознавства ім. О.О. Потебні НАН України |
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2014 |
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On Jan Twardowski’s indexical biblionyms / S.S. Yermolenko // Мовознавство. — 2014. — № 6. — С. 40-49. — Бібліогр.: 22 назв. — англ. |
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S. S. YERMOLENKO
ON JAN TWARDOWSKI’S
INDEXICAL BIBLIONYMS
The author focuses on the titles o f poetic works of the Polish poet Jan Twardowski which he calls
indexical, explaining their specific nature as determined by semiotic features of motivation proper
to them as poetic text names, on the one hand, and by their role as an integral part of the poetic text,
on the other.
K eyw ords: Jan Twardowski, biblionym, text, sign representation typology, indexical sign,
motivation.
The present paper is a study of language and style of poetic works by the outstanding
and very popular Polish author priest Jan Twardowski (1915-2006), focusing on titles
of his poems. Thus the paper’s subject matter is of double topicality, relating to two
fields of linguistic investigation, one more specific, the study of Twardowski’s poetic
language, and the other more general, the theory of literary work titles.
Generally speaking, the relationship between the text’s title (also termed
biblionym ') and the rest of the text it names (or the text proper) is ambivalent. Indeed,
on one hand, the title is considered an integral part of the text’s structure, the initial
one, that which the reader deals with first. But on the other hand, the title is also
perfectly capable of occurring autonomously, representing the text in bibliographical
lists or footnotes. This dual nature of the title’s relationship to the text it refers
to manifests itself in the character of title as linguistic entity: Y. O. Karpenko
maintained that seen as the text’s name the title is a lexical level unit, whereas as the
initial textual component it is a sentence2. He also pointed out that such duality of the
biblionym is caused by both the text and its name having the same, i.e. linguistic, form
of expression3, to which it may be added that, due to that duality, the text title denotes
itself along with the text proper.
Be that as it may, the relation between the literary work and its heading is still more
complicated. However important is the choice of the title for a book or article that are
not of artistic character, yet in itself such a biblionym is just a token, or a tag, that is to
say it is an outer attribute of the text it denotes, a textual component whose function is
a nominative and informative (and, possibly, persuasive) one, namely, to identify the
text it refers to and to differentiate it from other ones by presenting it in an effective
and attractive way (for that reason, even titles of strictly scholarly works can have a
distinct element of imagery and stylistic value, cf. H. Popowska-Taborska’s collection
of works and reminiscences named Z różnych szuflad, Roman Jakobson’s imaginative
1 Подольская H. В. Словарь русской ономастической терминологии.— М., 1988.— С. 42.
2 Карпенко Ю. О. Назва твору як об’єкт ономастики (переважно на матеріалі творчості
Миколи Бажана) // Повідомлення Української ономастичної комісії.— Κ., 1975.— Вип. 13.—
С. 4.
3 Ibid.
О С. С. ЄРМОЛЕНКО, 2014
40 ISSN 0027-2833. Мовознавство, 2014, № б
Про індексальні бібліоніми Яна Твардовського
titles, such as Poetry o f grammar and grammar o f poetry, Daniel Nettle’s monograph
Vanishing Voices. The extinction o f the world’s languages, the book by David Bello
Is that a fish in your ear? Translation and meaning o f everything, and the like.
On the other hand, the literary work title, besides being all that, is directly and far
more involved in the semantic structure of the work, especially a poetic one where,
given a poem’s shortness, its title is visually integrated in the text. Arguably, this
involvedness is caused by that property of artistic work (both verbal and not verbal)
which is its overall iconicity: in such a work, any of its formal features is meaningful
so that any change in its form results in the change in meaning as well 4. Because
of that, the variety of literary work titles is generally greater than non-literary ones.
