The World of Czesław Miłosz: Bombus Terrestris in the Authorial Honeycomb of Translators and Translated
This paper proposes that Czesław Miłosz in his numerous literary guises epitomises the cross-pollinatory nature of the creative literary process where texts are generated polytemporaneously in the authorial process of readers and writers. One such illustration, his early war-time cycle The World, can be shown to demonstrate the generative nature of literary creation in the intertextual plane, translation being a prime vehicle in the cross-pollination of the initial text, known as the original.
In this regard one poem from Miłosz’s cycle ‘The World’ will be taken as an illustration, where two English versions are discussed in terms of the roles of readers and writers in the authorial process across time. In this particular context, Miłosz as both author/translated and author/translator plays a vital role in exemplifying the making of authorial progression and the related creativity of the translation text in the formative process of literature.
It is therefore argued that Czesław Miłosz, working across a number of literary genres as well as assuming a number of various guises in the course of being reader and writer, serves as a good illustration of the making of the author and the attendant creative tensions between readers and writers. It is therefore both as translator and translated that one of Poland’s most influential literary figures in the recent past has underscored the authorial presence of translation in the re-generation of literature.
