
Giovanna TomassucciUniversity of Pisa | UNIPI · Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics
Giovanna Tomassucci
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28
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Introduction
Polish Literature Studies
Jewish Studies
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (28)
The essay is dedicated to the painful relationship with Judaism of the Polish poet Julian Tuwim (1894-1953), one of the protagonists of the Polish Vanguard. Although he was the privileged target of anti-Semitic attacks by the nationalist right, the poet generally avoided openly pronouncing on the Jewish question, so much so that he sometimes earned...
The article analyses Franco Fortini’s two poems written in 1944 during his exile in Switzerland: Warsaw 1939 and Warsaw 1944 (the latter’s former title was Warsaw 1943). The poet defined them Imaginary Translations, because he conceived them as translated from an inexistent original, written in occupied Poland. In this way, the Italian poet experim...
My aim is to contextualise and reflect on the ambivalences of Gombrowicz’s view of the interwar Polish Jews both in his satirical short story The Brief Memoir of Jakób Czarniecki (1933), focused on the mechanisms of the exclusion of Jews from the Polish society, as well in his later controversial declarations in "The Diary" and in "Polish Memories"...
The article tackles the complex topic of translating into Italian Witold Gombrowicz's novel “Ferdydurke” [1937]. The analisys is conducted on the basis of four existing Italian translations [Miniussi 1961, Verdiani 1991, Verdiani 2019, Salvatori-Mari 2020]. Focusing on the transla-tion of neologisms, solecisms, key words "pupa" and "gęba" and speak...
The aim of this article is to analyze Wisława Szymborska's poem Writing a Résumé, written in the late 1970s, which is a reflection on a seemingly simple event of filling in an official form. By juxtaposing incongruous details and playing with antinomies and paradoxes, the Polish poetess shows the process of reducing an individual biography to imper...
Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951) was a political prisoner detained in several Nazi extermination camps (Auschwitz, Natzweiler-Dautmergen, Dachau-Allach) from the spring of 1943 to May 1945. Soon after his liberation, he wrote several tales, short stories and poems, in which he described Warsaw during its ferocious Nazi occupation as well...
"Wisława Szymborska: 'Writing A Résumé,'"
The aim of my article was to analyse Wisława Szymborska's poem Pisanie życiorysu [Writing a resumé], written in the late 1970s. The Polish poetess reflects on a seemingly simple event of filling in an official form. By juxtaposing incongruous details and playing with antinomies and paradoxes, she shows the...
The article addresses the issue of Czesław Miłosz's poems dedicated to the persecution and the extermination of the Jews in Poland. A specific attention is devoted to the influence of Eliot's poetry on his poem "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto" .
Meanwhile, Jews were burned”... A Few Remarks about Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s Attitude to Jewishness.
For Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, the question of his own roots was a very private matter; he treated them as if they were not present in his life and wrote explicitly about Jewishness or Shoah only in his non-fiction work. Nevertheless, the themes...
Inhabiting the Apocalypse: Dystopic elements in Tadeusz Borowski's narration of the concentration universe
This paper, which contains some translations of Tadeusz Borowski’s poems and articles still unpublished in Italy, compares his early stories (from the collections Auschwitz our home and Farewell to Maria) with some aspects of the dystopian im...
A reflection on the so-called "wycinanki" - the artistic collages of Wisława Szymborska, influenced by the lessons of the Surrealists, Jacques Prevert and their more recent followers. The article relates some of their elements to aspects of Szymborska's poetic work.
The article reflects on aspects of Wisława Szymborska's poetry's extreme popularity and success among Italian readers.
Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951) was a political prisoner detained in several Nazi extermination camps (Auschwitz, Natzweiler-Dautmergen, Dachau-Allach) from the spring of 1943 to May 1945. Soon after his liberation, he wrote several tales, short stories and poems, in which he described Warsaw during its ferocious Nazi occupation as well...
The fact that Franco Fortini translated in Italian the poetic manifesto of the post-Stalinist Polish "Thaw", The poem for adults [1955] by Adam Ważyk – a work which had also been semi-clandestinely translated by Bertolt Brecht in 1956 – is very little known. Fortini made it for the militant magazine "Ragionamenti" with the help of an enigmatic coll...
Znakomity slawista, historyk teatru i poeta Angelo Maria Ripellino (1923–1978) bywa na ogół pamiętany jako rusycysta i bohemista, a w Polsce przeważnie jako autor swojego kultowego dzieła Praga magiczna. Dziś zapomniano o jego nieustannym sympatyzowaniu z kulturą polską, o przekładach dzieł poetów polskich (od Mickiewicza i Słowackiego po Tuwima i...
The article analyses Franco Fortinis two poems written in 1944 during his exile in Switzerland: Warsaw 1939 and Warsaw 1944 (the latter's former title was Warsaw 1943). Fortini defined them Imaginary Translations, because he conceived them as translated from an inexist-ent original, written in occupied Poland. Following Macpherson and Leopardi's tr...
This chapter focuses on Julian Tuwim, who presented his literary alter ego from the start of his poetic career as wandering about the city in search of spontaneous adventures, a twentieth-century flâneur with aimless time on his hands. It explains how Tuwim's 'idyllic walk' changed into a sad and crazy meandering that left sluggish footprints behin...
An emphasis on education has long been a salient feature of the Jewish experience. Historians of the early modern and modern era frequently point to the centrality of educational institutions and pursuits within Jewish society, yet the vast majority treat them as merely a reflection of the surrounding culture. Only a small number note how schools a...
Abstrakt
This article covers a particular form of Wisława Szymborska conceptism, her Thought fugues, which turns the world’s elements upside down and deconstructs them, uncovering their antinomies. The described reality takes the form of a concatenation, it is elliptic, based on seemingly symmetric tessellations, but in essence triggers some logic...
Tuwim’s approach to the “Jewish question” has already been analyzed by Polish and foreign scholars. The article is intended to consider some “survival strategies” of the Polish poet from a slightly different angle. In Poland, in the period between the wars Jewish writers were persuaded to accept total polonization and a rejection of their ethnic id...
This paper focuses on the problem of ethnic coexistence as presented in some of Korczak’s literary and dramatic works, from his earlier humorous short stories to the play The Senate of Madmen. Like many Polish writers, Korczak perceived literature as a space of freedom, but, unlike other Jews writing in Polish, he always stressed his Jewishness and...
The studies on Witkacy’s oeuvre Narcotics (Narkotyki, 1932) exist without any specific status, as if reduced to a research element ancillary to other “more serious” creative areas of its author. The above is especially astonishing since they belong to a specific literary genre which was started with De Quincy’s Confessions of an Opium Eater (1821)...
Giovanna Tomassucci, "Bruno Schulz in Italy".
The article reconstructs the reception of the work and the figure of Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) by Italian critics and writers from 1970 (the year of the publication in Italy of the stories "The Cinnamon Shops" and "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass", edited by the writer and poet Angelo Maria R...