I.R.Gal’perin indicated that the literary title often doesn’t express its meaning directly
(which is yet another corollary to the artistic character of the text: it is a well-known
fact that art does not tolerate plain language5), its sense being metaphorically or
metonymically «veiled». According to him, literary titles can be classified as follows
with respect of the form of information they contain: 1) symbol title, 2) thesis title,
3) citation title, 4) message title, 5) allusion title, 6) narrative title (cf. chapter
headings in 18th century English novels) 6. That is not to say, however, that there are
no nameless literary pieces or pieces with plain and uninformative names, since such
ones do exist too, cf. poems with three asterisks instead of a title as well as collections
of verse called (either by the publisher or the author) simply «Poems», for instance,
N. K. Kybal’chych first collection of verse Поезії (1913) or B. Oliynyk’s book
of the same name (1986). Then there are, of course, novels and stories that are named
after their main character, such as Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne, Christie,
or Carrie. While one may not fully agree with I. R. Gal’perin who thought
N. D. Arutiunova wrong in claiming that L. N. Tolstoy’s novel title Анна Каренина
does not perform the introducing function 7 — for it obviously does — yet even to
someone who has no previous knowledge of this novel’s content, this name is more
than a name: appearing in the title of an artistic work, it is presumed to refer to
the unique literary character (a parallel may be drawn here with artistic photographs or
paintings titled Mary, Louise and the like, anthroponyms used as their titles meaning
something entirely different from what they denote in everyday usage, even if persons
such pictures present actually have these names).
But then again, there are more complicated literary titles too, yet the originality of
even those can be different, since, as T. Kostkiewiczowa points out, «the way
of formation of the literary work title as well as its structure are subordinated to
the general principles of poetics of this work; being historically variable, they are
subject to conventionalization along with other components of the literary work» 8;
in particular, that means that the choice of a title can be matter of literary fashion
preferences (cf. the following fragment of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoirs «Другие
берега»: «...и у меня была с собой целая кипа беленьких книжечек стихов
со всей гаммой тогдашних заглавий, т. е. от простецкого “Ноктюрны” до
изысканного “Пороша”» 9).
4 See: Ермоленко С. С. Мовне моделювання дійсності і знакова структура мовних оди
ниць.— Κ., 2006.— С. 185-193; Milewski Т. Teoria znaku // Z zagadnień językoznawstwa ogól
nego i historycznego.— Warszawa, 1969.— S. 14—15.
5 Cf.: Потебня А. А. Эстетика и поэтика.— М., 1976.—С. 340.
6 Гальперин И. Р. Текст как объект лингвистического исследования.— М., 2007.— С. 134.
7 Ibid.
8 Kostkiewiczowa Т. Tytuł // Słownik terminów literackich.— Wroclaw, 1976.— S. 474.
9 Набоков В. В. Другие берега.— Ленинград, 1991.— С. 167.
ISSN 0027-2833. Мовознавство, 2014, № 6 41
С. С. Ермоленко.
Turning now to the titles of poem of Jan Twardowski, this very unusual author (his
biography by Magdalena Grzebałkowska, a journalist with «Gazeta Wyborcza», is
called «Ksiądz Paradoks»), they are of different character too, some of them quite
usual and traditional, e. g. Matka Boża Powstańcza (1, 20) 10, O ludzkim sercu pod
wielkim baldachimem (1, 86), Wiersz dydaktyczny (2,396), Zaufałem drodze (1,405),
Posąg Dawida (1, 64), Modlitwa (1, 77; 1, 87; 1, 127; 1,160; 1,264; 2,143) (besides
six poems with this title, there are three more where Modlitwa co-occurs with other
words), Ku wodzie (2, 330), Do Jezusa umęczonego organami (1, 141), Do albomu
(there are three poems of this name: (2,21 ; 2,244; 2,387)), Do albomu po raz drugi (2,
141), Dobranocka (2, 386) and so on. Among those, there are those that Gal’perin
called metonymical, in that they are realized by a word, a sentence or an utterance
occurring in the text as well and so representing it; in semiotic terms titles of this kind
may be qualified as indexical (i. e. belonging to indexical signs as defined
by Ch. S. Peirce u) and, one should add, iconic as well (again according to the Peircean
classification of representational relationships between sign and its object), since the
part of the text reproduced by the title is similar to, or identical with, the corresponding
fragment of the text (henceforth I will call them, for brevity’s sake, indexical titles).
But among Twardowski’s titles of this kind there are some that are fairly unusual, and
it is them that are the subject matter of this article.
Of course, this indexical type of titles is of itself perfectly usual, and among
Twardowski’s biblionyms, there are quite a lot of such usual and, if one may say so,
unremarkable names too. For example, of the two of his poems with the titles
containing the word koniec/Koniec (1, 419) and Koniec nie-koniec (2, 398)), it is
in the first that the word occurs elsewhere in the text {Koniec — to kłamczuch w
świecie nieskończonym). However, the both titles seem usual and predictable, since
it is the end that the two poems are about so that these headings express the poem’s
theme and, consequently, are generalizations of its content.
