„Niepoprawny romantyk” patrzy na Maroko. „Wspomnienia z podróży po Danii, Norwegii, Anglii, Portugalii, Hiszpanii i państwie marokańskim” Teodora Tripplina

Abstract

The article presents the image of Morocco as seen through the eyes of an “incurable romantic”, traveller, polyglot and physician: Teodor Tripplin, one of the most widely read Polish writers in the middle of the nineteenth century, now almost forgotten. His "Wspomnienia z podróży po Danii, Norwegii, Anglii, Portugalii, Hiszpanii i Państwie Marokańskim" ("Memoirs from Travels around Denmark, Norway, England, Portugal, Spain and the Moroccan State"), published in 1844, is the second in the history of Polish literature, after "Podróż do Cesarstwa Marokańskiego" ("The Journey to the Moroccan Empire") by Jan Potocki, report from a trip to North Africa. Fascinated by relics of the Moorish rule seen in Spain, he decided to get to know the descendants of Moors and search for answers to the key question in the Polish 19th-century historiosophy – of whether the memory of a nation’s glorious past can give hope for the nation’s revival in the future. The way of subjectifying the outside world, conditioned by the destination of the author’s travel, his belonging to the romantic cultural formation and his personal interests, shaped not only the descriptive-informative layer of his travel memoirs, but also the extensive layer of commentaries and reflection. The traveller directed his attention primarily to the folk people, their religion (the world of Islam, largely inaccessible to Christians), traditional beliefs and superstitions, landscapes, the widely understood “picturesqueness”, historicism, exoticism and extraordinariness, while trying to recreate the unique local colour of the country.