Interactive Encounters: Sosnowski Translates Ashbery’s “A Wave”

This article examines John Ashbery’s A Wave and its Polish translation by Andrzej Sosnowski as instances of performative poetry and performative translation. Rather than providing a faithful restatement, Sosnowski enacts Ashbery’s poetics through deliberate stylistic and conceptual interventions. The analysis focuses on how notions of landscape, time, language, and self are rendered as shifting, fragmentary, and contingent. By attending to literal meaning, disjointed temporality, and philosophical allusion, the essay argues that Sosnowski’s translation constitutes a site of interpretive agency and poetic performance.