1 Stakes
For months following the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in custody of the ‘morality police’ in September 2022, protesters all over Iran chanted “Woman, Life, Freedom” [Zan, zendegi, azadi]. The chant is ostensibly a feminist slogan. It has been associated with International Women’s Day marches for over a decade, and voices apparently straightforward demands. Analysing this slogan on the level of its deceptively simple semantics, however, misses many of the grievances the phrase lends voice to, and much of its mobilising power. The cry channels memories of resistance against the Iranian regime which span over four decades. On a lexical level, the provocative juxtaposition of nouns conjures previous instances of widely mediated state violence against women, including the viral video of the deadly sniper attack on Neda Agha-Soltan in 2009. At the level of linguistic code, or langue, the choice of language in which the words are sung in turn marshals specific historical legacies. When the current resurgence of the slogan began at Amini’s funeral, mourners chanted it in its original Kurdish [jin, jiyan, azadi]. Amini was a Kurd, and the slogan recalls the opposition within this major ethnic minority to the Iranian regime. More specifically, it echoes the feminist ideas of PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan – carrying an especially volatile association with Kurdish militancy. Finally, the slogan quickly became one of the few Kurdish/Persian phrases to gain global recognition both in translation and in the original, proliferating across banners, graffiti and magazine covers (Piller 2022). It became a cosmopolitan gesture, notably on the part of women, pointing past the thicket of sanctions, blockages and constant vilification that have plagued Iranian international relations since the regime change in 1979 (Sreberny and Khiabany 2023, 135–136). For Iranian protestors and the wider world alike, the phrase called up foreclosed and forgotten grassroots solidarities. The subtle memory work of the audacious cry, then, allows it to address different facets of Iran’s “conjunctural crisis” in one breath, and it is little wonder that its symbolism is intolerable to the regime (Sadeghi-Boroujerdi 2023).1
2 The Memory-Activism Nexus
This volume is part of a broader surge of interest in the ways that memory and activism inflect one another, at the intersection of cultural memory and social movement studies. This research agenda has sprung from the realisation that, even though social movements’ claims-making is oriented towards the present and future, memory is an important factor in the legibility of protestors’ repertoire of action (Berger, Scalmer, and Wicke 2021, 1; Berger and Koller 2024; Merrill and Rigney 2024; Velásquez Urribarri 2020). Memories of past protest are moreover an indispensable source of inspiration, attachment and lessons for later activists (Bos 2014; Crozier-De Rosa and Mackie 2019; Traverso 2021; Vlessing 2023). The history of civic protest and the collective action of previous actors within a movement, narrated in differing ways by activists, historians and artists, thus shape the actions of protestors in the present (Koller 2005; Kubal and Becerra 2014; Rucht 1995; Tilly 2008, 16; Zamponi 2018). In addition to exploring contentious actors’ dependence on a usable past, research continues to uncover how social movement actors safeguard their legacy by engaging
These insights have muddied the traditional separation between contentious episodes marked by frenzied, innovative protest activity and periods of abeyance (Tarrow 1993; Taylor 1989, Wüstenberg 2021). Historical examples of activists’ investment of time and resources in memorialisation suggest it is not an afterthought, but a crucial part of their activities (Armstrong and Crage 2006; Tetrault 2014), and that much of this “activist memory work” is done outside recognisable cycles (Merrill et al. 2020; Merrill and Rigney 2024). The varieties of this work are part of the “memory-activism nexus” (Rigney 2018; see also Daphi and Zamponi 2019; Wicke 2021). This concept highlights how memory in activism, the ways in which social movements mobilise memory as part of their contentious action, memory of activism, the engagement with the history of protest in public memory through different forms of mediation, and memory activism, strategic efforts to “effect mnemonic change” in society (Gutman and Wüstenberg 2023, 1), are closely interconnected. The latter form of civic engagement has become an increasingly important activity within contemporary justice movements and has become the subject of an “activist turn” in memory studies (Gutman and Wüstenberg 2023, 5; Gutman 2017; Hamilton 2010; Wüstenberg 2017).