And yet in Twardowski’s poetry there are also biblionyms which seem
thematically to be almost unconnected with the text they name, inadequate in that they
leave an impression of being randomly or arbitrarily chosen, not motivated and
determined by, and therefore ill or not at all fit to represent, the text of the poem they
refer to. The only thing they have in common with the latter is a word or phrase found
in it. Irrespective of their composition, their principal common feature is that of a fairly
loose or even non-existent meaningful relationship to poem they name.
Such biblionyms, too, are not unknown in literature, and reasons behind their
choice can be different. Say, the heading of W. Somerset Maugham short story The
book-bag does not immediately bear on the story’s subject matter, a love relationship
between a brother and sister, as told by another Englishman to the narrator travelling in
Malaya. The character of this relationship, although unambiguously inferred from
what is said, is never stated in direct terms either in the author’s narrative or in the
embedded story, and perhaps it is this theme being at those time «too hot to handle»
that is the is the reason why this story has a somewhat misleading name motivated in a
rather roundabout way (the story begins with the narrator telling of his love of reading,
which makes him, when travelling, take a huge book-bag with him; his Malayan host,
a British Resident, borrows from him Byron’s biography, some details of which bring
him to tell his own story).
10 The examples are drawn from his verse collection : Twardowski Jan. Miłość miłości szuka.
Wiersze 1937-1998.— Warszawa - Poznań, 1999.— V. 1-2.
11 Єрмоленко С. С. Op. cit.— P. 19-20.
42 ISSN 0027-2833. Мовознавство, 2014, № б
Про індексальні бібліоніми Яна Твардовського
Yet the (apparent) lack of motivation in Twardowski’s poetic biblionyms seems to
be of altogether different nature which has nothing to do with taboo subjects (actually,
being a religious poet, Twardowski never avoided difficult and controversial issues of
faith and religion and never tried to prove what cannot be proved). Consider,
for instance, one of Twardowski’s most popular poems, Kiedy mywisz (2, 68).
Dedicated to Aleksandra Iwanowska, his long-time assistant and literary secretary,
this very short text is an imperative utterance in the second person evidently directed
to the addressee in answer to her letter full of complaints of ill fortune and bad luck.
The two final lines of the poem summarize the essence of the message: a od zwykłych
rzeczy naucz się spokoju / i zapomnij że jesteś gdy mywisz że kochasz. The phrase
corresponding to the title is found in the second of these lines, with the difference that
in the text the phrase is introduced by the relative pronominal adverb gdy, whereas in
the title gdyis substituted, perhaps for the sake of euphony, by its variant kiedy.
However, this phrase, taken separately, doesn’t seem in any significant way to bear
upon the principal idea of the poem as expressed by these lines or, for that matter,
by the whole text; or rather it speaks about something different. Occurring in the
context of dialogue (such as letter exchange), the textual fragment gdy mywisz że
kochasz seemingly refers to something the addressee previously said, with an
additional emphasis on the alleged, i. e. not yet (fully) proven, content of the
reported/cited statement. Actually, however, it is an idiomatic expression meaning
approximately the same as gdy kochasz but highlighting the truth of this statement
(gdy naprawdę mywisz że kochasz «if you really mean what you say» = gdy naprawdę
kochasz «if you really love»): the representation by the addresser of something as
reported by the addressee himself (gdy mywisz że kochasz) operates as means of
emphasis, evidently on the ground of the following reasoning: «When something is
said to be true it must be true», the underlying Gricean assumption being that telling
anything is tantamount to telling the truth. Therefore taking the phrase gdy mywisz out
of its context and using it as the poem’s title seems to bring into relief an additional
topic, that of one’s responsibility to truthfully assert something, specifically when
claiming something essential (such as having a Christian virtue) regarding oneself.
Thus the title of this kind alters the focus of poetic utterance, deviating from the
main theme and putting emphasis on some other aspect of the poem’s content or even
adding a new aspect to it. For instance, in the poem Lura (2, 344), consisting of only
four lines, this word denoting watery drink or food is found in the poem’s first half
describing a cemetery in autumn: Listopad cmentarz pusty / deszcz zimna lura. This
description provides background to the following statement (uttered by an unspecified
person) : — to straszne—ktoś mówi /przestać kochać zmarłego dlatego że umarł. And
yet what the title highlights is this background’s feature, a cold autumn rain. However,
this feature, superimposed on the statement that follows, can be interpreted
as a metaphor for that kind of weak and therefore inadequate love which stops with the
demise of the loved one, the common feature shared by it and a watery drink being
their weakness (cf., in particular, the lura's definition «słaby, mało essencjonalny
napyj» 12, on the one hand, and, on the other, the attribute silny describing love
in the true, or prototypal, sense of this word, as in the following definition of miłość
«silna więź emocjonalna, jaka łączy ludzi sobie bliskich» 13).
