More on Jan Twardowski`s word-play: an immanent-transcendent approach

The present paper continues the series of the authors' publications exploring Jan Twardowski's diction, in particular, word-play as used in his poems. Creating an integrated approach that is both immanent and transcendent (as defined by G.Harman), the authors rely on observations and generalizations they had made while translating Twardowski's poems and seeking Ukrainian equivalents for his word-play; now they use the latter as a means to verify and assess their explication of the content and inner form of instances of pun in original texts. They analyze these cases in terms of the typology of their structural and semantic features as well as from the viewpoint of the sense-generating role they perform within the context of Twardowski's religious poetry. Regarding his poetic discourse as a hybrid of two linguistic-cultural codes, the religious and the artistic ones, they show Twardowski's use of pun to be a reflection and a manifestation of his Christian outlook and artistic mannerism. Involving lexemes and phrases of various kinds, including idioms and components thereof, Twardowski's word-play mostly concerns their semantics alone, leaving their form intact, so that the contextual clash of superficially similar entities (words as well as their lexical or phraseological semantic variants) that are essentially different and even contrasting in their meaning triggers their generating of new and profound senses. This relation of contextual semantic contrast brings together two or even more items. The underpinnings of Twardowski's pun can be either purely lyrical and therefore individual, or historical-cultural and generalized, and a specific pun can occupy a more or less prominent and salient place in the general content and inner form of his poetic texts, yet it is invariably consonant with brevity and humour as the invariants of his diction. Typically involving actual and essential relationships between linguistic entities, it is natural, rather than artificial, and also insightful, its very structure reflecting the paradoxical nature of both the world of Twardowski's poetry and his Christian beliefs.