It is hard to overstate the importance of mediation to the memory-activism nexus. Mediation does not only connect movement actors across space within particular protest cycles, but also brokers across time (Chidgey 2018; Reading and Katriel 2015; Rigney 2020), presenting both constraints and opportunities. Recent studies confirm social movement actors’ savviness with regard to media logics and explore the ways in which this critical awareness shapes their activities (Altinay et al. 2019; Cammaerts et al. 2013; Mattoni 2013; Merrill, Keightley and Daphi 2020). Ann Rigney and Thomas Smits’ edited volume The Visual Memory of Protest (2023) set out to advance understanding of the mediation of protest in visual media, and the present volume (originating from the same research project at Utrecht University, Remembering Activism 2019-2024, dir. Ann Rigney) presents a similar step forward towards a fine-grained understanding of the linguistic mediation of protest.
3 Troubling Language and the Linguistic Turn
Language is not just a primal medium of memory but also makes itself felt as a powerful vector along all axes of the memory-activism nexus. As it moved past
One of the principal insights is that any individual user of language steps into a system which, unlike the impression given by prescriptive grammars, is dynamic and has a history. Building on the nineteenth-century realisation that signs are conventional and that their meaning relies on their difference from other signs within a system (as opposed to their arbitrary real-world reference), the field of semiotics expanded the work of theorists like Charles S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure from the 1960s onwards to focus close attention on the complex ways in which words function as signs. It shifted the emphasis to their manifold connotations, rather than their singular denotation (Eco 1986). Roland Barthes’ monthly column analysing verbal and visual signs in popular culture and media (1957) applied semiotic insights to the layered, recursive process of social myth-making. Semiotic analyses showcased ordinary speakers’ expansive cultural literacy, which allows for the rapid expansion of the connotations of words and phrases and their potential shifts of meaning.
A second key idea is that second order uses of language, such as narrative, can be analysed by analogy with sentence structure. Somewhat analogous to Noam Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar, which spearheaded a key linguistic paradigm shift of the 1960s, the faculty for narrative emplotment is considered a human universal that helps to construct the social world. The fields of narratology and genre theory generated insight into the influence of emplotment and genre conventions as crucial structuring forces in collective experience. Originally rooted in Russian formalists’ study of folktales in the 1920s, this body of scholarship posited a ‘grammar’ of storytelling that governs how plots, within specific cultures, recombine motifs in finite and predictable
Finally, a third abiding insight is that language is an important arena for the exercise of power, and that this power in large part depends on social conventions. With the establishment of the disciplines of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, sustained attention was brought to the pragmatics of language in use, as scholars began to map how language and speaking context interact. Researchers like William Labov (2006 [1964]) developed new ways of studying ordinary language use and demonstrated, for instance, how community and class identity inflect speech. This body of research raised awareness of the mutual shaping of language, identity, and society. It also brought to light how social conventions play into the meaning and effects of utterances in various contexts. In the 1980s, reader-response critics like Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser critically examined the role of convention, cultural education and socialised expectation in the interpretation of written text, showing for instance how specific cultural settings such as the classroom shape speakers into “interpretive communities” (Fish 1980). One of the most influential lines of philosophical inquiry into how cultural conventions govern language’s real-world power has been speech-act theory. Inaugurated by J.L. Austin’s lecture series How to do Things with Words (1962), this field studies how language can constitute action and function as a vehicle for individual speakers’ agency. Moreover, chiming in with insights into the “dialogism” and “heteroglossia” within languages first formulated by the Russian circle of Mikhail Bakhtin, it has been usefully and extensively pointed out that utterances cohere with other statements, objects, practices and media in broader discourses (e.g. Fairclough 1992; Scollon 2014). Substantively under the influence of Michel Foucault’s (e.g. 1969) work on power and the construction of knowledge, Critical Discourse Analysis developed as an engaged scholarly field which uses corpus linguistics to study how social and political power operates through discourse (Wodak and Meyer 2015). Through the quantitative methods developed in this field, scholars have not only revealed much about how features like word choice and grammatical mode serve the operation of power, but also contributed significantly to the understanding of media framing (e.g. Hall et al. 1978).
The chapters presented here showcase the “semiotic resources” different modes of discursive action offer grassroots and state actors to intervene in cultural memory (Machin and Mayr 2023, 21). By adopting a resource mobilisation perspective, well-established both in linguistics (Halliday 2014 [1985]) and in social movement studies (McCarthy and Zald 1977), this collection invites scholars, irrespective of predetermined disciplinary boundaries, to shift their attention to the creative ways in which people work with the rich variety of (cultural) resources at hand to change the world around them. Capturing this wealth of implicit, embodied expertise, the chapters that follow here have much to contribute to our understanding of the mediation of memory through language.
