Richard Reisner

The World of Czesław Miłosz: Bombus Terrestris in the Authorial Honeycomb of Translators and Translated

This paper proposes that Czesław Miłosz in his numerous literary guises epitomises the cross-pollinatory nature of the creative literary process where texts are generated polytemporaneously in the authorial process of readers and writers.  One such illustration, his early war-time cycle The World, can be shown to demonstrate the generative nature of literary creation in the intertextual plane, translation being a prime vehicle in the cross-pollination of the initial text, known as the original. 

In this regard one poem from Miłosz’s cycle ‘The World’ will be taken as an illustration, where two English versions are discussed in terms of the roles of readers and writers in the authorial process across time. In this particular context, Miłosz as both author/translated and author/translator plays a vital role in exemplifying the making of authorial progression and the related creativity of the translation text in the formative process of literature.

It is therefore argued that Czesław Miłosz, working across a number of literary genres as well as assuming a number of various guises in the course of being reader and writer, serves as a good illustration of the making of the author and the attendant creative tensions between readers and writers.  It is therefore both as translator and translated that one of Poland’s most influential literary figures in the recent past has underscored the authorial presence of translation in the re-generation of literature.

David Malcolm, University of Gdańsk

Memory and Diction in Jerzy Jarniewicz’s Poetry

           

Jerzy Jarniewicz is a widely-published and highly-regarded poet, translator, and literary scholar. He has published nine volumes of verse since the early 1990s, his best-known collections being Niepoznaki (2000), Dowód z tożsamości (2003), Oranżada (2005), and Makijaż (2009). This paper examines the degree to which Jarniewicz’s work departs from the major concerns and technical features of pre-1989 poetry. Motifs of isolation, paralysis, and passing time (and impotence in the face of transience) will be considered, as will the poet’s deployment of blank verse and informal language. Special attention will be given, however, to the author’s determination to resist the effacing of a world (largely a pre-1989 world) both physically and in memory. Jarniewicz will be discussed – as he discusses Seamus Heaney – as a poet “pomiędzy,” that is “between” times and worlds.

Bryce Lease, University of Exeter

Hidden in the Theatre? The New Archive of Queer Performance Activism

Though homosexuality was decriminalized in Poland in 1932, the resurgence in Catholicism and moral conservatism in the country that accompanied neoliberalism after 1989 meant that gays and lesbians have had to negotiate complicated relations with right-wing fundamentalist groups. Joining the European Union caused conservative politicians to modify or adjust openly homophobic public discourse, but gay couples are still not permitted to adopt and civil partnerships have not been legalized. A ban on hate speech against gays only began the process of formalization in May 2011. Combining recent queer theory with an analysis of the critical reception of relevant performances primarily in Warsaw between 2001-2007, this paper briefly outlines the politics of gay and queer activism in the country alongside theatre performances and gay-rights campaigns, such as the Campaign against Homophobia, in order to illustrate a change in public perceptions of homosexuality after EU ascension (2004) and the election of the conservative coalition (2005). I argue that the recent history of pride parades gives us an insight into a developing transformation in public perception of homosexuality. Although pride parades were banned in Warsaw in 2004/5 by the then mayor of Warsaw, and later President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, Warsaw became the first post-communist country to host the Europride parade in 2010. I will also consider a shift in queer studies elaborated by Robert Kulpa and Joanna Mizielińska’s De-Centering Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives (2011), which crucially points out that over the past decade this field has refocused its politics in relation to geolocation, critiquing modern scholarly divisions that position the West as civilized, secular, liberal and pro-gay and the East as primitive, religious, fanatical and universally homophobic. Aligning myself with this scholarship, I will analyze key performances that premiered over the past decade which dealt with Polish homophobia, depicted gay or deliberately non-normative relationships and contemplated Polish queer futures. These include some initial plays that touch on gay relationships, such as Ingmar Villqist’s Anaerobes (2001) and Bartosz Żurawiecki’s Sekstet (2005). A longer treatment of the relationship between urban and rural spaces and their impact on sexuality will be discussed alongside Przemysław Wojcieszek’s Cokolwiek się zdarzy, kocham cię (Whatever happens, I love you… 2005), Wojcieszek’s Darkroom (2006), Marek Modzelewski’s Dotyku (Touch 2005, dir. Małgorzata Bogajewska), and Wiktor Rubin and Bartosz Frąckowiak’s Terrordrom Breslau (2006, dir. Wiktor Rubin). A discussion of the impact of HIV/AIDS in Poland will be contextualized in conjunction with Maciej Kowalewski’s Miss HIV (2005) and Tony Kushner’s Anioły w Ameryce (Angels in America 2007, dir. Krzysztof Warlikowski). With specific focus on the latter, I will show how the production was in sympathetic dialogue with, and later considered a significant component of, the ‘rainbow revolution’, a manifestation of Polish gays who protested against conservative Catholic groups. Tomasz Milowski (2007) writes disparagingly about the homophobia and hatred generated by the builders of the Fourth Republic and the ‘yoke of socially and historically embedded resentment’ in Polish society that cannot simply be reduced to a fear of AIDS. Warlikowski expertly collides black humor with irony, fantasy and absurdism in his critique of modern sexual relationships. Piotr Schmidt (2007) isolates Warlikowsi’s performance, the most personal to date, as the bravest attempt to regulate the steep escalation of hatred against gays, and has been more stringent in its broader cultural influence than a parade, campaign or anti-homophobia organization.

