top of page

William Blake’s masterpiece, Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion, has never been translated into Polish in its entirety. His other mature prophecy, Milton, was translated by Wiesław Juszczak in 2001. In 2006 Maciej Słomczyński translated the whole of the fragmented VALA, or the Four Zoas. But the poet’s ultimate achievement—the only major illuminated book Blake considered “consolidated,” and the only one of his prophecies in which he inscribed a promise of narrative continuity (“I give you the end of a golden string, / Only wind it into a ball”)—exists in Polish exclusively in the form of fragments. The reason may be that Blake’s Jerusalem, who is “Liberty,” and “the Divine Vision,” and “the Holy City of Peace” (cf. S. Foster Damon’s A Blake’s Dictionary), is, most emphatically, “the Emanation of the Giant Albion. . .”

bottom of page