the adventure of becoming an orientalist |
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If any part of my intellectual life were regarded as my destiny, this part would certainly be the Oriental one. I started learning Arabic on my own as a teenager, but initially I had no possibility of matriculating in Oriental studies; I studied Romance philology instead, because that was what existed in the minor university of Lublin, the city where I was born. My family couldn't afford to send me anywhere else, much less to study such a contemptible matter (at the time, in the early 1990s, the levels of Islamophobia were already high in Polish society). New horizons opened later on, when I moved to Kraków to teach Portuguese. Finally, I've made my first steps in Oriental studies at the Jagiellonian University in 2000-2001; those studies thus happened, quite irregularly, after I already got a PhD in Romance literatures and the fact clashed against the academic usages of the time. It partially explains why I started to publish in Oriental studies so timidly and so late in my academic career.
Classical Arab poetry is something of a myth for me. A mythical quintessence of human poetic capacities. Certainly, this is not an objective judgement; perhaps only a distant echo of the importance Arabs themselves gave to their poetry. It was strong enough to shape the persuasions of generations of Orientalists. And to foster the dream of some crazy people like me. It was thus a long-time aspiration to study those topics. I have read a lot, written very little. Nonetheless, new texts are likely to appear in this section. |
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“Wokół Wallady. Poezja i miłość w Al-Andalus w XI wieku” [“Around Wallada. Poetry and love in Al-Andalus in the 11th c.”], Nie tylko salon. Wspólnotowe formy życia literackiego, Ewa Łukaszyk, Krystyna Wierzbicka-Trwoga (ed.), Warszawa, DiG, 2016, p. 23-32. ISBN 978-83-286-0002-7
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