Mindaugas Kvietkauskas (Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Vilnius)

Poet as Mediator: Milosz and Local Memory

Czeslaw Milosz perceived the loss of local belonging, displacement and uprootedness as one of the crucial problems and experiences of a modern individual. He many times underlined his own attachment to the obscure and far-away native provinces, his lost places of origin as a necessary cure to the futility of modern imagination, and stated that the full emancipation of an individual from the concrete place leads to artistic and intellectual mimicry (The Roadside Dog). However, the symbolic return to the sense of place is a very complicated act for a modern self, especially in the situation of exile, and in Milosz‘s texts this effort turned into constant search for a specific formula of mediation between the individual identity and the identity of place. In his own biography and writing the problem of return to a concrete locality was largely connected with the ongoing attempts to revisit his native country – first in literary work, especially in the famous novel The Issa Valley and the long poems City Without a Name and The Rising of the Sun; after 1990, in the late period of life, Milosz’s return to Lithuania also took place in reality, resulting in late poetical cycles and essays about the experience of re-entering one’s original place. These texts attest to the specific understanding of poet’s or narrator’s position: the dialogical mediation between his own personal memory and the deeply perceived personality of the place. Because of that attitude, in twentieth-century European poetry Milosz imparted original meaning to the concept of human geography that is increasingly important for the humanities at present.

Paul Vickers, University of Glasgow, School of Modern Languages and Cultures

Constructing the memory of a PolishJewish Community in Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Nasza klasa/ Our Class (2008/ 2010)

In this paper I explore the evolution of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Nasza klasa/ Our Class from the 2008 ‘History in Twenty Lessons’ shortlisted for the Gdynia Drama Award (Gdyńska Nagroda Dramaturgiczna) to the 2010 Nike Prize-winning fourteen-lesson drama.

I argue that Słobodzianek’s drama shifts away from the earlier version’s blunt critique of the Polish national memory paradigm of exclusivist heroic victimhood towards a subtler attempt to portray the tensions involved in the negotiation of a PolishJewish community of memory. Such a community would be a site of competing and conflicting claims to victimhood and accusations of perpetration, alongside moments of harmonious JewishPolish coexistence. Like Słobodzianek’s drama, this community of memory avoids mythologizing a PolishJewish prewar idyll and also the “kitsch of reconciliation”.

I approach Nasza klasa as more than an attempted dramatic representation of the Jedwabne Pogrom. Rather, the text, and its evolution since 2008, also reflects the development of discourse on the Holocaust in Poland following the publication of JT Gross’ Neighbors. Consequently, only the 2010 version contains competing “versions of events” of the massacre itself and also depicts postwar construction of multiple memories of the pogrom, both between and within Polish and Jewish communities. However, the drama’s construction ensures that the author’s less-favoured narratives are critiqued throughout.

The revised version’s form also reflects shifts in Polish discussion on the Holocaust. Thus unlike the 2008 text’s Class, the Polish and Jewish classmates in the published text no longer present their postwar experiences in near-isolated Polish and Jewish groups. Rather the protagonists engage in dialogue, debate, contradicting each other’s claims, thus reflecting the negotiated process of Polish attempts to accommodate the Jewish Other’s experiences and their implication for Polish national memory.

