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East meets west: on translation and the dialogue of Polish and American poets

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East meets west: on translation and the dialogue of Polish and American poets

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EAST MEETS WEST:
ON TRANSLATION AND THE DIALOGUE OF POLISH AND AMERICAN POETS

by

Piotr Florczyk

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CREATIVE WRITING & LITERATURE)

May 2022

Copyright ©2022 Piotr Florczyk

ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My time in the PhD in Creative Writing & Literature Program, which I entered in Fall of
2015, has been tremendously rewarding on numerous levels. I grew as a poet, translator,
scholar, and teacher in ways that I would not have otherwise. I also became more
established as an author/translator while in the Program, having published or secured
contracts for twelve volumes of poetry, translations, and scholarly articles. None of this
would have happened if it weren’t for the guidance I have received from faculty, staff,
and my fellow students. First, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the
members of my Dissertation Committee: Mark Irwin, David St. John, Viet Thanh
Nguyen, and Olivia C. Harrison, who kept their office doors always open to me—I found
their encouragement invaluable. I also benefited tremendously from studying with Emily
Anderson, Percival Everett, Susan McCabe, Carol Muske-Dukes, Bruce Smith, and Anna
Krakus. In addition to my Committee members and professors, I wish to thank a number
of people who offered various forms of advice and assistance, including Joseph Boone,
Meg Russett, Christopher Freeman, Devin Griffiths, Zofia Lesińska, and my dear friend
Kevin A. Wisniewski. Further, I am grateful to the Center for Advanced Genocide
Research, especially Wolf Gruner and Martha Stroud, the Graduate School, and the
Department of English for fellowships and grants that enabled me to pursue research and
to fine tune my ideas at conferences in the U.S. and abroad. My heartfelt thanks also to
Janalynn Bliss whose kindness and support propelled me from start to finish. Finally,
thank you to my wife, Dena Florczyk, our daughter Iza, and our families on both sides of
the Atlantic, who made this all possible.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………...ii
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...iv
I. East Meets West: On Translation and the Dialogue of Polish and American Poets….1
Introduction………………………………………………………………..........................2
Chapter 1: Czesław Miłosz and the West……………………………………………........9
Chapter 2: Polish and American Poets in Conversation…………………………………20
Chapter 3: New York Comes to Poland…………………………………………….........52
Chapter 4: Translation as Performance…………………………………………………..80
Chapter 5: Found in Translation……………………………………………………......100
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...116
Work Cited……………………………………………………………………………...123
II. Nineteen Eighty-Nine and Other Poems……………………………………………131
Introduction: Writing With An Accent, or How I Became A Translingual Poet &
Translator……………………………………………………………………….132
Poems…………………………………………………………………………………...146
Notes……………………………………………………………………………………230

iv
ABSTRACT

This study examines the myriad ways in which translation and translators operate and
make international and personal transfer of art and ideas possible. More specifically, by
examining the reception of Polish poets in the United States and in the United Kingdom,
and American poets in Poland, this study considers how poets steeped in various
traditions and operating under divergent cultural norms and pressures can in fact come to
influence one another stylistically and thematically. Moreover, this dissertation also
examines the fact that avant-garde texts are often left out of the literary canon of
translated works, and in discussing the reasons for it argues for translation to become
more performative in nature, which would in turn give translators extra leeway in
tackling texts deemed untranslatable despite long-standing attitudes to the contrary.
Finally, this dissertation, in addition to considering translation as a transfer between the
source and the target languages, also examines translingualism and self-translation, both
of which are becoming more accepted by the literary community and embraced by
scholars as a field of study.

1
I
East Meets West: On Translation and the Dialogue of Polish and American Poets
2
INTRODUCTION

According to Three Percent, the oft-cited website and database produced by University
of Rochester graduate translation program and Open Letter, its in-house translation-
focused press, “only about 3% of all books published in the United States are works in
translation. […] And that 3% figure includes all books in translation—in terms of literary
fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7%” (Three Percent). While the
methodology employed by the researchers in Rochester leaves room for error,
1
the small
percentage nonetheless reflects the underappreciated role that translations—and presses
specializing in translation as well as translators themselves—play in the literary
marketplace of the United States. By comparison, the figure in France approaches “27%,
while in Spain it’s 28%, Turkey 40%, and Slovenia a whopping 70%” (Anderson).
However, what has become known as the “three percent problem” may not be a
problem at all. For one, the three percent still amounts to hundreds of titles. Secondly, the
idea that American presses should publish more books in translation is not the goal itself,
as evidenced by the comments made by five small publishers during a roundtable
discussion in an issue of Poets & Writers magazine, where they emphasized the
importance of getting more people to read translated literature.
2
Indeed, those who call
for translations to become—not unlike subtitled movies—more accepted argue that our

1
The Translation Database is now maintained by Publisher’s Weekly. The 2018 list
features 739 titles (as of January 29, 2019). However, I am personally familiar with
books released by at least one small press that have not been included. It’s highly
unlikely that those are the only titles that have been overlooked. Unlike in previous years,
the database is now searchable and updatable by anyone.

2
cf. Chamberlin, Jeremiah.
3
ignorance of foreign authors and literatures increases our cultural and political
homogeneity to the detriment of our ability to connect with others on emotional and
intellectual levels, even though it’s equally implausible to suggest that publishing and/or
reading more translated books alone would increase our cosmopolitanism and thus
silence those who see America and its people as insular. For that reason, I propose that
we shift focus and examine the fraught role that translators already play in the literary
marketplace of the U.S. I am particularly interested in the structures and mechanisms—
branding, appropriation, and cultural capitalization—that accompany literary translation,
especially from the so-called minor languages into American English.
That the U.S. market does not feature many translated titles is no secret to anyone
involved in the production and dissemination of literary works in the U.S., yet perhaps it
is understandable that a country as populous, not to mention geographically isolated, as
the U.S. would need not to search for literary talent abroad. In the words of Czech-French
author Milan Kundera, “large nations resist the Goethean idea of ‘world literature’
because their own literature seems to them sufficiently rich that they need take no interest
in what people write elsewhere” (37).
3
At the same time, literary critic and theorist Peter
Barry reminds us that large, developed countries, such as the U.S., perceive small or
minor countries “as a fascinating realm of the exotic, the mystical and the seductive. […]
the people there being anonymous masses, rather than individuals, their actions
determined by instinctive emotions (lust, terror, fury, etc.) rather than by choices or

3
Elsewhere in the same work Kundera quotes Goethe on the concept of ‘world
literature’: “National literature no longer means much these days, we are entering
Weltliteratur—world literature—and it is up to each of us to hasten this development”
(35-36). Goethe’s idea of world literature was born during the time that saw an increase
in international trade between, mostly, Western European countries.
4
decisions” (192-193).
4
We shall see later that most countries pay attention to the U.S.
book market, while the U.S., thanks to its global power and the reach of its cultural
producers, doesn’t have to show interest in the literatures of other countries. The ensuing
cultural colonizer/colonized binary can be disrupted in the process of translation, but only
if it encompasses linguistic or cultural reciprocity. Thus, translating a poem, say, from a
minor language into American English becomes less a mode of cultural appropriation
than of dialogue between languages and cultures if both parties benefit from it.
However, the process is much more lopsided, mainly because “Translation
relationships between minority and majority languages are rarely divorced from issues of
power and identity” (Cronic qtd. in Rubel and Rosman 6). Indeed, the noted translator
from Spanish, Edith Grossman, cites numerous examples of writers who saw their works
“adultured” when translators and editors chose not to preserve what made their language
or style unique, and standardized it accordingly instead.
5
No matter what approach the
translators take, their position is fraught with ethical and political considerations that go
beyond their choosing what and how to translate. As Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky
remind us, in their introduction to a volume of interviews with some of America’s most
noted translators:
the translator into English must remain ever aware of the power differential that
tends to subsume cultural difference and subordinate it to a globally uniform,

4
This quote is taken from Barry’s chapter on Postcolonial theory. In the context of this
work, I broaden the definition of the Orient to include all developing countries, including
those that might be referred to as the ‘Other Europe’ or ‘European Orient.’

5
Grossman talks about this in the context of Latin American writers being published in
Spain, but this applies to languages that aren’t ‘second cousins’ as well. For example,
when a dialect is translated into standard target language.
5
market-oriented monoculture. Weltliteratur is no longer (and may never have
been) politically, culturally, or ethically neutral. At the same time, the failure to
translate into English, the absence of translation, is clearly the most effective way
of all to consolidate the global monoculture and exclude those who write and read
in other languages from the far-reaching global conversation for which English is
increasingly the vehicle. (XVII)
How translators approach and perceive their activity is of paramount importance
to understanding its effect, especially since translation “is not simply an act of faithful
reproduction but, rather, a deliberate and conscious act of selection, assemblage,
structuration,” that, according to Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler, editors of
Translation and Power, puts translators on par with politicians and other agents whose
opinions and behaviors dictate what’s culturally fashionable or even acceptable (XXI).
In that sense, all literary translators can be divided into “ambassadors” or
“legislators,”
6
where the former aim to introduce foreign classics into a new cultural
realm, while the latter set their sights on upending the target literature by exposing it to
hitherto unknown formal and linguistic trends. Regardless which category they are
comfortable in, most English-language translators would reject the charge that they work
in the service of monoligualism, believing instead, given the ascendancy of English as
today’s international language, that they are helping make the literature of the globe
available to the masses everywhere. This perceived contribution to what Allen and
Bernofsky call “pluralism of world languages and cultures” fits the romantic paradigm
according to which writers and publishers and audiences are natural allies, but it does not,

6
cf. Jarniewicz, Jerzy. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are mine.
6
however, take the larger structural, especially market-driven forces, into consideration.
While poetry, or any other kind of niche literary production offering diminutive financial
rewards, may be somewhat immune to the pressures exerted upon its translators by the
market, it is nevertheless true that “Translators, like authors, are the product of social
structures and circumstances; translators, like authors, play a role in bolstering or
challenging those structures and continually altering the linguistic and narrative tools
brought to bear on them, as well as the attitudes and norms that produce them” (101). It is
equally true that translators and authors often do not share the same goals. For instance,
the “ambassador” translator chooses a work of value in the source culture, often to the
detriment of avant-garde or non-mainstream representatives, while the “legislator”
translator favors authors whose work stands a chance of upending the target literature.
While all authors would no doubt appreciate appearing in English, they often have little
say in how their work is presented and, consequently, received in the target language.
The fact that English has become today’s lingua franca further complicates the
already-fraught process of translating literature from a minor into a major language. In
their discussion of Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari famously identified ‘minor literature’ as
unrelated to a minor language, but rather as a literature “which a minority constructs
within a major language” (16). Although their theory applies to literatures and not to
languages as such, it is still useful to think of it while considering the cultural
appropriation that takes place during any cultural exchange, including translation,
between a superpower, such as the U.S., and a country where one of the so-called ‘less
commonly taught languages’ (LCTL) is spoken. In an ideal situation, arguably, where all
translators preferred to play the role of the “legislator” to that of the “ambassador,” most
7
of the texts chosen for translation would help lessen the domination that the major-
language agents wield over the minor-language texts and thus cultures. The hoped-for
heterogeneity seems to motivate Laurence Venuti, when he claims, in The Scandals of
Translation, to prefer “to translate foreign texts that possess minority status in their
cultures, a marginal position in their native canons—or that, in translation, can be useful
in minoritizing the standard dialect and dominant cultural forms in American English”
(10). This desire for heterogeneity, which comes by way of abandoning the vertical
structure of literary hierarchy in favor of a more lateral reading, is the first step en route
to a more pluralistic literary marketplace.
The goal, however, is not to dismantle the market’s mechanism or shame
translators for their work, but rather to highlight the far-reaching effects of the status quo.
Venuti is well aware that
Translation wields enormous power in constructing representations of foreign
cultures. The selection of foreign texts and the development of translation
strategies can establish peculiar domestic canons for foreign literatures, canons
that conform to domestic aesthetic values and therefore reveal exclusions and
admissions, centers and peripheries that deviate from those current in the foreign
language. (67)
Indeed, two of the three characteristics of minor literatures, i.e., their political and
collective values, get lost in, nomen omen, translation. What represents the political and
collective value in minor literatures, according to Deleuze and Guattari, serves as antidote
to disinterested individuality and an “enunciation that would belong to this or that
‘master’” in major literatures (17). In other words—and in line with our transnational
8
context—a compelling poem written in a minor language, once it is translated into a
major language such as English, loses its inherent collective value or, at best, is assigned
to serve a role that’s separate from what made it unique in the first place. Consequently,
the text loses its intended audience—what was its audience in its own context—and gains
an audience that will read it in certain, strictly prescribed ways. To avoid committing this
type of erasure of representation, some translators follow in the footsteps of Walter
Benjamin, who argued that translation is the only literary form “charged with the special
mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth
pangs of its own,” and choose to retain a level of foreignness in the translated text, even
at the expense of alienating their target audience (qtd. in Grossman 11).
What makes poetic dialogue and cross-cultural pollination possible represents a
case study of intertwined individual passion and ardor, institutional support, canon
building, and geo-political considerations, including cultural misreading and
appropriation. Be that as it may, the dialogue between Polish and American poets can
only be characterized as fruitful and enormously sustaining to poets in both countries.
Thanks to presses small and large, profit-driven, and nonprofit, authors such as Czesław
Miłosz (1911-2004), Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012),
Tadeusz Różewicz (1921-2014), and, more recently, Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021) have
played a role in the development of many American poets. That these poets represent
poetic super league goes without saying; what’s no less fascinating is how they came to
be revered in the U.S. and the so-called West in general.
9
CHAPTER 1:
CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ AND THE WEST

Translation that focuses on a group of poets from a particular country, especially those
whose aesthetic and philosophical views are congruent with those of readers in the target
language, inevitably leads to what Tejaswini Niranjana, in her study Siting Translation,
calls “fixing of colonized cultures” (3). By way of translating a particular country’s
authors, translators bestow a fixed identity upon the country and, oftentimes, its people in
general. This is exactly what we’ve seen in case of Polish poetry in the U.S. Thanks to
excellent and widespread translations of authors such as Miłosz, Herbert, Szymborska,
Różewicz and Zagajewski, Polish poetry seen through American eyes has become
synonymous with historical and philosophical exploration. There is no denying that the
poets wrote compelling work stemming from their experiences of Nazism and
Communism, for which they have been rightly celebrated, but the American audience has
been denied exposure to a slew of other Polish poets who did not write about WWII or
the Holocaust yet remain vital to Poland’s literary and cultural identity.
I bring up this point not to chastise the efforts of those who have made the
popularity of the so-called Polish School of Poetry represented by the above-mentioned
poets, some of whom, like Miłosz, seemed happy, at least at first, to play the role of the
bard assigned to them by their Western critics.
7
Instead, I believe that advocating on
behalf of other forms of poetic representation of Polish history and identity would not
diminish the stature of the aforementioned classics, but quite the opposite: it would allow

7
Miłosz wrote, “Perhaps I was born so that the ‘Eternal Slaves’ might speak through my
lips,” in Captive Mind (1953) (qtd. in Cavanagh 177).
10
for the possibility of Anglophone readers gaining a fuller grasp of Polish poetry—and the
country—in general.
Czesław Miłosz himself first became known in America not as a poet, but as a
translator. His groundbreaking anthology, entitled Postwar Polish Poetry (1965), remains
in print today. The root of its popularity among American poets stems from the political
fervent of the ‘60s, when the personal became political in a most defiant and public mode
possible. According to Clare Cavanagh, herself an award-winning translator of
contemporary Polish poetry:
‘The personal is the political,’ ran the slogan in the States—but the poetic was the
political, as we’ve seen, for the students who swarmed Warsaw streets in 1968
when Mickiewicz’s “Forefathers’ Eve” was shut down by the Soviet-backed
authorities. Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators” would have given their
eyeteeth for such a reception. Small wonder, then, that his American descendants
should be drawn at the moment to lyrics coming from a part of the world where
poets were capable, even posthumously, of disturbing the peace, inflaming the
young, and outraging the authorities. In the States, the 1960’s [sic] witnessed, not
surprisingly, the growing restlessness of American poets, chroniclers of the
personal unjustly confined, or so they felt, to the margins of a society that had
little use for the selves they lamented or extolled in their poems. (238)
While every poet presents a unique set of formal joys and challenges to his or her
translator, most poets become of interest to their translators and potential readers for the
subject matter/theme of their work. However, the issue of meaning or knowledge that can
be derived from a particular literary text is fraught with blindsides and linguistic double-
11
bottoms.
8
For American audiences, reading Polish poets’ treatment of their World War II
experiences has been illuminating, for it proved that poetry can in fact grapple with ideas
and worldly themes without the risk of losing its lyrical roots. “There are advantages,
needless to say, to coming from nations where poets are less highly rated. But to writers
reared on the Romantic myth of the poet-Christ, the fate of Eastern Europe’s modern
bards, besieged by history, persecuted by one repressive regime after another, must seem
seductive indeed” (Cavanagh 2). The meaning or meanings we derive from reading and
studying particular poets, however, are often less organic than born under specific
political and societal and artistic pressures indigenous to the poets themselves. A fitting
example is the famous poem by Czesław Miłosz, “Dedication,” written in the rubble of
Warsaw in 1945. Its best-known stanza, quoted by American poets as a creed of sorts,
reads:
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.
9
(ln. 14-21)

8
Cavanagh quotes Edward Said: “every new theoretical paradigm produces its own
brands of blindness as well as insight” (6).

9
Translated by Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass.

12
What appears to be a call to arms, however, is a cry for privacy and individualism clothed
in a poem that combines both an elegy and an argument. The poet Miłosz alludes to at the
beginning—“You whom I could not save”
10
— died in the Warsaw Uprising, an
insurgency that led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Poles and the near-complete
destruction of their capital, swept up by Romanticized language meant to appeal to
impressionable hearts and minds. The speaker of Miłosz’s poem, on the other hand,
comes across as shy and doubtful of his ability to communicate anything. His ironic
stance is aimed at all who trade in highfalutin rhetoric and do not take responsibility for
their words and deeds.
Likewise, we often misconstrue a particular poem’s meaning to reinforce our
preconceived narrative or label for the poet, the work, his or her culture, country, etc. The
British poet and critic, A. Alvarez, is an excellent example of a sympathizer who seems
aware of the pitfalls awaiting anyone who tries to pigeonhole a Polish or an Eastern
European poet. In his 1965 study on the subject, Under Pressure: The Writer in Society:
Eastern Europe and the U.S.A., Alvarez walks a fine line between a naïve observer and a
critic who senses that things are not as they seem. His observations pertaining to Eastern
European countries, gleaned during travels in the region, were meant to provide a
counterpoint to the propaganda emitted from both sides of the Iron Curtain at the time:
in Poland it is impossible to write even about the birds and the bees without
someone reading into it a political metaphor or allusion. Polish art runs
instinctively to allegory. It is all, whatever its appearance, written in what they
call ‘Aesopian language’, in which each detail can always be translated into terms

10
In the original Polish, the “you” is singular, which automatically disqualifies the poem
from the kind of reading that many American poets have subjected it to.
13
of something else—something relevant to the immediate Polish situation. (22)
But what if these alleged hidden meanings steer an outsider eager to see
something that may or may not be there toward misconstruing symbols and gestures
available only to the insiders? When later in the same study Alvarez discuses the work of
Zbigniew Herbert, pointing to what he sees as significant difference between the Polish
poet and his Western counterparts, he repeats a worn-out cliché: “they [Western poets]
too are deeply committed to the politics—or anti-politics-of protest. But where they
create worlds which are autonomous, internalized, complete inside their heads, Herbert’s
are continually exposed to the impersonal, external pressures of politics and history” (qtd.
in Quinn 110). For Alvarez, Herbert was a poet-messiah for the anti-Communist masses.
This characterization, ironically, echoes a passage from Kafka’s Diaries alluded to by
Milan Kundera in his discussion of literature and politics in small nations: “A small
nation, [Kafka] says, has great respect for its writers because they provide it with pride
‘in [the] face of the hostile surrounding world’; for a small nation, literature is ‘less a
matter of literary history’ than ‘a matter of the people’” (38).
11

Alvarez wasn’t the only Western critic to elevate Polish poetry because of its
potent cocktail of politics and lyricism. Most readers might find my objections
questionable, given that at least since Enlightenment
12
“the term ‘Eastern Europe’ has
become less a geographical designation and more a metaphor for backwardness and

11
To some extent, an analogous situation holds true in the U.S., where literary prizes are
a great example of how different factions support their own representatives; a quick look
at the judges reveals a connection between the winners and the former’s own aesthetics or
political leanings.

12
For an excellent discussion on the matter, see Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe:
The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994).
14
primitivism – ‘the Hinterland of the European Reich’, the dark other of the progressive
West” (Williams 23)—and now, thanks also to Alvarez and other critics, Polish poetry
has been hailed as an worthy example for others, not the least for a superpower like the
U.S., to emulate. Yet this good fortune shouldn’t come as a surprise, either, for it’s been
rather self-serving for American poets to read the Poles in a narrow way. As Justin Quinn
reminds us in Between Two fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry, “Cultures […]
take what they want and need from other cultures, without much regard for the
proprieties. Wordsworth has never been considered a great poet in France or Germany,
but Byron changed the course of European culture” (11).
Nonetheless, it’s surprising how many Western (not just American) poets fell
under the spell of Polish poetry. Here’s Seamus Heaney:
It seems to me that the ultimately powerful thing about the major poets of Russia
and Eastern Europe in our time is not their courageous, necessary and fiercely
local work of resistance to a totalitarian ideology but their verification of words
which poets in the west have become almost too embarrassed to utter: words like
faith, hope, justice, spirit, love, words which were abandoned as a precaution
against falsity and inflation but whose abandonment has resulted in a kind of
cultural and spiritual debilitation. (qtd. in Quinn 188)
The irony isn’t lost on critic Magdalena Kay, either: “major Eastern European poets make
it clear that the discourse of poetry must be separate from the discourse of politics, yet
their Western readers keep viewing them in political terms, and they serve as
(unwillingly) touchstones in the ongoing debate regarding politics and literature” (qtd. in
Quinn 189).
15
Writers resent being pigeonholed. What about translators? Some of them enjoy
wearing different hats. Miłosz certain did. While he himself characterized his own ‘native
realm’ as a backwater and perhaps became complicit in the cultural machinations of the
CIA during Cold War,
13
he desired, like a true “translator-ambassador,” to show the West
that there was another way to write poetry:
Opposing the West with my own specific [choices], taken from one country, I was
rather consistent. In my poetry and prose, and in translating young Polish poets
into English with a clear objective—to show: look, modern poetry t o o [sic] can
be written like this, quite different than yours. With good effects. I’ve received
letters from readers after the publication of poems by Białoszewski, [and] recently
a London critic Al Alvarez named Zbigniew Herbert as an example, a model for
young poets in English. (Szymański 88)
At the same time, Miłosz was proud of his work’s variegated form and content.
When Alvarez fell back on the same worn-out clichés while reviewing Miłosz’s The
Collected Poems, 1931-1987 in The New York Review of Books twenty years later,
characterizing the poet and his peers as Eastern or, at times, Central European moralists
who wrote “poetry that occupies the moral high ground yet is proof against ridicule and
impervious to pretension” (par. 10), Miłosz responded publicly. Alvarez’s otherwise
overwhelmingly positive review, full of insights acquired over decades of reading and

13
In his Harvard lectures, published as The Witness of Poetry (1983), Miłosz wrote,
“eastern Europe is a territory marked by ubi leones (where the lions are) the medieval
cartographer’s favoured [sic] designation for the unknown hinterland” (qtd. in Williams
21). Additionally, Quinn repeats a claim of Miłosz’s alleged involvement with the CIA,
when he quotes a source, “Milosz himself was deeply involved in the main CIA front
organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (in 1966 he was described as one of its
“top battery” by the liaising officer), and did not consider it a matter for remorse” (188).
16
study, would have made many a writer, especially an émigré like Miłosz, happy. Yet the
Polish poet replied to Alvarez in a letter of protest for having been depicted as exotic and
traumatized. The war events that Alvarez dwelled on so much instead of discussing the
poets, Miłosz argued, have added “an aura of nightmare to the vagueness that has always
characterized the presence of Central and Eastern European countries in the Western
imagination” (par. 3). Miłosz hit the nail on the head when he wrote that Western critics,
by way of attempting to provide a context for the writer’s work, invariably bring up
events that “distort the image of their author in the minds of readers and of literary critics,
by presenting him as more obsessed with historical events than he is” (par. 3). Of course,
Miłosz is more than aware of the various social-political pressures exerted upon
artworks—he admits as much in his letter (Miłosz wrote The Captive Mind, his brilliant
study of writers under the spell of totalitarian regimes, after all). Yet in calling for a more
individualized literary criticism that focuses on the poet and his artistic journey as much
as on historicizing his or her aesthetics, Miłosz argued that poetry “should not freeze,
magnetized by the sight of evil perpetrated in our lifetime,” then explained that he took
offense because Alvarez “seems to be impervious to the dynamics at the very core of any
art: after all, a poet repeatedly says farewell to his old selves and makes himself ready for
renewals” (par. 7). This appeal to individuality—as fitting the American ethos as it
gets—can also be construed as an appeal to see meaning, born in translation out of
generic contextualizing, as something heterogeneous.
Miłosz wanted to be seen and read as a poet of multitudes; instead, he found
himself labeled and categorized in ways that, he felt, flattened and robbed his work of its
thematically and sonically varied scope. While his initial years in America—he
17
immigrated from exile in France in 1961, when he accepted a position at UC Berkeley—
were spent in obscurity,
14
he eventually acquired a following among younger American
poets, many of whom wished to have the kind of societal gravitas enjoyed by Miłosz and
his Polish peers. This was indicative of the times. Even novelists of the mid-sixties, such
as Saul Bellow, longed for a greater embrace by their society. Having seen their works
commercialized, Bellow and other writers longed for the average reader— “the new
bureaucratic class which is having a good time, and the executive class, the newly
developed scientific group, the administrators, and all the rest of these have to be
entertained” (qtd. in Alvarez, Under Pressure, 141)—to turn to them. This sense of
wanting to belong to a particular place and time, and be the spokesperson, as it were,
seemed widespread.
Yet the Miłosz-Alvarez exchange disqualifies the idea that knowledge or meaning
can be fully transparent. Believing that he had written an enthusiastic review, Alvarez
likened Miłosz’s rebuke to a case of literary chest pounding, even though he clearly
employed ready-made schema in his review. The past, as experienced by Poles and
documented in their cultural output, was, in Alvarez’s eyes, the portal into Miłosz’s
work. However, such an ethnographical approach, Niranjana reminds us, stifles “any
awareness of the asymmetrical relations between colonizer and colonized that enabled the
growth of the discipline and provided the context for translation” (70). In other words, the
translators’—and by extension the publishers’ and the readers’—wish to understand the
Other, which they see as culturally unique but also primitive in terms of the knowledge
the Other possess versus the knowledge or meaning the Other can provide—is what

14
Miłosz wrote in Polish and published with an émigré press in Paris, since his works
were banned in Poland.
18
makes translation possible in the first place. The reverence with which most translators
treat their authors, at least initially, cannot be denied, but we must be equally cognizant of
the fact that our enthusiasm is often stems from a distorted and limited source. Realizing
its limitations, then reading and translating against the grain of received interpretations,
the translator can entertain the possibility of empowering himself/herself as well as the
author, not to mention, in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” of
the original as well as the target language. As Niranjana claims,
The drive to challenge hegemonic representations of the non-Western world need
not be seen as a wish to oppose the “true” other to the “false” one presented in
colonial discourse. Rather, since post-colonials already exist “in translation,” our
search should not be for origins or essences but for a richer complexity, a
complication of our notions of the “self,” a more densely textured understanding
of the who “we” are. It is here that translators can intervene to inscribe
heterogeneity, to warn against myths of purity, to show origins as always already
fissured. (186)
Ultimately, Miłosz-the-translator served both his countries well. “If in the States
he is perceived as first bringing Polish poetry to the attention of an English-speaking
audience, the inverse is true in Poland. Polish poets and critics alike credit him with
singlehandedly shifting the cultural axis away from France, […] and towards poetry
written in English” (Cavanagh 246). Ironically, those American poets and critics lauding
Miłosz and his work have failed to notice that his “expanded poetic diction was set in
motion in key ways by his intensive postwar reading of American and English poetry”
especially drawing “poetic lessons in wartime Warsaw from a young American who had
19
himself never witnessed war firsthand when he shaped his nightmare vision of a war-
shattered Europe in The Waste Land” (246-248). If Miłosz became the prime witness to
his times and events, even those he did not live through personally, be it because of
geographical distance or his choice not to participate in them directly, it was due to his
multitude of views and personas—Whitman-style, whom he adored—of a direct
participant and a reluctant chronicler. In Cavanagh’s words, he became “a master of
indirection, who learned to bear witness only by finding the proper distance, a distance he
found partly through his immersion in the Americans” (265). I would risk saying that the
label “master of indirection” applies to poets in general. That’s certainly the case with
several Polish poets who had been pushed aside to satisfy the West’s craving for more
Eastern European poetry of witness.