4 Language as a Medium of Memory
In his seminal work Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925), Maurice Halbwachs described language as a first but primitive, ‘slack’ social encoding mechanism (111; see also Assmann 2011 on this primacy).3 This idea has since been vindicated by experimental psychology, particularly regarding conversational narrative (Amberber 2007, 1; Bezdek, Zacks and Butler 2022; Hirst and Echterhoff 2012; Nelson and Fivush 2000). One of the most important findings of this research has been that the way speakers verbally narrativise (or ‘narratively encode’) events significantly influences how they are later recalled by what is commonly referred to as an individual’s episodic memory. Cultural memory
Yet putting events into words does not only occasion recall in crucial ways; words themselves also structure that recall – making language an important “fabric of memory” (Courtine 1994, 10; Schiffrin 2006, 214ff.). Words, bringing vectors of their own to bear on memory, can work as narrative frames and even recall historical events, as Michael Walzer explored in his study of the frames conjured by the words Exodus and Revolution (1985). Word choice can also support the convergence of a multiplicity of experiences into a more unified account, help maintain this story over time, and connect dissimilar historical experiences, as demonstrated by Deborah Schiffrin’s (2001) study of the propagation of the nouns ‘Holocaust’ and ‘concentration camps’ among Jewish and Japanese communities in the US.
In memory studies, much attention has been paid to the “communicative limits” of words, particularly when it comes to the impossibility of narrativising traumatic experiences (for a discussion of this trend, see Pickering and Keightley 2009). By taking semiotic resources as its focal point, this volume expands the scope of the discussion of language as a mnemonic medium by bringing into focus individuals’ creative engagement with language – which is on full display in the context of contentious action. Word definitions have long been intuitively conceptualised as more or less static entries of the “generalized conceptual knowledge divested of a specific spatiotemporal context” that makes up the “semantic memory” of individuals (Irish and Piguet 2013, 1; Tulving 2002).
This volume also chimes in with recent developments in the sociolinguistic study of collective memory, which has begun to thematise the significance of the material forms through which language presents itself in interpersonal communication, and the media dynamics at play in them (Deschrijver 2020; Dickinson, Blair, and Ott 2010, 3; Scollon 2014). In her study of the discursive conflict over the memory of the military’s actions during the Uruguyan dictatorship of 1973–85, for instance, Mariana Achugar analyses a range of genres, from editorials to commemorative speeches, drawing attention to the “discursive resources” they offer (2008, 21). More explicitly, in her study of the memories of late colonial India, Vaidehi Ramanathan (2019) studies the communication of memories in marginalised textual genres such as the telegram and explores their potential to reorient collective memory. This volume is similarly organised to accord the question of medium, and of medium-crossing, pride of place. Speakers make use of poetic, aural, kinetic and other affordances of language as it manifests in different media materialities to attune their individual stories to collective memory, and to modulate memory (see also McLuhan 2013 [1964], 83–96). Taking the setting of communicative memory as an example (Assmann 1995), speakers may for instance play with the rhythm of stress patterns to echo past utterances (Hill 2018, 105, 154), marshal particular semantic webs and historical allusions through their lexical choices (Ludlow 2014, 7–25), change their register or drop loaded terms depending on their audience (Scott 1990; Katzenstein 1995, 44–45), or adapt their narrative condensation to sharpen their account of an event for a particular context (Polletta 2006, 22–24). As words travel between genres and materialities, different affordances of language as a medium of memory come into play. Moreover, the affordances of particular media may be echoed in later remediations (Bolter and Grusin 1999, Erll and Rigney 2009), such as in the addition of an ‘exclamation’ mark to a written slogan.
Acknowledging that utterances are geographically as well as historically situated is of principal importance for any consideration of “defiant discourse” (Katriel 2021), which is by nature highly contextual and part of the public sphere. As the example of ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ shows, the choice of language can be a key way in which protestors position themselves in their environment and channel the voices of previous generations of struggle. Beyond this performative aspect, the choice for a particular language or register also influences what is ‘sayable,’ what stories are mnemonically available, and even what commemorative models are available (Amberber 2007).