As numerous critics note, the drama indeed tells us “nothing new” about Jedwabne as an event; however, Nasza klasa’s significance lies, rather, in its representation and commentary on the construction of memory discourses once Jedwabne became common knowledge in Poland. In this way the 2010 Nasza klasa contributes to the ongoing and necessarily unceasing process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung or coming to terms with the past.

Błażej Warkocki (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)

               Strategies of homosexual/gay emancipation in Polish prose since 1989

            This paper will develop around the trope of „gay emancipation” in Polish literature of the last three decades. I will be particularly interested in coming-out narratives
            I will begin (briefly) with two authors of the early 1980s: Julian Stryjkowski (short story Tomasso del Cavaliere) and Marian Pankowski (Rudolf). The first one presents, I want to suggest, a “modernist” strategy, as opposed to the “Genet-like” strategy of the second author. And that is starting-point of emancipatory strategies in Polish prose.

            The beginning of the 1990s sees the addition of the new, “strictly emancipatory” strategy of authors like Marcin Krzeszowiec, Witold Jabłoński,  Tadeusz Antos, Tadeusz Olszewski. Novels written by these authors were not noticed by Polish critics.

            In this context I want to examine the „poetics of inexpressible desire” (German Ritz's term), which became the most famous analytical tool used to read Polish modernist prose (especially that of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz)

            Finally, the latest turning-point came with Michał Witkowski's famous novel “Lubiewo” (English: “Lovetown” translated by William Martin) and five other novels published around 2007, which were a reaction to homophobia and the political situation in the country.

            I will analyse these writings from the socio-anthropological perspective, trying to weave the literary and the social fabric of these texts again together. Particularly, I am interested in the presence (or sometimes, absence) of “coming out” narratives, which have been identified in American literary scholarship as one of the key elements of so-called “lesbian and gay writing”. Will the lesson to be learned from an analysis of the named authors be the same as one present in the Western and longer-established tradition? Is it possible to write gay plots without coming-out structures? I intend to answer these questions.

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

Polish Studies

Department of Anthropology of Literature

Dirk Uffelmann (University of Passau, Germany)

Wrong Sex and the City: Polish Migration and Masculinity

- Abstract -

This paper aims to discuss challenges to traditional models of masculinity in the wake of migration to Western metropolises. Drawing on examples from recent literary production by (and about) Polish migrants to Germany (Becker, Knapp, Muszer, Rudnicki), the UK (Bolec, Koziarski, Kropiwnicki, Sędzikowski) and Ireland (Wojnarowski), it explores how male migrants are deprived of (seemingly) secure masculine roles when confronted with a subaltern position as unskilled migrant workers. Special attention is paid to the modes of literary compensation for subalternity – carnivalisation (Bakhtin), the picaresque hero, mimicry (Bhabha), Signifying (Gates), self-orientalisation (Khalid) and so on.

Monika Świerkosz (Jagiellonian University, Kraków)

Marianna in the House of Bluebeard: Tropes of Female Authorship in Absolute Amnesia.

Absolute Amnesia (1995) is a book that has evoked many discussions in Polish literature after 1989, of both a critical (about menstrual/women’s literature and the processes of canon formation) and a political nature (related to the questioning of the significance of the Romantic heritage of the past). In my presentation, I would like to show these mutual relations between text and its literary context, reading Marianna – the main character of the novel - as a figure of female authorship.

As Izabela Filipiak writes in her well-known essay Literatura monstrualna, the situation of the woman writer within the canon is comparable to that of Bluebeard’s young wife when she enters her husband’s castle. Unlike in the fairy tale however, the woman writer does not allow herself to break the ban and cross the threshold of the Bloody Chamber. Is it because of the ‘anxiety of authorship’ - this female malady of a specific nature well-described in feminist criticism? Can she walk out of Bluebeard’s house?

Absolute amnesia contains tropes of both possible and impossible female authorship and thus displays various strategies of a writing woman’s experiences within the framework of the canonical tradition and outside of it. The language of family metaphors – mother (and grandmother), father, daughter and son figures – used by Filipiak to confront the writer with tradition (and the past), reveals that the matter of sexual difference stands at the very centre of the discourse of canonicity.

