Great Stories in Everyday Life
Tadeusz Pióro
0000-00-00Twentieth-century Polish literature was privileged by history in a special way. The story of our country in the century that has just ended is an inexhaustible source of national, social, and personal experience that guarantees literary works a lasting and authentic grounding in historical reality. This is even more true of poetry than of fictional prose, since the romantic belief in the irreplaceable role of poetry in forming the national identity still prevails in Polish culture.
Among the literary results of this cultural peculiarity are themes that are common to a great many poets of differing aesthetic orientations and differing ways of subordinating new poetic idioms to political tasks. This does not mean that ideological engagement rules out various varieties of the poetic avant-garde. The conditions under which the renewal of language is taking place must nevertheless be borne in mind. In periods when communist propaganda dominated public discourse, the poet appeared as the defender of the word, the custodian of its proper significances and destinies. The cultivation of tradition may well have seemed to be the most appropriate aesthetic and political attitude. Among the Polish poets who achieved international fame, the majority held exactly such a conviction. I have therefore chosen, as a criterion for evaluating and classifying contemporary poetry, the relationship of the poet to the possibilities afforded him by the existing, sanctioned poetic language, as well as the way in which this language, a common possession, changed under the influence of his or her work.
The period of interest to us began after the Second World War, when Poland passed from German occupation to de facto Soviet occupation. This was followed by a period of repression that was deadly for culture. Several important poetical debuts, 'postponed' for political reasons, occurred after the death of Stalin. These included books by Zbigniew Herbert and Miron Bialoszewski, as well as a new volume by Tadeusz Rozewicz. In the atmosphere of 'thaw' and cultural vitality of the late Fifties, Rozewicz alluded outspokenly and directly to Theodor W. Adorno's negative view of the possibility of poetry after the Holocaust. The opportunity to publish verse that was not socialist-realist was an important matter, but a purely local one. The culture of the West, in the meantime, was only just beginning to refer to the Holocaust-which, after all, had taken place in Poland more than anywhere else. The traditions of gentry culture, from which most of the Polish intelligentsia had sprung, proved to be of no use in the process of moral and aesthetic reevaluation that was obligatory after the Holocaust. The poetry of Rozewicz is an attempt at just such a reevaluation, through the invention of an idiom that offers no possibility of any delusions. In this, it differs fundamentally from the poetry of Herbert and Milosz. Furthermore, Rozewicz reacts consequently to the most salient phenomena of the European avant-garde, situating his own work in the circle of Kafka, Celan, Rimbaud, Pound, and Francis Bacon. These figures appear in his verse as interlocutors sharing concerns and obsessions, linked by a highly distinct and powerful artistic vision. The broad cultural and thematic range of Rozewicz's poetry never yields to the temptation to aestheticize history, while the ethical import of his verse grows increasingly profound: the long poem Recycling illustrates the uninterrupted presence in European culture of both the results and the causes of the Holocaust.
Miron Bialoszewski adopted a radically divergent strategy for the presentation of reality. He concentrated on the minor events of everyday life, and at times even on the lack of any events at all-that is, on the bare persistence of existence, the passage of time, and the reactions of language to historical inertness. He writes about what is undoubtedly present in his own life, rather than about what some collectivity, of people, the nation, or its intellectual elite, feel or ought to feel. This is not to say that he is uncritical of the political realities of his time. On the contrary, he expresses his dissent in an unusually refined way by forsaking the approved literary idiom for a common diction that appears to be both limited and poor. Fullness and perfection strike him as being as unattainable as they are inappropriate, and as being grotesque in relation to the world that he represents.
The abandonment of grand historical narratives was, however, rather exceptional in Polish poetry. These narratives appeared in a highly distinct form in the work of the young 'rebels' of the Sixties (especially Rafal Wojaczek, as well as the poetry of Stanislaw Baranczak, Julian Kornhauser, Ryszard Krynicki, and Adam Zagajewski), although they often appear from the perspective of the mundane, or of concrete real-life problems in a period presented by party propaganda as a time of normalization and of political and material prosperity. The political events that favored 'normalization' were the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which stifled hopes for the reform of the communist system, as well as the recognition by the German Federal Republic of the border on the Oder and Neisse. The official rhetoric concentrated on the building of a modern economy, the growth of consumption, and the celebration of the 'ideological unity' of the Eastern Bloc. At the same time, the deteriorating economic situation and the repression of protesting workers led to the rise of the civic opposition movement as well as of literary publishing that was independent of the state or, in other words, illegal. A new, politically engaged poetry emerged.
