Improving the Original. Stanisław Barańczak’s Clown-World

The article discusses Stanisław Barańczak’s idea of the possibility of improving the original in translation as a crucial aspect of his poetic agenda both before the 1989 change of the political system in Poland and after it. This aspect of his poetics is linked with his frequent recourses to normalization as a way out of, in his eyes oppressive, rule of the idiotic clownery and chaos of the surrounding reality regardless of its actual political or social significances. Hence the ambivalence in Barańczak’s vision of normality which, paradoxically, can be seen as either negative or, litotetically, as non-negative.