Savez-vous ce qu’il y avait derrière? Un mur énorme, noir, massif comme le roc. Il en fut de même d’une autre, puis d’une autre encore : j’étais prisonnier d’une ville toute en façades, sans bruit et sans autre vie que celle des flammes bleues, épouvantablement ardentes et pourtant ne brûlant pas.
-- Jean Ray, La Choucroute
Two months ago while on vacation in the region of Katowice and Cracow, I've had the privilage of attending the international conference "Poe, Grabiński, Ray, Lovecraft. Correspondences, Parallels, Comparisons" held in Sosnowiec at the Institute of Romance Languages and Translation Studies of the University of Silesia. I first heard about the conference when I was invited by Claudio Salmeri, one of the organizers and conference co-secretaries, to participate as a presenter. Initially, I had high ambitions of preparing some materials on Jean Ray in French and to finally to dive deeper into his works - something I had on my mind for quite some time. I had to decide against getting involved as the first half 2016 continued busy for me with regards to my professional career and my ambitions for reskilling and my presence at the conference was very doubtful.
Nevertheless, I was eager to engage in helping to spread the news about the event. The conference was held in four languages: Polish, English, French and Italian. The entire programme can be downloaded here. Multilingual international conferences on the subject of horror, gothic, or weird fiction are not very common in Europe, let alone in Poland, therefore, due to its international character, this particular conference deserves to be covered on Confusio Liguarum.
I will focus here on those presentations that have particularly drawn my attention and on day 2 only, as it was this day that was fully dedicated to presentations delivered in English, French and Italian.