20
CHAPTER 2:
POLISH AND AMERICAN POETS IN CONVERSATION

There is no dying that Polish poetry occupies a special place in the United States.
Embraced by non-specialists and critics alike, the works of Czesław Miłosz, Wisława
Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, and Adam Zagajewski, among others, have played a role
in shaping the aesthetic of American poetry in the 20
th
century. Anecdotal evidence
suggests that today’s emerging poets also read the Polish masters, finding the historical
and moral context that marks much of Polish poetry available in English not obscure, but
germane. Indeed, the poets mentioned earlier represent only the tip of the iceberg and
belong to what has been dubbed the Polish School of Poetry; a poetry endowed with the
voice of individuals manhandled by history and grappling with the lyric poet’s ability to
make sense of the human condition vis-à-vis the world at large. When Edward Hirsch,
poet and President of the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation, says that
Miłosz “taught the American poet and American poetry itself to consider historical
categories, not the idea of history bowdlerized by Marxism, but something deeper and
more complex, more sustaining. The feeling that mankind is memory, historical memory,
and that our hope is historical” he isn’t voicing his own opinion alone (qtd. in Jackson).
Much of the Polish American poetic dialogue has its origin in the 1960s. Amidst
the social and political unrest, both in the U.S. and abroad, there was palpable interest in
writings and writers from the so-called Other Europe, as evidenced by the eponymous
series edited by Philip Roth for Penguin, or its poetry-focused sibling, Modern European
Poets, in the UK. In their introduction to an influential anthology, Another Republic: 17
21
European and South American Writers, which came out in 1976, editors Charles Simic
and Mark Strand locate the attraction of Eastern European poets for the American poets
in the former’s historical consciousness:
Such poets bear tragic witness to the social and political events of their time, and
their work is characterized by two modes of self-expression: the lyric, which
attempts to ennoble the suffering of those who are victimized or estranged; and
the comic, which recognizes the absurdity of individual destinies in the presence
of the great abstractions of history. (17-18)
Their misleading choice of words notwithstanding—the so-called “abstractions of
history” were anything but for those who had to endure them—the editors should be
applauded for drawing out attention to the lyric and the comic in Eastern European poets,
for humor was one of the most powerful ingredients for those poets. Former U.S. Poet
Laureate Robert Hass characterizes the attraction as centered on “their irony, their
minimalism, their use of parable, […] their dryness of tone, the passionate seriousness”
[qtd. in Haven 242].
When it comes to Polish poets specifically, no book has been met with greater
enthusiasm than Miłosz’s anthology, Postwar Polish Poetry, which has stood as the best
introduction to Polish poetry in English since it first appeared in 1965. Although he later
chaffed at what he saw as a reductionist reading of his work, especially in the testy
exchange with the British poet and critic A.A. Alvarez, under the label of ‘poetry of
witness’ to the near complete erasing of its other, no-less-prominent characteristics,
Miłosz himself first characterized Polish poets as being “better prepared to assume tasks
22
assigned to him by the human condition, than is his Western colleague” (xi).
15
The list of
American poets who’ve engaged with the work of Polish poets, privately or publically, is
long and thus impossible to cover under the limited scope of this study. Instead of
discussing as many examples as possible, let us take a closer look at a select few.
Although he might be characterized as a poet chiefly preoccupied with the
quotidian concerns of middle-class America, on one hand, and the natural world,
especially of his native Northern California, on the other, Robert Hass remains the
primary commentator on and interlocutor to Miłosz among American poets. Doubtless,
his having co-translated, with the author himself, most of Miłosz’s work available in
English, has granted him a privileged vantage point and insight into all things Miłosz, his
lack of the command of the Polish language notwithstanding. Here is how Hass explains
his evolving take on Miłosz in an essay collected in Twentieth Century Pleasures:
I had first been drawn to Milosz because I thought of him as a poet afflicted by
large and desperate questions, and that intuition had certainly been accurate. But
what I came to love about his work is that he is an erotic poet, and a poet of great
inclusiveness, that he includes a great deal without any loss of emotional
intensity, of lyric poetry’s steady attention to the circular dance of being and
suffering. (210)
The oft-repeated notion that all criticism is at its core autobiographical seems
supported by several of Hass’s own poems. The erotic and sensual motifs he singles out
in Miłosz’s work figure prominently in his work as well, especially in the two collections
marking his middle period: Human Wishes (1990) and Sun Under Wood (1998). Here are

15
I discussed the exchange in the preceding chapter.
23
the opening lines of “The Gardens of Warsaw,” from the later volume:
The rain loves the afternoon and the tall lime trees
just where the broad Avenue of Third of May
crosses Jerozolimska Street (it is 1922)
have carved green channels deep into summer. (ln. 1-4)
What begins as an exposition, a sensual sketch of what and where, quickly snowballs into
a stichic catalogue of Warsaw’s landmarks, personalities, and events. The sheer
inclusiveness relayed by the poet gives the poem its momentum and surprising turns and
twists, like the one toward the end, after dozens of lines, where suddenly the poem veers
towards “It is summer as I write, / Northern California. Clear air, a blazing sky in August,
/ bright shy Audubon’s warblers in the pines” (ln. 36-38). This superimposing of the two
locales helps to cement the friendship between the two poets; I am thinking of you over
there, but I’m really here, is what the poet is saying. Their shared landscape, that of the
Bay Area, becomes shored up by the landscape of Warsaw to which the Californian poet
lays claim as well. Thus, the poem acquires a new speaker, one who’s not only familiar
with the layout of Warsaw in the 1920s but can also appreciate the natural beauty of
California. Few lines later we learn that the speaker has “been reading an old travel
guide” he found in a used bookstore. The fact that the guidebook contains an inscription
that mentions Kraków is important, because it allows Hass to leap over time, over the
carnage awaiting the city of Warsaw preserved in the guidebook, the one the poet is
navigating for us, and connect with the poet in Kraków in present time.
The way the two realms—Poland and California—converge in Hass’s poem
compels one to think about Miłosz the person, stuck, as it were, between what he called
24
his native realm of Europe, with its art and history and calamities, and the seemingly
virginal characterization of California. Moreover, one could argue that Hass’s poem
echoes two of Miłosz’s: “In Warsaw” and “Return to Kraków 1880.” The first poem was
written in Warsaw, in 1945, when the poet-survivor asks, “How can I live in this country
/ Where the foot knocks against / The unburied bones of kin?” (ln. 28-30) Fearing that he
might become “a ritual mourner,” the speaker claims that it’s “madness to live without
joy.” Choosing life over death, he wishes to celebrate life and its variegated beauty. In the
second poem, an allegorical piece that celebrates Miłosz’s move to Kraków after years
spent in California, the poet writes:
So the Earth endures, in every petty matter
And in the lives of men, irreversible.
And it seems a relief. To win? To lose?
What for, if the world will forget us anyway. (ln. 25-28)
Just as the joy of living manifests itself in the veracity of Hass’s cataloging, the forgetting
hinted at in the last line of Miłosz’s poem finds its antidote in Hass’s poem as well: the
cataloging prevents the world of yesteryear from being forgotten, rescuing it from
remaining forever buried under the rubble of History. Note how the final three lines of
Hass’s poem wipe the slate clean, literally and figuratively: “The children clear the table,
fetch fleecy towels / for the beach. Congress in recess, guards sleeping / at the embassies.
Even the murderers are on vacation” (ln. 45-47). What’s most fascinating about this
ending is that the stage is being readied not for History to repeat itself, the way it does in
“In Warsaw,” but for having fun in the sun. The metaphor of the children clearing the
table, which puts a spin on Time’s merciless march forward, by returning to us our long-
25
lost innocence, places the speaker squarely on the side of those who believe in the
world’s ability to rejuvenate and right itself.
The topic of rejuvenation or renewal, or of return, has been at the forefront of
Miłosz’s work, no matter how steeped it became in mulling over historical horrors. In this
latest collection of essays, What Light Can Do, Robert Hass included two anecdotal
essays on Miłosz to commemorate the Pole’s eightieth and ninety-third birthdays. The
essays are standard fare of bibliographical details, the stuff most desired by newspaper
editors seeking a comment on a literary life, but in the first of the two Hass has this to say
on what was then Miłosz’s new poems:
Some of the latest poems have the old torment and the old sobriety. Those
emotions are at the core of his art. But some of them are uncharacteristically
serene, and many of them have a wonderful lightness and playfulness. And all of
them are shot through with the wonder at existence that is also at the core of his
art. […] [I]t’s hard for me to think of any recent book by a young poet—or
novelist, for that matter—that can match the freshness and urgency of these
poems. (184)
“Lightness and playfulness” are not two qualities that come to mind when we describe
Miłosz’s or, for that matter, Hass’s work. On the other hand, the capaciousness and
ability to genuinely wonder at the presence of order, equilibrium, and the encroaching
demise of Nature at the hand of human agency, is of paramount importance to Hass, too.
In his introduction to the Polish edition of Hass’s poems, poet and critic Paweł
Marcinkiewicz posits that Hass’s descriptions of Nature “uncover unsymbolic materiality
of language,” which has in effect, in Hass’s poems, become “an indivisible part of the
26
world depicted” therein (7). This is exactly what’s at the heart of Hass’s most celebrated
poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas.” Hass’s slowly unfolding meditations have gained a new
dimension as result of the poet’s reading of Miłosz, whose own work is steeped in
documenting various guises of the conflict between an individual and History.
Although Miłosz remains the chief conduit in the dialogue between Polish and
American poets, there is another Polish poet who’s partaken in it since the very
beginning. Zbigniew Herbert, whose first selected poems, translated by Miłosz and Peter
Dale Scott, appeared in the prestigious Penguin Modern European Poets series in 1968,
became the talk of the poetry town again a few years back. At the heart of the matter was
Ecco’s 2008 publication of his Collected Poems, which includes many poems translated
anew by another hand. The row was essentially about the quality of the new translations
by Alissa Valles vis-à-vis those done previously by John and Bogdana Carpenter, which
many consider unsurpassable. Although bitter at times, the discussion helped to bring
attention to the work of translation in the U.S. and the poet’s work in general. Today,
Herbert is best known for excavating ancient mythologies in search of meaning and
defenses strong enough to withstand the onslaught of political, ethical, and existential
concerns. Arguably, he is also very catholic when it comes to subject matter; a reader will
find in among his oeuvre meditations on love, war, politics, travels, objects, religion, and
the domestic and imagined lives we all live.
For a while, though, he was known to one young American poet, Larry Levis, as
the man who called for the City of Angels to be burned to the ground. The anecdote was
recounted by Levis, who drove the older poet around when Herbert served as a visiting
professor at what is now CSU Los Angeles, in his essay “Strange Days: Zbigniew
27
Herbert in Los Angeles,” first published in The Antioch Review and reprinted in
Blackbird:
“Sometimes,” said Zbigniew, “in communist countries . . . beauty is possible . . .
in . . . what do you call it? I forget.”
“Architecture?” The word suddenly seemed so grand somehow.
“Yes. Sometimes the state says, O.K. But here is not possible.”
“Well, sometimes it is.”
“But there is only one solution for L.A.”
“A solution? For L.A.? What?”
“Burn it,” said Zbigniew, as if the idea was clear to everyone, had been clear for
some time now, as if the wholesale torching of everything from Pomona to
Hermosa Beach was already on the drawing boards of urban planners. I looked
over to see if he was merely kidding, but he kept staring out the window. Perhaps
I had not heard him correctly.
The thing is, of course, that Levis had heard him—and continued to hear it for, it seems,
the rest of his life—just fine. He even wrote a poem to commemorate their encounter.
Here’s the opening section of “For Zbigniew Herbert, Summer, 1971, Los Angeles,”
found on page 60 in The Selected Levis: Revised Edition: “No matter how hard I listen,
the wind speaks / One syllable, which has no comfort in it— / Only a rasping of air
through the dead elm” (ln. 1-3). What is the one syllable that Levis refers to? Is it a sonic
image, harking back to the essay and its “scrawny trees” somewhere in Monterey Park?
The wind seems both meditative and rueful, embodying a mind and a body that have seen
too much to be anything but stoic. Levis remembers Herbert as a kind man who didn’t
28
mince words.
Maybe this wind was what he heard in 1971.
Maybe I have raised a dead man into this air,
And now I will have to bury him inside my body,
And breathe him in, and do nothing but listen—
Until I hear the black blood rushing over
The stone of my skull, and believe it is music. (ln. 19-24)
The last line suggests this poem is about processing of information and experiences. The
stone comes alive because it is being worked on by the craftsman’s skilled hands; by
putting himself in the proverbial shoes of the Other, the way a sculpture embodies the
thoughts and feelings and emotions of the sculptor, Larry Levis insists on the importance
of writing about what’s painful and tragic. After all, the lonesome wind is music,
however melancholy or withdrawn it may seem, not unlike the words of Herbert cut off
from his European roots during his stay in Los Angeles. He will never embody Herbert’s
world, that’s what he means by acknowledging “some things are not possible on the
earth,” but his statement is generative rather than defeatist is nature. It is clear to Levis
that poems, even harrowing ones, must be written.
Had Levis read Herbert’s “Pebble” by then? The poem is famous for elevating
and praising the physicality of objects and things, especially in the face of man-made
interventions, including war. “The pebble / is a perfect create,” the poem begins, in
Miłosz and Scott’s translation, because, we are told, it is “mindful of its limits // filled
exactly / with a pebble meaning” (ln. 1-2, 4-6). The passivity and coldness of the pebble
is what gives it strength; its perfection a saving grace:
29
I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth (ln. 11-14)
Is Herbert’s “false warmth” the same as Levis’s “black blood”? It would in fact seem so.
The American poet, whose many poems can be called conversational in tone and style,
what with their long, pregnant with meaning lines, believes in poetry’s salutary aim (to
use Miłosz’s phrase). At the end of the poem dedicated to Herbert, he writes about poetry
that brings back the dead who watch over us. It is their mission to do so “Until their
hands feel like glass on the page, / And snow collects in the blind eyes of statues” (ln. 28-
19). Thus, writing becomes (re)generative and, effectively, sensual; it allows us to touch,
see, feel—and, hopefully, understand. By animating the stone—even the tiniest of
pebbles—the poet finds a way forward toward meaning.
Another American poet whose practice has its roots deep in the perennial search
for meaning is Jane Hirshfield. Her poems defy laborious explication. Spending time with
them, rotating them ever slightly from side to side or turning them upside down, we
notice that their strength stems from the way their parts orbit each other while
continuously either snapping into or falling out of place. Within and without, what holds
them together, then, is the poet’s attention. When Hirshfield writes in Ten Windows, her
excellent latest poetics treatise, “Poetry’s generative power, then, lies not in its
“message” or “meaning,” nor in any simple recording of something external to its own
essence. It resides within the palace of its own world-embedded, intertwining existence,”
she doesn’t sound like a poet who might have learned from and supported Polish poetry
30
in the U.S., but that’s exactly the case. Long pigeonholed as a Zen poet, Hirshfield not
only observes and contemplates rigorously, but also travels corporally and intellectually,
mapping out the inner-outer highway of our lives and the world we live in. Her
conversation with Polish poets stretches at least back to 1988, the year Hirshfield’s
second volume of poems Of Gravity and Angels came out.
The collection, which was recognized with a California Book Award for Poetry,
includes a poem that shows Hirshfield’s involvement with the world at its most
historically minded. “For the Women of Poland: December 1981” is inspired by the
imposition of Martial Law in Poland on December 13, 1981. Formally speaking, the
poem resembles an ekphrastic rendition of an image that had come to represent daily
reality of living under Communism in Eastern Europe. Writing of women “at the crossing
of two streets, / where even the leaves have turned / accomplices of the cold,” (ln. 2-4)
Hirshfield sympathizes with lives suspended because of political and economic upheaval.
She also, aptly, erases the division between the women as homemakers standing in long
lines to buy food and women as citizens yearning for freedom from oppression, as when
she writes “Everywhere there are lines, / people hoping for butter, or freedom, / or meat”
(ln. 11-13). As the single-stanza poem progresses down the page, its lines stop and go,
just like those streetlights at the intersection. The women in the poem then, who’ve
“made up [their] minds / to stay stubbornly on,” (ln. 26-27) become heroines to which the
poet pays an homage of poetry and love. In that sense, Hirshfield becomes a poet of
witness not unlike her Polish counterparts: the poem on the page embodies the protest
going on in real time halfway around the world. While “For the Women of Poland:
December 1981)” didn’t make it into Czesław Miłosz’s personal anthology of
31
international poetry, called A Book of Luminous Things—that honor belongs to “A
Story,” also included in Of Gravity and Angels—it is the poem that brought Miłosz and
Hirshfield together. The two had met at a group gathering a year earlier, but it was this
volume’s publication that precipitated a call from Miłosz and a subsequent invitation to
dinner. (qtd. in a private email) Consequently, it won’t seem like a stretch to state that
personal friendship has always played a role that was equal if not larger in developing a
conversation between poets of various languages and traditions.
In her recent American Poetry Review essay, “Poetry Is a Kind of Lying, or, Tell
All the Truth But Tell It Slant,” Hirshfield comments on a poem by Anna Świrszczyńska
(known in English as Anna Swir) as a way of explicating her own thoughts about the so-
called poems of witness that have played such an important role in the conversation
between Polish and American poets. The poem in question, which provides a glimpse
into the dire conditions suffered by civilians during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in which
Świrszczyńska took part as a military nurse, becomes for Hirshfield a prime example of a
poem of witness that, contrary to what we see in many political poems today that strive to
be all-encompassing, “registers itself in individual life and in subjective feeling”:
“The Child Lives One More Hour”
i.m. Stanisława Świersczyńska
The child is two months old.
The doctor says:
without milk, the child will die.

Mother wanders all day through basements
to the other side of town.
32
In Czerniaków
a baker has a cow.
Mother crawls on her stomach
among rubble, mud, corpses.

She brings back three spoons of milk.
The child lives
one more hour.
Hirshfield singles out this poem—translated by me and included in Building the
Barricade and Other Poems of Anna Swir—which is representative of Świrszczyńska’s
surgically precise and nearly completely unexplained war poems, for its “slant-sided
funnel” design:
We don’t know whose the child is—the Mother of this poem is Anna Swir’s
mother, and probably not the infant’s; if it’s one of Anna’s own children, or
someone else’s, we’re simply not told. It is someone’s baby, anyone’s baby,
everyone’s. The child—who may or may not survive, we aren’t told what happens
beyond that one hour’s extension— is nameless, is future, is hunger that is not
stopped by the circumstances it finds itself in. We feel the unspoken in every
word of this poem, whose hard grip on purely objective description signals the
depth of its feeling. […] By that side-by-side, unsparing setting of the pans of the
moment, this poem’s meaning is made: it says exactly and only what it says and
nothing more. It says “See how the unbearable is borne”.” (14)
Not only does the poem contain a multitude of emotions in its depictions of war and
33
motherhood, Hirshfield seems to be arguing, but it also succeeds in combining the micro
and macro perspectives that make it universal without being rhetorically heavy handed.
“The Child Lives One More Hour” isn’t Świrszczyńska’s only poem that
Hirshfield explicates en route to praising it for its restraint. In her latest collection of
essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, she also discusses
“Poetry Reading,” whose chief lesson resides in its direct description of “the bleakness of
fundamentally unanswered able questions” (125). Indeed, when she commends
Świrszczyńska for her refusal of “any idealization of poetic wisdom,” she is only a stone
throw’s away from highlighting what makes Wisława Szymborska’s work so appealing.
By situating Szymborska among Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Larkin—“fellow
practitioners of the school of chilled verse”—Hirshfield reminds us that “surface
coldness, when it appears in what is also good poetry, almost invariably is drawn over
something unbearable—whether heat, grief, hope, or despair” (166). Here’s the final
stanza of Szymborska’s “Some People,” as translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław
Barańczak:
Something else will happen, only where and what.
Someone will come at them, only when and who,
In how many shapes, with what intentions.
If he has a choice,
Maybe he won’t be the enemy
And will leave them to some sort of life. (ln. 21-26)
What strikes Hirshfield as pivotal in this final stanza, which is preceded, one might add,
by an enumerating of various angles of vision that’s become synonymous with the Nobel
34
Laureate’s style, is the slight grammatical change. The line “If he has a choice” brings
back human agency which in turn serves as a reminder that “the bedrock decision to harm
or not harm rests always in individual hands, and cannot be disguised as something
generic or collective.” More importantly, in the case of the so-called Polish School of
Poetry, Hirshfield locates the poem’s main lesson for other poets in its subtle “shifting in
and out of a morally based stance.” Moreover, it is thanks to her restraint—“by quick and
close to invisible sleights of hand”—that Szymborska succeeds and that is “what marks
this the work of a poet, not a jurist” (168).
In addition to Świrszczyńska, Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, perhaps even
Tadeusz Różewicz, whose own classic “In the Middle of Life” resembles the ending of
the poem discussed above, and Anna Kamieńska, with whom Jane Hirshfield enters into
direct dialogue in her poem “This Much is Promised,” it is really Czesław Miłosz, her
late friend and Bay Area neighbor, that Hirshfield converses with poetically time and
again. Poems such as “Vilnius” or “If Truth is the Lure, Humans are Fishes,” or “The
Bell Zygmunt” (eulogizing Miłosz’s second wife Carol) employ frequencies and registers
mastered by the older poet. Another eulogy, “Letter to C.,” which Hirshfield began
writing the day she learned of his passing and included in her 2006 collection After,
recalls Miłosz’s own letter-poems to his departed friends. Here is the second of the
poem’s five parts:
II.

Living memory holds the dead as a hand holds water,
As a dry window keeps the traces of rain.
And still we speak.
35

I write in these lines what I hear myself saying to others—

that you wanted most, it seemed, to preserve
the dresses and potions of women, an unmetaphysical spider and cat.
Against the age’s erasures
praising a blacksmith’s forge, a dish of olives set on a table. (ln. 10-17)
The fragment shows Hirshfield’s deep familiarity with Miłosz’s oeuvre and his views of
the world. Yet by alluding to specific poems—for instance, “Blacksmith’s Shop” in the
final line—Hirshfield emerges from the shadow of the late master, who, like herself now,
never tired of saying “I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: / To glorify things
just because they are” (trans. Robert Hass, ln. 13-14). In this way, Hirshfield writes
herself into a tradition that has helped form her own poetic style as much as her studying
the Japanese poets has. The fellowship of poets extended from the art they shared and
culminated in their personal relationship. Was it his voracious appetite for poetry and the
things of this world that most intrigued her? Or was it something related, mainly his
“undiminished amazement— / no matter the houses had vanished, the curve of the river
remained” (ln. 52-53).
That Miłosz had suffered the twentieth century’s worst goes without saying—he
lived between 1911 and 2004—but what’s equally true is that he never stopped marveling
at the world’s variegated beauty, too. “Your immutable “Why?” remained,” the poet
writes in the poem’s final section, “like Job’s, unanswered. / And still in the halls of
silence it echoes again” (ln. 68-69). By universalizing the ‘why’ Hirshfield signals her
36
desire to answer it. In another poem, one of the “Fifteen Pebbles” gathered in the 2011
volume Come, Thief, called Memorial, she writes “When hearing went, you spoke more. /
A kindness. // Now I must” (ln. 1-2). And she has, having learned from Polish poets how
not to lose one’s sense of wonder in the face of omnipresent horror. Equally grounded
and fleeting, her perceptive poems work best when we give them ample room to breathe.
That we get to drink from the same spring as she does owes to the fact that her poems are
not muscled into being. At the risk of shooting itself in the foot and becoming a version
of the one-trick pony enterprise, much of contemporary verse relies on the element of
surprise to move the audience, but a Hirshfield poem draws its energy chiefly from
uncertainty. Neither here nor there, yet groping for the proverbial switch in the dark, the
poet assembles her poems with tiny, carefully chosen pieces. There are no gotcha
moments. We are always two steps behind the poet who seems a step or two behind
herself. The slow uncovering of an idea or an image, not to mention sound or syntax,
heightens our senses, tuning us in to the intricacies of existence.
Miłosz’s own stance toward American poetry was rather ambivalent. While he
read deeply Robinson Jeffers’s work, for instance, disagreeing with his hostility to
society under the guise of “a heroic ‘inhumanism” (The Witness of Poetry 15), or praised
Jane Hirshfield, stating outright that her poem “A Story” was written by “a person whom
I number among my friends,” he was less than forgiving, at least during the first years of
his Californian exile, toward others, especially the Beats and those who came to be
known, for better or worse, as Confessional poets, despite or because of his belief that
that “The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person”
(“Ars Poetica?”). This embracing of multitude did not cancel out his belief in God, which
37
he came to profess deeply toward the end of his life, or his disdain for art smacking of
nihilism, exemplified by his sharp rebuttals of Różewicz and Philip Larkin. He admired
and translated Walt Whitman but also believed it, as Hirshfield states in “Letter to C.” to
be a “cause of the First World War.” The job of the poet, in other words, was not to give
another man a reason to weep (as he states, more or less exactly, in one of the poems
gathered in his final volume Second Space).
Not surprising perhaps, it was Robert Lowell and his hysterics that Miłosz ever
the Stoic found disdainful. A late poem, in which he conjures up the ghost of the
American master, speaks volumes of Miłosz’s feelings toward Confessional poetry,
which dominated the poetry scene during his first years in California. Here’s the poem,
“To Robert Lowell,” in translation by the author and Robert Hass:
I had no right to talk of you that way,
Robert. An émigré’s envy
Must have prompted me to mock
Your long depressions, weeks of terror.
Presumed vacations in the safety of the wards.
It was not from pride in my normalcy.
Insanity, I knew, was insinuating itself
In a thin thread into my very being
And only waited for my permission
To carry me into its murky regions.
And I was watchful. Like a lame man,
I used to walk upright to hide my affliction.
38
You didn’t have to. For you it was permitted.
Not for me, a refugee on this continent
Where so many newcomers vanished without a trace.
Forgive me my mistake. Your will was of no use
Against an illness that held you like a stigma.
And beneath my anger was the vanity,
Unjustifiable, of the humiliated. A bit belated,
I write to you across what separates us:
Gestures, conventions, idioms, mores.
What makes this poem memorable, in my view, is not its artistry, although it shows
Miłosz’s aim to speak plainly, “like a tree or a cloud,”; rather, the poem, published in a
collection that came out in the year 2000, uncovers for us how Miłosz really felt about his
fellow American poets and his surroundings. Though he had come to admire much of
America, he remained an outsider to be denied his first taste of literary success until he
was way into his sixties. By asking for forgiveness, Miłosz breaks down the barriers of
foreign or unseemly “Gestures, conventions, idioms, mores.” The universal gesture
speaks volumes of acceptance, on one hand, and desire to make amends with, on the
other, of human imperfections, not the least his own.
So far, I have discussed intellectual and artistic kinship between Polish and
American poets, although it is certainly true that Miłosz and Hass were friends and
collaborators in equal measure. Still, in terms of a dialogue that’s fully realized in verse,
we need to look to Edward Hirsch and Adam Zagajewski. How the two poets got to be
friends has everything to do with the expansion of the creative writing program system in
39
American colleges and universities. In the mid-1980s, when Hirsch was teaching at
University of Houston, he invited the Polish poet, who by then had been living an émigré
existence in a Parisian suburb for five years or so, to become a visiting professor at
Houston. For the next seventeen years, even after Hirsch had left to preside over the
Guggenheim Foundation, Zagajewski spent every spring semester in Houston, teaching
young American poets how to read the great European poets like Miłosz, Rilke, and
Benn. His friendship with Hirsch eventually extended to organizing an annual summer
seminar in Kraków, where American poets, including Houston’s MFA students, could
discuss poetry and one another’s work.
Houston, American’s fourth largest metropolis, does not resemble Kraków, Paris,
or any other of the European cities that have come to exemplify the poet’s cultural
heritage. That Zagajewski’s felt displaced there, even though American poets have
embraced him as one of their own, especially since his standing in Poland kept being
contested by younger Polish poets, many of whom saw his work—and him—as elitist and
aloof because he wrote about Vermeer rather than the quotidian that interested them,
shouldn’t surprise anyone. The poem “Houston, 6 p.m.,” from his 1999 volume
Mysticism for Beginners, translated by Clare Cavanagh, highlights some of the aches and
anxieties the poet suffered at the time. Here are the first two of the poem’s ten quatrains:
Europe already sleeps beneath a coarse plaid of borders
and ancient hatreds: France nestled
up to Germany, Bosnia in Serbia’s arms,
lonely Sicily in azure seas.

