Journals Showcase (Witryna Czasopism.pl)

What is the dummy adopted for the leading theme in the latest issue of “Portret” (26/2008)? The Polish Dictionary gives us two main definitions: first – it is an imitation of some object; second – something worthless, which pretends to be something that in reality it’s not. Concerning the cultural understanding, “a fake dummy” would be the phenomenon that indeed connects both definitions into one. An example of a fake reality is that proposed to us in most TV commercial, which show a family consisting of two attractive, young parents and usually two charming children; the family that reaches its full happiness when spreading the advertised margarine on their bread.

The editors of “Recycling” [nr (10) 2008] knock readers out of a nice dream. With the aid of Kamil Majchrzak’s article titled Demokracja na wojnie (Democracy During the War), they are trying to make us comprehend the deep roots of contemporary neo-liberal imperialism, which – as we can see from the presented analyses – is a raised to the n-th power, mature nineteenth century capitalism. The type of goods and services which drive the economy has changed, geopolitics has changed, but we still live in the world in which economic tensions give birth to ideas that are to make the socio-economic reality easier to digest for an ordinary mortal.

The task of the new translations is not only to refresh the text but also to free it from the associations with freely functioning key words, which enable us to over-interpret. Re-interpretation, which has been changing the original sense more and more, has to reach its end and free itself from such secondary contexts. Jakub Ekier writes that “this attempt to exclude the analysis not intended by the author is not yet an interpretation. It is only one of many decisions in the area of semantics, though this semantics is hard to get hold of.” („Literatura na Świecie” nr 1–2/2008)