'What is poetry that does not rescue nations and people?' This question, posed by Czeslaw Milosz, returns in the poetry of the '68 Generation.' It is Ryszard Krynicki who poses the question in its most essential and thorough form. He answers that poetry can be the voice of the conscience, that it is fundamental moral distinctions that can perform the act of 'rescue.' The work of the New Wave poets frequently has to do with the very possibility of speaking or writing the truth, and of standing up to propagandistic lies that demonstrate the vulnerability of language to manipulation. The New Wave poets do this by picking apart the commonplaces and cliches of media newspeak and party rhetoric. At the same time, New Wave poetry is very direct. It is addressed to the widest possible readership of people who share the poets' experiences of Polish life in the Seventies. The social conflicts reflected in this poetry led to the rise of 'Solidarity.' The introduction shortly afterwards of martial law lent New Wave poetry a status similar to that of patriotic verse from the time of the partitions. Piotr Sommer and Bohdan Zadura remained on the edges of the trend. In the Eighties, they wrote a completely distinct poetry that nevertheless drew on attitudes towards history, politics, and poetic language that were similar to those held by Krynicki or Baranczak.
In the period when officially sanctioned literature was concerned with 'undotting the i,' as Urszula Koziol puts it in her poem Impas, Bohdan Zadura wrote the long poem Cisza, which was not published until 1994. This is the best of the existing poetic representations of Poland under martial law. Both Zadura and Sommer introduced into Polish poetry new tones and a new diction. They thus came to the rescue of a language that was enervated by repeated instances of the same kind of emotional tension, by an almost reflexive pomposity, a poetic language all too wrapped up in its own moral and historical import. In their translations of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, Sommer and Zadura showed younger poets especially the potential for a different kind of lyrical expression than the kind that had existed up to then in literary Polish. Their own poetry was distinguished by meticulously constructed emotional situations, with history on the grand scale always present in the background-but as only one of the elements of consciousness. History was not able to throw its 'objective' weight around to the point of pushing those other elements off the stage. At the same time, the colloquial speech from which Zadura and Somme derived their idiom was subjected to a rigorous discipline that revealed denotations and connotations that had been hidden, ignored, or forgotten.
The change in the political system was accompanied by a number of important poetic debuts. In the course of more or less ten years, these poets have marked out highly distinct and varied aesthetic and ideological positions. Marcin Swietlicki carried on the poetics of rebellion and cultural shock that were best exemplified twenty years earlier by Rafal Wojaczek. Swietlicki's verse features an unusual yoking of the sort of candor, or even abruptness that is known from the songs of Brecht, together with a lyricism that is all the more effective for being spare and achieved with minimal effects. There is nothing tongue-in-chheek about Swietlicki's lyrics on the subjects of friendship, love, and death. Krzysztof Jaworski, in contrast, deploys a Rabelaisian hyperbole that scoffs at everything and everyone, including himself. A completely different set of issues and means of articulating them can be found in the work of two quite different poets, each of whom has managed to come up with a seductive and fully formed poetical diction. When Andrzej Sosnowski writes about everyday life, he takes each lyrical situation to the border line where the potentials of language and imagination end, and the very idea of 'the everyday' loses all meaning. Ironic distance goes hand in hand with incredible emotional tension in his verse. The way that critics are disoriented by his work testifies to Sosnowski's status as a trailblazer. Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki confines himself to a single poetic form, a fairly regular twelve-line poem, but the formal limitation heightens the effectiveness of the way that he combines several different and easily recognizable linguistic registers in an extended meditation on death, madness, love, mourning, and desire that stretches from one collection of his verse to another. Biblical diction intermingles in his verse with imagery allied to the baroque macabresque, Ukrainian borrowings, and completely modern Polish to form a staggering, obsessive vision of life and death.
This thumbnail sketch of the contemporary Polish poetry scene has missed out on more than a few significant figures who stand outside any schools, trends, or groups, but who are nevertheless fundamental to the development of the Polish lyric. If I have succeeded in encouraging my readers to turn to more complete surveys or collections of translations, I would especially recommend the work of Jerzy Ficowski, Tymoteusz Karpowicz, Urszula Koziol, and Marcin Sendecki. And all the others, as well....
Tadeusz Pióro
Back |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
|
|
|
|