40
It’s early evening here, the lamp is lit
and the dark sun swiftly fades.
I’m alone, I read a little, think a little,
listen to a little music. (ln. 1-8)
The changing of the scale employed in these stanzas is standard of Zagajewski and, in
fact, many Polish poets. Man-handled by History, they strive to recapture the
individualism of a single human being, however fleeting it might seem. The contrasts
continue in the images themselves: not only do we have Europe vs. I, but light vs.
darkness, being alone vs. in the company of books or art. “I’m where there’s friendship,”
writes Zagajewski, “but no friends” (ln. 9-10). What about Hirsch and others? Clearly,
what the Polish poet aims for is to uncover the manufactured nature of so much of what
America has to offer. His American friendships might be shallow, but it is his American
existence in general that he finds superficial the most. “I’m alone,” he tells us, “because
Europe is sleeping” (ln. 13). The poem then opens up again, turning into an ars poetica of
sorts. Exalting poetry’s powers to move and save from oblivion our mortal selves,
Zagajewski posits himself within its spiritual realm at the expense of his impoverished
surroundings. A poem might emerge, but it won’t offer any enchantment or nourishment;
it will be just another thing that anyone can—true to America’s ways—just claim for
himself. Answering his own rhetorical question, the poet clearly cannot gaze calmly at
the Earth “like the perfect astronaut” (ln. 32). He is adrift on the high seas, away from his
North Star: Europe.
Later, Edward Hirsch traded spots with Zagajewski and wrote a poem that mirrors
the latter’s in a number of ways. In “Kraków, Six A.M.,” which he dedicates to the Polish
41
poet, Hirsch employs nearly identical form and tone. The quatrains and melancholic
ruminating echo across times zones—Hirsch’s poem is set in the morning—and
continents. Here are the opening three quatrains, quoted from his selected volume The
Living Fire:
I sit in the corner of the town square
and let the ancient city move through me.
I sip a cup of coffee, write a little,
and watch an old woman sweeping the stairs.

Poland is waking up now: blackbirds patrol
the cobblestones, nuns rush by in habits,
and the clock tower strikes six times.
Day breaks into the night’s reverie.

The morning is as fresh and clean
as a butcher’s apron hanging in the shop.
Now it is pressed and white, but soon
it will be spotted with blood. (ln. 1-12)
In contrast to the Houston poem, here we see a scale that is much more human, so to
speak. The calm of the poem’s opening sets up a scene of tranquility and harmony, with
the speaker’s taking it all in while the city is stirring into life all around him. The scene
doesn’t get disturbed until the third quatrain and the ominous image of a butcher’s apron,
which calls to mind several Charles Simic’s poems, incidentally. We could also argue
42
that there is a bit of unease in the speaker’s voice—after all, he is jetlagged. Indeed, what
must be sleep deprivation and tiredness makes him feel weary and less confident in the
state of the world:
Europe is waking up, but America
is going to sleep, a gangly teenager
sprawled out on a comfortable bed.
He has large hands and feet

and his dreams are innocent and bloodthirsty.
I want to throw a blanket over his shoulders
and tuck him in again, like a child
now that his sleep is no longer untroubled. (ln. 13-20)
Comparing America to a teenager, boisterous and prone to irrational action, has a lot to
do with politics of the Bush administration. The poem literally shatters as we are reading
it. This is post-9/11 America, where the sense of calm and tranquility, not to mention
openness and collaboration, has been replaced by xenophobia, narrow-mindedness, and
warmongering. Like the Polish poet, Hirsch too turns to poetry in search of solace and
wisdom and companionship, as when he writes, “I am alone here in the Old World, /
where poetry matters, old hatreds seethe, / and history wears a crown of thorns” (ln. 21-
23). The fact of the two poets talking to each other across the time and space—Hirsch’s
poems appeared over half a dozen years after Zagajewski, in the 2008 volume Special
Orders—reestablishes for us, their readers, a connection as well. If they are talking to
each other, then so can we. “Poetry, too, seeks a place in the world— / feasting on
43
darkness but needling light,” (ln. 33-34) and so do we. Eventually, the two poems come
together in their endings. Here is final quatrain of Zagajewski’s Houston poem:
Europe is already sleeping. Night’s animals,
mournful and rapacious,
move in for the kill.
Soon America will be sleeping, too. (ln. 36-40)
And the ending of Hirsch’s Kraków poem:
Europe is going to work now—
look at those two businessmen hurrying
past the statue of the national bard—
as her younger brother sleeps

on the other side of the ocean,
innocent and violent, dreaming of glory. (ln. 37-42)
The fact that Hirsch chooses to break the stanzaic patter is telling—and ominous.
America, that pimpled teenager, might be sleeping, but her dreams are no less
bloodthirsty and equating violence with glory. What about Europe? Are the “animals” in
Zagajewski’s poem supposed to symbolize a few bad apples, the rogue elements that
remain hidden during daytime, operating as they do in the shadows? Hirsch seems to
suggest that Europe is just going about its business, which is exactly what he wryly
observes from his perch in the Market Square. The open-endedness of both poems is
precisely what, I would argue, allows for the conversation, both poetic and intellectual,
even political, to flourish. The two poets, unlike the politicians of then and now, don’t
44
force their views upon us.
In a foreword—entitled “To the Polish reader”—to the 2015 editions of his own
poems translated and published in Poland, Edward Hirsch states that what has always
attracted him to Polish poets was their, in my loose translation, “duty toward history, but
also their search for something outside of history, [something] metaphysical. Perhaps the
strongest motive of their work is the desire to break through history in order to praise the
secrets hidden deep inside (and outside its borders) the mutilated world” (6). The last
phrase recalls Adam Zagajewski’s famous poem, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.”
Did Hirsch have it in mind while addressing Polish readers, or did the Polish translator of
his foreword associate the original with the title of Zagajewski’s poem as translated by
Clare Cavanagh? Meanwhile, Zagajewski’s poem, which I’m quoting here in full, is a
perfect example of what Hirsch has come to admire in Polish poetry, and which, one
might argue, he’s tried to apply to his own work:
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
45
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
The poem appeared on the final page of The New Yorker’s first post-9/11 issue; it was the
only poem included therein. While Zagajewski had written it years before, it has since
become the most popular ‘Polish’ poem, reproduced and posted in various places and in
numerous times, including by non-poets. As a poem that blends together what Hirsch is
talking about, mainly historical reckoning, ecstasy, irony, it is a perfect example for
anyone seeking meaning and solace following a tragedy.
Given the popularity of Polish poets in America, however, it wouldn’t be
surprising to find out that some American poets have responded to their Polish colleagues
by way of appropriating, on purpose or subconsciously, their work. One such poem was
written by poet and critic Robert Archambeau. Its title, “Misremembering Szymborska,”
suggests that the poem that Szymborska had written, “The End and the Beginning,” had
entered the circuitry of this poet’s poetic preoccupations, which in turn led him to
46
misremember its fragments. In other words, by allowing Szymborska’s poem to enter his
bloodstream, Archambeau has been able to appropriate it and make it his own. This is
how he explains the origins of his own ‘Szymborska poem’:
I’d read the poem, “The End and the Beginning” in Clare Cavanagh’s translation
in The New Republic, and loved it immediately. In the weeks that followed, I’d
run the poems lines and images through my mind, or talk about them to friends,
urging them to have a look at Szymborska's work. A few months later, when the
book containing the poem came out, I rushed down to the Seminary Co-Op
Bookstore by the University of Chicago to get a copy. On the train back home, I
read the poem again, and realized I’d remembered it incorrectly, in essence
making my own poem out of the poem Szymborska had written. (par. 2)
Contrary to what one might see as misappropriating the Nobel Laureate’s work,
this is an example of the highest form of homage. Szymborska’s poem had become so
ingrained in Archambeau’s poetic vocabulary that its lines served as springboards for his
own work, which in turn illuminates the uncanny way in which poets can talk to each
other through their work without quite realizing the extent and profundity of the dialogue.
Szymborska’s poem, with its oft-quoted opening “After every war / someone has to tidy
up. / Things won’t pick / themselves up, after all” (ln. 1-4), carries out in each of his
remaining ten stanzas the process of rebuilding splendidly. Every time the poet mentions
rubble, or a wall needed propping up or a bridge in need of rebuilding, she also illustrates
her writing process, the way in which most of her poems work by accretion. Likewise,
Archambeau’s response works by accretion, at first at least, before becoming an example
of what he calls “a kind of sampling-plus-morphing of the original.” Having cataloged
47
the highlights of Szymborska’s poem in the first half of his poem, he takes a turn:
[…] I read it, there, but
remembered it differently. Somehow

in the tired and task-bound wearied mind those final,
placid, resting limbs

became a body in the earth, not on it,
a corn stalk growing from that place in which it lay.

I see your poem now, again. “The End and the Beginning,”
and know I've carried my mistake for months.

That soldier I remembered—that’s what he must have been,
that body under earth—he would have dreamed

of days spent gawking, on a hillside, at the clouds.
Perhaps he fought for just such days, that he should have them, perhaps

that dream is where he lingers even now.
Perhaps he can lie beneath your dreamer, a rightness, there,

each in his way the other’s end. Perhaps, too,
48
we could say my poem lies in the grass of your poem’s dreaming,

forgetful, pulls at cornstalks, gawks at sky.
Whereas Szymborska’s poem ends on a note of conciliation, embedded in the image of
someone lying in the grass and gawking at clouds, Archambeau’s misremembering
suggests a kind of uncovering that takes place where her poem ends and his begins.
Neither an extension nor a contradiction of the Polish poet’s poem, “Misremembering
Szymborska” opens new possibilities in how we read the original poem. The American
poet breathes new life into the poem by misconstruing, every so slightly, its original
images, suggesting, in the end, how slippery the process of memory, especially when it
comes to the hinted-at by Szymborska causes and effects of war, can really be. Rather
than lazing around, as Archambeau would have it, his poem makes Szymborska’s
original edgier. The added urgency, in turn, helps to ensure that the dialogue, by way of
creating a new poem that resides at the confluence of the original and its memory carried
around by the younger poet, continues.
While the Polish American dialogue remains variegated in form and content, there
is no denying that the figure and work of Czesław Miłosz casts the longest shadow of any
agents involved. This might be a good problem to have; having a following in both
Poland and the U.S. has allowed Miłosz to not only contribute to the dialogue but also
influence its trajectory. What’s more surprising, though, is learning that the Polish poet
remains relevant in the U.S. today. For proof, one needs look no further than Stephen
Burt’s This Poem is You anthology. This book, assembled by a leading critic of his
generation and published by a venerated American academic press, is subtitled, 60
49
Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them. Miłosz has been called ‘an
American poet’ before, but the fact that his poem is the only translation featured in the
book speaks volumes about his stature in the U.S. and, by extension, the influence his
work may have had on his American colleagues.
In his Introduction, while speaking to his motivations behind choosing these
rather than other sixty poems, Burt mentions two criteria, which more or less come down
to: individual vision and formal strangeness. The first of them seems to apply to Miłosz’s
poem “Incantation”; here is how Burt explains his first category, “First, these poems let
us imagine someone else’s interior life, almost as if it were or could have been ours: they
project a voice and embody a compelling or attractive individual consciousness, which
we can then hear, or speak, or sing, or try on, or try out, as if it were our own” (3-4).
The Harvard critic doesn’t mention Miłosz anywhere in his extensive
introduction, even though he discusses American poetry’s reach into issues of, among
others, identity, sexual orientation, and pedigree. It is in the essay in which he discusses
Miłosz’s poem, in translation by Miłosz and Robert Pinsky, that Burt hits the nail on the
head, when he writes that “[The poem] is a link at once between the United States and
Eastern European literature, between the poetry of the 1960s and that of the 1990s and
afterward, between two very public poets, and (not least) between ancient hopes and
contemporary beliefs about what poetry can do” (62). With its memorable opening line
“Human reason is beautiful and invincible” and ensuing identification of human reason
with, by extension, poetry, since that’s how the poet chooses to think aloud, as a bulwark
against every form of oppression, from racism to totalitarianism, in “Incantation” Miłosz
equates himself with someone whom Burt calls “a self-conscious bearer of universals”
50
(65). Ultimately, however, Burt rightly celebrates Miłosz and his poem not for its
idiosyncratic version of what’s been called “poetry of witness,” but for the ability to
“open up a space for the unpredictably individual imagination, a space where neither he
nor anyone else would let history or society tell us what to make or do” (66). This appeal
to individualism couldn’t be more American. While calling the Polish poet “an American
poet” may be an exaggeration—for one, Miłosz never wrote in English, a standard
demarcation in matters of literary identification—including him in This Poem is For You
is not.
According to Charles Simic, who himself straddles the two realms, Europe and
America, so well, writing in Metaphysician in the Dark, “In his journals, [Miłosz]
compliments American poets on their first-rate technique, but complains that they have
nothing to write about in their tedious everydayness, free of historical upheavals. If
there’s no sense of history, he argues, there’s no sense of the tragic, which is born of the
experience of collective misery” (140). This judgment seems unfair, to say the least, and
with time Miłosz came to see the “tedious everydayness” as pregnant with meaning,
which is why he wrote two poems to Robert Lowell, chastising him for his confessional
mode in the first, then apologizing for having been too parsimonious in empathy and
understanding. Nonetheless, most American poets continue to see their Polish
counterparts, especially those who had experienced World War II and Communism
directly, as sages seeped in morality, ethics, philosophy and history. The examples
discussed above are just a few among scores of others. Poets as diverse as Philip Levine,
W.S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Jane Hirshfield, David St. John, Mark Irwin, and Linda
Greg have all engaged with the Poles—the ones already mentioned and others—on many
51
levels. Writing in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times on August, 26, 2004, Robert
Pinsky addressed the many contradictions—political, nationalist, artistic, religious, and
intellectual—that marked Miłosz his whole life and made him, in the end, as indicated by
the title of the piece, “A Poet Worthy of Protest,” before calling Miłosz “an essential
sound of the 20th century, persisting in an unsurpassed body of work. The enemies of
that great voice could not silence it in exile; their baffled, angry protests cannot muffle its
triumph at home.”
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CHAPTER 3:
NEW YORK COMES TO POLAND
16

Twenty years after Miłosz’s landmark anthology appeared in the U.S., the Cold War had
entered its final dawn. Yet the Polish poets coming of age then couldn’t care less. With
the publication of what’s become known as the blue issue (due to its cover’s color) of the
journal Literatura na Świecie
17
in 1986, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and especially
Frank O’Hara, became the most popular poets in Poland. The man responsible for the
import was the poet, translator, and editor Piotr Sommer (b. 1948). Here’s how he
describes the process of putting the issue together in an interview with William Martin:
Anyway, it took a long time to construct this New York School issue. It was close
to 450 pages, and had a lot of poetry in it. Then a lot of difficult critical essays
that were hard to translate into Polish, more than they would be now, I think,
because there seemed to be no language for certain things back then. So it was a
lot of work, and heavy editing. I even used my Museum of Modern Art ticket,
which I got the first time I was in the States, that was in 1983, and saved it for the
cover. I had been thinking about this issue for a long time. And it didn't matter to
me, when I was working on the issue, whether it was or was not going to be
“important.” (200)

16
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in The Massachusetts Review.

17
Warsaw-based Literatura na Świecie [trans. World Literature] remains one of the most
important journals dedicated to translations not just in Poland but all of Europe.
www.literaturanaswiecie.art.pl

53
The main revelation to Polish readers, most of whom were unaware of the poets
translated by Sommer,
18
was the ways in which poets like Ashbery and O’Hara either
eschewed linear narrative or elevated the bric-a-brac of the personal in the here and now.
That Sommer chose to focus on Frank O’Hara, whose work was garrulous and steeped in
the quotidian, at the expense of, say, American New Formalist poets, who were very
much in vogue at the time in the States, suggests that individual players can have a
significant impact on exposing larger groups to new literary voices. Sommer remains to
this day a quintessential “translator-legislator” aiming to upend the existing literary
fashions in the target language. Polish critic Jerzy Jarniewicz quotes him in Gościnność
słowa as saying, “I assume that a foreign poem gets translated into Polish so that, among
other reasons—or because of it—the Polish language of the poem would gain something
it didn’t have before, and learn something that it previously didn’t know, and that is what
testifies to its (the foreign poem’s) uniqueness” (28).
The late 1980s was a turbulent time in Polish history. Faced with published
models whose work verged on literary martyrdom and a general sense of hagiographical
reverence for the older generations of authors, the new poets longed for a breath of fresh
air. How many of them equated the representatives of the so-called New York School
with American poetry in general? Some did, no doubt, but certainly not all.
19
The general
sense, nevertheless, was one of discovery and infatuation. While their decision to

18
Sommer conducted an extensive interview with Ashbery during his 1980 visit to
Poland, the translation of which was later reprinted in Code of Signals: Recent Writings
in Poetics, edited by Michael Palmer (University of California Press, 1983). For the
Polish version see Piotr Sommer’s essay collection Po stykach (Gdańsk, 2005).

19
Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) was part of the same ‘blue’ issue, yet he couldn’t be
any different from O’Hara or Ashbery.
54
embrace those poets whose work is democratic in form and content contains political
overtones (could poetry be yet another American export, like Wrangler jeans and Pepsi-
Cola?), they were, arguably for the first time in their country’s history, shown how to
write about anything they wished.
It’s not that translators such as Sommer express no interest in cultural hegemonies
or hierarchies; instead, they attempt to rewrite them and in doing so create their own
versions of the cannon. Indeed, Sommer’s colonization of a select group of American
poets has taken on mythic overtones. Possessive of his status as the lead translator who
exposed Polish poets to hitherto unknown American voices, Sommer has turned his work
into a cottage industry of sorts. Twenty years after the legendary magazine issue, he
published an anthology of his translations of American poets, O krok od nich. Przekłady z
poetów amerykańskich,
20
which also features reproductions of paintings by Jane
Freilicher. In his discussion of the anthology, Polish poet and critic Kacper Bartczak
names as its lineage the Imagists, especially the work of William Carlos William,
although the table of contents also includes such names as Objectivist Reznikoff and,
among living poets, August Kleinzahler. Nevertheless, the poems included therein
suggest that, in Sommer’s view, “Poetry is no longer synonymous with lyricism, but a
certain movement of language forms that listen to one another, searching constantly for
new arrangements” (Świat nie scalony 160). Trying to isolate a dominant effect of
Sommer’s translation, we could argue, following in Bartczak’s footsteps, that what
interests Sommer the most is a kind of indeterminacy of the speaker and the reader.

20
The book’s title is a direct translation of “A Step Away from Them,” a poem by Frank
O’Hara. An expanded version of the anthology was published in December 2018 by
Wydawnictwo Karakter
55
What’s more, the essence of the poem becomes unresolvable, as it were. Having gotten
to the end of a typical O’Hara poem, indeed sometimes we shrug or scratch our heads—
perhaps even more so when we read an Ashbery poem—then go back in, feeling the need
to read it again.
A young Polish poet in the late ’80s or early ‘90s could be forgiven for believing
that O’Hara or Ashbery were the most important American poets, ever. Inevitably, this
newfound license to write poems on subjects previously untouched
21
could be viewed as
a domestic form of re-translating and re-writing history. As translators of their drab
surroundings, the Polish poets engaged in what Bhabha called “a putting together of the
dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present” (qtd. in Niranjana 173). In
other words, by translating the past, however quotidian or imagined, of the American
poets, the Poles were discovering new translatability of their own present. It’s as if they’d
heard and were responding to Norman Mailer talk about how, “every ambitious
American, no matter what he’s doing—he may be a machinist in a small shop in Iowa—
but if he is at all ambitious he is rewriting his picture of the world all the time” (qtd. in
Alvarez, Under Pressure, 167). Seemingly all of the sudden, the loneliness, the humor,
the whimsy, and, above all else, the individuality of the American artist became a
trademark of the young Polish poet.
Who were these young new poets I keep referring to? The main cohort belonged
to the “bruLion generation,” named after the eponymous Kraków-based literary journal.
Here is how critic Joanna Niżyńska of Indiana University explains the context in which
their new poems came to operate:

21
Miron Białoszewski (1922-1983) was a widely admired Polish avant-garde poet who
wrote about his quotidian reality. I discuss his work in the next chapter.
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Prior to 1989, Poles regarded the dominant metanarrative in their literature and
culture as the paradygmat romantyczny (Romantic paradigm) or, as it was
sometimes called, the paradygmat romantyczno-symboliczny (the Romantic-
symbolic paradigm). The question of whether the influence of the Romantic
heritage was on the wane in the new reality became a focal point of cultural
discussions in the 1990s. In these discussions, the term Romantic was clearly
associated with beliefs originating in the nineteenth-century period of high
Romanticism in Poland. Literature at this time was tied to the fate of the
community that produced it and was invested with the power to create an
alternative (“spiritual”) community in the face of external political oppression.
Literature was also charged with the ethical responsibility of witnessing the
community's misfortunes and working toward its survival. (“The Impossibility”
465)
Of course, not everyone who argued for the continuing relevance of the Romantic
paradigm understand that the Romantic ideals of the nineteenth century were anything
but crystalized or devoid of foreign influences. By embracing the cult of individuality, as
it were, which was never actually spelled out to resemble a manifesto, the bruLion poets
also crisscrossed the division between us and them that had been a staple of Polish
Romantic literature. Actually, this wasn’t first time when Polish poetry turned away from
nationalist mythologizing. The previous generation, known as Generation ’68 or New
Wave—mainly Adam Zagajewski, Julian Kornhauser (b. 1946), Stanisław Barańczak
(1946-2014), and Ryszard Krynicki (b. 1943)—poked holes in the state’s daily
propaganda, turning toward dismantling of language and its lies-ridden constructs; what
57
critic and translator Clare Cavanagh says about them also applies to poets whose coming
of age coincided with the events of 1989: “Poetry’s task, as they saw it, was to wrench
language away from its prescribed social functions in hopes of revealing glimpses of a
human reality that had survived the various ideologies and social constructs designed to
distort or disguise it” (226). The difference lies in the fact that the new poets rejected
New Wave’s ethical consciousness, which had been a major tenant of the latter’s poetics.
Eschewing the traditional roles expected of Polish poets to play—acting as a
witness to history, moral authority or spiritual guide—the new poets, dubbed
“Barbarians,” as opposed to “New Classists’ or, briefly, “O’Harists”—chief among them
Sommer, Marcin Świetlicki (b. 1961) and Marcin Baran (b. 1963)—quickly adopted
Robert Lowell’s views pertaining to an American artist for whom “his existence becomes
his art; he’s reborn in it and he hardly exists without it” (qtd. in Alvarez, Under Pressure,
163). However, their rebellious stance wasn’t to everyone’s liking. For instance, an
important Kraków critic Marian Stala, quoted by Joanna Orska, worried that it was an
artistic dead-end:
Continual observation of oneself and the immediate environment—sooner or later
it raises the feeling of boredom, monotony, banality. This may be a deliberate
effect, revealing the essential feature of a particular existence, uncovering its
tonality; or else: it can also be a trap of banality, putting forth the question:
whether or not a banal existence, endlessly analyzing its own banality, is a
sufficient justification for poetry. (194)
Stala’s response indicates that the conservative forces within Polish poetry were trying to
preserve what they—and, by extension, the readers in the West—perceived as its most
58
important quality: its ability to speak and comment on matters of existential and historical
importance. In Stala’s eyes, the American poets were doing nothing more than navel
gazing or spinning tales of familial and psychological drama. While Polish poetry had
been known in West as an embodiment of Shelley’s view of poets as society’s
unacknowledged legislators, the younger Polish poets who came of age during the
heyday of Solidarity in the late 1980s had a much different idea of who they were as
individuals. Not unlike Miłosz in years past, actually, they too aimed to free themselves
from a literary tradition that demanded they write for the people.
Sommer has since published three volumes of his poems in English translation.
Reviewing the second of them, entitled Continued,
22
in The Guardian newspaper, poet
and critic Mark Ford prefaces his comments with the following:
Piotr Sommer is increasingly coming to be seen as one of Poland’s most exciting
and influential poets. However, his work will perhaps disappoint those who are
convinced that all Polish poetry must be a vehicle for political resistance. It
doesn't accord much with the way we still expect Polish – or indeed east
European poetry generally – to sound. Such expectations were in large measure
shaped by the extraordinary oeuvres of Polish poets of the previous generation, in
particular the achievements of Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert. There are
of course political dimensions to Sommer’s work, but he also enjoys mocking the
notion that poetry can ever be reduced merely to a set of political imperatives.
(par. 1)

22
The collection includes a foreword by August Kleinzahler and features poems
translated by no fewer than fourteen translators, including John Ashbery, Douglas Dunn,
and D.J. Enright.
59
Ford goes on to single out Sommer’s “Apolitical Poem” as representative, calling it “a
wry hymn to a burbling brook that is in no need of stamps, paperwork or, more sinisterly,
a handshake, to be itself” (par. 1). The type of offhandedness that’s become Sommer’s
signature style can be seen already in the opening poem, “Morning on Earth”:
Morning on earth, light snow, and just when
it was so warm, practically spring.
But the thermometer in the kitchen window
says seven degrees,
and pretty sunny.
Here’s
the electric company guy I like,
and no sign of the gas guy
I can’t stand.
And all of a sudden two Misters M.—
one I’ve fallen for, the other
a bit of a hotshot—
coming back, both nine years old,
just passing the jasmine bush,
a huge bouquet of sticks.
Behind the door
the dog’s excited, nothing’s
at odds with anything.
This domestic scene speaks volumes about ways in which Sommer has embraced the up-
60
close and personal at the expense of the bardic or historical. In fact, when Kacper
Bartczak refers to the poems by American poets collected in Sommer’s seminal
anthology as displaying their “flat surface, ordinariness that cannot be tamed by means of
assigning it multiple meanings” (166), we see something similar at play in this poem. The
pronounced, Imagistic, we might add, situating of the speaker in the here and now is
followed by a seemingly unremarkable details the reader consumes without much
reflection. This lack of complication, which Bartczak singles out as the main
characteristic of Sommer’s translated poets—mainly Reznikoff and Cage—becomes a
quality in and of itself, and the driving force of a poem. “We come in contact with the
poem’s clarity and calm, which seem to suggest that more so than the need to interpret,
that is, to create meanings, refraining from doing so can be more interesting every once in
a while” (167). Of course, one could argue that the presence of the man reading gas
meters is itself a political gesture, positioned deliberately at the onset of a poem that’s
borderline pastoral, because of his role as an agent of the government, thus political
oversight, but the poem’s ending really does strike this reader as a celebration of open-
endedness. Whether or not we wish to part take in the composition of the poem’s
assumed reading is up to us, the readers.
One of my personal favorites of Sommer’s work, though, is another poem from
Continued, a poem whose lyricism—not to mention its recalling of an edible prop made
famous by W.C. Williams—I find no less moving or penetrating than those found in
many a poem by, say, Miłosz or Herbert. It’s called “Amnesia”:
I forget about the other world.
I wake up with my mouth closed,
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I wash the fruit with my mouth closed,
smiling, I bring the fruit into the room.
I don’t know why I remember cod-liver oil,
whole years of misery, the cellar bolt on the floor,
the self-sufficient voice of the grandmother.
Still, this is not the other world.
And again I sit at the table with my mouth closed
and you bring me delicious bursting plums
and I repeat after someone I also forget:
there is no other world.
The Polish critics have come to identify lack of pathos as one of the main characteristics
of the new poems being written in Poland after 1989, although one might argue that
Sommer’s poem brims with it—what the poet expresses is a kind of affection for the
world. The fluidity of the poem—its fluency?—however seems to slow down time. What
ensues is what Sommer refers to, when discussing poetic language, as “retardation,” a
kind of slowing down or braking on the level of a sentence that leads to, in Bartczak’s
words, a decrease in “the process of realizing and reaching of meanings” (193). Indeed,
the kind of vertical opening up of the poem to possible meanings vis-à-vis the details
presented in the poem, stemming directly from the slow unraveling of the poem, can also
be thought of as metaphysical. The poem opens up to show us its depth, which is neither
filled with emptiness nor devoid of signposts, but rather full of possibilities that call for
repeated readings.
Nevertheless, the call for a new type of poetics rang loud and clear, not the least
62
in the work of Marcin Świetlicki who decades later continues to be identified as the main
representative of the bruLion cohort. Świetlicki’s poem “For Jan Polkowski,” from his
debut volume, Zimne kraje [trans. Winter Lands], a volume that became a bestseller upon
its publication in 1992, expresses the feelings and emotions common to the entire
generation that refused to subscribe to the poetics exemplified by Polkowski and his
peers, most of whom were born in the 1950s. Here it is in William Martin’s translation,
as it first appeared in the Polish literature-themed issue of Chicago Review:
It’s time to shut the little cardboard doors and open a window,
to open a window and get some air in this room.
Before, there was always luck to fall back on, now
the luck's run out. With one exception:
when poems go and leave their stench behind them.

The poetry of slaves lives on ideas,
and ideas are a watery substitute for blood.
The heroes remain imprisoned,
and the worker is ugly but touchingly
useful—in the poetry of slaves.

In the poetry of slaves the trees have crosses
inside them—under the bark—made of barbed wire.
How easy then for the slave to travel the monstrously
long and practically impossible road
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from the alphabet to God, it lasts only a moment,
like spitting—in the poetry of slaves.