In the poem Na pół (2, 176) the adverbial phrase meaning «half» and used as
a biblionym later occurs in the text, where the phrase modifies the participle
12 Uniwersalny słownik języka polskiego. Versia 1.0.— Warsawa, 2004.
13 Ibid.
ISSN 0027-2833. Мовознавство, 2014, № 6 43
С. С. Єрмоленко.
przedarte, and the latter is a constituent of the headless noun phrase consisting of several
modifiers (Niedokońzone / przerwane / przedarte na pół / niekochane / nic już nie
warte) sharing the semantic feature «inadequate». Judging from these modifiers one
may infer that the ellipted head’s meaning should be construed as «your life»: the verb
in the 2nd person imperative, nie wybrzydzaj, coming immediately after them, indicates
that the whole text is an apostrophic enunciation directed to the unnamed person,
possibly to the lyrical subject (i. e. the speaker as represented in the artistic text’s inner
world) himself, who supposedly complains of the inadequacy of his life. Bu if we take
into consideration the general idea conveyed by the poem (something like
«inadequacy is human condition in general»), then what the adverb phrase used as title
specifies will be understood as the human’s lot. Hence in the general context of the
poem the title Na pół implies that human nature is also essentially divided, not integral,
and therefore contradictory, consisting of two parts, good and bad. So this title is
indexical too, both formally and semantically, adding an important generalization and
a deeper philosophical sense to the poem’s message.
Another poem by Twardowski, also dealing with the existential aspect of human
condition, has the title Na okrągło (2, 247), this adverbial phrase being part of its text
as well. The phrase is polysemous, its primary meaning «roundly» and the secondary
«continuously, incessantly». Since this very short poem tells about loneliness and
alienation, and since, used in the text, na okrągło specifies the head noun jęk
(Samotność pośród ludzi /podrapana droga /telefon jak ryba śnięta /skrzynka na listy
dla serca pułapka / .. ję k na okrągło / samotność bez Boga), it is quite obvious that it is
in the second meaning that the phrase is used in the text. Yet being put in the prominent
position of the poem’s title seems to impart to it an additional sense underlying which
is the phrase’s literal meaning conveying the image of something rounded, circular.
In the first line the author speaks about loneliness among people (Samotność pośród
ludzi) and in the final one, about loneliness without God (samotność bez Boga)', this
«solitude», significantly mentioned twice, at the beginning and the end of the poem,
brings along the image of circularity, of a closed circle which in a well-known symbol
of a hopeless situation that in spite of any efforts remains the same, cf. the Polish idiom
with the corresponding inner form kolo (kółko) się zamyka «jakieś sytuacje, czynniki
wzajemnie się warunkują, uniemożliwiając rozwiązanie problemu; sytuacja mimo
wielu podjętych działań jest taka, jak na początku» 14. And this is how the poet
assesses that kind of loneliness: as endless and desperate. Besides, it should be noted
that circularity is regarded as feature of a pagan (or mythical) model of time 15,
different from a lineal and directional (and also hopeful) image of time as conceived
by Christianity 1б.
In another poem by Twardowski, Na słomce (1, 100), the title corresponds to
the prepositional phrase found at another prominent point, the very end of the last line
and, correspondingly, the last sentence of the text: Matka Boska mnie trzyma / jak
niezdarną bankę na słomce. At the beginning, the lyrical subject envisages his death
at the altar (Przygasnę przy ołtarzu iskierka po iskierce / zostaną tylko buty jak
przydeptane serce), and the last line of this short poems expresses, through the simile
comparing it with a soap bubble, the dangerously poor condition of the author’s heart
14 Ibid.
15 Элиаде М. Миф о вечном возвращении. Архетипы и повторяемость : Пер. с фр.— СПб.,
1998.— 249 с .; Мелетинский Е. М. Время мифическое//Мифы народов мира : Энциклопедия/
Гл. ред. С. А. Токарев,— М., 1992,— Т. 1,— С. 252-253.
16 Cf.: Словарь библейского богословия / Под ред. К. Леон-Дюфура и др. : Пер. с фр.—
К. ; М., 1998,— 927 с.