Katarzyna Zechenter, SSEES UCL

“Matka Żydówka”: Jewish Women and Memory

The three recent autobiographical works: Frascati Street by Ewa Kuryluk, Here you go by Ada Rottenberg and Bozena Keff’s Work About My Mother and Homeland represent three ways of dealing with a difficult, disturbing and hidden past for the generation that knows the Holocaust mostly through their parents’ incomplete stories and the absence of larger, extended families. This paper outlines major strategies employed by the writers using Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory to reconstruct to what degree the knowledge of national differences and histories, collective and private prejudices, as well as the relative lack of ‘collective’ or ‘social memory’ of the Holocaust, or in general ‘the distance from the everyday’ informs their understanding of who they are and why they are who they are.

It is proposed that the notion of a modern Polish Jewish woman emerges as part of the effort of a generation that tries to understand and internalise their feelings of rejection by wider society in which the hidden memory of the Holocaust and absence become a focal point. These women also need to locate themselves within the notion of ‘a Polish mother’ and ‘a true mother’ both as mothers and daughters. Their complicated relationships with their mothers informs their relations with their children and their homeland where they are both seen as an intrinsic part and the Other.

Mira Rosenthal, Stanford University

Czesław Miłosz as a Translator of Contemporary Poetry

     

Anglophone readers of Czesław Miłosz’s poetry and prose have always lacked a sufficient narrative of his career. Even now, much of his early poetry is unavailable in English, and various English-language prose volumes collect essays that were originally distant in date of composition and intellectual framing. The chronological reach of this paper suggests that Miłosz indeed developed as a writer (of poetry, essays, fiction, and translations) and that his lifelong practice of translating the work of other writers (their poems, essays, plays, and translations) had everything to do with this development. In telling the story of how Miłosz’s translations of Polish and American poetry came about during the years he lived in the United States—from his early translations of American poets and his first forays into self-translation to anthologies of translation he put together with his own commentaries later in life—this paper helps us understand the evolution of his thinking about translation and the shifting relationship between English and Polish literatures from the 1960s into the 21^st century. His ideas about translation do not constitute a unified theory that can be divorced from its development, and his various translation projects are not a stable body of work to be evaluated for fidelity. Rather, ideas change over time and translations have different consequences in new locations. As political realities shifted during these years, so too Miłosz’s choices as a translator circumscribed an ever increasing and more complex comprehension of the interplay between minor and major languages. This paper teases out the conceptual capital latent in this narrative.

miraro@sbcglobal.net

Grzegorz Niziołek (Jagiellonian University, Kraków)

Patterns of Resentment

The experience of resentment has shaped nearly all the significant phenomena in Polish theatre and drama of the past two decades. The powerful political and cultural transformations which occurred shortly after 1989 froze the initial impact of this resentment and even negated its presence – the first suppression seemed to be quite successful, and to promise an unbroken transition from the old to the new. All the denied resentments erupted a few years later, considerably affecting Polish theatre and drama. As a result, patterns of resentment can be easily traced in major performances staged by Krystian Lupa, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Jan Klata and Monika Strzępka, and in plays written by Andrzej Stasiuk, Dorota Masłowska and Paweł Demirski. The experience of resentment forges their latent structures, becomes the object of attack or sympathy, provokes painful emotions, undermines the new ideologies and ridicules the old ones, and finally, provides readers and spectators with an instrument for critically approaching Polish history. This also expresses itself in a speciality of the Polish theatre, which is to evoke and depict the suffering of the humiliated body after it has been inscribed by resentment. Researching these phenomena takes us back to post-war Polish culture and its traumas, which have recently been revived through post-memory strategies, verging on both memory and history. The humiliated body has become the centre of the theatrical cosmos, and it is called on stage to speak out. The voice of resentment remains the most provocative strategy in Polish theatre and drama.

Joanna Michlic (Brandeis University)

“Living in the Shadow of Wartime Traumas: Contemporary Autobiographical Writings of Child Holocaust Survivors in Poland.”

The paper will focus on the traumatic impact of the Second World War on child Holocaust survivors, and how it is translated in autobiographical literature through the works of Michał Głowiński (1934) and Piotr Matywiecki (1943), two acclaimed figures of the contemporary Polish literary world. During the last two decades, both Matywiecki and Głowiński have written about their wartime experiences, and the complexities of their postwar double identities as Jewish survivors and Poles living in post-1945 Poland. Their writing on the subject can be interpreted as a meaningful search for identity, a compelling confession and a powerful desire to come out of the closet.