Instead of saying: I have a toothache, I'm
hungry, I'm lonely, both of us, four of
us, our whole street - they say quietly: Wanda
Wasilewska, Cyprian Kamil Norwid,
Józef Pilsudski, the Ukraine, Lithuania,
Thomas Mann, the Bible, and at the end a little something
in Yiddish.

If the dragon still lived in this city,
they'd flatter the dragon to death—or hole up
instead in some corner to write poems
—little fists for threatening the dragon with.
(Even love poems would be written
in a dragon alphabet...)

I look the dragon straight in the eye
and shrug my shoulders. It's June. That's obvious.
There was a thunderstorm here this afternoon. Dusk will fall
first into the perfectly square city squares.
From the opening line, mixing empirical and bodily experiences, Świetlicki’s poem aims
64
to upend the existing order of things. Here is how Joanna Niżyńska sees it:
No hierarchy or historical chronology governs the speaker's sarcastic enumeration
of the poetry of slaves; he places, for instance, the poetry of politically engaged
dissident poets (“the heroes remain imprisoned”) alongside metaphysical poetry
(which quickly travels “from the alphabet to God”); he juxtaposes the universality
of biblical tradition (“the Bible”) with a specific foreign influence (“Thomas
Mann”). Martyrological poetry (“trees have crosses inside them”) as well as
poetry written under various political systems (“Wanda Wasilewska” or “Józef
Piłsudski”) are both forms of “enslaved poetry.” The speaker does not even spare
Cyprian Kamil Norwid, whose poetry enjoyed wide popularity in the 1980s, when
it was widely performed as part of the cultural resistance to the suppression of the
Solidarity movement. (“The Impossibility” 469)
That Świetlicki remains a main representative of the bruLion generation isn’t
surprising, what with his borderline anarchist stance toward the Polish literary
establishment and writing poems in which he ridicules poets such as Czesław Miłosz and
Adam Zagajewski. However, his first book included an afterword by Julian Kornhauser,
an established New Wave poet, critic, and professor at the Jagiellonian University.
Likewise, at the beginning of its existence the magazine was more than happy to print
poems by established authors. The break came later; it was Kornhauser himself who soon
after welcoming the younger poem wrote a scathing essay about being fed up with
‘poems about vodka and cigarettes,’ a phrase that echoed the title of one of Świetlicki’s
later poetry books. In turn, here is how Świetlicki himself remembers his former
infatuation with O’Hara’s poems:
65
I no longer have any need for poetry whatsoever. And I don’t miss it. My last
enchantment was some thirty years ago, when the New York-themed issue of
Literatura na Świecie appeared. I liked Frank O’Hara very much back then. The
American poets made me bolder, but I chose not to follow in their footsteps. I
didn’t feel like an American poet. They made me bolder in the sense that I
realized that I didn’t have to write about my fatherland, that I can write about
waking up and eating breakfast. It was simple things I learned. I felt that I can do
more than I previously thought. (524)
What’s ironic about his recollection is the fact that he never actually stopped writing
about his fatherland. His first book featured a poem whose one line has become equally
important for Świetlicki’s generation: “There is nothing about me in the Constitution.”
Still, not everyone was amused. Krzysztof Koehler, who edited Świetlicki’s debut
volume, became a vocal opponent of all poems that bore even the faintest traces of
having been influenced by Frank O’Hara’s style. It was he who coined the term
“o’haryzm” (trans. “O’Harism”) and had this to say in response to Świetlicki’s
emblematic poem “For Jan Polkowski”:
What he [Świetlicki] desires is to perform a kind of conjurer's trick. Swinging his
watch back and forth, he assures us that he's free, authentic, above
conventionality; but it's because of us, the readers, that he thrashes about as if
caught in a net of verses, and what should have been authentic and free turns out
to be—after all, it’s poetry—artificial and forced [literally “enslaved”].
Marcin Świetlicki is clearly under the impression that within the confines
of convention and by virtue of convention he can actually smash convention to
66
bits and stand naked before us in the light of truth. But, then, why bother wasting
all that ink and paper? It's enough to go hang out with your friends. (qtd. in
Niżyńska “The Impossibility” 470)
Water under the bridge, we might say in hindsight, but what’s most ironic still
about those debates is the fact that, despite brimming with references familiar almost
exclusively to Poles, the poem “For Jan Polkowski” owes its existence, at least in part, to
the cross-cultural and international dialogue initiated by Miłosz. According to Justin
Quinn:
once the Polish-American conduit had been opened up by figures such as Czesław
Miłosz, Stanisław Barańczak, and Adam Zagajewski, leaving an indelible mark
on American letters, this allowed a very different poetic—that of the New York
school—into Poland, a backwash that influenced the next generation of poets,
much to the consternation of Miłosz. These current often brought with them
thematic floes, but in more complex ways recalibrated artists’ ideas of the formal
potentialities of their own traditions. (33)
One other consequence of this two-way transfer was that older nontraditional Polish poets
were suddenly viewed through a different lens, one that’s been provided by the language
used to discuss the American imports.
Younger Polish poets unassociated with the bruLion magazine, such as Andrzej
Sosnowski (b. 1959), have also benefited from the ongoing poetic crosspollination.
Sosnowski’s poetry seems to exemplify the suggestion that despite the early and
enthusiastic embracing of O’Hara’s poems, it is really Ashbery’s work that has exerted
greater influence on Polish poets. In his “Translator’s Note” to the only available
67
collection of Sosnowski’s poems in English, Benjamin Paloff borrows a term from Helen
Vendler when he says that “Sosnowski’s poems often read as intimate addresses to an
invisible listener” [emphasis mine], before going on to state the following:
the beauty and challenge of Sosnowski’s poems derive not from his elision of the
rhetorical chains that might otherwise help us make sense of the whole—“this
gadfly sense,” he writes in “The Walk Ahead”—but from their inclusiveness, the
practiced diligence that allows him to name as much as he can in the time that he
has, and the discipline and restraint that permit that naming to tell its own story.
(X)
Paloff’s description recalls what Ashbery has said somewhere about his own methods,
mainly that of including whatever may be occurring in the present time in the poem he
happens to be working on. The rush to create inventories, which Paloff mentions later on,
is clearly present in Sosnowski’s “What is Poetry,” a work by which he enters into a
direct dialogue with the great American poet, whose own poem by that title appeared in
the 1977’s volume Houseboat Days. First, here is Ashbery’s poem, quoted from his 1985
volume Selected Poems:
The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? But we
68
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire? Now they
Will have to believe it

As we believed it. In school
All the thought got combed out:

What was left was like a field.
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us—what?—some flowers soon?
And here is Sosnowski’s poem—the first half of it; note the opening word of agreement:
Sure, it’s no strategy for survival,
nothing to live on. Your obstinacy is laughable
as you recall the enchanted lakes,
the rustling woods and hushed caverns
where a voice echoes out vividly, and has for centuries.
Sibyls? What matters is leaves, then maybe the rhyme
of voice and choice, since voices press against the world,
and choice is that which does not entrust names
to leaves. Just you try to catch them! Try
69
to touch the ground and fly farther,
like a flat stone over water—how many times?
Five, twelve? A sequence of poems and reflections,
a sequence of leaves, and anyway all the stones and leaves
lie one beside the other according to an ancient order,
their forms unclear.
These poets simultaneously embrace and mistrust the idea of poetry as something spelled
with the capital P, both primordial and to be approached with reverence. They are also
united, it seems, in their mistrust of forms and patters, believing that they shouldn’t be
thought of as synonymous with ideas or exegesis. Sosnowski’s much longer and
elaborate poem itself becomes generative, although its ending is no less conclusive than
Ashbery’s: “words come like a sprinkling of confetti,” the poet says, the door left ajar
produces a draft, but what might come of their arranging on the page is anyone’s guess. It
needs to be said that in addition to translating Ashbery into Polish, Sosnowski’s has also
engaged deeply with the work of the French Surrealists, both as a poet and translator,
which supplies further similarities between him and Ashbery. Here is what Bartczak sees
as the general outcome of this engagement in Sosnowski’s work:
Sosnowski’s readings in Raymond Roussel and an intimate, translator's
familiarity with the mercurial tissue of John Ashbery’s poetry, taught him a
lesson, alien to Polish rationalistically based verse, that thinking in language
means dreaming in language, that central thoughts and situations are easily
accompanied by adjacent conceptual tracks, linked to the centre by simile,
metaphor, metonymic proximity, or unaccountable strokes of imagination. As a
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result, his poems have a capacity to weave a number of parallel scenarios,
exchanging the fantastic, the dreamy and the real. (“Hazards and Hopes” 59)
What’s more, Sosnowski’s has also translated into Polish poems by Elizabeth
Bishop, another of Ashbery’s favorite.
23
The inclusiveness of Sosnowski’s poem, which I
mentioned earlier, can also be thought of as a mask worn by the speaker of his poems.
According to Jacek Gutorow, Sosnowski “not only does not speak in a single voice, but
he consciously problematizes the singularity of any utterance” (Niepodległość 184). In
that sense, Sosnowski’s engagement with Bishop isn’t surprising; after all, the placid
surface of many a Bishop poem hides a storm of emotions, true, but not necessarily
multiple voices. Perhaps the main attractiveness of Bishop’s poems for Sosnowski lies in
her alleged lack of “predilection for deeper syntheses or analyses featuring history,
culture, mythology, quotes” (Najryzykowniej 75). Or the fact that, as he shows in his
reading of Bishop’s “The Map,” “the author doesn’t allow us a direct access to herself or
the world” (Najryzykowniej 74). The indeterminacy of the Bishop poem, despite its
praised accuracy, which comes across as both faked and experienced, remains of interest
to Sosnowski as well as still younger Polish poets, including Krystyna Dąbrowska (b.
1979).
It goes without saying that the poetry scene in Poland is no less fragmented than
in the U.S., and that many poets did not jump on the bandwagon driven by those calling
for the overthrow of Poland’s poetic masters. Jacek Gutorow, for instance, remains a vital

23
After years of translating Bishop’s poems and publishing them here and there,
Sosnowski’s efforts appeared recently in a book form: Elizabeth Bishop. Santarém.
Wiersze oraz trzy małe prozy. Stronie Śląskie: Biuro Literackie, 2018.

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voice in Polish letters, not only a poet who spans the not-so-distant shores between the
old and the new voices, but also as a critic and translator of numerous British and
American poets. Born in 1970, Gutorow is a poet of perception, not unlike Wallace
Stevens, whose work he’s translated and written on extensively. When I published The
Folding Star and Other Poems,
24
a book of my translations of his poems in 2012, I wrote
in my Introduction that in “a typical Gutorow poem, the poet dredges his thoughts and
feelings for the smallest of nuggets of insight, a momentary reprieve from his
cacophonous surroundings” and that “one of the qualities I found most exciting when I
first began to read his poems was his remarkable willingness to bore into language, so to
speak, and peel back its multistoried structure of feeling and thought” (8-9).
What’s more, I quickly seized on the connection between Gutorow and Stevens,
when I wrote:
Gutorow is a champion of the meditative lyric, but, unlike Stevens, his private
preoccupations have a striking way of turning outwards, inviting others to partake
in their luscious peregrinations. […] Gutorow’s poems are ontological gems of
time and place, endowed with the poet’s desire not only to examine, but also to
penetrate the dull scaffolding we erect about ourselves as we move through our
daily lives. For Gutorow, to merely describe something doesn’t suffice; instead,
the methodical probing of the world’s linguistic and phenomenological trappings
provides the impetus for yet another round of examinations—however futile or
maddening they may prove to be. (9)

24
I recently published my second volume of Gutorow’s selected poems, with an
introduction by Mark Ford, entitled Invisible (Arc Publications, 2021).
72
Indeed, Gutorow’s meditative lyrics are meticulously composed; their boundaries
both self-contained and porous. What the poet sees gets processed, even reclaimed
internally by the language which the poet then uses to give it back to us in the form of a
poem. In other words, Gutorow looks, sees, and hears first, then he speaks, or writes. No
wonder then many of his poems, again like Stevens’s work, focus on the process of
composition. He doesn’t shy away from asking questions about the nature of the written
world, of poetry in general. At the same time, nothing escapes his attention, no matter
how trivial it might seem—in one of his poems, called “A Different Tempo,” which zeros
in on the moment when language takes over the process of creation and words write
themselves at were, guiding the stupefied poem on a journey with an of unpremeditated
itinerary, he confesses to reading the classifieds, because “That’s poetry, too.”
That silence can be as generative as talking or reading is beautifully relayed in
this untiled poem:
Two white boats against a white background.

Two tempos of silence.

The silence of the boats
whose thoughts have gone out
onto the lake.

Two silences after the boats have disappeared.

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Two shadows.
What we see here, in addition to the poets skillful connecting of the dots of his perception
for us, flies in the face of Auden’s much-overused statement that poetry makes nothing
happen. Auden, arguably, meant that poetry makes nothing happen sociologically or
politically, but poetry does make plenty happen on the level of each poem itself. The
silence left on the surface after the boats have sailed speaks to us—it not loud, then clear
for sure. The poem embodies time and space linguistically—as far as we agree that
silence is a kind of part of speech.
In another poem, “The Footnote Man,” the unnamed he dissolves in the onslaught
of details; the external world being too much, perhaps, for his domesticated internal. “The
fiesta of light,” when rays of sun enter a room through curtains, is more than an example
of the world masquerading as a benevolent source of vitality. In fact, having been drawn
out from the confines of his home, the man soaks up his surroundings, marked by the
park that is “smiling” or the river or the flock of birds that he “digresses with” as it “turns
midair, suddenly, like a ball / bounced off a wall. The irregularity of the scene painted for
us by the poet resides on the surface of what’s described, including the colors. “Back at
home,” we learn in this irregular sonnet, “The remnants of his thoughts lie scattered. / He
is blurred. The room goes blank or blank” (ln. 3, 5, 7, 8-9, 13-14).
Early in the afterword to his own volume of translations of Stevens’s poem,
Gutorow stresses the presence of ambivalence in Stevens’s work, the way one diction or
language leads to another. The process, as Gutorow rightly points out, in never-ending,
given that reality manages to slip from our grip each time. Following in its footsteps, as it
were, we search for and employ new forms of speaking of it; they’re all inadequate to the
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task, yet the process goes on. The ultimate goal? To describe “things as they are.”
Gutorow takes this phrase, having borrowed it from Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue
Guitar,” to observe that therein lies the problem encountered by all poets. In order to
overcome it, “we must exhaust the rhetorical potential inherent in our perception of
objects and people, and finally let them appear as they really are. Poetry has a special task
here—it is the stage and the staging of the exhaustion of languages” (102-103).
Questioning and undermining of their own linguistic constellations is a major
characteristic of Stevens’s and Gutorow’s work alike. The Polish poet agrees that, as
many claim, Stevens is a poet of the imagination, but with one caveat: “he is first and
foremost the poet of the imagination that’s been postponed” (105). In that sense, Steven’s
poems bring out into light those parts of our reality that remain hidden from us, though
the process is never complete. It’s hard to believe that Gutorow’s volume, entitled Żółte
popołudnie (trans. A Yellow Afternoon), which features nearly seventy poems,
representing all of Wallace Stevens’s individual collections, is the first real major
presentation of the poet’s work in Poland.
25
Reading it next to Gutorow’s own poems we
recognize the serenity of the voice, despite the mind being constantly at work, and the
clarity that forms when that which is both present and somehow absent, that is, slipping
from our grip and ability to name it, flashes before us momentarily. It is this moment—
contracting, expanding, and vanishing nearly simultaneously—that captivates both poets
the most.
Miłosz may have been disappointed with the course the new Polish poets chose to
pursue, but it’s equally true that the younger poets weren’t really free of the shadow the

25
A 1969 volume of translations by Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz wasn’t well received.
75
Nobel Laureate continued to cast onto the Polish poetry scene. Perhaps the best way to
illustrate this new duality, if not quite co-dependency, is to look to a poem that embodies
it. The poem, an elegy for Czesław Miłosz, who died at his Kraków apartment on August
14, 2004, at 11:10 in the morning, was written by Paweł Marcinkiewicz (b. 1969), a
noted translator of John Ashbery’s poetry. What’s more, it is modeled after a Frank
O’Hara’s classic, “The Day Lady Died,” which I quote here in full from Lunch Poems:
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
76
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
This poem embodies what Frank O’Hara himself said about his own composition
method: ‘I do this, I do that.’ Trying to encapsulate the dynamics of an urban
environment often ends in a catalog-like effort, but in this case, O’Hara’s trivialities
possess a velocity that harness the attention of the reader. Sucked into the vortex of the
images unspooling in real time, the reader careens toward the poem’s meaning that’s
being continuously delayed—until it ends abruptly. Or, as Joanna Niżyńska puts it, “By
overlapping the temporal planes of the speaker's activities and his description of them,
O’Hara involves his reader as a witness to the poem's creation, whose “occasion”
77
(connected, in this case, with the title of the poem) unfolds with each stanza” (“The
Impossibility” 473).
Now here is Marcinkiewicz’s elegy, entitled “The Day the Lithuanian Bear Died”:
It’s 8:20 in Opole, a Saturday,
one month after the fall of Bastille, and oh, yes,
it’s 2004 and I’m getting out of bed to turn on
the computer and print out a couple of pages, since I can’t
read on the screen, and in Outlook I find ads and porn
the world doesn’t forget about me a day so happy the fog lifted early

then I’m driving to town on a steamy beltway
and stop at the Makro center to get a burger and a mega Sprite
those bookstores in malls
I go into a restroom
and some loser is shouting, “one buck, Chief, one buck,”
and the thought that I have my last 100 bill doesn’t cross his mind
and at the DVD stand I buy Aneta Polanski’s Bitter Moon
with Polish dubbing, though I’m actually interested in
Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom or the new
film by David Lynch or Amores Perros or 21 Grams
by Iñárritu, but that’s fine, I’m sticking with Polanski especially
after I almost went to bed with this dilemma

78
and the narrative continues, after the speaker makes several more stops to buy alcohol,
and turns on the radio and hears the news of the poet’s death:
and sweat is pouring down my face and I remember how
one day in Casablanca we were sitting at the table with Carol Jacek and Jurek
and he was drooling over the menu—potato pierogies bigos cabbage rolls
and talked in poetry and everyone and I stopped breathing
The poem’s ending hints at what many who knew Miłosz have said about him, mainly
that he was courtly yet childish, aloof yet voracious in his marveling at all that the world
has to offer. More Dionysian than Olympian, Miłosz accepted the demands of being a
poet of witness, but not unconditionally and without losing sight of Whitmanesque
defiance and multitudes that he and his times have come to exemplified, including the
time’s mad dash embodied in the anaphora at the heart of O’Hara’s and Marcinkiewicz’s
poems, both of which are symbolic of the communal final gasp released at the news of
the death of their respective heroes, Billie Holliday and Czesław Miłosz. Imitation is the
most genuine form of flattery indeed.
In writing this chapter, my goal hasn’t been to be exhaustive or to perform
detective work for the reader of both Polish and American poets. Comparative studies,
even those as personal as mine, have their limits—their boundaries reflect personal
readings habits, even tastes. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the Polish poetry canon in
American is male dominated; likewise, most American poets who’ve made an impact on
Polish poetry have been men. This statement allows for exceptions, of course. The work
of Julia Fiedorczuk (b. 1975), for instance, who has also engaged, both as a scholar and
translator with the work of Laura Riding and Forrest Gander, among others, has taken a
79
major turn toward what’s become known as ecopoetics. When the first and so far only
volume of her selected poems appeared in the U.S.—Oxygen (2017)—it included a
prefatory note by Brenda Hillman. Not a bad endorsement. And perhaps that’s been the
point all along. In order for one’s poetry to thrive, a dialogue with other, especially
international poets, must be established. We see this when we study Polish poets in
America and vice versa—after all, it was just one loose coterie of poets talking with or
imitation another—but as the literary marketplace becomes more centralized, it is
important, in my view, to diffuse rather than strengthen the top-down mechanisms that
make translated literature possible. The dialogue initiated by Miłosz has both contracted
and expanded over the years in terms of whose work has been translated and why, but the
job of introducing new voices and aesthetics still belongs to poet-translators guided by
their individual taste as well as creative needs and desires. Though it may sound utopian,
I believe in one poet talking to another poet; if anything resembling a group emerges out
of it eventually, so be it, but for me, the unit of measure and the effective ratio will
always be one to one.
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CHAPTER 4:
TRANSLATION AS PERFORMANCE
26

The above examples of poetic dialogue suggest that at any given time there are multiple
poetic and cultural currents vying for influence. How one of them becomes dominant at
the expense of the others depends on several factors, including the ways in which
translators pursue and acquire cultural capital. While thanks to the efforts of translators
and poets on both sides of the Atlantic the dialogue between Polish and American poets
not only continues but flourishes to this day, it nevertheless could be expanded or
broadened if translators felt they had more leeway in how they approach works deemed
untranslatable.
While translators tend to be underappreciated by publishers—who don’t put their
name on the book’s cover—and by most readers—who have no idea they’re reading a
translation—they play a vital role in the literary marketplace and, to borrow a phrase
from Pierre Bourdieu, in America’s economy of cultural goods, where they serve a
myriad of roles, from de facto cultural ambassador and foreign policy wonk to literary
critic. Bourdieu disagrees with Kant’s notion that art appreciation is inherently
autonomous or disinterested, when he writes “A work of art has meaning and interest
only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it
is encoded” (Distinction xxv). While translators may not see their work as adding to the
cultural capital of a few privileged consumers, that is, those conversant in the

26
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in The American Poetry Review.
81
encoding/decoding mapped out by Stuart Hall
27
—in fact most would argue that their
work strives to open up the literary field to new voices—it is equally true that they
themselves belong to the social group and their codified habitus by way of participating
in an activity that is destined to be enjoyed by a few, which, for better or worse, helps to,
in Bourdieu’s view, “fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences”
(Distinction, xxx).
Not all translators champion the most rarified of artistic or literary tastes, but
those who do, among the so-called literary translators,
28
take pride in translating and
publishing works of canonical status. This may stem in part from what Allen and
Bernofsky see as a shift, “a generational move toward an image of the translator as an
intellectual figure empowered with agency and sensibility who produces knowledge by
curating cultural encounters” (XIX). Furthermore, translators vie for attention not just
among consumers and employers, but also, and to some extent most importantly, among
themselves, seeing their area of activity as
polarized by two opposing principles of organization. On the one hand, there is
the tendency toward autonomy where peer reference and review assumes priority.
At the extreme, this results in “art for art’s sake.” On the other hand is the
tendency away from autonomy, where legitimacy and reference are sought

27
Art consumption, including book buying and reading, is determined by the consumer’s
social standing and education background, hence my focus on those who, thanks to their
high social and educational background, produce and consume translated literature.

28
Most people who list ‘translator’ as their occupation do not participate in literary
production. Perhaps this is why those who do have felt the need to establish an umbrella
organization, the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), that would
propagate their work and look after their interests. More info: www.literarytranslators.org
82
outside the field in forms such as book sales, public appearances, honors, etc.
(Swartz 127)
Moreover, if we applied Bourdieu’s theory of the literary genre stratification to
the producers themselves, we would discover that they see themselves not unlike poets,
occupying the top of the hierarchy. Also, they want to be perceived as tastemakers.
Possessing the perfect combination of habitus and familiarity with at least two literary
markets, they become connoisseurs and guides—“[g]iven that the work of art does not
exist as such, meaning as an object symbolically endowed with meaning and value,
unless it is apprehended by spectators possessing the aesthetic disposition and
competence which it tacitly requires” (“The Rules” 289)—in the rarified and fetishized
realm of translated literature. Naturally, the struggle over fame and ideology leads to a
hierarchy building within the field of translation, which is ironic, given that most of the
players are grossly undervalued. Nonetheless, pursuing translating books by canonical
writers or contemporary award-winners affords translators a certain level of fame, which,
according to Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, is synonymous with worth in the eyes
of the public, where “worthy beings are the ones that distinguish themselves, are visible,
famous, recognized: their visibility depends on their more or less attention-getting,
persuasive, informative character” (179). In other words, translators attempt to reach a
level where they become the go-to person for a particular language/author/culture.
Furthermore, translators, like other authors and cultural players, strive to acquire
non-monetary benefits. In his influential study of prizes and culture, University of
Pennsylvania scholar James F. English investigates what he calls “the economics of
cultural prestige” (4). This system “involves such terms as “capital,” “investment,”
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“endowment,” “return,” “circulation,” “accumulation,” “market,” and so forth, and it
assumes certain basic continuities between economic behavior (that is, interested or
advantage-seeking exchange,”” but for some, if not most, of the players, it revolves
around transactions that are intellectually or artistically symbolic (4). The realm of
literary prizes, or prize giving in general, which in English’s study includes such
venerated examples as the Oscars and the Nobel Prizes, isn’t a new phenomenon, but its
recent proliferation in terms of numbers and heightened media exposure is without
precedent. The prizes and the status symbol they confer upon the few represent “struggle
for power to produce value, which means power to confer value on that which does not
intrinsically possess it” (English qtd. in Menand, par. 4). In effect, translators and other
middlemen—publishers, critics, editors, curators, etc.—who seek to acquire cultural
capital, do so by ‘adding value’ to their work.
The power they attempt to obtain in the process is not just symbolic; it creates
patronage and endows translators with a sense of power that in turn emboldens them to
pursue new projects. As Foucault states, “what makes power hold good, what makes it
accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but
that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces
discourse” (119). What’s more, that an established literary system be conservative, as
illustrated by Stala’s qualms about the new Polish poets and their embrace of O’Hara and
Ashbery, is symptomatic of the way in which the literary market and the taste-making
apparatus, including the education system, are often at odds about canon revising. Why?
Because the literary marketplace is motivated less by ideology than by profit, whereas the
education system tends to value inclusion. The fact that most English majors study
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Shakespeare extensively has less to do with the Bard’s timelessness than with the tug-o-
war between the two systems, which, alas, often leads to stalemate. It’s safer for
everyone, including literary critics, to keep reproducing the system and its norms than to
upend it by introducing new authors into it, which, of course, does happen when
ideological considerations gain critical mass.
According to David Swartz, Bourdieu’s great success lies “demonstration that
there is a political economy of culture, that all cultural production—including science—is
reward-oriented, and that stylistic preferences are selected and rejected in ways that are
analogous to the general notions of investment and search for profits in the economy”
(67). The pursuit of symbolic or financial profit, in turn, dictates the ideological outcome
of the translated work, i.e., how the work comes to be chosen for translation and what
choices, which are, on first glance very practical in nature, the translator makes. If
something changes in the original during the process of translation—such as depiction of,
say, a Polish historical event as in some of the earlier examples—are the changes
imposed by the target language’s facility with particular linguistic characteristics of the
original, or are they imposed from above, so to speak, by the publisher, the funding
source, or even the translator’s personal set of codified responses to specific elements of
the work’s language (diction, register, etc.) and its subject? All of the above, seems to be
what Peter Cole, American poet and translator of Hebrew poetry, suggests:
there is an often invisible, or at any rate hard to detect, political dimension to the
consideration of ethics in translation, beginning with the choice of texts to be
translated and deciding how a given literature or even a single poet will be
represented. […] Political sensitivities of the readership and the publishing
85
industry, dull questions of funding in both the commercial and nonprofit
hemispheres of the translation globe, chemistry and temperament extending to the
bonds among translator, author, and editor—all play a central role in the
development and dissemination of translations from a given culture. (qtd. in Allen
and Bernofsky 9)
The ensuing branding performed by translators would not, however, be possible
without the institutions indispensable to the production and dissemination of cultural
wares. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of the titles listed in Three Percent’s
database were funded by a foreign subsidy. These translation grants, as they are
commonly known, vary in the amounts they provide, but are often the only way for a
small press to purchase the rights and pay the translator. In fact, most foreign subsidies
cannot be applied to cover the publisher’s production costs.
29
Likewise, domestic entities,
such as the PEN Center or the Lannan Foundation, also serve the role of ‘tastemakers.’
Acting as the middlemen between translators, presses, and the literary marketplace, these
institutions disseminate “cultural products to a broader and broader public” (Bourdieu,
“The Rules” 293). Needless to say, dissemination of cultural products with the help of
institutions—private and public alike—comes with its own perils, many of which are
illustrated by the proverbial conflict between workers and management: the two sides
rarely see eye-to eye. According to Adorno, “Culture suffers damage when it is planned
and administered; yet when left to itself, everything cultural threatens not only to lose its
possibility to have an effect, but its very existence as well” (qtd. in Bauman 105). Every

29
As a founding editor of Calypso Editions, I’ve worked with foreign underwriters in
Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. All three operate on the same model.