44 ISSN 0027-2833. Мовознавство, 2014, № б
Про індексальні бібліоніми Яна Твардовського
(indeed, in the early years of his priesthood Twardowski suffered from some obscure
health problem that was never identified17). It will be noted that the phrase na słomce,
used within the text as a part of the simile jak niezdarną bankę na słomce is,
in syntactical terms, an adverbial modifier of place within the adverbial modifier
of comparison; hence the phrase belongs to the syntactic and semantic periphery
of the last sentence. That is to say, the poet, while comparing himself to a bubble held
on the straw by the Virgin Mary, reproduces only a peripheral (but supposedly
significant) feature of this image in the poem’s title. In doing so, he omits pointing
directly not only to himself but also to the object which he compares himself with
(a bubble), and verbalizes only where this bubble is found (i.e. a straw). That makes
this title doubly indexical, since it is part of the whole poetic text as well as its fragment
expressing a complex image (a straw instead of a bubble on a straw instead
of the lyrical subject). In spite of the fact that the poem’s theme is the poet’s condition,
its title masks him by putting him, so to say, behind the straw. It may be added that
a straw, i.e. a dried cereal stem, is lightweight, fragile, rapidly consumed by fire, and
easily moved by the wind, which makes it a perfect metaphoric image of something or
somebody equally fragile, vulnerable and perishable. Thus the title at once hides and
profiles the lyrical subject.
The same indirect and, so to say, partial naming of the entity within
the text-internal world is exemplified by the biblionym Gorętsza od spojrzenia (1, 99).
In the poem it refers to, there is a list of the lyrical subject’s wishes, negative and
positive, which are expressed by infinitive phrases. At first, he tells what he doesn’t
want to be (Żeby nie być taką czcigodną osobą t której podają parasol / którą do
Rzymu wysyłają...), then, what he does (Ale być chlebem / który krają /żywicą którą
z sosny na kadzidło skrobią / czymś z czego robią radio / żeby choremu przy
termometrze śpiewało / ... żółtym dla dzieci balonem). Transition from the former to
the latter, grammatically manifested by switching from the negative to the affirmative,
is also signaled by the double interlinear space. The last among the positive wishes is
that of always being a host (i.e. a bread disc used in Communion): / a zawsze hostią
małą / gorętszą od spojrzenia / co się zmienia w ofierze. The importance of this wish is
again emphasized by double line spacing separating the fragment of the poem
containing it (which is also the poem’s last one) from the previous. Accordingly, it is
the host that the comparative clause used as the poem’s title describes. Yet it does so
indirectly, not naming it but specifying its attribute («more ardent than the look»)
instead. As a result, the focus is shifted from the author’s wishes to the host, which is
represented by its property rather than directly. This shift is made still more
pronounced by the change of the case form: in the title, the adjective gorętsza is used
in the Nominative instead of the Instrumental. This focus on the host is consistent with
what is said about it in the last line of the poem (co się zmienia w ofierze), expressing
the author’s underlying wish of selflessness, self-denial and self-sacrifice for the sake
of God. Arguably, the comparison of the host with the look in terms of temperature
and, metonymically as well as metaphorically, the intensity of emotion 18 implies that
communion with the invisible God by means of sacrifice is more close, important and
profound than communion with other people by means of eye contact.
17 See: Grzebalkowska M. Ksiądz Paradoks. Biografia Jana Twardowskiego.— Kraków,
2011.— S. 133.
18 See: Апресян Ю. Д. Избранные труды // Интегральное описание языка и системная
лексикография.— М., 1995.— Т. 2.— С. 460; Черниш Т. О. Слов’янська лексика в істори-
ко-етимологічному висвітленні.— Κ., 2003.— С. 129-151, 392.
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С. С. Ермоленко.
Yet there are cases among Twardowski’s biblionymikon, too, that are far less
clear-cut. For instance, in his poem titled Kochanowskiego przekład psalmów
the author enumerates objects, both material and spiritual, which he had possessed
in his early years and which he asks the Lord to bring back to him to be taken then to
his grave with him. Among these there are ...herbaty gorzkiej łyk w manierce / і
umarłego ojca list, / sweter od siostry, matki serce / Kochanowskiego przekład
psalmów/ spalony z Wilczą w czas powstania / i wszystko czego zyczę innym— /a sam
niestety nie dostane and so on (1,46). Although Jan Kochanowski’s translation of the
Book of Psalms, considered a masterpiece of the Polish literature and a monument
of the Polish literary language, is just one of the items on this list, it is significantly
mentioned twice in the poem, both in its text and in its title, and in the former,
the collocation Kochanowskiego przekład psalmów is repeated in the first line of the
second stanza, occupying a fairly salient position within the text structure.