Civic protests, grassroots resistance against the ‘normative environment’ of public discourse (Scott 1985, 186), and the language of contention are charged linguistic contexts, involving high stakes and inviting sophisticated communication practices. These contexts are rich, as they frequently host the clash and commingling of spoken and written expression, as well as the sprawling remediation of salient points and phrases. They throw everyday practices of mediating memory through language into sharp relief, foregrounding questions of agency, intentionality, and location. As scholars have come to recognise both the importance of language as a battlefield for social actors and the vanguard nature of activist language use, there is a growing body of work that studies what Sidney Tarrow termed the “language of contention” (2013). The present collection foregrounds the salience of memory in this important arena of activism, which has not been sufficiently addressed.
Polish émigré poet Czesław Miłosz once called irony “the glory of the slaves.”6 Indeed, James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) and Benedict Anderson’s Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (1990) provide compelling evidence that language and linguistic savoir-faire do not just reflect political dissatisfaction but are in fact prime vehicles for grassroots resistance. This insight has been further developed for the analysis of contentious action from several vantage points which explicitly, or more often implicitly, involve attention to memory dynamics. The first has been to study the multiple functions of activists’ utterances in different contexts. In It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (2006), Francesca Polletta pioneered research into storytelling as a tool for protest. Her analysis highlights how subtleties of language use in the public recall of memories of grievance and past protest can have acute political consequences. Tamar Katriel’s Defiant Discourse: Speech and Action in Grassroots Activism (2021) also undoes the ‘talk vs action binary’ (29; see also Katzenstein 1999). In her study of soldiers’ “discourse-centered activism” within the broader contexts of Israeli speech culture and transnational anti-war activism, Katriel distinguishes between proclaiming, witnessing, and accounting, as three distinct “language-centered moves” which represent different forms of political intervention within the context of particular language ideologies (30). In The Language of Protest: Acts of Performance, Identity and Legitimacy (2018) Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill (2018) similarly draws on speech-act theory in order to analyse iconic activist utterances across different genres, including chants, songs, poems and prose. An important dynamic she distinguishes across protest utterances is that of ‘convocativity,’ whereby addressees are drawn into new communities which can act as a basis for further counter-hegemonic discourse (63–4).
Other scholars have sought to complement, or expand, the understanding of the action repertoire with the study of the discursive repertoire of contention. This is essentially a resource mobilisation approach to language (McCarthy and Zald 1977). The idea of the action repertoire transformed the study of social movements when Charles Tilly first proposed it in the 1980s (Tilly 2007, XIII–XIV). Tilly suggested that there is a limited set of culturally legible
A third line of approach to the study of the role of language in contentious action has been to follow particular keywords in the protest lexicon as a metric of the thinkable over time. As Carol Gluck and Anna Tsing point out, words do different kinds of work as they travel through different contexts, including “organizing, mobilizing, inspiring, excluding, suppressing, or covering up” (2009, 3). Bordering on the history of ideas, this keyword approach has become a classic method for probing the associations and memories connected to particular words in a discourse (e.g. Bestor 1948; Williams 1985; Rodgers 1998). Following the model of Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), which posited that transformations in word meanings indicated broader social changes, there have been several projects probing the shifting inner logics of (left-wing) intellectual projects through salient words (Bennett, Grossberg, and Morris 2005; Fritsch, O’Connor and Thompson 2022; Leary 2022). Particularly fruitful have been studies of keywords for activist sociality (van den Elzen 2024), such as “the people” (Laclau 2005) and “comrade” (Dean 2019).