86
translator, who, by definition, operates within a complex network of producers and
clients, and depends on them for funding, understands this dilemma, especially when he
or she aims to introduce an unknown author from a so-called exotic country into an
established market.
30

This rather lengthy exegesis is meant to remind us that choosing what to translate
is a fraught process. A decision to translate and publish a particular book is largely based
on its local representativeness; however, the standards used to evaluate such title’s
alleged representativeness are often foreign. Consequently, a majority of titles whose
quality has been recognized by the middlemen fit “a particular category of literature that
might be recognized as properly “global,” a literature whose fields of production and of
reception could be mapped—and whose individual works could be valued—only on a
world scale” (English 304). It is obvious why this kind of cultural globalization has been
met with skepticism; some view it as profit-motivated push to homogenize literature by
turning it into a product that can be sold to the largest possible number of customers.
Those critics believe that a book branded as ‘world literature’ is “an essentially false and
touristic product, specially, if not always consciously, made for Euro-American
consumption, masquerading as a representative form of indigenous cultural expression”
(English 307). From a more artistic standpoint, this critique also extends to the work’s
alleged literary value, or rather lack thereof; since much of a book’s linguistic excellence

30
The operation to print and distribute Doctor Zhivago by the CIA is but one example of
ideology’s impact on literary production. According to Peter Finn and Petra Couvée,
authors of The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden
Book (Pantheon, 2014), “From the birth of the books program in the 1950s until the fall
of the USSR, the CIA distributed 10 million books and periodicals in Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union. […] In the program’s final years, when Gorbachev was in power, at
least 165,000 books were sent to the Soviet Union annually” (264).

87
is lost in translation, books with a subject matter deemed universal have a larger chance
of becoming products of mass consumption.
31

As we have seen, the need for meaning, especially of the kind that satisfies our
craving for knowledge of a particular people or culture, must be redefined. A translator
has the option of adapting purely linguistic stance, be it Benjamin and his idea of “pure
language” (“The Task” 80) or Derrida’s view that translation represents “a moment in the
growth of the original” (“Des Tours de Babel” 188), to revise our notion of cross-cultural
dialogue. Otherwise, it is equally true that countries and cultures, as illustrated by the
Miłosz case on a smaller scale, aim to set the agenda for how they are perceived around
the world. Translation, especially translation into English, the language of global
commerce and pop culture, can help alter a country’s view by outsiders. One could argue
that this is a good problem to have, given the shortage of outside funding for translation
work. However, what if the funding, which usually comes from the government, is
provided in order to quiet or bolster the critics of the government? When translation
funding is used to further political or nationalist gains, the process of extrapolating
meaning or knowledge, both domestically and ultimately on the international stage, risks
“reducing the problem of representing difference to the demand for different and more
favorable representations” (Bhabha qtd. in Niranjana 168).

31
English singles out books whose appeal stems from their alleged social value. This
echoes some of the criticism leveled against the Nobel Prize Committee, which some see
as overtly favorable to books and authors with leftist political leanings. However,
Alexander Beecroft, the author of An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the
Present Day (Verso, 2015), introduces a key caveat into the discussion of the Nobel
Committee’s preference for European writers, when he writes “There is, however,
nothing wrong per se with the idea that the Nobel exists primarily to recognize literature
in European languages (and particularly from the European periphery), so long as we do
not continue to make the historic error of making universal whatever happens in
European languages” (297).
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Representatives of the so-called Polish School of Poetry, mainly the quartet of
Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski, are the
most visible Polish poets translated and published in the U.S. Although not all of them
follow the poetics favored by Miłosz, which is characterized by historical and
philosophical exploration, they do not stray too far from it, either. As critic Joanna
Niżyńska reminds us, the Polish poetry canon in America, just as any other canon, “is
subject to political and economic considerations that drive the market for translations,
changes in educational curriculum that render some authors more desirable than others,
and, ultimately, a cultural tendency to reinforce rather than challenge the familiar
understandings of foreign literatures” (The Kingdom 7). It is largely due to the third
reason mentioned by the Indiana University critic that many American readers equate
Polish poetry with Miłosz’s style. Consequently, a list of Polish poets unavailable or
underrepresented in English should start with Miron Białoszewski (1922-1983), the most
important Polish avant-garde poet of the last sixty years. In order to ease the carrying-
over of poets like Białoszewski into English, I propose something seemingly obvious, if
not outright banal, mainly that translators begin thinking of the translation of poetry as a
performance rather than a process recognizable for its fidelity to the original, which in
turn may liberate them to tackle projects deemed difficult or untranslatable.
The fact that we have had only one small book of his poems translated into
English and published in the late ‘70s, concerns the interpretive difficulty one encounters
reading his work—Białoszewski’s eccentric poems, steeped in neologism and contorted
syntactical constructs, are difficult to decipher even for native speakers. What has stood
in the way of having Białoszewski translated into English widely, then, is the issue of
89
translational fluency. Lawrence Venuti has observed that the sought-after fluency of a
translated text can be traced back to the mid-20
th
century shift marked by the elevation of
science writing that favored clear theses and discussions. In the case of translated
literature, which has never been popular, American readers came to expect what Venuti
calls “translator’s invisibility” and an accompanying domestication of the foreign text:
The prevalence of fluent domestication has supported these developments because
of its economic value: enforced by editors, publishers, and reviewers, fluency
results in translations that are eminently readable and therefore consumable on the
book market, assisting in their commodification and ensuring the neglect of
foreign texts and English-language translation discourses that are more resistant to
easy readability. (15-16)
The favoring of texts deemed desirable for translation due to their perceived readability
not only restricts who and what gets translated, thus eliminating any semblance of
difference from our literary discourse, but it also impacts the visibility of the translators
themselves, who must practice, in Venuti’s words, “a weird self-annihilation, a way of
conceiving and practicing translation that undoubtedly reinforces its marginal status in
Anglo-American culture” (8). The literary market’s desire for transparency in translated
works, especially poetry, is why, partly at least, we haven’t seen more Białoszewski’s
poems in English. However, as Paul Ricœur put it his seminal work, On Translation, via
an analogy from the world of painting, “the original will not be duplicated by another
original” (5). Therefore, “a good translation can aim only at a supposed equivalence that
is not founded on a demonstrable identity of meaning. An equivalence without identity.
This equivalence can be sought, worked at, supposed” (22). Thinking of translation as
90
performance would allow a translator to approach the process from a variety of angles,
thus embodying the search for equivalence mentioned by Ricœur, which in turn might
lead to the creating of new poetic idioms.
As a translator of contemporary Polish poetry, I view my own process as
involving elements of both action and communication. My translating is a performance
because it features what Richard Bauman refers to as “a specially marked mode of action,
one that sets up or represent a special interpretive frame within which the act of
communication is to be understood.” Furthermore, I do regard my activity, to paraphrase
Bauman, with special intensity (44). Employing both formal and social-psychological
reflexivity, when I translate I perform for myself as well as for others (47-48). I reenact
the writing of the poem, and muse on its original and continuing reception in Poland,
while also imagining how it might be received in English. In doing so, I introduce a
consciousness into the process, and turn the act of mere ‘doing a translation’—i.e., re-
writing a text in another language—into performing it for myself as much as for others,
thus illustrating Marvin Carlson’s claim that “Performance is always a performance for
someone, some audience that recognizes and validates it as performance even when, as is
occasionally the case, the audience is the self” (qtd. in Bial 73).
The interpretative aspect of translation as performance is a key first step to
opening up the mode of translation to more performative approaches. Incidentally, any
kind of interpretive outcome disagrees with Walter Benjamin’s oft quoted call to action
for translators to create a “pure language.” Ricœur borderline ridicules Banjamin’s
messianic overtones in the latter’s seminal essay “The Task of the Translator,” when he
points out that “the practice of translation does not receive any help from this […]
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eschatological waiting” (16). Indeed, the interpretive aspect soon gives way to a practical
and creative refashioning of the poem in the target language. As another performance
scholar, W.B. Worten, observes, “Where interpretation is earnest, concerned with fidelity
and obedience, performance is insouciant, rewriting and disseminating the words of the
text in various ways” (qtd. in Bial 12). In other words, while interpretation produces a
reading, performance produces a meaning that goes above and beyond merely
transmitting what Diane Taylor sees as transmitting of “social knowledge, memory, and a
sense of identity through reiterated behavior” (qtd. in Bial 381). Furthermore, since all
writing is a performance, as Stephen Greenblatt reminds us (par. 1), then translating can
be thought of as that prerequisite occasioning of writing, which must be identified and
understood if the writing is to be successful.
Miron Białoszewski isn’t the only poet whose work has been deemed difficult.
Yet Paul Celan (1920-1970), to use a famous example, has had more luck with American
translators, poets, and readers. When discussing his translations of Celan’s famously
hermetic poems, which, by the way, Celan never saw as such, believing instead that
reading the poem would eventually yield a type of understanding or meaning, Pierre Joris
claims, in his introduction to Breathturn Into Timestead:
The printed poem is, in fact, only a score for all subsequent readings (private or
public) and performative transformations, be they through music, dance, painting,
or foreign-language translation. Such view is bound to destabilize any concept of
the poem as some fixed and absolute artifact, readable (understandable,
interpretable) once and for all. (xii—xiv)
The idea of a poem as a fluid object goes a long way in helping translators break
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the chains of translation understood as duplication in favor of performance. Of course
some poems and poets already embody degrees of performance within them. Walt
Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855) is a good example, as is Tadeusz Różewicz (1921-
2014), another Polish poet who hasn’t had much success in America. In one of his better-
known poems, “In the Middle of Life” (1953), the poet plays God:
After the end of the world
After my death
I found myself in the middle of life
Creating myself
Building a life
People animals landscapes

This is a table I kept saying
This is a table
On the table are bread knife
The knife is used for cutting break
People feed on bread (trans. Joanna Trzeciak, ln. 1-11)

The poem’s opening two stanzas can serve as examples of the kind of performativity that
translators engage in; Różewicz sets out not only to create a new world, with subjects and
objects, but also evokes actions, such as slicing a loaf of bread and eating. The self-
reflexivity of the task of rendering this type of work into English is self-evident. The
Polish critic Andrzej Kopacki finds an analogy to translation as performance in the way
that a literary text or script is adopted for the stage, whereby “the translator is the
93
director, the arranger of the adaptation, and the performer” (90).
According to literary theorist Jonathan Culler, “Performative acts may originate
or inaugurate, create something new” (126). However, not all performative gestures are
identical. Relying on the distinction originated by the late British philosopher J.L. Austin,
whereby “performative utterances, which accomplish the action to which they refer”
versus “constative utterances, which make true or false statements” (125), Culler
observes that many “performatives have an explicitly ritualistic character” (125).
Consequently, Culler favors the term performance rather than performativity when
discussing lyric poems, which may or may not bring about what’s described therein.
Here’s an outline of his four cases of performativity:
First, there is a general performativity linked to the conventional character of
literary discourse, which could be said to bring into being that which it describes.
This applies especially to fictional discourse. The basic performativity of the lyric
is different, and so a second case: not the creation of a fictional world but the
simple event of establishing itself, constituting itself as a lyric. At this level—
which is of little interest because it applies so broadly—the performativity of
individual elements of the poem consists in their contribution to the overall effect
of the poem. The third case, to which I propose to restrict the notion of the
performative, is the poem’s success in bringing about what it describes, as when
Sappho’s superb lyric craftsmanship creates the effect of making Aphrodite
respond. The fourth case, which we do better to call “performance” rather than the
performative, is the lyric action or lyric event, the poem’s functioning in the
world. The lyric performance succeeds as it acts iterably through repeated
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readings, makes itself memorable. (131)
Culler’s point, thus, helps shift the focus from the representational efficacy of a poem to
the search for memorability. Because there might not be an easier way to establish
memorability than through repetition, thanks in part to the aforementioned “ritualistic
nature of lyric” (131), translators should take liberties in order to ensure a degree of
originality, even foreignness, in the translated poem.
Strangely enough, Białoszewski’s poems, which are full of repetitions and
neologisms, lend themselves to this kind of approach perfectly. The translator and editors
of the sole volume of Białoszewski’s in English, The Revolution of Things, drew heavily
on the poet’s early work, which is characterized by the “return to things,” whereby
“Białoszewski responds to the pressure of ideological abstractions by fabricating
mythology of things and, in his later poetry, by abandoning himself willfully to the
contingency of speech and situation” (xi-xii). This sub-genre of poetry is not without
precedent in American poetry, as the case of Charles Simic’s much-anthologized ‘fork’
and ‘spoon’ poems illustrates. Nonetheless, celebrating life, with all its multifaceted
richness, even at the most rudimentary level, was life affirming for Białoszewski, whose
hometown of Warsaw was practically wiped off the face of the earth during WWII.
Given their generative and performative character, his poems are full of theatricality and
bear little resemblance to poetry as it is traditionally defined:
they are a sort of hybrid for which one critic has coined the term "little narratives"
(male narracje). Some are anecdotal diary entries about people known only to the
poet. Others are descriptions of street scenes taken from what Białoszewski calls
his “stroll book” (spacernik). Still others are composed solely of snippets of
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conversations. In some, full words are represented only by abbreviations so that
the reader has to guess what is actually being said. (Levine 44)
Indeed, Białoszewski’s poetics rely heavily on the participation of readers and
audiences, not unlike spoken-word poetry. His poems are deeply rooted in his private
surroundings, including his Warsaw apartment, where the poet founded his own
experimental theatre troupe called “Teatr Osobny” (trans. The Separate Theater). Here’s
how the American columnist, Joseph Alsop, described its setting:
Nothing quite like this apartment exists anywhere else in the world. Every single
piece of furniture has been gravely maimed or wounded at some time in the past.
Abstract paintings, strange and menacing constructions of wire and masking tape,
great numbers of fragments of Polish baroque church-sculpture, two damaged but
still magical Polish-Byzantine icons, the remnants of a beautifully tender late
Gothic altar piece- all these and many other objects are hung or strewn about.
(qtd. in Levine 41)
It’s not surprising, then, to consider that Białoszewski’s actual process of creation was
equally experimental and open-ended. According to Polish critic Michal Głowiński,
“Białoszewski’s acting skills allowed him to emphasize the theatricality of his writing. In
the 1970s his creative process often involved reading his works into a recording device
and listening to himself read before revising the text for publication” (qtd. in Niżyńska 5).
Translating speech acts, as Głowiński characterizes Białoszewski’s representations of his
own every day, isn’t easy, though they seem to arrive furnished with the kind permission
to take liberties I have argued for throughout this essay. Here are two translations of the
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same representative poem, “A Ballad of Going Down to the Store”
32
:
First I went down to the store
by the stairs,
ah, imagine only,
by the stairs.

Then people known to people unknown
passed me by and I passed them by.
Regret
that you did not see
how people walk,
regret!

I entered a complete store:
lamps of glass were burning.
I saw somebody—he sat down—
and what I heard? what I heard?
rustling of bags and human talk.

And indeed,

32
“Ballada o zejściu do sklepu”: Najpierw zeszedłem na ulicę / schodami, / ach,
wyobraźcie sobie, / schodami. // Potem znajomi nieznajomych / mnie mijali, a ja ich. /
Żałujcie, / żeście nie widzieli, / jak ludzie chodzą, / żałujcie! // Wstąpiłem do zupełnego
sklepu; / paliły się lampy ze szkła, / widziałem kogoś - kto usiadł, / i co słyszałem?... co
słyszałem? / szum toreb i ludzkie mówienie. // No naprawdę / naprawdę / wróciłem.”

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indeed
I returned. (trans. Czesław Miłosz)
And the second version:
First I went into the street
down the stairs,
would you believe it,
down stairs.

Then acquaintances of strangers
and I passed one another by.
What a pity you did not see
how people walk,
what a pity.

I entered a real store.
There were glass lamps burning.
I saw someone, he sat down.
And what did I hear? What did I hear?
The rustle of bags and human talk.

And indeed,
indeed,
I returned. (trans. Busza and Czaykowski)
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The poem’s open-endedness, not to mention its energetic pacing and seemingly random
details, are quintessential Białoszewski. Translating this poem shouldn’t test a translator
too much, yet the two versions are slightly different. For instance, in the second version
Busza and Czaykowski successfully recreate the alliteration found in the second stanza—
all those “p” words—while Miłosz, who takes liberty of skipping the detail of the speaker
coming down to the street first, before heading to the store, to the detriment, in my view,
of the multilayered design of the poem, recreates the curt and colloquial “and what I
heard?” in the penultimate stanza better than the grammatically sounder and safer choice
made by Busza and Czaykowski (“what did I hear?”). The repetition present in the
poem’s final stanza, an alliterative affirmation spoken by the speaker meant to sound
convincing, is somewhat lost in both versions. Having translated this poem myself, I
opted for “For real / really / I returned.”
That Polish poetry enjoys a singular status in the U.S. goes without saying, but
having more of Białoszewski’s poems in English would force us to revise our notion of
Polish poetry in the twentieth century. Since “Translation is the forcible replacement of
the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text with a text that will be intelligible
to the target-language reader” (Venuti 18), a translator can choose to destabilize the
existing notion of a foreign literature in its target language by foreignizing the translation
or choosing to translate texts that fall outside the reinforced understanding of the literary
culture. Likewise, Homi Bhabha’s influential text “Of Mimicry and Man,” ostensibly
about post-colonial concerns, mainly the power of colonial mimicry to control the
colonized, but conceptually about how acts of mimicry and imitation are inevitably acts
of performance that introduce fidelity and variation, also holds apt lessons for translators
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seeking to redefine their activity as performance. What’s more, by translating so-called
hermetic poems, Polish or others, translators would de facto voice their dissent to the
onslaught of cheap information that characterizers our media-saturated world. That’s
where Hans-Georg Gadamer locates the value of wrestling with difficult texts, as when
he asks poignantly, “How can the word still stand out amid the flood of information?
How can it draw us to itself except by alienating us from those all too familiar turns of
speech that we all expect?” (135) Finally, if we keep in mind that all writing is
performance, and that translating is writing, then these activities should embody all that
performances and, by extension, experiences do: anxiety and fear, especially if the
experience is previously unlived, and unfolding in real time, as well as dislocation, and
pleasure, that comes with newness.

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CHAPTER 5:
FOUND IN TRANSLATION

To have been born in another country and immigrated to the United States is both a
blessing and a curse. For those who see America as the proverbial Promised Land, the
move brings new opportunities, but it also triggers insecurities, a fractured identity, and
an uncertain sense of self-worth. The young newcomer from a country outside the
Anglophone sphere has no choice but to enter the strange process of acquiring English by
translating himself for others while simultaneously translating his new home and friends
into his native tongue. This process is full of static, of confusing innuendoes, of grating,
accented sounds that heighten one’s sense of otherness. For those immigrants dreaming
of becoming successful writers, and use their writing toward self-definition, the journey
is even more fraught, given their apparent linguistic in-betweenness.
Indeed, the resulting hybridity of culture and identity provides translingual
writers, i.e., writers with two or more overlapping linguistic systems—with both
opportunities and constraints. On one hand, their writings may come across as stilted—
mere doodles for passing on information. On the other hand, exophonic writing liberates
authors from the prescribed modes of written expression when using their native
language, effectively turning them into literary innovators. As Jhumpa Lahiri writes in In
Other Words, her Italian-language debut, her imperfect Italian offers her “a stunning
clarity, a more profound self-awareness. Imperfection inspires invention, imagination,
creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive” (113).
Most translingual writers would identify with these two extremes, as would
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anyone who’s as much as tried to practice their foreign-language skills on a trip abroad.
Some will never be able to reconcile with the feeling that their writing is somehow
imperfect or lacking, even though as Doris Summer writes in the introduction to
Bilingual Aesthetics, “More than one language is a supplement, not a deficiency” (xi).
Still, the question of why some authors pursue writing in an acquired language looms
large over the entire enterprise. After all, literature is littered with statements describing
the transition as either impossible or extremely painful, given that since “the Romantics
we have all been brought up to believe that each language has its mystery and its soul”
(Forester 7). Czesław Miłosz, for instance, who lived in Berkeley for over thirty years,
never wrote in English, believing that one can write poetry only in the language of his or
her childhood. Vladimir Nabokov, on the other hand, who had made the switch, and
successfully so (though he grew up learning English, among other languages), we might
add, nevertheless states that “My complete switch from Russian prose to English prose
was exceedingly painful—like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight
fingers in an explosion” (qtd. in Jin 48).
The question of to what extent writers’ linguistic allegiance is tied to their very
corporeal being is fascinating. The Polish American essayist and translator Ewa
Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, who has made the switch herself, looks to a neurological
component, citing Canadian researchers who have “recently confirmed what previously
was only intuitively grasped: people who leave the country of their birth in infancy and
have no memories of the language they were born into retain the pathways of their first
language in their brains” (207). This must partly be why so-called “coordinate
bilinguals”—those who learned their languages at different times and in different
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environments—catch themselves swearing in their primary language when under
emotional stress, despite having left their native country years ago. At the same time, the
work of François Grosjean, a scholar of bilingualism and biculturalism, reminds us that
half the world is already bilingual or multilingual and mixes and matches their various
languages on daily basis, with context dictating when and how the languages are used.
However, as the great Chinese American novelist Ha Jin argues, what changes for the
translingual writer is the experience of displacement, which brings about fear of the
unknown and self-incrimination. To survive in his or her new surroundings, the
translingual writer considers switching languages, yet for many:
the ultimate betrayal is to choose to write in another language. No matter how the
writer attempts to rationalize and justify adopting a foreign language, it is an act
of betrayal that alienates him from his mother tongue and directs his creative
energy to another language. This linguistic betrayal is the ultimate step the
migrant writer dares to take; after this, any other act of estrangement amounts to a
trifle. (Jin 31)
But what if the writer finds that the switch has liberated him or her to pursue
never-before approached subjects or to revel in stylistic pathfinding? The question of
style is in fact of paramount importance here. Joseph Conrad, for instance, claimed that
he never considered writing in his native Polish, once the English language found him, as
he put it somewhere, yet many scholars and authors have pored over his works and
pointed out their subtle deviances as proof that they weren’t written by a native speaker.
After he quotes Naipaul, who says regarding Conrad that “there is something flawed and
unexercised about his creative imagination” (14), Ha Jin goes on to say about Conrad’s
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prose style that it “tends to be purple at the expense of immediacy and penetrativeness.
Indeed, some of his novels and stories often read like prose poetry, which can be a virtue,
and some of his main characters, often flat, remain underdeveloped. Even his masterpiece
Heart of Darkness suffers from lack of dramatic complications” (42). What’s interesting,
both Naipaul and Jin rest their cases by stating that Conrad is like a monument to them,
and there’s no point of griping about his stylistic or grammatical limitations. Incidentally,
Milan Kundera’s style is also seen by Ha Jin as “thinner” after the author switched to
writing in French (32).
Of course, matters of style go much deeper than the translingual writer’s ability to
create dynamic characters or to use the past perfect tense correctly. The late Polish poet
and Harvard professor Stanisław Barańczak, who never switched to writing in English,
talks about tonal variety and rule breaking as off limits to most translingual writers. In his
essay, “Tongue-Tied Eloquence: Notes on Language, Exile, and Writing,” he brings up
the example of another Polish émigré, Antoni Słonimski, who managed to leave Poland
for England when World War II broke out, only to return to his native country in the
grips of Stalinist oppression because in the UK nobody laughed at his jokes. Here is
Barańczak sounding a cautionary note to any prospective translingual writer:
True, even though the absolutely perfect command of a language is something an
outsider cannot really acquire, he can, through a lot of effort, finally attain a
fluency and glibness that makes him sound almost like a native writer. But
literature is something more than glib writing. It also includes the right—and
necessity—to violate glibness, to make light of rules, to speak in a novel way
without bothering to be correct. In literature, a new thought cannot emerge except
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from a new way of speaking: in order to say anything relevant, you must break a
norm. And this is precisely what an outsider cannot afford, since if breaking is to
make any sense at all, you may break only the norms that bind you, not those that
bind someone else. If a native writer purposely violates language, it’s called
progress; if an outsider does it, it’s called malapropism. (qtd. in Jin, 49-50)
Barańczak’s final sentence reads more like the stating of a fact than complaining.
Yet there is plenty to complain about when it comes to what some see as pigeonholing of
translingual writers. The 2015 anthology Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets,
Influences, and Writing in America contains a number of entries by writers finding the
American literary establishment and, by extension, the American reader stacked against
them. For instance, Kwame Dawes writes that “Americans like immigrant writers to
acknowledge their immigrant status even as they speak as Americans” (90). Yet when
they don’t, by way of employing unconventional syntax or peppering their work with
references and allusions that sound alien to the native ear and eye, they are, effectively,
often rejected by the gatekeepers. Of course, one might counter that the American literary
establishment is becoming more inclusive and should be recognized as such, but many
translingual writers see these developments, which aren’t recent at all but rather cyclical,
as mere tokenizm. Not all translingual writers push against the existing power
structures—some are perfectly happy to pen immigrant narratives of struggle and
ultimate success, subscribing to the maxim write what you know—but those who do, aim
to destabilize the system whose chief characteristic is its drive to categorize everyone and
everything.
Alas, most writers aren’t the masters of their own fate, as far as their writing’s
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existence in the world is concerned. While the process of how a literary text gets written
is and should remain a mystery—despite what creative writing primers and handbooks
tell us—translingual writers have little say in how they are perceived and classified by the
community whose approval they seek. As Jahan Ramazani puts in his study A
Transnational Poetics, “some poets are born to Americanness, some achieve
Americanness, some have Americanness thrust upon them” (37), yet they all struggle
with finding the right words to express themselves in a language that itself both offers
and delays them a chance at acculturation, in addition to resisting a slew of ready-made
labels that would make them classifiable and thus less threatening to the establish culture,
which they may or may not be addressing in their writings.
Indeed, the issue of classifying or cataloging writers seems to stand in the way of
many translingual writers becoming more accepted. As Rebecca L. Walkowitz reminds
us, migrant writers may not only compose in several languages, but also embody
divergent political and literary affiliations and “affiliation complicates,” she writes,
“composition since writers addressing many places are less likely to believe that language
confers belonging, or that belonging limits language. They are more likely to assume that
the language of writing and the language of speaking do not necessarily overlap.” As we
have seen, the Romantic paradigm hanging over literary works and stressing “native”
proficiency continues to foment debates regarding which writers can call themselves or
be seen as “the rightful or natural users of that language” (Walkowitz, 21-22).
In fact, I would argue that those translingual writers who choose to write poetry
become further removed from the community, given our society’s little faith in the poetic
enterprise. Piotr Gwiazda, who is also a scholar of American literature and translator
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from Polish, says as much when he writes that “The challenge of writing in English, my
second language, has been central to my identity as a poet” (122). Moreover, he proposes
that anyone who chooses to write poems seriously “has to accept a certain level of
alienation in one’s life, from one’s life, in order to inhabit that other, exclusively verbal
realm. After all, what is a poem if not a personal act of attention to language? All poets,
to some extent, are alone with their language—whether it’s their first or second or third
language” (123). Far from sounding like a copout, Gwiazda’s words remind us of Samuel
Beckett, who chose to make the switch from English to French. Beckett’s justification—
“the need to be ill equipped”—suggests that the achieved state of estrangement from
one’s linguistic surroundings bestows upon the poet a higher power of poetic perception.
In other words, by making things harder for himself or herself, the poet hopes to reach
new artistic levels.
Putting his identity as a poet on the line, Gwiazda proclaims, in his contribution to
the anthology Others Will Enter the Gates, entitled “Like a Bear Playing a Flute,” that
No matter how foreign my poems may appear to those who read them, I would
like to think that they implicitly tell a story of not only my giving up of one
language for another but giving myself over to a new language and the ways it
shapes my experience of the world. Regardless of how hard I try to make them
my own, I hope that they will always remain translations without an original.
(126)
It’s hard to overstate the courage of Gwiazda’s statement; indeed, by suggesting his
engagement with self-translation, he puts himself in an even more fraught position, as far
as the literary community is concerned, since translation is squarely defined as a transfer
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between two foreign tongues. The resistance to self-translation leads to what Doris
Sommer identifies, dismayingly, as a situation in which “the shared language should be
the mechanism of exclusion” (“Be-Longing” 110).
To see an example of Piotr Gwiazda engaging in self-translation, we need to look
no further than to the poem “Rok urodzenia.” The original version, written in Polish,
appeared in 1991 in the literary magazine Teraz My? (trans. Now It’s Us?). It reads:
Był to rok
Wiary w niemożliwe.
Dobre czasy przechodziły właśnie do legendy
Ludzkość dawno przestała afiszować się
Swoim dziewictwem.

Zimą, jak zawsze o tej porze,
Wszczęto poszukiwania niemowlęcia
ze złotą aureolą wokół głowy.

Rodzice tanio sprzedali mi
Dwa imiona i nazwisko,
Jedynym świadkiem porodu
Był ból.

And here is the English-language version, entitled “Birth Certificate,” translated by the
poet’s own hand and included in his 2005 debut volume Gagarin Street:

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It happened in the year
when everything seemed possible.

Hard times were becoming a legend.
For once man and woman
stopped feeling guilty about their sins.

It was winter,
so the authorities organized nationwide persecution
of a child with a golden halo
around his head.

My father gave me a passport
with a false name.

The only witness to my birth
was pain.

