Grzegorz Wróblewski’S kopenhaga and the Process of Inscription

This essay discusses several issues that arose in translating Grzegorz Wróblewski’s book of prose poems Kopenhaga from Polish into English. It is hoped that these reflections will offer new insights on the prose poem genre, especially its movement across national and linguistic borders. My essay also places the genre in relation to the concept of world literature, defined for my purposes as “a mode of circulation and of reading” (Damrosch). This chapter views translation as a practice that requires a great deal of craft and expertise, but also some deliberation and strategizing. As much as it entails a pursuit of formal and semantic correspondence, translation calls for a reflection on what it means to introduce a foreign text into a new cultural context–what Lawrence Venuti calls the “process of inscription”.