The paper will explore Jewish identity in the shadow of the Holocaust in Głowiński’s and Matywiecki’s autobiographical writings, including essays, novels and memoirs. The paper will pose questions about the representations of Jewishness and Polishness, and the nature and evolution of themes pertaining to the memory of the Holocaust. Finally, the paper will place these authors within the tradition of autobiographical writings of child Holocaust authors such as Henryk Grynberg and Suzanne Suleiman.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Translating children’s literature

Poland has a long tradition of excellent children’s books, and in the past decade new children's publishers, authors and illustrators have produced some highly original books across a wide range of genres. I hope to show that contemporary Polish children’s literature offers a challenging and interesting area for translators, one that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. For the translator, children’s books present some specific issues. With reference to several books that represent various genres/age groups (e.g. picture books for children under ten, stories and novels for roughly seven-to-twelve-year-olds, and novels aimed at teenagers) I will give examples of some of these, including: considerations for the reader’s age group (e.g. how far to depart from local references that non-Polish children won’t recognise, and whether or not to change names); finding the right register for speech (e.g. playground colloquial language, teenage slang); and some knotty puzzles of the kind that keep translators occupied for hours (e.g. the younger children’s books have a high incidence of puns and other word play, not to mention rhymes and made-up words). This is also a call to arms, to encourage other translators to help convince English-language publishers that Polish children’s books can compete and are well worth publishing.

Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese

Rewritten Poems and Anthologized Presences: A Sequel

In 1991, introducing Stanisław Barańczak’s anthology Polish Poetry of the Last Two Decades of Communist Rule: Spoiling Cannibals’ Fun, Helen Vendler expressed her strong conviction that Polish poets would know how to cope without Communism: ‘The Mr. Cogitos of Poland will not lack for things to write about with respect to their own past and future; and the old and distinguished resources of the Polish literary tradition, from folk ballads to historical epics, will surely not fail them’ (xxi). Vendler’s belief in the creative resourcefulness of Polish Mr. Cogitos reinforced, paradoxically, the cognitive template of ‘the East European poem’ popularized in English-speaking poetic circles thanks to anthologists and translators. In 2004 Jerzy Jarniewicz, my guest at the ‘Poetries, Translations, Cultures’ symposium, argued – much to the dismay of Daniel Weissbort, another guest and editor of the 1991 anthology significantly entitled The Poetry of Survival: Post-War Poets of Central and Eastern Europe – that the East European poem had long died. ‘In its place new poetry has appeared – poems by Marcin Świetlicki, Andrzej Sosnowski, Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, Darek Foks, Roman Honet, Mariusz Grzebalski. [This new poetry] does not need the support of political context or exotic historical experience. However, it does require from its translators creativity which equals that of the original authors’ (Przekładaniec 2004-2005: 36).

Bearing in mind André Lefevere’s argument that translating and anthologizing are acts of rewriting (see Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, 1992), I would like to examine the rewritten presences of the new Polish poetry. My current investigation will start where I left off in the 2000 essay ‘How to Make a Name for Yourself: Contemporary Polish Poetry in English, Anthologies and Choices’, which finished with the 1993 Donald Pirie anthology collecting poems that ‘speak with the authentic voices of real “singularities” and their very sensual experience of what is more than a New Poland – it is a New World’ (xxvi). While writing that essay, I myself was engaged in the act of rewriting: translating and co-editing Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird. Poetry from Poland, which finally appeared in 2004, the year which also saw Altered State: The New Polish Poetry. I have since guest-edited or assisted editing seven presentations of Polish poets, which also feature my translations. How alive are the rewritten poems?

The Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use

University of Copenhagen

Bill Johnston, Indiana University

The Peasants are Revolting

or

Szymek from the Village and Joe from Missouri:

Problems of Voice in Translating Wiesław Myśliwski’s Stone upon Stone

Abstract

The paper offers an example of praxis (Freire, 1970), or theoretically informed reflection on practice, in exploring choices made in the process of translating Wiesław Myśliwski’s 1984 novel Kamień na kamieniu into English. The translation process presented at least two significant issues above and beyond the usual problems of literary translation. First, Myśliwski’s novel is often categorized as “peasant literature,” yet the use of dialectal and other nonstandard forms of English is highly problematic for a number of reasons. Second, the tone of the novel is overwhelmingly that of spoken, rather than written, language, thus presenting a problem in the creation of a written text.