Nonetheless, it remains unclear from the text, what it is that makes the book so special
for the lyrical subject. On the other hand, it can be assumed that it is precisely by
mentioning it in the title that the author emphasized the value of the book as compared
with his other wishes.
There are some other poems as well where the motive for the choice of its part to be
used as a title seems unclear indeed, or rather there seems to be no such motive at all.
For instance, in the poem Z pliszką siwą (2, 186) the corresponding prepositional
phrase with the object denoting the bird white wagtail (Motacilla alba L.) is found in
the fragment enumerating things that are being remembered after someone’s death: jak
pachniał orzech suszona lawenda / jak wujek kochał ciotkę w pamiętniku / bawił
dowcip o kuchni z widokiem na cmentarz / spotkanie we dwoje nad wodą zieloną / z
pliszką siwą co podgląda na wysokich nóżkach / nad Narwią zwą ją starą panną
młodą. This list is embedded in the author’s reflections upon death and its crucial role
in preserving everything that fills life with love and is so ephemeral and transient
(as well as trivial and everyday) as life and love themselves.Yet the place occupied
by the wagtail in these remembrances is clearly peripheral, this bird merely
accompanying and, as it were, being a witness of, a date on the river Narew bank.
Nonetheless, given the above-mentioned context of embedment, and taking
into account Twardowski’s well-known Franciscan biophilia 19, his love to animals
and plants as well as his life-long interest in zoology and botany, and also assuming he
had a personal experience associated, however loosely, with wagtails, or some
particular wagtail, inhabiting the Narew banks, — with all that taken into
consideration, it is exactly the mentioning of the wagtail in the title that imparts to the
omithonym a generalized sense, making this endearingly small bird a symbol of all
that death makes immortal.
Thus, however insignificant and randomly chosen may the title of this kind appear,
yet it is by making a poem’s fragment its title that this fragment is given a meaningful
prominence within the whole text of the poem, and it is exactly by its seeming lack of
importance that the presence of some deeper sense in it is signaled.
Somehow or other, the specific message the title of this kind conveys can be
far from evident, a question rather than a statement. For instance, the poem W grudniu
(2, 187) tells of seasonal events happening in various months: W marcu przylatują
zięby... /w maju mignie wilga jak w niebieskim fartuszku dziewczynka/w październiku
19 See: Czemysz T., Jermolenko S. O księdzu który pisze wierszy // Twardowski Jan. Trzeba iść
dalei, czyli spacer biedronki / Wybór, tłum. na ięz. ukr., wstęp i przypisy T. Czemysz i S. Jer
molenko.— Kraków ; Kijów, 2000.— S. 12.
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Про індексальні бібліоніми Яна Твардовського
czernieją szpaki / w grudniu kocha / podaje nam ręce / na śmierć grzecznie ubrana
choinka. So why is it precisely December that is mentioned in the title? Perhaps,
primarily because of Christmas, the most important holiday in the Roman Catholic
liturgical calendar, which is celebrated in December and with which the Christmas tree
is associated: describing the Christmas tree as loving, reaching towards, and
sacrificed for, people clearly makes it resemble Jesus, this resemblance further
supported by associations connecting cross with tree due to Greek ξύλον
«wood» denoting, as a contextual synonym of σταυρός, the cross that Jesus Christ died
on in the New Testament (Acts 5,30; 10,39; 13,29; Galatians 3,13; 1 Peter 2,2420). But
what about the other months? Twardowski mentions four of them, two spring ones
(March and May), one autumnal (October) and one winter (December), with no summer
ones, all of them (except December) witnessing some events in wild birds’ life, so that
birds (the chaffinch, the oriole and the starling) are juxtaposed with the fir tree. What
does this juxtaposition ‘birds vs. tree’ imply is not immediately evident, at least for me,
and is open to dispute. Then again, maybe it was exactly discussion, making one ponder
over the poem and its title, that the author had in mind.
The previously discussed Twardowski’s poetic biblionyms or their components
had appellative counterparts of such lexical classes as substantive, adjective or adverb.