As a whole, this field of inquiry has demonstrated that activists make deft use of the full range of linguistic-cultural resources at their disposal, such as narrative schemata, genre conventions and (social) media affordances, to shape and disseminate their messages. This collection is focused on the
First, words and verbal formulas, such as the three-word Kurdish phrase, are highly economical carriers (Krieg-Planque 2003), which have the potential to mobilise memories at several levels simultaneously because of their specific features, including the aural, compositional, graphic, and lexical. Second, they are arguably the most portable medium of memory (Rigney 2004, 383). Open as they are to extraction (or entextualization, Bauman and Briggs 1990), relocation, reactivation and recontextualization, they have an unparalleled potential to ricochet from local mourners to international football matches overnight and require no special skill to be taken up in sophisticated ways. Travelling freely, and travelling light, between the genres and media available in urban landscapes, they accrue further meaning along the way. It is quite possible that the twenty-first century with its superdiversity and (social) media virality has further destabilised already-unpredictable meaning-making processes, making mixed-method, multimodal semiotic approaches and linguistic ethnography more important than ever for grasping meaning (Blommaert and Rampton 2011, Varis and Blommaert 2015; Pennycook 2016). Thirdly, verbal formulas are dialogic (Bakhtin/Voloshinov 1994, 35; Dickinson, Blair, and Ott 2010, 4); in activist contexts, they are formulated in tension with the state, but also engage in a broader cultural dialogue with the citizenry and sometimes other protesters. Their utterance carries within itself a definitional struggle with potentially high stakes. Put differently, word meaning can be fundamentally and ongoingly social, when the word itself offers a structural invitation to debate and generates productive friction. As we will see throughout this volume, word choice can become hotly contested ground for different stakeholders in memory, and the frictions produced by the resignification of words and formulas often prove a key part of the contentious work they do. While this friction can take the shape of disputes over how the past ought to be represented, memory can also act as a potent resource for resignifying particular words in the present (Van den Elzen 2024).
6 Prospectus
Artists and speakers seamlessly integrate their “implicit collective memory” of language conventions and their history to produce sophisticated utterances
The first section, Speaking Out, focuses on how cultural memory inflects spoken and written testimonies: the domain that is classically known as parrhesia, speaking plainly, truthfully, and courageously (Dyrberg 2014, 2), and more colloquially, as speaking truth to power. Tamar Katriel argues that activist memoirs of the Israeli anti-occupation movement are a genre of ‘resistance literature’ which, by producing narratives, seeks to change public opinion and, ultimately, current policy. Besides representing powerful testimonies of activist experience, these memoirs, she argues, are a discursive site where activists engage with mainstream discourse. Katriel shows how dissenting authors display “communicative vigilance” in their engagement with the established language of the anti-occupation debate, strategically adopting terms in their account of the past that carry more or less of a “contentious edge.” Michal Kravel-Tovi discusses the intricate ways in which #MeToo activists and survivors in the Orthodox Haredi community use their testimonies of personal trauma not just as a way to confront abusers but also to challenge conventional language ideologies within their community. Bridging the gap between traumatic personal memory and the deep memory of cultural and religious convention, Kravel-Tovi argues for paying attention to how language ideology underpins witnessing and its cultural reception as well as to the potential of “discourse-based activism” to reshape communities’ modes of engagement with trauma. Natalie Braber discusses ongoing oral history work recording the testimonies of Nottingham miners regarding their changing community and role in the infamous mass miners’ strike of 1984–1985 in the UK. She demonstrates how decades of retelling stories within particular communities consolidated strong shared narratives that continue to sow division regarding the meaning of the past. Word choice and metaphor, particularly, continue to leave their mark on miners’ recounted memories of the historic protest in the present day. Giving testimony to an outside observer, such as an oral historian from abroad, however, has the potential to break open ossified disputes, and fissures may become apparent through close attention to witnesses’ language use. Finally, Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill explores how political actors attempt to capitalise on the language conventions of parrhesia, and the dangers this poses to the very workings of civic protest in democracy. Using speech-act theory as a framework to analyse official language conventions in public memory, she analyses Donald Trump’s speech of January 6, 2021, and the subsequent storming of the Capitol, as an “insurrection performative” which masks as a “protest
The second section, Word Work, examines memory dynamics around keywords that belong to the protest lexicon. Nicolás Villarroel and Vic Riveros’ contribution analyses how a keyword of the Chilean political left, compañero, mobilises memories of left-wing sociality in different historical and contemporary circumstances. Building on the conception of dialogism formulated by the circle of Mikhail Bakhtin, they show how keywords can act as condensations of social relations in specific historical moments, and how governments can choose to repress them as such. After repression, different forms of linguistic socialisation are needed to restore these relationships in new generations, and later activists may choose to inflect the words with modern concerns while still paying homage to their historical pedigree. Hannah Grimmer’s chapter similarly deals with how certain keywords, most notably el pueblo, are used to mediate the left-wing legacy of the Allende presidency in Chile. Focusing on historic and contemporary artistic interventions which, despite their innovative use of new media, are nevertheless firmly rooted in the past, Grimmer explores how during the 2019 protests artists and protestors used the urban space to reclaim historically charged terms connected to Allende and his Unidad Popular campaign. Michiel Bot’s chapter sheds light on how states deal with the dangerous potential of words to mobilise the memory of political opposition. Offering a critical analysis of the linguistic work of the 2019 German Bundestag resolution against the pro-Palestinian BDS movement as well as a historical contextualisation of this intervention, Bot shows how the Bundestag attempted to reshape the meaning and historical associations of not just the term boycott but also of Staatsräson.