One doesn’t need to be able to read both languages to see that the poems are laid out
differently, with the Polish version being much more compact than the self-translation.
But that’s not the end of the differences between the two; arguably, the two poems share
only their thematic scaffolding, i.e., the progression of narrative and imagistic elements.
While the extra white space slows the poem down significantly, allowing the audience to
take in each image, it is in fact the images themselves that undergo significant
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metamorphosis. The Polish poem can be read as a commentary on the political and
economic situation in Poland and, significantly, in the world (the poet was born in 1973).
The religious overtones heard in the first and second stanzas serve a rather platonic
function, while suggesting that the poet was born during the month of December. The
Polish poem is a good one but feels a little flat until we arrive at the third and final stanza,
where the image of painful birth or delivery serves to undercut the idyl sketched out by
the poet.
“Birth Certificate,” on the other hand, is a great poem, not least because of its
slowed down pace and, above all else, the raising of what we might call its rhetorical
temperature, which begins with the choice of the title. In Polish, “rok urodzenia,” means
“year of birth,” and the phrase sounds like something that one might be asked during roll
call or whenever it’s important to verify one’s identity (another option for the title?
DOB). “Birth Certificate” then sounds both more idiomatic to an American ear but also
carries with it a question of identity. In the second stanza, we see a major change in the
form of “dobre czasy” (good times) being changed to “hard times,” which might stem
from the poet’s newly acquired immigrant status, although in this case, the end of
hardship is a work in progress. The end of the second stanza carries the same biblical
overtones that segue nicely into the third stanza, although there the child is persecuted by
sinister sounding “authorities” rather than, as in the Polish, merely sought or awaited.
The most significant divergence between the two poems occurs in the penultimate
stanza. In the Polish version, at the beginning of the final quatrain we learn that the
speaker was sold cheaply “two names and a surname” by his “parents,” but in “Birth
Certificate,” the parents are replaced by “My father,” who gives the speaker “a passport /
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with a false name.” Did the poet opt for “father” to replace “parents” to draw a
connection between himself and the baby Jesus from the preceding stanza? If so, then the
translated stanza could be read as commentary on the ultimate sacrifice that immigrants
make when they move to a foreign land and are expected to take on a new, locally
approved identity while also growing estranged from their parents who might remain
more attached to their first country. The poet’s earlier choice, to call the new poem “Birth
Certificate,” coupled with the foretelling of the son’s migrant future, also brings to mind
a kind of struggle on the part of the speaker: he’s being send to a land of opportunities
with a passport in which his name has been changed, but he’s also reminded who he is
and where he comes from by his birth certificate, which this poem itself doubles as.
In many ways, both poems bear the standard hallmarks of Eastern European
poetry, what with its images that touch upon politics, religion, and existential concerns,
all in a span of less than a dozen lines, but it’s only the self-translated poem that bears the
unmistakable marks of displacement and the loss of self-caused by immigration.
Ironically, Gwiazda’s translation choices led to—in Lawrence Venuti’s parlance— a
“domesticating” of the poem that became “Birth Certificate,” but in doing so the poet was
also able to raise the stakes for himself and his readers, and cast a strong light on the
process of immigration, which is never not fraught. In that sense, we could situate the
self-translated poem in what Adrian Wanner calls, in his excellent study The Bilingual
Muse: Self-Translation Among Russian Poets, “a transnational hybrid space” (173). This
is less utopian than it sounds. Millions of people are affected by, to quote Wanner again,
“postmonolingual condition” (175). Will there be more writers writing with an accent?
Yes. Will this lead to “the emergence of ever more deterritorialized communities” (176)?
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Looking at the case of Piotr Gwiazda, I would likewise answer in the affirmative.
The issue of belonging plays out, for translingual poets, both on the page and
carnally. As Steven Kellman writes in his recent collection of essays, Nimble Tongues:
Studies in Literary Translingualism “Except in linguistic atlases, language is not defined
by latitude and longitude. Language is a process, a performance, a system of
communication—not a place.” Yet applying spatial metaphors, including Kellman’s
“third space,” a kind of neither-here-nor-there state, is common. Fortunately, the road
toward second- or third-language acquisition, which is both progressive and regressive, is
marked by a kind of porousness present at the heart of the entire translingual process.
Moreover, dabbling in literary translation seems to be one of the basic stages that
translingual authors go through. According to Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, writing in her
pioneering study Alien Tongues, which is primarily an analysis of the literary adventures
of bilingual Russian writers belonging to the so-called first emigration, bilingual authors
at first barely experiment in writing in the second language, usually duplicating the style
and subject matter of the first language, and after some time switching to translating from
the first to the second language, often in order to prove to themselves and to the world
their competences in the acquired language, and then initiate the psychologically painful
movement toward accepting self-translation, which is tantamount to engaging in regular
creation in the second language. Somewhere between stages 3 and 4, a bilingual writer
gives up writing in his first language because he wants to keep it from becoming
contaminated by the second language. As the Hunter College professor points out, this is
also an attempt to “avoid psychic split by committing the inner voice to only one of the
output systems, albeit the most recently acquired” (53). Moreover, what prevents a
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translingual author from accepting his so-called third language, which arises at the
intersection between the first and the acquired languages, has an emotional background
and results, inter alia, from “the feeling shared by many bilingual writers that it is
somehow abnormal [sic] to be able to write in two languages” (40).
Piotr Gwiazda’s poetic trajectory testifies to his wish to bore into language. His
three English-language collections of poetry are distinct, both formally and thematically.
Although it’s never safe to generalize a poet’s work, we see that the poems gathered in
his debut volume, Gagarin Street, are narrative in structure, featuring a speaker grasping
at his past in hopes of understanding his present. In the subsequent two volumes, we see a
progressive abandoning of established forms of poetic communication, where the speaker
is clearly identified and the lines, ironic though they are, accumulate in a linear fashion
and deliver a grand pronouncement and closure, i.e., what is referred to in Poland as
puenta. That Gwiazda must’ve tired of this type of writing, or that he refused the label of
an immigrant poet penning immigrant stories, would be an understatement.
In his most recent work, Aspects of Strangers, it is the language and the society
that get interrogated. This new direction must feel destabilizing to the poet himself,
although it brings him closer to his own aesthetic and bicultural ideal. The poems
gathered in the volume are preceded by three epigraphs, one of which, taken from Julia
Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves, reads:
To be of no account to others. No one listens to you, you never have the floor, or
else, when you have the courage to seize it, your speech is quickly erased by the
more garrulous and fully relaxed talk of the community. Your speech has no past
and will have no power over the future of this group: why should one listen to it?
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You do not have enough status—“social standing”—to make your speech useful.
It may be desirable, to be sure, surprising, too, bizarre or attractive, if you wish.
But such lures are of little consequence when set against the interest—which is
precisely lacking—of those you are speaking to. (20)
As we have seen, translingual poets, many of whom (though not all) acquire their
exophonic status due to emigration, often suffer from the condition of being neither-here-
nor-there. To improve their standing with the community they aspire to join—despite
Kristeva’s words quoted above—they often subscribe to the creative writing mantra and
write what they know. For many, it is the only chance to become rooted in the place even
while being of the place is not an option. Gwiazda has been and done that, as evidenced
by the Gagarin Street poems, but has since realized the futility of his trying to fit in:
You see their other faces.
You hear their other voices.

You pass them in the airport
or the subway station

or any street or place…
Are you a part of them?

Your face gives you away.
Your voice denies you.
This untitled opening section of Aspects of Strangers (the book and its eponymous
114
opening section) speaks volumes of the peculiar condition of in-betweenness endured by
immigrants around the world. The ability to look and see things from multiple
perspectives is a gift, Gwiazda suggests, until the gaze is turned onto the immigrant, who
speaks in response and thus betrays himself as an ‘other.’ At the same time, turning away
from efforts at acquiring the right “social standing,” then, can be liberating, for it allows
the poet to engage not only his own demons, so to speak, but also the society—its culture,
politics, people—he stands apart from. However tenuous this practice may feel to the
translingual poet who is also an immigrant, it empowers him to pursue his own path
toward acquiring or resisting what others have called Americanness.
In the final pages of Monolingualism of the Other, Jacques Derrida writes that
“The miracle of translation does not take place every day; there is, at times, a desert
without a desert crossing” (72). It is a beautiful statement, and a nearly perfect metaphor
for translingual authors. In Gwiazda’s case, what he calls his “linguistic difference,” is
precisely what his poems embody and offer to the readers—mainly “their own kind of
truth” (Others Will Enter the Gates 125). There is nothing impersonal in that statement,
as far as what T.S. Eliot had in mind, even though some translingual writers admit that
their acquired, working language keeps them at arm’s length, or, as Gwiazda believes,
quoting George Santayana talking about his own relationship with the English language,
“Its roots do not quite reach my center” (Messages 61). This could explain the part about
“My poems are full of images / that occur to me in dreams,” as Gwiazda confesses in part
6 of his great sequence “Time” (Messages 26), even though in an earlier poem in the
same collection he wrote that “During sleep I talk in a language no one understands”
(Messages 16). Perhaps it’s a good problem to have, especially if we agree with Gwiazda,
115
when he writes in one of his poems collected in Aspects of Strangers, that “It’s never
about the right word; it’s / about the next word. (His accent suddenly thickened.)” (71).
The question why study translingual writing, including the ways in which self-
translation becomes creatively generative, should be of interest to all writers and critics.
Why? The main reason, I would suggest, is that as writing in an acquired language
becomes more commonplace, due to a growing number of people becoming displaced for
political or economic reasons, we are presented with a vantage point from which to
observe how the changes taking place by way of inter-dialogue in exophonic writers can
contribute to our own subjective craft-, meaning- and world-view making. As the
Japanese-German author Yoko Tawada states, “Today a human subject is a place where
different languages coexist by mutually transforming each other and it is meaningless to
cancel their cohabitation and suppress the resulting distortion” (qtd. In Perloff 137).
Indeed, it is increasingly common for writers to rely on untranslated foreign phrases for
creating a kind of disorienting effect on the reader. The ensuing code-switching, by the
way, has nothing to do with one’s language proficiency or lack thereof.
Nevertheless, some readers or so-called gatekeepers will be turned off by it, no
doubt, but others will perhaps attempt to translate the problematic fragment or feel
compelled to make heads or tails of a mangled sentence, which in turn may offer them a
glance at how their own modes of reading and writing have grown stale to the point of
excluding other voices and styles. Isn’t that the point of writing and reading literature, to
be forced beyond one’s own narrow sense of the self? That’s my bet for the future. Plus,
as the French linguist Louis-Jean Calvet reminds us, “there are no ‘mother’ tongues, only
‘first’ tongues” (72), and every time we write, we learn to speak it all over again.
116
CONCLUSION

When a country sees its political and economic fortunes rise, the issue of funding and
institutional support becomes crucial. Eastern Europe is a case in point. While most of the
region’s countries, just like their neighbors to the West, establish governmental offices
charged with disseminating their homegrown literature by way of financing translators
and translations, they do fight an uphill battle against market forces that couldn’t care less
about their past, let alone present, literary output. In the introduction to his study of the
post-Communist writer, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in
Eastern Europe, Andrew Baruch Wachtel recounts being asked, quiet frequently, “Why
has no new Milan Kundera appeared in Eastern Europe since the collapse of communist
regimes?”” (1) His answer is predictable: of course, there have emerged writers just as
talented, successful and significant, but the issue, given the domestic and international
forces involved, is as much sociocultural as it is literary. “Publishers must wish to make
[a new] Kundera available,” he writes, “critics must decide to review him, states and
privately funded groups must award him prizes, and readers (both in his own country and
abroad) must chose to buy and, at least in some cases, to read his work” (1). The forces
and entities that had performed the invaluable service of promoting literature, making it
important to audience both domestic and international, collapsed right after the 1989
transitions. Some have been rebuilt, but still, it is highly unlikely that Eastern European
writers will again commend the kind of respect they once did. On the other hand, if
foreign audiences, including institutionalized players, had looked at Eastern European
writers through the prism of the past, then now there is a chance that although they will
117
import fewer writers, those who do make it across will be respected more for their writing
than the context into which they were born.
While contemporary Polish poetry continues to be available in English in
respectable numbers, the critical reception just isn’t there anymore. In fact, those writers
the closest to the line established by the so-called Polish School of Poetry, seem to have
been received much more favorably than those who do not.
33
Arguably, this has nothing
to do with the loss of prestige experienced by all writers and other literary players in
Eastern Europe after 1989, as poets such as Świetlicki, who has already recently been
translated into English despite being widely regarded as the most important Polish poet of
the last twenty years, continue to receive plenty of acclaim in their home countries. The
blame, according to Wachtel, should be placed squarely at the (largely) positive change
in their countries’ geo-political situation:
in the post-cold-war world there is no longer a political reason to pay attention to
East European literary developments. What is more, as these societies have
become more Westernized, they are less exotic, less “other,” and hence less
interesting to Western readers. In a word, just as the material base for their
individual and corporate prosperity eroded at home, writers of serious literature
began to seem less relevant abroad.” (47)
Since Eastern Europe along with Poland are now allies of America and the West, they are
no longer the enemy worthy of our money and attention.
Not surprisingly, some writers deliberately strip their work of any so-called local
flavor in hopes of getting translated. This “new internationalism,” as Wachtel calls it, is

33
Tomasz Różycki (b. 1970), who has published three books in the U.S., and appears
regularly at festivals and conferences, is a good example.
118
about getting translated as well as obtaining legitimacy, because for authors hailing from
minor countries and writing in minor languages
it is increasingly impossible to consider oneself a “real” writer unless one has
been published in major European languages (particularly English) and because
such a perspective provides a way to overcome the lack of interest in Eastern
Europe on the part of Western publishers now that the “automatic” political
reasons for publishing East European literature have disappeared. (122)
The risk with this kind of writing, however, includes dumbing things down for the
foreign audience, thus insulting its own sense of self, as well as generalizing.
Nonetheless, writing for a foreign audience (again, English language audience seems to
matter more than any other) has taken hold of homegrown authors. The English novelist
and critic, Tim Parks, who’s lived in Italy for over thirty years, claims—citing research
by his Milanese colleagues—that “contemporary Italian prose increasingly places
adjectives before nouns, uses possessives rather than reflexives to indicate body parts,
and expresses subject pronouns, all as a result of contact, through translation, with
English” (qtd. in Beecroft 279-280). For his part, David Williams uses the term
trümmerleute and trümmerliteratur (“rubble literature, but most commonly translated as
literature of the ruins”) to designate writers who feed the West an expected cocktail of
political strife and historical misfortune (4).
34
However, the case of younger Polish

34
The charge of exploiting her country’s bloody past is commonly brought up by her
Croatian countrymen against émigré writer Dubravka Ugrešić. According to Williams,
“Ugrešić […] has (implicitly and explicitly) been accused of performing a kind of
Auftragskunst—of willingly meeting the demands of the western literary marketplace for
‘the fairy tale about good and evil, which a good child likes to hear again and again’. The
accusation is doubly chauvinistic, implying both that Ugrešić’s talent has played no part
in her success, and that western readers are too stupid to see that they have had the wool
119
poets illustrates another side of the same discussion. While Świetlicki and others have in
fact increased the amount of local flavor in their poems, some might argue that, given the
influence of O’Hara and Ashbery on him and his peers, there is no point of translating ‘a
Polish O’Hara’ into English.
35
This would be, of course, nothing short of disingenuous.
Still, poets stripping their poems to meet demands of “world poetry,” according to
Stephen Owen, often produces work that’s strikingly “a version of Anglo-American
modernism or French modernism, depending on which wave of colonial culture fist
washed over the intellectuals of the country in question” (qtd. in Quinn 121).
Even though translators themselves are products of the culture they consume and
help define, they do exercise some level of independence when deciding what to
translate. According to Pascale Casanova, translators, while operating within existing
power relations, exact a “particular type of consecration in the literary world” (133). In
that sense, Casanova sees translation as an act of littérisation [italics hers], or literary
transmutation “achieved by crossing a magic frontier that allows a text composed in an
unprestigious language […] to pass into a literary language” (136). This process
concludes with a stamp of approval, so to speak—a legitimization. Within their national
literary markets, some writers from the so-called minor or peripheral countries embrace
this process; they revise or adapt their writing style, wishing for a type of “integration
within the dominant literary space through a dilution or erasing of original difference.”

pulled over their eyes. It would, however, be disingenuous to suggest that extraliterary
factors have played no part in the attention Ugrešić has received – when Anna
Akhmatova learned of Brodsky’s exile even she is alleged to have responded to the effect
of ‘oh what a biography they have written for our little redhead’” (Williams 92).

35
At the same time, Quinn refers to Miłosz, not without reason, “The most Americanized
Polish poet of the twentieth century” (121).
120
Likewise, the writer might choose differentiation [italics hers] and assert his or her
difference (179). The act of choosing, or perhaps just the feeling of having to make a
choice, is what Casanova calls “the terrible and inescapable dilemma” (180). While the
distress associated with the decision to belong or not to belong is not exclusive to
translated authors, since it affects ever author trying to break into print and become
established, it seems that translators face a dilemma that’s compounded by their
presumed allegiance to the foreign authors they work with and the presses that ensure
their livelihood. This codependency does not need to represent a conflict of interests, but
it’s easy to see how it might. Just by translating authors whose work sells well in the
target language, the translators help define the readers’ perception and views of that
country (if not their literature in general). Edwin Gentzler and Maria Tymoczko compare
the dilemma faced by translators to a situation “similar to a lawyer having to represent
both the plaintiff and the defendant in the same case” (XIX).
According to Zygmunt Bauman, “the function of culture,” including translation,
“is not to satisfy existing needs, but to create new ones […] Its chief concern is to prevent
a feeling of satisfaction in its former subjects and charges, now turned into clients, and in
particular to counteract their perfect, complete and definitive gratification,” yet despite a
periodic, even cyclical, acceptance of the exotic and foreign, the U.S. translation market
continues to shrink relative to the market’s overall size (17). This is so, in part, due to a
decrease in the linguistic and cultural plurality of the world, one on hand, and an increase
in the number books published by homegrown authors and presses. If we return to
Bourdieu and his views of culture as a conservative force used to particularize citizens in
accordance with their cultural consumption into this or that class, then perhaps it’s
121
equally true that a heightened visibility of translators and translated literature in general
would help destabilize the literary marketplace to the benefit of all its players, if, and it’s
a big ‘if,’ ‘translation’ were to become the new catchword, signaling intent, a call to
action, the way that the word ‘culture’ did for Matthew Arnold.
36

While translators are indispensable to the inner workings of a healthy literary
culture, mainly by enabling foreign authors and, by extension, their languages and
cultures to gain exposure in a new setting and context, they need to be cognizant of their
role in how the Other are represented and, in some cases, appropriated by American
publishers, critics, and readers. As Erich Prunč reminds us “the greater the power
imbalance between two cultures, the smaller the number of texts that are translated into
the language of the more prestigious culture” (qtd. in Wolf and Fukari 44). Thus, given
that the reciprocity of international literature is stacked heavily in favor of Anglophone
writers, not to mention the fact that translation alone makes ‘world literature’ possible,
both in the academy and the marketplace, translators should seek out and carry-over into
English works that revise our understanding of the world and the canon itself. This could
be done, for instance, by encouraging would-be translators to study less prestigious
languages. In Grossman’s words, translation affects “the very nature of the language
itself. The more a language embraces infusions and transfusions of new elements and
foreign turns of phrase, the larger, more forceful, and more flexible it becomes as an
expressive medium” (23). More specifically, translators, whether they see their practice
as “ambassadors” or “legislators,” could move away from the reader by not
domesticating translation but foreignizing it, which as Venuti puts it, “is a way of

36
cf. Bauman, Zygmunt 7.
122
rectifying the power imbalance by allowing the voice of those latter [subaltern] nations to
be heard in their own terms” (qtd. in Rubel and Rosman 7). The translation that seems
foreign and odd, not to say shabbily done, to a reader in the target language, is meant to
destabilize the reader’s expectations and alleged familiarity with the theme and the
language employed. If this is true, as I believe it is, then it’s possible to image that a
translation of an unorthodox text not only changes our perception of its native culture and
literature, but also forces us to revise the language we use to discuss it. While translating
and publishing a text without considering its projected readership is foolish, in this case,
ironically, the inherent shortsightedness of the consumer market might be a good thing.

123
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Literackie, 2017.

Świetlicki, Marcin, and W. Martin. “For Jan Polkowski.” Chicago Review, vol. 46, no.
3/4, 2000, pp. 278–279. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25304637.

Three Percent: A Resource for International Literature at the University of Rochester.
University of Rochester, 2007. Web. 7 Oct. 2015.

“Translation Database.” Publishers Weekly.
https://admin.publishersweekly.com/pw/translation/search/index.html Accessed
Jan. 30, 2019.

Tymoczko, Maria and Edwin Gentzler, eds. Translation and Power. University of
Massachusetts Press, 2002.

Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. New
York, NY: Routledge, 1998.

———. The Translator's Invisibility. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Wachtel, Andrew Baruch. Remaining Relevant After Communism: The Role of the Writer
in Eastern Europe. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2006.

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Walkowitz, Rebecca. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World
Literature, Columbia University Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=1980216.

Wanner, Adrian. The Bilingual Muse: Self-Translation Among Russian Poets.
Northwestern University Press, 2020.

Williams, David. Writing Postcommunism: Towards a Literature of the East European
Ruins. Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmilan, 2013.

Wolf, Michaela and Alexandra Fukari, eds. Constructing a Sociology of Translation.
Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007.

Zagajewski, Adam, and Cavanagh, Clare. Without End : New and Selected Poems . 1st
ed., Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
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II
Nineteen Eighty-Nine and Other Poems

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INTRODUCTION:
WRITING WITH AN ACCENT, OR HOW I BECAME A TRANSLINGUAL POET &
TRANSLATOR
37

When I open my mouth, I give myself away as an ‘other,’ my speech stubbornly distorted
despite my best efforts. But while the purity of diction to which every immigrant aspires
will always remain out of reach for me, I’ve also aimed to not only accept my accent—
however much it has diminished over my nearly thirty years living in the States—but turn
it into a badge of exceptionalism and a pathway to finding my own place, both physically
and metaphorically, in this world. Teachers of English as a second language know that
their students can communicate just fine in their native languages. The trick is to
convince them, ourselves—even though the election of Donald Trump to the highest
office in the land only made the task of self-definition more fraught—that while our
identity may come across as a little schizophrenic, it is replete with opportunities waiting
to be seized.
Some of the ensuing assimilation happens through writing and involves
negotiation between one’s two or more languages. For instance, immigrant children tend
to keep diaries in their new language, often to protect their private feelings and thoughts
from the eyes of overbearing parents. If the parents insist on speaking their native
language at home, perhaps to soothe the pain of dislocation, children usually aim for the
opposite. After all, you cannot fit in at school without speaking English. The first
language of the home and the increasingly familiar American English of the world

