Myśli nocne, Treny, albo Myśli nocne o życiu, śmierci i nieśmiertelności, Sąd Ostateczny. Poema = The Complaint: or Night-Rhoughts on Life, Death & Immortality. Poem on the Last Day

Abstract

The present volume offers the Polish reader the most representative poetic works of Edward Young (1683-1765), presented in a critical edition, with footnotes and scholarly commentaries. Thereby, by reintroducing the masterpieces that are often compared with James Macphersons The Works of Ossian, the editors fill in a significant gap in the history of pre-Romanticism in Poland. The volume includes the following works by Young in the rendition of Fortunat Rydzewski: Myśli nocne o życiu, śmierci i nieśmiertelności; Poemat o Sądzie Ostatecznym, Listy moralne o rozkoszy and Modlitwę rozpustnego libertyna, which, in fact, are Polish translations of the French paraphrases of the originals, Les nuits d'Young, by Pierre Letourneur (1737-1788). Additionally, it features the Polish translations of Poem on the Last Day and the first book of Night Thoughts, both made by Franciszek Ksawery Dmochowski. The second part of the volume comprises the English versions of Young’s poems in their original forms (The Complaint, or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death & Immortality and Poem on the Last Day). The texts in Polish were prepared and edited by Łukasz Zabielski, PhD, a researcher at Książnica Podlaska Library in Białystok; the English versions were prepared and edited by Jacek Partyka, PhD, a researcher and Assistant Professor at the Institute of Modern Languages, the university of Białystok. The introductory notes were written by Professor Mikołaj Sokołowski, a researcher in Romanticism, and Polish-Italian as well as Polish-English literary relations, director of the institute of Literary studies, Polish Academy of sciences, and by Łukasz Zabielski. The edition of the whole volume was supervised by Professor Emeritus Halina Krukowska, a researcher in romanticism, who initiated the scholarly series ‘Dark romanticism’ and was its first editor-in-chief, and by Jarosław Ławski, a researcher in the imagination of eighteenth- and twenty-first century culture, Head of Chair in Philological Studies ‘East- West’, the University of Białystok. The present volume does not include the French versions of Young’s both poems - as it has been confirmed by philological examination, they correspond to Fortunat Rydzewski’s renditions. The Trinitarian from Lublin made a faithful translation of Letournurs paraphrases. Therefore, instead of doubling contents, the editors of the volume have decided to offer the read- er a much broader (and more interesting) perspective on the phenomenon of Young’s writings in the context of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century. Published as fragments from 1742 to 1745 (the first complete Polish version came out in 1785), Night Thoughts immediately made the big time, remaining an artistic inspiration in the whole Europe for the years to come. The editors of the Scholarly Publishing Series ‘Dark Romanticism’ hope that the present bilingual edition will initiate the process of regaining Edward Young for the Polish literature and culture, and will reintroduce Night Thoughts (and other works of the poet) into the mainstream twenty-first century academic reflection.