Kasper Twardowski. Between the Look and the Language

Abstract

Twardowski's allegorical poems imitate the structure of emblems; sometimes they seem to be completely like a verbal response to an image. The poet does not use abstraction, he does not compose the world of his works of the speculative matter of notions and names – he will always translate them into a visible, concrete thing. His language is exactly the language of translation; often it is relatively simple: he names what the eye can see, he makes the allegorical picture move by the dynamics of verbal presentation: the description of the action, accumulation of the presented details.

Twardowski's poems, if their connections are shown (as can be seen e.g. in the contemporary edition of Łódź młodzi?) with emblems, extraordinary popular and dynamically spreading at the beginning of the 17^th century, reveal important networks of relations that connect them to exactly this domain of art., they reveal their own representational dimension.

Verbal references to the sight that are really numerous in the works of the author of Pochodnia project a certain type of recipient: they stress visibility, they underline the fact that the text with which we are dealing imitates the image.

Twardowski does re-coding of three kinds. The first level of such a translation from image to language is a plain description of the picture; an iconographic description. The second level is adding a plot to the icon; rendering the virtual character of the presentation in writing, which is the amplification strategy. And finally, the third level would be separating the poetic image from the visual imagination and moving the very visibility into the language. The verbal construction of the metaphor – that is the third level.

A highly relational character of this poetry, and particularly the mutual penetration of the work and allegorical images taking place in the space of Twardowski's texts (especially when the poems are not collections of emblems) are the cause why in the research procedure the intertextual approach seems to be the best one.