37
An earlier version of this essay first appeared in The American Scholar.
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outside are the parallel roads on which one’s identity blunders and staggers forward. It’s
only with time that a child, now grown and more secure in their identity, will begin to
accept and cherish their multilingual and multicultural self.
But what happens when the child wants to write seriously, to become a writer? Do
they choose to work in their first language or in English? Despite the biological and
societal drawbacks, people do choose to write in their adopted languages. The decision to
go with English may result from a person’s using it every day, perhaps having grown
more comfortable with it than with their first language, particularly if the latter has been
relegated to weekend visits with relatives or other people of shared ethnicity, when the
writer’s relatives point out how his accent has changed or how the frequency of his
grammatical errors seems to have increased since they saw each other last. Indeed, to
rebel against your native culture is one thing; to realize that you have outgrown it is quite
another, and something that carries with it even more consequences.
When I first started writing, after I’d lived in the United States for some time, I
wrote only in Polish, precisely so that I wouldn’t have to face some of these
predicaments. Like many poets before me, I shared the sentiment that poetry can be
written only in one’s first language. I had never been an émigré—nobody forced me to
leave Poland; my entire family still lives there—but I was attracted to the romantic idea
of the banished poet, someone cut off from his native language yet refusing to abandon it.
Writing in Polish became my badge of honor—I called myself a “Polish poet,” hoping
that this would elicit envious stares from my peers, many of whom revered the great
Polish poets of the 20th century. It didn’t matter that I was setting myself up for
obscurity; after all, I lacked my predecessors’ dissident credentials, the prerequisite for
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being accepted in America, which in any case hardly ever pays any heed to foreign
authors living here. Still, I knew that would find appreciative readers, if not here, then in
Poland. Surely the editors in Poland would be impressed with my work and take great
interest in it if it came with the tagline, “The poet has lived in the United States since
1994.”
But I also wrote in Polish for another reason, something to do with wanting to
assuage the pangs of homesickness I still feel from time to time. In that sense, I was
following a different path than ‘my patron saint,’ Joseph Conrad, who wrote in English—
albeit sprinkled with Polish idioms and French syntax—out of necessity. I saw my poetry
as the best way to preserve my Polish, to stave off the inevitable. I was spending only a
few weeks in Poland each year, and my Polish was growing staler and staler, increasingly
blemished by errors. With poetry, I had no choice but to be precise. In my case, the drive
toward an economy of language, the desire to lend each word its maximum effect, played
a therapeutic role. I despaired when other Poles pointed out my mistakes, and I tried hard
to stop making them. Looking back on the experience, which lasted all the way through
my first stint in graduate school (2004-2006), I see now that I had been fighting a losing
battle all along. My Polish was getting insipid and ingenuous—it was becoming a vessel
for passing on information rather than something rich and variegated. With time, it grew
more and more torturous to write anything resembling a poem, and the editors in Poland
agreed.
My farewell to Polish as a language of creative expression was unceremonious—
one day I simply stopped using it. Did I feel any guilt? Yes, but at this point I’d become
much less self-absorbed about my poetry and writing in general, and most of the guilt I
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felt had to do with my parents not being able to read anything of mine ever again.
Yet I also felt liberated and quickly went from writing quiet, meditative lyrics to
trying my hand at long, narrative poems. I also discovered what fun it is to write
discursively. Like the speaker of Whitman’s poems, I sang at the top of my lungs, writing
poems that were just as heartfelt as they were rambunctious and whimsical. Jhumpa
Lahiri’s In Other Words may be a tad too self-indulgent for my taste, but her record of
learning how to write in Italian is nothing short of inspirational due to the parts when she
discusses the accompanying feeling of imperfection.
Indeed, because I was testing the limits of my expression, the rules of language
did not seem to apply to me. I tweaked the syntax, did away with punctuation, relishing
run-on and comma-spliced sentences, and saw nothing wrong with it. Doubtless, some of
this creative careening took place in all innocence, but the high I was experiencing came
about because you always feel another language differently, no matter your level of
proficiency. That explains why people who live abroad often curse in their native
language—anger always touches the core of your being (just ask many a taxi cab driver).
But the freedom to wear different hats, as a poet and a writer, has also deepened my
affinity for English as the language of my poems as well as of my home. Taking full
advantage of its massive vocabulary, I’ve learned how to feel and see and think and
sound in many ways.
With time I’ve also learned to follow the language’s rules and, more important,
I’ve chosen my path as a poet. I’m still looking for new ways to learn how to write—how
to expand my poetic toolkit—but I realized that a small, yet essential, correction had to
take place. Many of the words, styles, and dictions I was trying out—including some
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burlesque, cheeky poems and a few that employed too much urban slang—simply didn’t
reflect who I was, and it’s ultimately fruitless to write against your personality and
temperament. When my apprenticeship came to an end, I wasn’t done pushing the
boundaries of what I could do through poems, but I had to settle down a bit. Eventually,
feeling more secure in English, I decided to start translating Polish poetry into English.
Those of us who can read more than one language are lucky, but it takes time and
the proper circumstances for that gift to make itself useful. Although I’d stopped writing
in my native language for oven a decade, I had continued to read Polish authors,
including contemporary verse. To set myself up as a translator, I’d spent a lot of money
on dictionaries, believing that these heavy tomes were prerequisites to being taken
seriously. Admittedly, I was operating in complete anonymity, knowing only that I
needed to find a poet to translate whose work I enjoyed but who was unknown in
English. Working on what eventually became my first volume of translations, I
sometimes felt embarrassed for not knowing a certain word or for having misread the
poet’s intentions. But churning the stones of Polish in my mouth, listening to its
grumbling and screeching sounds, gave me a lot of satisfaction—like cursing, it seemed
to touch my very core.
The same holds true for translation. Like a poem, a translation is never finished.
Even when it is abandoned, its traces remain everywhere and can be used as
steppingstones toward the next piece of writing. Ultimately, I see myself as a craftsman,
an artisan of words and sounds. I also keep in mind that most readers will judge the
translation on its own merits, and that a bad translation might determine what people
think not only about the original, but of the poet, too.
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There is a lot of talk about Americans having no interest in translations, yet I
think that to make the conversation more even-handed we need to look at the works
themselves. In fact, it has become fashionable to claim to have read everything but
having read everything is not the same as having read everything closely and having truly
gained from the experience. Shouldn’t we apply the same logic to works in translation, so
that we only read what is truly capable of changing our literature, culture, thinking, even
our whole being? Thousands of American authors publish books every year and it’s hard
to believe that at least some of them aren’t writing something that their foreign
counterparts are doing. I’m not trying to shoot myself in the foot here, not at all; rather,
I’m hoping that our approach to translating literature, especially poetry, is judicious,
guided by personal affinity, where the translator is ready to go out on a limb for it, and to
vouch for the earth-shattering experience they have had reading the work.
I’ve embraced the role of helping my American friends appreciate what I see as
the best of contemporary Polish poetry, but I’ve also seen the whole enterprise as a labor
of love, a way for me to fill a void or gap in my poetic practice. Very often, this labor of
love grows out of a sense of wonder I’ve experienced reading a particular poem, such as
Kornhauser’s “Fieldfare,” or Gutorow’s “Hebrew,” with its stunning opening couplet, “I
too have only two tenses: / the memory tense and the longing tense.” Just as often,
though, it has been fueled not by love at first sight but by questions about the poet’s craft
and politics. By studying a poet’s work closely, I get to appreciate the intricacies of the
creative process and all the labor it entails. Consequently, I’ve come to realize that some
of the difficulties I encounter while first reading and translating a poem should be left
untouched in the translation; after all, too much revising may produce a patchwork of
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smooth but spiritless parts, rather than the real thing.
Yes, I’m very selfish as a translator, for the whole process is very holistic; it helps
to nurture the sense of Polishness in me, while it also enlivens and strengthens my
writing, nourishing my thirst for the other and the elsewhere. We as poets are driven to
seek new ways of expression, even though, to the eyes of the pragmatic majority, it may
seem to be another attempt to reinvent the wheel. But perhaps that is our most pressing
need—to reinvent the wheel of American culture, with all its flaws and imperfections
exposed.
People translate poetry for many reasons, but money is not one of them. The
Polish American essayist and translator Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough tells in one of her
essays that translating her allowed her to re-connect with Polish while simultaneously
helping her carve a space for herself in English. I’ve also always told my students that it’s
much easier to break into print as a translator than as a poet, which was arguably why
Miłosz began translating Herbert and others when he first came to Berkeley. But I also
stressed a more important reason for translating: it would provide them with another way
to look at English. In a way, translating is an ideal form of learning through imitation;
translators don’t so much steal as remake the original in a new language and, along the
way, enrich their own poetic vocabulary and increase their versatility as poets/writers.
Another way to look at it is to think of translation the way we think about writing
in received forms, like sestinas or villanelles. Most young poets—including my former
self—do not think of writing in forms as useful, seeing it instead as a mandatory stay in a
penal colony run by old-fashioned poet-instructors. I’ve heard some say that writing in
forms stymies their originality, keeping their talent from developing and maturing. They
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think they’re ready for the Olympics of poetry, but by twisting their arms into writing in
forms we’re sending them back to hang out with the novices. Of course, with time, some
of them come around, seeing how difficult it is to write a decent sestina, for example.
Perhaps more importantly, while some of them will never write a sestina they could be
proud of, they do understand that the kind of mental and creative acrobatics they’re asked
to perform can be very useful when writing free verse poems. And so it is with
translation. To translate, even if for your own desk drawer rather than for publication, is
to step outside your comfort zone and see language from a less certain vantage point. Yet
holding up each word, line, and stanza, and rotating them against the light of your best
judgment, makes the process intensely rewarding. Sometimes I wonder if my choice to
become a translator, or to write in English, isn’t a result of my embracing of the
American self-made-man myth. This wouldn’t be my first-time changing courses
midstream, having abandoned competitive swimming for poetry years ago.
There is a tendency to believe, not without some basis, that jocks stay jocks, and
that poets are born, not made. As such, my journey from world rankings and the national
swim team to the pages of literary journals is unusual, and many—including myself—
find it intriguing. I became a serious swimmer, i.e., one that trained two times per day,
when I was nine or ten, after I’d been recruited to join the local team following a year of
taking swim lessons. In those days, swim lessons were a mandatory part of physical
education in Communist Poland. Once a week, instead of running around the perimeter of
the gym, jumping over the hobble horse, or learning how to play basketball, we marched
to the local swimming pool, an indoor facility that was, and is to this day, a far cry from
the Olympic-caliber pools I would later encounter. That local pool was a standard twenty-
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five meters in length but had only three lanes. Boys and girls alike were required to wear
white swimsuits. We blew bubbles a lot. Then, after a year of perfecting the freestyle and
backstroke, the more promising among us were asked to join the competitive team, which
meant that those who accepted were also asked to change schools.
I traveled all over Poland for competitions and training camps, and even went
abroad, to Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Hungry, and Slovakia. All
along, while we were getting exposed to foreign cultures and languages, not to mention
the people, who dressed and ate differently, however, my swimming friends and I had to
take classes just like all primary school students. The ones I remember best were classes
in Polish language and literature. Our brilliant teacher for all five years, Ms. K., made
certain that we spoke formal Polish and were able to name and explain the seven cases
for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. She also introduced us to Polish poetry. Did we read
Czesław Miłosz? I don’t remember. Did we read Adam Mickiewicz? Yes, there was no
getting around his epic poem Pan Tadeusz. Zbigniew Herbert? Yes—who could forget
lines like these (in translation by John and Bogdana Carpenter): “in the second year of the
war / our biology teacher was killed / by history’s schoolyard bullies”? The enthusiasm
and dedication of Ms. K., who worked tirelessly to expand our chlorine-smudged
horizons, was not short of inspiring—although the poetry didn’t immediately take root.
Little did I know that those first inauspicious lessons helped shape who I am today.
But before I decided to give poetry a chance, I had more swimming and racing to
do. After years of following the black line painted on the bottom in that local, three-lane
pool, I did well enough to score an invitation to come to the United States for a year of
training in Southern California. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and my coach and
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parents knew it. I landed at LAX in the first days of September 1994. I’ll never forget my
first glimpse of the clear-blue sky, the palm trees, the many car models and makes
cruising the freeways and wide boulevards. I thought I was in heaven.
It didn’t take very long for the homesickness to set in, however. Not only did I
hardly speak a word of English, but I also missed everything Polish, including being able
to speak in my native tongue. The highly structured, not to mention exhausting, workout
regiment, which included getting up at 4 am for the morning workout and swimming on
average ten miles each day, didn’t do much to alleviate my sense of having been uprooted
and tossed into the deep end of an existential crisis. I was just an okay high school
student, though I did markedly better in English and history than math and science
courses, just as I had in Poland. Go figure. When the news came that my fellowship
would be renewed for another year, because my times kept getting faster, I celebrated,
but I could also sense that something was coming to an end—that my interests were
shifting toward the arts, and toward literature in particular. My first poems spoke of
someone fumbling for the light switch in the dark, someone trying to connect his internal
feelings, thoughts, and emotions with the outside world. I wasn’t quite like the speaker of
Robert Pinsky’s melodious “Samurai Song,” who says that “When I had no roof I made /
Audacity my roof,” but I too wanted to be that strong, independent, and confident.
Eventually, after years of reading Polish poets—often in translation!—I began to
read American poets, many of whom were a joy to discover. Not surprisingly, given the
fact that he’d translated Miłosz’s work, I read Robert Hass—and must have read and
reread his “The Lament for the Poles of Buffalo” a hundred times, quietly repeating to
myself the ending of the poem’s first section, “Mr. Lewandowski, Mrs. Slominsky, / I
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toss hard words at you / from here on Chestnut Ridge, / white Anglo-Saxon words, /
heavy, strange as buckshot / on the tongues of your grandfathers.” The poem captivated
me. Surely Hass, a Californian, saw himself no less out of place in Buffalo than the
Polish immigrants whom he taught. Reading this poem now, I think of Buffalo as how I
saw it for the first time when I traveled there for a swimming competition in 1995 or
1996. I’d seen snow once before since moving to America, in Seattle, but that’s what I
remember enjoying the most about the Western New York State city—the snow and the
harsh, angular architecture of its downtown. The snow reminded me of Poland, of course,
but Hass’s poem and the work that had gone into building that downtown, which at the
time seemed in dire need of a makeover, made me contemplate how much of our
collective human experience is really about finding the most suitable way to express
ourselves, so that others can learn about themselves.
Indeed, while the general view of swimming and other sports hinges on the
assumption that all athletes strive to do their best before the world, poetry isn’t all that
different: in moments of private contemplation, poets long to be in the world rather than
to shy away from it. The only, and most important, distinction between the two solitary
activities lies in the fact that poetry is not a race, that it cannot be timed or measured, and,
as such, it is paradoxically much less individualistic than the pursuit of athletic glory. In a
country like the United States, where the model of civil solidarity has not been tested by
centuries of significant external pressure, poetry lives in the margins. But it doesn’t stray
too far from the ethos of engagement, doing its best to remain socially conscious and
banish the sense of hopeless separation that comes on the heels of discordant political
debates and shenanigans. While most Americans think of poetry as a vehicle for
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narcissistic peregrinations, in truth, poetry’s communal reach is much wider; reading it,
we acknowledge the interconnectedness of our private joys and fears. Is that not what
Elizabeth Bishop’s masterpieces “The End of March” and “In the Waiting Room” teach
us? Bishop might have been the most private and reticent of our poets, but she expressed
her sense of alienation with such great skill and casual offhandedness that any reader can
share it—and thereby overcome it. Poetry remains the best place to turn to for a nuanced
view of life.
During my junior and senior years in college, I stayed up late reading Eliot, then
had to crawl out of bed and put myself through physical and emotional pain in order to
prepare for another swim meet that always seemed to lie just over the horizon. But I
couldn’t get “The Waste Land” out of my head, nor could I stop thinking about Louise
Glück’s “Mock Orange” or Paul Muldoon’s “Incantata.” I swam the butterfly down the
pool, wondering why the speaker of “Mock Orange” hated the smell of the orange tree
blossoms so much, while on the way back, gasping for breath, I thought about the rhyme
scheme of the Irish poet’s great elegy, his romanticism and anguish—“that you might
reach out, arrah, / and take in your ink-stained hands my own hands stained with ink”—
that come bubbling to the surface not despite, but because of his superb technique. The
two views of life—one more tragic than the other—of Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor
of Ice Cream,” expressed with such matter-of-factness, as if the poet had wanted to
eliminate any possibility of second thoughts, which would force him to keep revisiting
the misery that was his private life, made me want to escape my own quotidian stomping
ground.
After I graduated from college, I spent a year working as a swim coach in the Bay
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Area, then went back to racing myself. My comeback lasted only a year. One just can’t
be a poet and serious athlete at the same time—one must choose one over the other.
Why? Well, serious athletics requires complete dedication. When it comes to reaping the
benefits of all the hard work, one can’t be distracted by other endeavors and lose focus—
after all, there is a reason why a certain company’s marketing slogan reads “just do it.” At
the same time, poetry entails long contemplation, the obsessive nature of choosing words
because one either sounds better than the other or works in other, surprising ways,
connoting something that no other word could. That’s dedication of a different sort, but it
is no less complete. What’s more, swimming is all about getting to the wall first; indeed,
it’s such a tough sport because of its unyielding competitive atmosphere. On the other
hand, a working poet may have ideas of greatness, but most of us admit that we are
engaged in a conversation, be it with our predecessors, our contemporaries, ourselves, or
the world at large. Moreover, this conversation cannot be solely about poetry, but must
include other arts and disciplines whose impact on our views and ideas may not be
immediately apparent. This is very different from swimming or any other high-level
athletics: while Michael Phelps—or Lance Armstrong, for that matter—do have a small
army of experts in various fields helping them get faster, they wouldn’t have reached the
pinnacle of their sports if it weren’t for their single-minded focus on the goal ahead.
Doubtlessly, writing is hard, and it too requires great deal of work ethic and discipline,
but my decision to pick up a pen and begin writing poems in earnest is, more broadly, a
search for answers to our most fundamental questions, questions that are wide-ranging
and endure beyond any rankings and competitions. Like the speaker in many of Adam
Zagajewski’s poems, I too oscillated between ecstasy and doubt in my daily life. Though
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I swam in a chlorinated pool rather than a sea, I felt alone, but not lonely, repeating these
lines from “On Swimming” (in Clare Cavanagh’s translation): “I love to swim in the sea,
which keeps / talking to itself / in the monotone of a vagabond / who no longer recalls /
exactly how long he’s been on the road.” It took me a long time to do so, but I’ve come to
accept the possibility that swimming is “like prayer: palms join and part, / join and part, /
almost without end.”
Eventually, poetry and literature won the battle between the jock and the sensitive
kid. But I have since come to wonder if perhaps swimming and writing aren’t that much
different. Among the few things they share, none matters more than the desire to go back
in. In swimming, you come to the wall at the end of the lap and dip under the surface to
do a flip-turn, and when writing a poem—whether it’s your first or the one you’ve been
trying to write all your life—you come to the end of the line, turn around, and do your
best try to cover some of the distance all over again.
For the longest time, I didn’t think of myself as an immigrant—that’s how badly I
wanted to belong somewhere, anywhere. I was tired of translating myself for others, even
though I now realize that what I needed most was to translate myself for myself. Getting
to know authors whose work has been translated from another language or, if originally
written in English, is heavily committed to the other, has helped me understand who I am
and has inspired me to write about the people and places I love and care about. Indeed,
I’ve come to accept my mongrelly identity. I would’ve never arrived at this point if it
weren’t for poetry and translation, two sides of the same coin, two ingredients that make
literature such a potent force in my life.
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POEMS
147
ONE
148
NINETEEN EIGHTY-NINE

1.

It was a strange life we lived. Strange people knocked on our doors at strange hours
and asked for two eggs, a frying pan. Strange how we dressed in the same gray suits

and hats. Remember? Our future was unpaved. If we stretched our arms out, took five
steps to the right or the left, there was the wall. So we moved little, like shadows

at the onset of night. Then you showed up, with a scoped-rifle slung across your back,
pushing a white, top-load Maytag on a dolly. We greeted you as if you’d never left.

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2.

Which is why nobody noticed your breasts. The glasses. Or the stars tattooed on
the inside of your right wrist. The way you wrapped your hair around your finger,

nervous before strangers, even though you were raised on fate alone and then schooled
in East and West. What happened after your hot-air-balloon escape? Like others

from this side of sense, we got hard labor, but not as bad as grandma’s stint at Carl
Zeiss in Nazi days. At least we knew you wouldn’t grow up to toil at the coke plant.

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3.

Everybody worked there: your father, uncle Stephen, aunt Stella, the red-haired twins
who lived below us. They rode together the rickety tram in the mornings, never

missing their stop. On weekends we fished for King carp, checked our place on the list
for the Fiat family car, attended Sunday mass. Then the strikes began: prophets

went down or up, through trap doors, over the fence. The air stung. Imagine the fun
we had, hunkered between potted ferns on the balcony, skipping stones at the enemy.

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4.

Next our food rations were cut: one loaf of bread a day instead of two. A small
brick of butter mixed with lard per week. Hardly any meat, except chicken bouillon,

which we diced like a Rubik’s cube. The waiting lines became the talk of the town.
Yesterday’s news served as toilet paper. After they shut down the colleges and interned

the faculty, your father said that words don’t grow on trees, so we read the way
we ate—slowly chewing each word—unsure which words we were allowed to keep.

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5.

This is how we found out about the tanks in Budapest, Prague, Sofia, Bucharest.
Monks transcribing prison verse. Bards rewriting Beatles’ songs for bound hands.

I too wanted to sing our way out of here with a guitar I got from a Swedish friend,
but it broke while I was being chased. Tell me, where did you learn to speak

so fluently? Ten years, and your accent hasn’t changed—you still roll your R’s
and shorten those pesky Slavic vowels. (Your boots stood at attention in the foyer.)

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6.

You told us you flew high above Europe, across La Manche, before the winds carried
your balloon back to Munich, where you were shot down accidentally. A refugee,

you attended a boarding school run by the Ursulines. You prayed in German for
those who pole-vaulted the barbed wires but would never walk again. Lucky for you,

you said, by the time you finished college, the Cold War had entered its final dawn.
Still, you stayed up late, calculating how far a heart travels from home with each beat.

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7.

If you were a boy, I would’ve asked how often you nicked your smooth jaw
before you learned to shave, but since you were a girl, my girl, who showed you

how to put a tampon in or how to fit a bra? Was there a man in your life? I wept,
knowing how much we’d missed. But with the neighbors coming over with Bulgarian

wine, your father and I kissed and hugged you instead—we didn’t ask about the gun—
suddenly unwilling to share you with anyone, including your cousins Alex and Jan.

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8.

Believe me, we were beside ourselves at the sight of the washing machine made
in the USA. Those buttons and knobs. The days of bending over a washbowl were over.

Sheathed in aluminum was a drum the size of a sauerkraut barrel, you explained,
and while the cycles were limited to cold and hot, the spin to fast and slow, meaning

there was no way for us to lose control, our faces had already been bleached by grins.
We couldn’t wait to finally sieve, sort, and disembody the impurities in our garb.

156
9.

Or in our lives. You’re free, you said to us, to do as you please. Go on—try it out.
But who would’ve thought the Maytag would work to this day. Buried under towels

and coats in the basement, its motor revs up dutifully, then the whole thing shudders,
slides like a continent towards its future. Doubtless, my daughter, it will last until

the final load, until the ants march it out through the back, even though there is
a tendency in this house to overload the guy with too much that just won’t wash out.

157
OMAHA BEACH

Returning here, it hasn’t been easy
for them to find their place in the black sand—
always too much sun or rain,
strangers driving umbrellas yet deeper

into their land. The young radio host said so,
speaking of the vets. When the sea had come,
some curled up inside the shells;
others flexed and clicked their knuckles

on the trigger of each wave, forgetting
to come up for breath. Then, as now, there was
no such a thing as fin-clapping fish,
quipped the host—his voice no more than

an umlaut going off the air. But he didn’t
give us a name at the start or the end.
Nor did he explain how to rebury a pair of
big toes jutting out from the mud

at the water’s edge. In the end, it’s a fluke.
A beach ball gets lost. And a search
party leads us under the pier, into the frothy sea
impaling empty bottles on the rocks.

158
STOPPAGE TIME

I’m not sure how soccer
explains the world,
though books
are written about that, you know.

If the ball sneaks in, grazing
the post and the crossbar,
the upper-ninety
shot doesn’t take us

into a bedroom,
where a TV’s always on.
Democracy means everyone
gets to play—

regardless of who rules
the clock or the stands—
like in baseball:
our turn, their turn…

In another place, you
know, that fucker,
grabbing his shin and faking
a foul, would be a friend.
159
LULLABY

Wrapped in sheets like a mummy, or a wound, you can tell it is not a murmur
but something lesser still that you hear when you eavesdrop on the couple

having sex next door. Their bodies, gasping and changing gears, are in the way—
stuck between you and some muffled yelp that travels down the dimpled walls.

If only they stopped ringing the doorbell, those tipsy carolers, maybe you could
finally hear the conch in your head. Insured by Smith & Wesson, powered by

Rita’s Apple Pie, you won’t catch any Zs tonight, since the footsteps and toilet flush
give way to MAYDAY being tapped on the pipe above. Is fire alarm next in line?

You’ve fed the dying goldfish, paid the gas bill…And now you put your lips on
your wife’s open mouth, sorry to see it adrift on the pillow, like an island in high seas.
160
FROM THE LIFE OF POSTAGE STAMPS

The American Aspen

Unlike birches, which bring
the Nazis and frost to mind,
you got yourself a town
the rich can get behind.

But I know you flutter
in the breeze, gold though you are.
Destined to become paper,
I’d too reach for the matches.
161
The Fighter Ace

I tried hard, long and hard,
to get away from you,
though somehow I always managed
to do the split on the wing

and hurt myself, climbing
into my shiny Messerschmitt.
Those were the days!
I ran out of fuel after takeoff, once—

the sight of the green, green
grass forever embossed on my mind.
I learned to water-land
in dry season. They called me

‘son-of-a-gun,’ but I was
more than that: the Cuban Eight,
the Chandelle. On my first mission,
in ’39, I pulled off

the Immelmann, only to lose
my way back to base.
There’s beauty in staring
at the world, but from the air

all rivers look the same.
My own fate was sealed
when they called off the search.
Go ahead, hold me,

but you can’t lick me,
unless you mean it.
You can have my Iron Cross—
rusty though it is. In turn

I ask that you don’t flap your arms
at every plane that flies by.

162
The Weightlifter

Neither clean nor a jerk,
he stands before us,
holding the bar over his head,
more or less.

What a sexy midget—
hundred percent pure muscle.
The red singlet
hardly hides his private parts.

The six bumper plates
do what they can
to keep him straight.
He has a future in Sudan,

carrying pails of water,
should anything here go awry.
Things are getting hotter.
Hold your breath

and you’ll see he’s accidentally
powdered his cheeks.
What a class act—
too bad there are no Greeks

among us. The blood that flows
through his veins
can’t be described in simple prose,
hence the cheers and grunts

coming from all but the judges
who keep their fingers
on the buttons while his mind
slowly lingers.

Hurry up, you white light.
Let me off the hook.
No man can make things right
while he holds the world in his arms.

163
The Castle

Hold your horses, everyone—
this isn’t Scotland.
What ramparts have done for them,
a rusted chain-link does for us.

No wonder the drawbridge stays
down—a thirsty tongue.
After years on the job, the watchman
pisses in the moat at night,

when elsewhere the school kids
are learning how to be
the best they can be.
Ah, if the moss could talk.

Sometimes a bored clown
hitches a ride on the gun, or a pair
of ghosts hooks up inside
the royal chamber, but the legends

are buried in the dungeon.
Climbing to the top of the tower
the guests are reminded
America wasn’t built in an hour.

Still they come from beyond
the tree line to see the flag, stuck
wrapped around the pole half the time,
either whole or tattered.

164
The Kitchenware

Between the fork, spoon, knife
and, my favorite, the two-faced
meat tenderizer, an entire
commando force can be assembled.

No one beats the wiry eggbeater
or the black spatula, even
the food processor shoved behind
the Dutch oven. A jar opener

is for sissies who’ve never squeezed
a tennis ball. Better they stick
to the frying pan or the wooden
citrus reamer. Tongs are fine

for dealing with sauerkraut or
Polish sausages, but they share
a drawer with the measuring cups,
which often go missing.

Stir-frying noodles in a wok
is easier than it looks. The peeler
loves the grater the way
the heirloom tea cup loves the saucer.

The carafe of icy water is a beauty.
From the center of the table,
it reflects sunlight onto
the plates and mugs of mortals.
165
The Explorer

To con and be rad in one
breath is the goal,
although there’s no poll
as to what

drives us more.
Some of us pay for the privilege
with a public visage;
others lose their lives,

friends or fortunes.
Hitting the road—the desert
or the sea—has never
been easier, and that’s a fact.

Pelts, stones, routes,
peaks and continents.
Secret codes and documents.
In the name of; because;

can’t stop us now.
We thrive when we’re told
there’s a spice we can’t hold
or taste.

The natives we meet
on trips, they come in many
shapes and sizes—sound and crazy.
But sometimes we see

no one for miles.
That’s when the world’s flowers
and animals are truly ours.
The planets are next.
166
The PC

Not much can be said about it—
this depository of fading memory.
If you agree the future looks bleak,
don’t click here.
167
PASTORAL

I was born in a city—you’ve never been there. I rubbed shoulders with buildings, blue
trams, and pigeons. Then I had this idea to take a hike and get some fresh air elsewhere.

The idea wasn’t mine, but nor were the oaks I hugged with strangers, or the lashing
brook I stood in barefoot, catch-and-releasing. I followed the rules and stayed on the trail.

Then I changed my mind, decided to leave, but couldn’t find my way back. The idea
was mine. I’ve carried it around like a breadcrumb; neighbors think I’ve got stuff

up my sleeve. So we’re learning together how to cross an intersection with the lights
turned off, or how to tell a real turnip from a knockoff. No one complains if, out of

boredom, I slingshot rocks at their windows, but when I stagger with a story of the sun
climbing a fire escape in the rain, they ask not for the ending but for silence, something

like a furrow or a dagger.

168
RAIN

It’s been raining nonstop for five days
in Los Angeles, and hardly any driver thinks
it’s important to turn on the headlights.
In Europe, for example, they keep the lights on
year-round. Should we applaud?

While ruin invites rumination, light
doesn’t always wait at the end of the tunnel.
For now, wading down Bundy, men in orange
smocks keep dead leaves from clogging the drains.
All other escape routes appear passable.
169
BACKYARD

It’s my first—and everyone I know is already here, or waiting
in line to get in. Ants, spiders, earthworms, even a pair of field mice

with BB gunshot wounds who show up at dusk. Same as newlyweds,
they bring suitcases full of sticks, tin foil scraps, dead flies, and

walnut shells packed like coffee cans with grass seeds.
If things go well, they will soon settle in the nooks of the trench,

quarry the rocks, build a shanty town in the shade of the orange cable I cut
when I tilled this hill. May’s beautiful here. They will turn the young

pachysandra into tables and chairs. And why not—this place
is growing on me, too. It’s near the tracks. Fenced in by tall weeds.

Half a mile from the twirling barber pole. Go on now, climb over
my calloused foot, between the muscled roots, you gypsies of the soil—

I whisper as they disappear, come knocking again. And when I peek
under the quilt of lawn, I see rooms, hands waving in the air.
170
TETRIS

While searching for a place to eat our sandwiches
of honey ham, Swiss cheese, we came to the edge of

a tract I once lived in, unsure why I had left,
unsure why thistles grew where a bike path had been,

and leaving you to guard the gate, I went inside
a five-story block, pretending I didn’t know the way.

But the staircase remembered my stride—its wooden
planks creaked and squeaked as I climbed slowly, holding on

to the wrought-iron rail. The air was thick with flies,
the smell of fresh tar sizzling on the roof, where,

years ago, we’d go to spit on people’s heads and tweak
the antennas to catch somebody else’s dreams.

Life was beautiful, I thought, leaving the first floor.
I found my misspelled nickname carved into the wall.

The second story, too, held a secret I would never
forget. The teenage years. Boys chasing girls.

The painted-shut window with the view of the church.
The hollow spot under the stairs where she told me

I had to take my clothes off before she would hers.
(After she unplugged the extension cord, the light-

bulb that dangled above went out, shivering stars
around us.) Out of breath, I cleared my throat, pushed on.

Arriving on the third story, I wondered what
became of Peter and Paul. They started shaving

in junior high, grew to be six-foot-four. I’d heard
they followed the dusty footprints their father left

coming home at night, and got a job underground.
Who knows, they might well be in Dublin or Belfast,

tossing back pints in an empty pub. No wonder
171
the fourth floor was a blur, and the fifth why I came.

But when I rapped my white knuckles on the door,
the brownish leatherette cover caved in under

my wedding ring. So I checked the address again—
apartment 9, last building on the right, dead end

street lined with lilacs—check, check, check, I flipped
through memories, hoping to see the familiar eye

plug the Judas hole, hear the turning of the locks,
the clinking of the chain lifted and unhooked, dropped.
172
STORM

A tree in the eye of
the wind, I
trembled while clouds raced
around me.
Then I heard
a thunder, twice,
but the bolt of lightning
I had to imagine.
173
TWO

Kraków Testimonies
174
LIEU DE MÉMOIRE

Only now, after months abroad,
having put away my passports—one navy, the other
burgundy—and taken out the trash
that had been left in the can

despite better judgment, I remember
the square in the middle of the city,
gleaming with tourists
unfazed by the rain—

how in their mingling
together they celebrated the open space
as the past both alive and forgotten,
something captured and released

repeatedly in the same instant
as a military parade
rolling across its marble slabs, perhaps
a beheading or two, or

if we hit rewind hard enough,
a field of the most ordinary grass
and rocks, some larger than others,
no doubt.

The square: not a blank page, then,
or the proverbial do-over,
but one script
placed atop another script—like

so—where
the present meets that which was
and could’ve been.
But what right do I have to judge

the visitors
for not asking the right questions
about coronations coup d’états
pogroms, not to mention the carriage

horses dying of thirst?
Build your own cathedral,
a smart man once said, quickly
175
forgetting what he meant.
Is this it? I’ve been there;
the same jetlagged look slashing across my face.
The same maples swaying
in the breeze at the river

with a single boat
doubling as a pub and a tanning salon,
while my gaze wavered
a few inches above and below

the eye-level,
the space dwelled in, then as now,
a mere step ahead of my own lengthening
shadow. That’s why

this song is for the soloist
wearing a paper crown, for the speechless,
the missing, the kidnapped at dawn.
This song a memory,

a certificate of authenticity
forged to fill the frame of mind unfolding
across the frayed maps
we follow in search of sunlight to wishbone

our past. Believe me,
this song has no price on its head.
I sing it for those who pretend
these things never happened and for those

who long for their voices
to disappear in a chorus, forgetting
that applause, bravos and encores
suffocate the air.