In Twardowski’s biblionymikon, however, there are also indexical titles formed by
the use of units of other lexical classes. These titles also leave the impression of being
a random and arbitrary choice, and this impression remains even upon a closer
scrutiny. Some of these are formed by the use of verb, cf. Ryczał (2,53) or Spojrzał (1,
190), where ryczał and spojrzał are also the words that the respective poems begin
with. The first title is motivated fairly clearly: the poem describes the reaction of an
unspecified person to the loss of love, the description followed by the lyrical subject’s
exhortation (Ryczał na cztery strony że miłość odeszła... /głuptasie nie wybrydzaj /
wystarczy że przyszła). At the same time, deriving a biblionym form of a finite verb
form in the past tense not unaccompanied by any other words is rather unusual both
grammatically and stylistically, as if the author, looking for a (indexical) title but not
especially preoccupied with his task, indeed used the word solely because it happened
to be the first one met in the text.
The second title repeats the first word of the poem which is also its first line.
Besides, it is also one of the four verbal predicates found in the text, clearly referring to
the same ellipted subject that should be construed as Jezus, as the line stanął w kącie
załamał odjęte z krzyża ręce makes especially evident. The text of this poem tells
about Jesus Christ who, looking at the finely decorated interior of a church, thinks that
all of it is perhaps not for Him (/' pomyślał / chyba to wszystko nie dla mnie). So, the
title represents a peripheral part of the poem’s theme (as understood in the functional
sentence perspective framework), which is a church seen by Christ and which is then
contrasted with the poem’s rheme, Christ’s judgment. Still there may be more to it than
peripheral motivation and ungrammatical formation. Another interpretation of this
title seems possible, relating the act of looking performed by Jesus in a church to the
well-known (in Poland as well as elsewhere) Christian concept and image of the Eye
of Providence (or the all-seeing eye of God), usually depicted as an eye surrounded by
a glory and enclosed in a triangle21. In this case the meaning implied by the title would
be something like «God keeps watching and seeing everything», thus reminding
the reader to try and see everything, including ecclesiastical matters, as He sees it.
20 See also: Дворецкий И Х . Древнегреческо-русский словарь.— М., 1958.— Т.2.— С. 1147.
21 http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oko_opatrzności.
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http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oko_opatrzno%c5%9bci
С. С. Ермоленко.L
The poem Sześć listków containing a numeral in its title tells about a man
in suicidal despair so deep that everything seems black to him. Yet this vision of his is
not true, which is proven by the herb przylaszczka «hepatica» coming to him and
showing him under his nose its six blue petals. So the content of the poem is based
upon color symbolism, the contrast between black and blue expressing the opposition
of despair and hope. With hepatica represented as the carrier of the blue color of hope,
it would have been natural if the biblionym which mentioned its petals had mentioned
their color as well rather than their number. Yet it is the opposite, number rather than
color, which the title highlights. Presumably, for the author the number of hepatica’s
petals was in itself equally important, cf. in this respect his poem Pisze: Piszę to со
widzę niczego nie zmyślam...(2, 188) ), where he points out, among other facts about
plants and animals, that daisy sometimes has ninety eight petals. What is more, it is
also possible that in the poet’s view, this number of hepatica’s petals, too, is a symbol
of hope — otherwise why should he have made a special mention of it in the title
of a poem speaking of despair and hope.
Some of Twardowski’s biblionyms derive from pronouns of various types. For
instance, of titles formed by using personal pronouns referring to Jesus Christ, Ту
(later changed fòr Kaznodzieja (1, 158)) is indexical, the pronoun then reappearing at
the very beginning of the first line (Ty co nie zbawiasz dusz porośniętych słowami). So
is Z Tobą (1, 136), whereas in On (2, 102) and Porzucili wszystko i poszli za Nim (2,
373) the pronoun only occurs in the title.
There are pronominal titles of other kinds as well, such as two biblionyms
containing the relative pronoun który with an omitted antecedent, Który (1, 214) and
Który stwarzasz jagody (1, 331). In the latter poem, the clause underlying the title is
repeated in the first line following the pronoun Ту, whereas in the former, the
antecedent remains implicit (Który stworzyłeś / pasikonika jak szmaragd z oczami na
przednich nogach...). In both cases, it is the Lord whom the poet addresses in his
meditation or appeal, and in the texts of the both poems który introduces the attributive
clause in which some of the Lord’s creatures (living ones, animals as well as plants,
and also some spiritual entities) are enumerated together with some of their distinctive
features.
