Kto i do kogo mówi w litanii poetyckiej? Wokół utworu Wojciecha Bąka „Modlitwa do Marii Matki”

Abstrakt

The Wojciech Bąk’s poem The Prayer to Mary the Mother (Modlitwa do Marii Matki) represents the main communicative structure of the genre of litany. As a litany, the text has not a single formal subject, but belongs to a triple addressor instance (the subjects of tradition, community and the faithful) and is directed to a quintuple addressee instance (the faithful, the divine mediator, God as the Supreme Witness, God as the indirect addressee, God as the direct addressee). The triple addressor instance imposes many limitations on the author. The article describes the three liberty axes of the author: within the linear structure limitations (the syntactic axis), within the formula paradigm limitations (the paradigmatic axis) and the axis of the traditional formula translation (the exegetic axis). While the church litanies tend to standardize the translation of the formulae, the poetry attaches more importance to the exegetic axis, enlivening the prayer language and enabling a dialogue among different ways of understanding the given formula.