176
PROLOGUE

I was the chief designer of plywood motorways, of a bridge of socks
stretched out between the footstool and the flowerpot. I drove a backhoe
to clear the sofa for parachutes with Red Cross gifts. I was ten.
Life was good. My parents cursed each time they stepped on a Lego block
or hurt their heels on the submarine I cut out from a cardboard box.
Yet the city kept growing in our single room—with spires and domes,
bazaars and saloons. Wars waged. I learned to remember
who lived where—their names and hobbies, what they did for fun—
since every night before bed I had to put my city away.
Eventually, things started disappearing. What’s a cathedral
without a spire? Cats and pigs—poof! People went missing, too.
They’d lived in our one room since prehistoric times. I would find
their arrowheads here and there. Everybody, including Jews,
had lived and died together—disappearance unexplained.
Why am I telling you this? Because I’ve gone out looking for them.
Where the mill once stood, filled with the whirring belts
that carried grain to be ground and made into bread,
now schools of weeds attain the deepest red. How long did it take
to unstack the bricks from the walls and loading docks? Sixteen years
I took this tram, every day, and still can’t tell where it terminates.
When the Jews tried coming back, they were chased away;
a few stayed but betrayed their roots. Looking for them, I ascended
driveways too steep even for burglars to climb—fed on sand and gravel
displaced by the bottomless dig on the edge of town—and knocked on doors.
I dove into lakes to explore sunken rafts. Breathing underwater
is hard, but people talked. They knew of jars of gold buried in the woods.
Of a shallow grave dug hurriedly with a single pitchfork.
I encountered trouble only once, out in the country, when five local men
in faded overalls, who, with their foreheads pockmarked like that,
could pass for relatives of the ash they carried underarm, asked,
“Need some logs?” We exchanged half-toothed smiles. Setting, the sun
engulfed their truck. They took a long drag on their smokes, exhaled,
haloed like the candles in the windows I pretended not to peek into
along the way. Having declined, I marched to the village limits,
waving, in case they were watching, to a boy on a tricycle
with a missing wheel—and to someone who wasn’t even there.
Suddenly, staying upright was a struggle, though tripping and falling
would’ve somehow felt right. Weeds and fissures led me home.
For a week afterwards my voice didn’t rise above a whisper—
“Our past has been recycled,” I repeated, “and turned into love.”
But the world had become an inkblot again, spreading across a page.
I shouldn’t have loosened my grip.

177
I

Full moon. One, two, three and more rusted cars
bursting with flesh. Coal-fired engine

sending smoke signals across plains. Each puff
a breath in the sky, disappearing. Da-dum-

da-dum. The tracks have always been here.
My compartment-mates, keeping their eyes closed,

pretend to dream. A pond. A sketched-out
villa that was once a hut. A barn. Woods, where

a boy tries desperately to whistle a nursery rhyme
on a blade of grass. This relic train for tourists

is slow, but the arrival will be swift.
These are the facts. The headlight? A scream

swallowing itself.

178
II

Little is known
of the life of Kraków’s Jews
seven decades after the war,
since knowing and remembering
are not one and the same,
my guide, Piotr Polin—
the alliteration
an exercise for my tongue—
tells me as much.
Most lived in Kazimierz,
south of Rynek.
Some prospered;
others didn’t.
We’ve also heard of a long
tradition of welcoming
and persecuting the Jews
in the city.

(Piotr, who met me
at the station, is 38,
and graying at the temples.
He wears thick-rimmed glasses.
The tan cargo shorts
and a too-tight short-sleeve
button down shirt
belie seriousness
and enthusiasm.
I’ll tip him in the end.)

179
III

One of the first testimonies
I watched at the Shoah
Foundation belongs to Klara
of the black-dyed hair
and beaming smile.
What does she see
spelling the town’s name
with her eyes shut?
Each letter a face a house a meal
a tree a bend in the road
an end. That she
and her brother
and parents had once shared
this southern Polish city
with Piotr’s grandparents
is a fact.

180
IV

Nobody asked about us nobody asks about us
we have survived it was a good thing that nobody asked
but is it still? They helped us they didn’t
care but they helped. They had two rooms. Filled
one of them with straw, floor to ceiling, straw
or hay, can’t remember exactly, and made a little hole
for me in the middle. That was that. People came over,
sat and talked in the other room while I stayed quiet
in my hole. Straw was important. It was natural.
There was plenty of it and and and that was that.
In the spring they had to use the straw
so I had to go. That’s it.

Later, back in the ghetto, I learned
a trade I became a tailor I cut trimmed sewed.
The measurements came in every morning along
with clothes stripped off the dead. I altered them.
Did my best. It was a terrible thing to exist. Of course,
the Poles had their style. We had ours. They didn’t mix
too much, like white socks and a black suit at a funeral.
Different hats. Different coats. Shoes? We slept
and ran in the same shoes. As for buttons I cannot say—
never got close enough.

If you’re not like me
look speak dress pray eat sneeze swim or walk like me
if you don’t watch my movies read my books
dance to my music you are not like me you are not welcome
here if you don’t laugh at the same jokes shake hands
when greeting strangers you are not like me if
you live on the first floor rather than the fifth you
are not like me if you don’t sleep on the same side of the bed
if you don’t hold utensils the way I do wear glasses
or dye my hair.

Our Palestine, meanwhile,
bobbed on the horizon like a rubber duck while Hitler
didn’t hide anything. Even the void that was coming
that was to stay. The illiterate could have seen as much.
But the Poles thought they’d win the war while we knew
shearing beards and beatings would only worsen.
Even today we don’t know enough as much of God
to blame Him for it.

181
V
182
VI

Whose, if not mine,
are these words? Listening
is a form of speaking,
viewed from another angle, the far
corner of the room where
servers hum with the stories
of survival.

183
Piotr tells me he’s heard it all,
having guided group and private
tours through these streets.
Marching past the bars
that stay open late, serving
chilled vodka with pickles
or herring, he learned
how to build dugouts,
forage for berries and roots.
How the air tastes at night, when
the mouths hidden underground all day
come out.

184
The room I worked in
has become a story itself.
The keyboard, the mouse, the screen
in front of me. For every
search word, either a place or name,
an index of tributaries.
Kraków kept showing up
on every map.

185
The surrounding villages—
Skała, Grębałów, Mogiła
or Łęg—
whose names mean something else
to me—no less
a constellation of what
could’ve been
if the day of the week were
a Monday instead of a Wednesday.
Morning instead of evening.

186
These words become mine
the moment I let them go.

187
VIII

Eenie meenie miney mo—
children didn’t know how to be scared.
I tied myself to mother with a string.
She was proud of me.

We paid for hiding with our earrings.
I haven’t worn earrings since.
We searched for food at night—we knew
everybody’s bedtime.

After I caught a cold and started coughing,
it was time to go. We were arrested
the next day. Does the train’s engineer know
where he’s going? We didn’t

know—it was terrible.
It was cold. January. The Poles helped us,
throwing food aboard open cars.
We had our hands.

People can use their hands
to catch food and feed themselves.
The food becomes food only when eaten.
The Poles aimed well.

A piece of bread a potato an onion—
a sign of goodwill
fitting snugly in the palms of our hands.
At dawn, when we rolled through a station

they saw what we looked like.
After the Germans tattooed the numbers
on our forearms, we tried to suck them out before
they became part of us.

188
IX

Piotr Polin was born in the seventies.
In May. He told me as much as we crossed
the intersection of Dietla and Starowiślna Streets.

He shares a birthday with the late John
Paul II. Nobody in Poland forgets his birthday.
A history major, he can tell a fact from an opinion.

Wieliczka. Płaszów. Prokocim. Before he knew
anything about the Jews, he went to summer
camps on trains departing from Płaszów.

When he broke both arms, having fallen
off the window of an abandoned house
whose walls were covered with the sweetest

grapes, he ended up at the children’s hospital
in Prokocim. The doctors were nice to him.
The beds and breathing machines bought with dollars.

He says years later when he mentioned
to one American Jew that he’d been to the
museum at Auschwitz numerous times,

the man asked him if he enjoyed it so much
that he couldn’t get enough? Fucker. Those
are the facts. From Starowiślna we turn

right onto Miodowa—Honey Street—
then left on Szeroka. The Jewish Festival
ended yesterday. He asks if I’m hungry.

189
X

The American poet, Charles Reznikoff, copied out fragments of the Nuremberg
Trials transcript to create his Holocaust, an arrangement of vision and horror.

The tone and delivery, both flat, sneak up on you. The who what and when
get answered at the expense of the why, which often gets answered

with questions, anyway. I’ve watched the testimonies. Is it evil to be
inspired at the same time as horrified? The tug-o-war didn’t end

when I closed out the browser, logged off, and took off the headphones.
Back home, I delved into an album of Holocaust paintings by Wilhelm Sasnal,

poring over his 2003 “Shoah (Forest)” piece. In heavy, deliberate brushstrokes,
the primordial forest towers over three tiny figures. The greenery a dust storm,

not foliage. Taking unhurried steps, the survivor talking to Lanzmann through
a translator. Beyond the frame, off to the left, the villagers talking directly to me.
190
XI

We was lucky.
We was hungry.
We go from this place away.
We leave the house
clean.
Nothing left.
Not even a nail.
Polish people give me
a dog. A happy dog.
I had nothing.
Just walls.
Then they give me a couch.
A nice man came.
He tells me to run
with what I have
on my back.
The skin. The blouse
unwashed in days.
I didn’t want to
go to ghetto.
I had a job:
filling holes in roads.
We danced
when the Germans
were shooting guns in the air.
When we run
from the city to the village
for good,
we was sad.
Someone stole my dog.
Then we saw
one bird.
Another bird.
We kept our armbands clean.

191
XII

Once upon a time, an SS
man took me away.
He needed a translator.
I spoke Polish and German.
He took me to a farm,
gave me a knife,
and made me catch
and kill a chicken for him.
Afterwards, he took me
back to my parents,
thanking me
for helping him out
with his hunting affair.

192
XIII
193
XIV

No, no
testimonies

for me
today—

I went cycling
instead.

Two wheels
spun like

the globe,
on repeat.

Poland
everywhere.

Without
wind

in my way
I was God:

those who
passed

me saw
only

mountains
sea.

194
XV

1939, 1912, 1888, 1926, 1945, 1942, 1875, 1928, 1919, 1933, 1907, 1943, 1930, 1897,
1940, 1925, 1937, 1909, 1922, 1941

195
XVI

Working on a rail
junction station
we saw tanks heading east soldiers singing
songs and the wounded
heading west.
More trains meant more rails,
but the earth wouldn’t yield easily.
The rocks wouldn’t break.
The nettles were fierce.

Any Jew found hiding would be shot.
Any Pole helping out a Jew would be shot.

Maybe that’s why
some would denounce a Jew
for a pound of sugar,
even someone like me,
who regularly played soccer
with Polish boys
(except on Sundays;
church made them agitated).

You killed my God catechism
says you killed our Lord, they’d say.
If you kill the leader you kill
the people we are told it is our
turn to kill don’t pray for heaven
to intervene we are here now
we decide who lives and who dies.

I play soccer to this day.

Then one day I split
from my railroad crew—
I went left; they went right.
I counted steps,
expecting to be shot in the back.

There were no Germans in the town
I ended up in—
can you believe it?
The curfew didn’t bother us
because there was no one around
to enforce it.
196
XVIII

When the Germans came looking
for contraband—tobacco—we hid in the cellar.
They knew no leaves
would handle the dampness,
so they never came down the stairs.

Some days, the hitting and crying
upstairs went on for hours.
We didn’t look or speak Jewish.
But we knew we were Jewish, we small kids, we
knew, because we had to hide.

197
XIX

When the doors were kicked in the light of day
streamed in illuminating the room the water stains
fluorescent the walls stopped closing in on us
the first thing we did was learn how to read time
the hands of the clock became our friends
then we ran ran and hid in an outhouse
we were hungry the outhouse had a hole
that let us see the world outside nobody
the sun went down
the hole to the outside filled with stars our ears
listening in we couldn’t stand anymore we couldn’t
sit either but there wasn’t enough room to lie down
even to ourselves we remained unseen.

198
XX

Two trains leave the station
at the same time, blowing their whistles
unceremoniously.

Heading east the one with five cars
travels 20 miles per hour
faster than the other, which is also
heading east.

Both trains will reach their destination
after two hundred miles.

What is the speed of the train
with ten cars, and why
does it eventually return
empty?
199
XXI

Zofia Radzikowska

Abraham Unterberger

Yoram Gross

Klara Halbreich

Felicia Lieberman

Esther Kozlowski

Adolph Polland

Tadeusz Dzik

Janina Kurczab

Józef Orłowski-Burniański

Elli Ledererová

Janina Bauman

Lola Orzech

Stanisław Walczak

Samuel Lustiger

Romek Pilcer

William Deutsch

Mala Gastfriend

Idek Rosenblum

Efraim Landau

Henry Freeman

Pesla Lis

200
Marvin Jacobs

Roman Ohrenstein

Harry Stanford

Majer Goldstein

Henry Idler

Amy Hauer

Rita Horowitz

Jerzy Bielecki

Janina Kurczab

Leo Bach

Elizabeth Stierman

Emanuel Tanay

Barbara Walusiak

Efraim Pollak

Sonja Himel

Alfred Engel

Lola Liber Schwartz

Adam Porepa

Bronia Schoenmann

Adam Susser

Marcha Kreuzman

Amy Hauer

Sol Urbach

201
Edward Haven

George Popper

Władysława Tracz

Rachel Gottstein

Mala Halbreich

Regina Lockerman

Chaim Spielman

Alex Finder

Maria Segan

Marie Shafer

Christine Stamper
202
XXII
203
XXIII

After touring Kazimierz, Piotr said we should go to Nowa Huta,
east of the city center. When it was built in the late ‘40s,
it gobbled up surrounding villages, including Czyżyny,
today the location of an excellent airplane museum, in a park
dedicated to Polish airmen who fought in WWII, first in Poland,
then with the RAF in Britain. Piotr says he’s never been
to the museum, preferring unmediated historical touring.
He wants to see and touch and feel things without glancing up
at little plaques explaining things. Oral history, too,
is his thing. When we arrive, having taken the Line 1 tram
from Old Town to the sports and concert arena, we head north
across the park, skirting the University School of Physical Education.
But rather than the park itself, or the museum, our destination
an old defunct airfield. The runway disappearing
under the encroaching apartment blocks.
When Piotr was a little boy, one could still see the concrete
runway that divided the two housing estates named after Polish
air squadrons. Many a kid learned how to ride a bike
on the runway extended by slave laborers. I’m telling you how to get there
so you can see it yourself before it disappears forever.

204
XXIV

When is the wheat high enough
to hide in? Parting wheat en route
to freedom might attract
suspicion. No wind can part the wheat
the way a person in hiding can.

The light of day troubled me.
The light the why I was found out
in a barn. Here, child, put on this hat—
its wide brim will protect you.
We, the uncircumcised, will take you in.

205
XXVI

Piotr remembers
the day when Steven
Spielberg’s people came
to his school, looking
for dark-haired children
to star as extras in
Schindler’s List.

(While at the Shoah,
I did a lot of googling.
That’s how I found out
that Amon Göth’s house
in Płaszów, the one
with the infamous
balcony, still stands.)

206
XXVII

War wasn’t bad,
believe me.
The aftermath
was worse. We
returned to
our streets homes
and stores. We
searched for one
another.
Some were more
damaged than
others. When
I knocked on
the door of
my old house,
seeing a
stranger’s face
flash in the
window, I
knew there’d be
more trouble.
An under-
statement now
became my
shibboleth.
Telegrams
went back and
forth. “Come home.”
The news spread
fast. My dad,
who had hid
with Polish
partisans
and fought so
bravely, didn’t
recognize
me at first.
There were more
questions. More

silence—

207
XXXI

Lines
upon lines
at the railroad

station
in Kraków
behind the glass

smudged
full of starts
and stops

a barn in
the distance on fire
people

and cars
waiting
at the crossing

between nowhere
and nowhere else
imagine that

what could’ve
been was is
time

and again
ticking on
ahead

followed
by the finger
tracing

the rows
and columns
of letters engines

carriages
at least one
crying baby

208
and a suitcase
falling off
the wobbly rack

above the sleepers
whose hands
yo-

yo
across the seat
about to clasp
209
XXXIII

What

You

Have

Not

Heard

Is

Also

True

210
THREE

211
SECOND LANGUAGE

It’s rained for so long
I haven’t left the couch in days.

Feeble-hearted Chopin
practices his funeral march
with “a small hand.”

My next-door neighbors—
“Dinner time!”—
don’t mind the rain
or our initials
disappearing from the curb.

I look in the mirror
and see a pig.

I read the book again backwards,
but the pit of smoldering
questions deepens.

Years ago, in Warsaw,
I went to see that heart—
stowed away inside
the first pillar on the left.

What keeps the world
from falling apart?
212
KINDERSZENEN

Nineteen Ninety-Four

From the air, patches of wilderness
across undulating land
give way to runaway freeways and blue-
tiled swimming pools
framed by eucalyptus. Southern California:
gorgeous people without
grammar rich in gender and case. (On TV
everyone claps and cheers.)
Last night I met my first tremor inside
a Sav-On. The freckled
checkout girl didn’t ask where I was from,
or why I cut each day into
the frame of the unlocked side door,
tracking my height, my time to go.
213
Looking West

These floor-to-ceiling windows
deserve another view—something
besides the graveyard, the wispy clouds.
The rainbow-inked
flier had dirtied my hands with promises.
If only a single griever would
come, grasping a bunch of lilies,
and kneel at the plaque
half-buried in the ground, the end would
again resemble the beginning.
A trace of consolation remains
in the distant peaks climbing
over each other like men. By sundown,
they’re nearly here.
214
Cape Cod

Water, water, but no fish—too bony
to eat off a paper plate
balanced on my knees. Still, ponds upon
ponds test my limits:
the letters I write you, having learned
the ABCs alongside nettles,
horseflies, and the most gnarled of trees,
sink without a trace.
With luck, I touch the bottom and catch
a glimpse of a one-eyed
monster rumored to nestle inside footprints.
My ship, the one I’ll take home,
is a walnut shell—its figurehead
a boy gasping for breath.
215
In the Heart of the Country

After winter, spring comes knocking,
knocking on the jaws
and chests of the tools hung in the shed.
This is not a place
to visit alone. Better go play outside,
he says, locking the door.
Ride the water pump. The zinc
bucket, kicked over by a pig
on the run, is a crown—try it on
while you can. Be safe, though,
climbing the stone angel. One day
you’ll understand
the words cut in the wing by another
trembling hand.
216
Europa, Europa

From behind, even the cabby’s bald
and egg-shaped head
resembled a dome. “To the city limits,”
we said. As he reset the meter
and put the Audi in first, sweat beaded
on the hairy stem of his neck.
The popping of bugs that stood in our way
wasn’t enough to get us
talking, until the last bored tourist
disappeared from the mirror
and we, with time to kill, arrived in a field
dotted by gopher mounds
and a single brass cross. “Son, you can
never leave the past behind.”
217
Havre de Grace

Out where the lone oak meets the beach,
they throw their kayak
onto the bay, then slip on the orange vests.
Like two faithful swans,
they tie up each other’s loose strings—
his trunks, her Brazilian bottoms—
and, gripping the sides for balance,
slide into the keyholes. Suddenly
they barely escape a landing seaplane
and tipsy anglers whose
floats disappear. “Left, right,” “left, right”—
they shout back and forth,
joining the others who’ve turned their oars
into crosses and swords.

218
Thaw

Taught to know better, the scouts march
through dirty snow—the shoeshine
hides the moss of their beards.
When the chief’s arm goes up,
they sign their names in piss—all winter
they’ve prepared for this.
Had the creek not burst its banks, drowning
the marker tractor tire, they
would’ve mastered the compass, and Steve
would still be alive. “Coming,”
he had yelled from the lookout
on the mace-shaped rock. While they
carry him in a poncho, the wind twists
the trees into question marks.

219
In the Tropics

Like fountain statues, the surfers
bob and spit on the waves
while we draw lines in the sand, jailing
our own shadows.
Those who cap their bronzed ears
with a conch, remind us
we are not alone, but the sky merely looks on.
Here, as on the boats
that go by, with their three funnels
spewing smoke of the deepest black,
everyone fibs just to survive.
After three days and two nights,
the stone stairs the sea gave up
at low tide are our only way out.
220
Endless Summer

As she begins cutting my hair, she
promises I’ll lose
five pounds by the end. Snip, snip—
she takes years off
my baby face; the hairline turns out
rounded, not squared. Watching
my blond locks tumble down the cape,
I follow the buzzing
of the clippers, a hit of life and death,
until the sliding door
opens and I end up on the sidewalk,
in a pool of light. There,
staring through the glass at a pile of hair,
I vow never to forget her.
221
Painting a Room

Between smoke breaks and eating
a cheese pizza, choose
a roller that won’t shed its fuzz. Then dip it
in paint poured into a tray.
Splatter the excess onto the wall, like holy water.
Though eggshell or mocha
blur dream and reality, the blotted
abstraction is where you begin.
Move up and down—use force to cover
every blemish. If this is
the kitchen—spill and splash; the next coat
matters most. If this is the guest
bedroom, imagine the emptiness of people
departing each year.
222
Homecoming

After twelve hours in the belly
of the plane, you’re speechless
in a shuttle van hurtling down the road
past boarded-up shops
and rope-jumping kids, while your eyes—
barely open, glazed
from alphabetizing time—twirl, then
focus on the fonts of rain
erasing the jonquils on roadside shrines,
until, out in the open,
someone you love throws their arms
around your sweaty neck,
so that you can let go of splintering oars
and wear your body like air.
223
LAST POEM FOR YOU

To end all suffering, more suffering
is on the way, I feel, not holding my breath.

But saying so isn’t easy.
When I lose my voice like this, which happens

when I read through the night,
switching between Polish and English

and churning scraps of fiction and fact
with my tongue, I wish I had less

time to think about the future.
That man, whose hand I grabbed

in a jam-packed underpass,
calling him “dad,” he said, “everything

worth remembering begins at the end.”
I don’t know how we made it out

alive—I only heard the muffled yelp
of someone going down.

You see, that was long ago, but still
I carry the crowd and the crowd carries me.
224
ELSEWHERE

Now that Poles have conquered an island
without firing a single shot—
“Ireland’s beautiful,” “The people kind”—
I say we follow in their footsteps

and hop on the bus, or take it to the skies,
and find this, escape that.
How long have we stood on
the bridge here, waiting for the water to pass

while it gurgles and chokes on gloves,
plastic bags, bodies, even?
Rocking, the railing resists
our climbing and spreading our arms, Love.

By the time the stars show up at five,
we’ll be eating berries for supper,
making a tall fire with your flint necklace.
I’ll hum your favorite tune—

something off the desert island disc—
and strike a deal with the dead below us.
If they grab or tickle us,
we’ll tell them about our city’s striped

smokestacks exhaling debris all day.
Or how we found the missing paperboy
in a ditch with the bike
chain around his wrists, pedaling on.

Or how it’s the absence of God that makes us
behave, fall for each other,
for the guy who plays bucket drums
on the corner of Broad and First,

and for the AAA voice that says, “The tow truck
will arrive in fifteen, twenty minutes.”
We always knew
we’d need help getting from B to C.

It was only yesterday that dense fog
plagued the downtown, filling

225
the eyes of the roaring marble lions with milk.
We had nowhere to hide.

By noon, the poor East had become
the wealthy West;
the South took on the North’s way
of introducing itself with frost.

The footprints we followed
led us from one blazing oil barrel to another.
We watched people play musical chairs
with the books and lamps

they brought over to keep the fires going.
Sure enough, some kid
noticed we had brought nothing,
and they let us stay for only an hour,

though a tire, or pillows stuffed with horsehair,
would’ve bought us a whole day.
Our time was up before we knew it
thanks to the tower bell lashing its tongue.

I worked there one summer.
Going up and down the two hundred steps,
I lost twenty pounds.
After two weeks of pulling on the ropes

at the top of each hour, every
national holiday, tragedy or triumph,
my hands stopped bleeding.
The pay was low, but the view to die for.

On clear days the toothed mountains
shone among satellite dishes and spires.
If I looked down, I saw
tourists aiming their cameras at me.

I waved to them as one waves to ghosts
lurking in cellars, or lovers on train platforms.
And when it rained,
and water flooded my bulbous tower,

I sent signals with a flashlight to my pals,
Oscar and Maggie,

226
sure they were placing bets
on whose house floats away or sinks first.

I didn’t want them to have fun without me.
During one heavy flood,
after the five miles between the river and us
had filled with catfish and bass,

they went out in their scuba gear
and robbed the dozen or so cars
still parked in the metered spots on our block.
They were never caught,

and I know I should’ve turned them in.
Instead, I quit tolling the bell
and moved closer to the airport,
where the jets unzip the sky before dawn.

Thanks to that fog, though, yesterday
was the first day I got to sleep in past nine.
Before you came, carrying
onion bagels with egg and sausage,

I dreamed of going over the state line,
beyond the strawberry field,
where I found a meadow scabbed in stones.
I enjoyed rolling them around.

But the stones quickly collected leaves
and dirt, grew too heavy
for me to push across the undulating land.
That’s when a bald man appeared

out of nowhere. He said he’d take me
to bathe in nectar with voluptuous nymphs
if I moved off his property.
Instead of pockmarking it, he said,

press your ear to the ground and listen
to what the earth says.
Don’t let my accent fool you, he added,
then vanished without a trace.

If you hadn’t shown up, Love,
I don’t know what I would’ve done.

227
Tell me, do you think I’m going crazy?
Do you think

the fog had anything to do with me
dreaming I was Sisyphus on leave?
This whole thing happened
on the fourth day of the seventh month—

but twenty-five hours later
I can’t tell if the horizon resurfaced first
or the robins and the jays.
Either way, I’m glad to be back,

strolling with you across our bridge.
It was here that we first met Wanda and Hans,
the carpenter with sawdust
on his eyelids, when they bungee-jumped,

shattering the water each time.
It was here that we saw two zeppelins
fly in and drop leaflets
warning us that crime was on the rise,

while a rainbow flashed in the distance.
When we come here
it’s like our first date all over again, though
now we kiss and hold hands.

But look, on the left bank Mr. Burt
is hammering a red-letter sign to his mailbox,
calling this place
something unpronounceable.

On the right bank, a fire hydrant
stuck between the locals and the newcomers
who’ve built their villas there,
brings them together, keeps the peace.

Nestled against two roadside shrines,
our house looks beautiful in the falling snow.
No doubt, the squirrels
dream of taking over all the floors.

Every other weekend we’re back
on the roof, stomping across

228
the slippery slope of the autumn-brown shingles,
testing the soft spots.

Do you miss our old apartment, Love?
Once, I stood beside the chimney,
thirty feet above the ground, cleaning guano
off the siding with a squeegee.

I tried hard not to look over the edge,
down at the electric
lawnmower tangled in its cord,
the grass that to this day refuses to grow.

I found the gutters clogged
with the eerie silence
of dead flowers and headless nails
piercing the season’s first film of ice.

I wanted to turn around,
climb down, unsure how one is supposed to
clean up his own mess.
Then, while I was scooping

the tea-colored water with a trowel,
panning—I saw you
at the opposite end, packing the ballast
that threatened our first home

into billowing seventeen-gallon trash bags,
as if it didn’t belong to us.
But today, Love, the snow bandages
more than we can hide or ignore.

So let’s follow the Poles and jump
onto the ghostly sailboat
coming our way with its engine sputtering,
like folks do in movies.

If nothing else, we’ll see more
bridges, smokestacks, algae, and wrecks.
We’ll be the pirates, the U.S. Navy.
We’ll go skinny-dipping.

No more shifting our weight from foot to foot
to translate our need

229
to keep warm and move,
while our fractured shadows float in the water.

No more sticking our tongues out
and eating snowflakes, believing each one
erases a year of misery
because your fortune teller said so.

Even now, with midnight approaching
and the sky like steel
thanks to the moon dimmed
enough so as to not attract attention

to the Mexicans, Cubans or Senegalese
running or swimming for it
across borders, we must look
like hieroglyphs, exotic and maddening,

to anyone watching.
Having cancelled the cable, the mail service;
having ransacked our attic,
our Dollar-a-Day midtown storage,

we walk off the bridge, hoping
to open that door and enter the world,
and find it the same
as the last time we left it once and for all.
230
NOTES

The poems of Part II, Kraków Testimonies, are based on my research into the testimonies
of Holocaust survivors.

Abstract (if available)

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Asset Metadata

Creator Florczyk, Piotr (author)

Core Title East meets west: on translation and the dialogue of Polish and American poets

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Degree Conferral Date 2022-05

Publication Date 02/14/2022

Defense Date 01/25/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American authors,OAI-PMH Harvest,Poetry,Polish authors,translation,translingualism,World literature

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Irwin, Mark (committee chair), Harrison, Olivia (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member), St. John, David (committee member)

Creator Email pflorczyk@hotmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC110702278

Unique identifier UC110702278

Legacy Identifier etd-FlorczykPi-10391

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Florczyk, Piotr

Type texts

Source 20220214-usctheses-batch-912 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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