In all these titles with pronouns referring to God, either directly or anaphorically,
the very scantiness of this indexical representation (which is indication rather than
naming) seems to comply with the third of the Decalogue’s ten commandments:
«Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not
hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain» (Exodus, 20,7; Deuteronomium5,11 ;
cf. aslo Proverbia 30,9). At the same time, this modest and even poor way of referring
to God by simply indicating Him rather than naming Him with sonorous names is
consonant with Twardowski’s reiterated desire for a kościół deprived of all decorations,
cf., for example, the already cited poem Spojrzał or the following lines from the poem
Jak długo (1, 200): pokaż się choć na chwilę w kościele — rozebranym do naga ze
świecidełek / jak święci co nie mają nic do ukrywania... Significantly, the phrase
rozebranym do naga ze świecidełek is syntactically ambiguous in that it can be interpreted
as specifying either kościele or the implicit addressee of the author’s appeal, i. e. Christ, the
author wishing both to be bereft of embellishments they don’t need.
And this also corresponds to Twardowski’s inclination to equally poor,
undecorated naming of his own work, this inclination especially manifest in his titles
formed by using still other types of pronouns as well as other classes of functional, or
formal, words (such as conjunctions and particles). Titles of this kind are fairly
numerous, ct:A jednak(l, 357), Chociaż(2 ,161), Choćby (1,298), Choćbyś (2,205),
48 ISSN 0027-2833. Мовознавство, 2014, № б
Про індексальні бібліоніми Яна Твардовського
Co potem (2. 126), Czemu (2, 77), Dlaczego (1,372; 2,128), Dlatego (1,231), Gdyby
(1,401), i/e (2,73), Jakże (l, 442), Jeszcze (1,351), Jeszcze nie (1,164), Jeśli (1,385),
Już (2, 130), Kiedy (1, 234; 2, 110), Którędy (1, 215), Który (1, 214), Może (1, 261),
Nie (1,167), Nie tak nie tak (1, 305), Nie tylko (2,23), Ta sama (1,448), Tak (2, 372),
Ten sam (2, 123; 2, 158), Teraz (1,409), To (2,192), To samo (1,289), Tylko (1,417;
2, 33; 2, 206; 2, 318), Wszystkiego (1, 318; 2, 223). Some of them are indexical,
occurring elsewhere in the poem, while others are not. In both cases, however,
the reason for their choice seems to be connected, at least partly, with the poverty
of semantic content.
But the same applies, mutatis mutandis, to Twardowski’s poetics in general. In his
poem Królewna ze Skępego he, addressing the Virgin Mary of Skępy, described his
poems in the following way: ...wiersze nieśmiałe i bose /takie co nie idą jak krytyk za
modą / ...takie co nie świecą jak szyja ozdobna /za które nie płacą dolarami Nobla (2,
166) (also, emphasizing his unprofessionalism as an author, he would call himself a
priest who writes poetry rather than a poet). So his poetics follows one of the three
Christian counsels of perfection, that of poverty, as well as Seneca’s dictum Res sacra
miser (found on the pediment of the building of the former Warsaw Charitable Society
currently housing Archdiocese Charitable Center «Caritas»), Besides, there is another
Christian tradition (with some notable parallels in Zen philosophy), which many
of Twardowski’s titles seem to comply with and which the known paraphrase
of Tertullian’s statement (from his «Came Christi») succinctly expresses: «Credo quia
absurdum» 22. In his poem indexically and so meagerly named Jesteś, Twardowski
wrote: bo gdzie sensu już nie ma to sens się zaczyna (2, 78). That explains why there
are such titles in Twardowski’s biblionymikon that seemingly defy logical
explanation, at the same time challenging the reader to uncover the message they
presumably hide in accordance with the fundamental principle of their author’s
poetics, a principle that can be formulated in the following way: «Nomino quia
absurdum».
С. С. ЄРМОЛЕНКО
ПРО ІНДЕКСАЛЬНІ БІБЛІОНІМИ ЯНА ТВАРДОВСЬКОГО
Статтю присвячено тим назвам віршів польського поета Яна Твардовського, що їх автор
окреслює як індексальні, пов’язуючи специфіку цих бібліонімів з умотивованістю, властивою
їм як позначенням поетичного тексту, з одного боку, і з їхньою роллю інтегральних
складників поетичного тексту, — з другого.
Кл ю чо в і слова: ЯнТ вардовський, бібліонім, текст, типологія знакової репрезентації,
знак-індекс, мотивація.
22 See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credo_quia_absurdum.
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