            In describing the approach I took to dealing with these two issues, I draw on the concept of remainder, a notion that Venuti (2000) borrows from the work of Lecercle (1990). Venuti describes remainder as comprising “target-oriented possibilities of meaning” (p. 485) that are not present in the original yet emerge in the translation. I explore the particular kinds of remainder that I sought to exclude from the translation—these included geographically identifiable dialectal forms, eye dialect, markers of uneducated speech, British English expressions, Latinate words, and semi-colons—and also those I attempted to include, which included generic spoken forms of language, idiomatic expressions, and occasional non-identifiable dialectal forms. Lastly, I reflect on what other kinds of remainder may have inadvertently remained in the finished translation, and what effect this remainder might have on the reception of the novel in English.

Jerzy Jarzębski (Jagiellonian University, Kraków)

The Conflict of Generations and the Crisis of Plot in the Most Recent Polish Prose

One of the most visible features of Polish prose of the past twenty years is a kind of paresis in the plot resolutions. The action of recent novels does not usually drive forward towards any clear conclusions, but rather flounders in descriptions that promise no resolution of inter-human conflicts.  It looks as though the heroes have been deprived of the ability to overcome life’s obstacles, which likewise affects men as well as women (and a description of the overcoming of such obstacles is what propels the plot in prose fiction). The problems of the protagonists begin in childhood and are the result of disastrous relationships with parents, and especially with their fathers (or stepfathers). This can be seen especially in the prose of Izabela Filipiak, Wojciech Kuczok, Bohdan Sławiński, Jerzy Franczak, while a specific type of conflict with the mother is experienced by Bożena Keff’s heroine (Utwór o Matce i Ojczyźnie). Sometimes – as in Niehalo by Ignacy Karpowicz or in Bóg zapłacz By Włodzimierz Kowalewski – the conflict seems to divide the generations. This crisis is averted by Karpowicz in his Gesty, where the protagonist enters into an understanding with his mother. In my presentation I would like to analyse various aspects of the intergenerational conflicts and their influence on the strange “immobilization” of the protagonists and the paresis in the narration of plots in which they play the main role.

Duncan Jamieson

‘Reanimating’ the Past: Collective remembering as a cultural praxis in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s rehearsal processes (1999-2011)

The performance of memory has constituted an important aspect of post-war Polish theatre – ranging from Tadeusz Kantor’s mnemotechnic devices for evoking officially disallowed histories onstage to Jerzy Grotowski’s uses of scenic montage in ‘screening’ his actors’ stagings of personal material from their lives, to name two of the best-known examples. However, while various deployments of critical memory in pre-1989 Polish theatre practices have received considerable scholarly attention both domestically and internationally, many of the distinctive ways in which contemporary performance practitioners have sought to address the crucial role of collective memory in (re)configuring identity discourses in post-communist Poland have been sidelined or overlooked to date.

This paper will take a closer look at several performance examples from the work of the acclaimed theatre director Krzysztof Warlikowski, examining how he and his ‘informal ensemble’ of co-creators have sought to approach the cultural witnessing of certain traumatic events in Polish history and their resonances in contemporary public life. In doing so, the paper will focus on the rehearsal process as a whole, in order to draw attention to elements that are not always made explicit or directly ‘visible’ within the final script and production choices – and consequently have been overlooked by many theatre critics and researchers to date – but which nonetheless have formed part of the ‘deep layering’ of memory discourses within a number of their major theatre productions, often exerting a notable impact on Polish audiences.

The performance examples will illustrate how Warlikowski and his collaborators have informed and interwoven their work on non-historical (and non-Polish) scripts with dramaturgical correlates taken from contested episodes of Polish history and historiography, primarily concerning the Second World War period. Crucially, the chosen examples will show how this process is often centred on redeploying ‘memory traces’ of events and experiences that Warlikowski considers variously to have been excluded, forgotten, marginalised, or ‘disfigured’ by what he calls ‘amnesiac’ modes of public discourse and remembrance, both during the communist and post-communist periods in Poland. Through attention to how these traces emerge and are articulated by the ensemble during rehearsals, I will address in particular the ways in which identity themes that are frequently associated with Warlikowski’s theatre – such as minoritarian affiliations and solidarities, culturally hybrid subjectivities, and the Polish-Jewish cultural heritage – are represented in the discrete contributions of the actors, director, dramaturg, scenographer, and other colleagues to the productions signed collectively under Warlikowski’s name.

