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The theme of the article is translation as a mode of internal immigration. Paul Celan, who chose German as the language of his work, (it was the language of his mother and of murderers), found a sanctuary also as translator. In translator’s profession, he found ways of distilling the German language, which never ceased to be his “internal landscape” in spite of the wound inflicted to the language by Nazism. Most of the discussion focuses on Celan’s motivations when he translated Osip Mandelstam’s poetry.

In her essay, the author recalls literary contexts (including John Donne, Michel Houellebecq and Ernest Hemingway) and philosophical and anthropological contexts (including Aristotle, Thomas Merton, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Paul Sartre and Gilles Deleuze) presenting the poetic “I’s” various ways of approaching friendship. The quotation from a German translation of John Donne’s poem used in the title of the article is in itself a meaningful phonetic wordplay: “Kein Mensch ist ein Ich-Land” (no man is an “I” land, no man is an island). The main part of the essay includes an interpretation of the television series Lost — Joanna Roszak investigates philosophical references in the series and indicates biblical contexts (“Am I my brother’s keeper?”). A very apt comment to many episodes in the series is, according to the author, the formula told by Z. Herbert’s Fortinbras: Ani nam witać się ani żegnać żyjemy na archipelagach/ A ta woda te słowa cóż mogą cóż mogą” [It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos/ and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince]. It is a similar defencelessness in which the main characters of Lost try to struggle the reality, even if they live together, and die all alone. Collective memory has become a safeguard for the community in the world, which is to be destined for homelessness and forlornness. The other person though becomes a reference point — it is him or her that makes it possible to find the way home.