The chapters in the third section, Slogans, consider different ways in which memory inflects the lives of slogans, fixed formulas which often display poetic features, such as repetition, alliteration and puns. Zoé Carle’s contribution examines the afterlife of the iconic slogans of the student protests of May 1968. She charts the ways in which these were ‘immortalised’ directly after the event and how these efforts, which ultimately constrained the radical potential of the slogans, played into their assimilation into contemporary national heritage. Corinne Sandwith calls attention to the function of a selection of slogans that appeared throughout a flagship newspaper of the South African Left, Umsebenzi, in the 1930s. Taking as her starting point the finding that slogans can act as compressed narrative emplotments, she demonstrates how key slogans in this periodical engaged leftist protest memory from an anti-colonial perspective, challenging dominant postcolonial narrative modes. Tashina
As a whole, the collection shows the importance of language-specific resources, such as specific grammatical constructions, polysemy and language ideologies, for activist memory work. Language is revealed as not only a source of creativity but also a potential site for triumphant defiance of neoliberal, cultural and monoglot hegemony, as it can bring to life alternative historical intellectual trajectories. The chapters also show how it is not just persons, periods, traditions, and events that ‘stick’ to words, but that words’ transcultural and transmedial travels can leave their traces too, adding layers of significance to their invocation in new protests. Moreover, memory work can involve intervening in these layers of meaning, as well as in the unwritten rules governing contentious language in a particular time and place. Finally, when taken together, the different chapters offer a powerful reminder of the breadth and variety of “players and arenas” in which contentious language does memory work, ranging from intimate confessions between comrades to the halls, and the walls, of government offices (Jasper and Duyvendak 2015). Ann Rigney’s afterword returns to the volume’s central question regarding the role of memory in activist language use. Observing how activists coin neologisms but also the efforts they make to preserve linguistic innovations, her reflections underscore how language helps to connect the struggles of the past to the hope for the future.
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This discussion is indebted to Fatemeh Sham’s discussion in the New Yorker, “How Iran’s Hijab Protest Movement Became so Powerful” (2 October 2022) and Seyma Bayram and Diba Mohtasham’s discussion for NPR, “Iran’s Protesters find Inspiration in a Kurdish Slogan” (see: https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/2022-10-27/irans-protesters-find-inspiration-in-a-kurdish-revolutionary-slogan/).
Joseph Stalin’s open letter in Pravda in 1950, which aimed to shut down the ‘Marxist linguistics’ founded by Nikolai Marr (Stalin 2000 [1950]; Pollock 2006, ch. 5), is a noteworthy exception.
“Les conventions verbales constituent donc le cadre à la fois le plus élémentaire et le plus stable de la mémoire collective: cadre singulièrement lâche, d’ailleurs, puisqu’il laisse passer tous les souvenirs tant soit peu complexes, et ne retient que des détails isolés et des éléments discontinus de nos représentations” (111).
See, for example, Assmann (2006, 2008); Caruth (1996); Erll (2009, 2014); Erll and Rigney (2005).
See also Mlynář (2014) and Erll (2022) on this lacuna. Notable exceptions are the Wójcicka (2014) and Czachur 2018; see also Bukowski (2018) and Wójcicka (2018).
From Miłosz’ “Not this way” (1972): “I protect my good name for language is my measure. / A bucolic, childish language that transforms the sublime into the cordial. / … My voice always lacked fulness, I would like to render a different thanksgiving,/ And generously, without irony which is the glory of slaves” (1988, 246).