ABSTRACT Poetics of grammar is among the largely neglected facts in literary translations. As a rule, this term is missing in translation handbooks and also in surveys concerning translation theory. The reason why this aesthetic device frequently escapes translation scholars' attention, probably has to do with the different make up of languages. There are certain qualities of a language which inspire authors to poetics of grammar. Three such qualities are to be found in the Polish language: 1. a relatively high amount of optional variants of grammatical phenomena, 2. a relatively high amount of grammatical categories and structures equipped with either specific grammatical sense or a number of meanings that a user may choose from, and 3. a certain amount of word classes, which allow for creating lexical variants--first of all with the help of prefixes and suffixes. This study discusses poetics of grammar based on the copula jest, the reflexive pronoun sobie, the adjectival attribute, interjections, and the grammatical sense of the verbal aspects. Most examples are taken from 20th century Polish literature, i.e. from texts written by Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, Herbert, Rozewicz and others. Both German and English function as target languages.