Much of this co-authored work begins from identifying and investigating pressing issues for the individual practitioners, with the ensemble’s final production scores constructed from an intricate interweaving of personal, historical, journalistic, and dramatic narratives, scenarios, and devices. My presentation will thus aim to reveal some of the techniques with which Warlikowski as director attempts to ‘mobilise’ his collaborators and to create a multilayered impact on the spectators, by exploring their shifting relationships to the collective memory traces established during rehearsals and integrated to varying degrees within public performances. Recurring features here include: the physical presence or denotation of real historical objects within the production designs; the dramaturgical layering of reportage and found texts within fictionalised scenes (e.g. in stagings of Shakespeare or Greek tragedy); uses of historical testimony in processes of script adaptation and improvisation; and aspects of cultural memory evoked through musical and filmic devices. In particular, I will consider dimensions of the actors’ work, such as the indexing of recognisable historical situations in performers’ interactions, the ‘filtering’ of personal experiences through the role, and the use of flexible performance personas (usually working along a spectrum of ‘character’/‘commentator’/‘personal-confessional’) to guide viewers’ attention and to shift between different modes of memory-association and critical commentary.

Using extracts from Warlikowski’s and his colleagues’ reflections on their rehearsal processes – set within a critical framework developed from hermeneutic and psychoanalytic theory, and from recent writings in the expansive field of memory studies – the paper will look to (re)situate their theatre practice, considering it as part of a broader shift in the remapping of identity discourses on the contemporary Polish stage. In this regard, the paper will focus on two areas in particular. Firstly, it will challenge a major trend in the reception of Warlikowski’s productions that characterises his work as ‘refuting’ its ‘Polish identity’, arguing that this practice seeks rather to interrogate essentialized conceptions of ‘Polishness’ and symbolic citizenship in the present, through critical re-readings of recent historical experience (to re-open ‘the future of the past’, in Ricœur’s terms). Secondly, it will review the selected performance examples in light of Warlikowski’s suggestion that the political force of much new Polish theatre derives from its capacity to contribute to a shift in the wider socio-political imaginary, towards a more inclusive reckoning with the problems of collective remembering and self-reification. Ultimately, while affinities undoubtedly exist with the work of other current practitioners, I will contend that the ensemble’s densely layered ‘reanimation’ of memory traces constitutes a highly distinctive approach to the cultural recognition and working-through of historical wounds and scars – one that, in a quasi-therapeutic manner, engages both artists’ and audiences’ narrative resources to re-imagine the relationship between past and present ‘otherwise’.

Kris van Heuckelom (Catholic University of Leuven)

Itinerant (Wo)Men. Migration and Inter-Ethnic Coupling in Recent Polish Prose

Throughout the 1990s, authors such as Manuela Gretkowska, Janusz Rudnicki, Krzysztof Maria Załuski, Izabela Filipiak i Bronisław Świderski have put much effort into coming to terms with the traditional commitments and expectations posed upon Polish émigré authors and in outlining the existential dilemmas and universal challenges faced by Poles living and working abroad in the post-89 era. The literary characters (and authors) embodying this new literary paradigm have been given manifold names: stipend-holders, cosmopolitans, semi-emigrants, transnationals, globetrotters, transmigrants, ...

New westbound migration waves in the years preceding and following Poland’s accession to the European Union seem to have consolidated and reinforced the topicality of migration-related issues in Polish literary and cultural discourses. The past few years have seen a remarkable outburst of creativity on the part of young – and not-so-young – authors providing fictional – and less fictional – accounts of their recent expat experiences. The list of books and authors involved includes, but is not limited to: Global Nation. Obrazki z czasów popkultury by Grzegorz Kopaczewski (2004), Własne miejsca by Ewa Tubylewicz (2005), Hotel Irlandia by Iwona Słabuszewska-Krauze (2006), Socjopata w Londynie by Daniel Koziarski (2007), Zajezdnia Londyn by Aleksander Kropiwnicki (2007), Przystupa by Grażyna Plebanek (2007), Dublin. Moja polska karma by Magdalena Orzeł (2007), Egri bikaver by Łukasz Suskiewicz (2009), Przebiegum życiae by Piotr Czerwiński (2009), Kara by Maja Wolny (2009), Polska szkoła boksu by Adam Miklasz (2009), Zielona wyspa by Mariusz Wieteska (2010), Karpie, łabędzie i Big Ben by Ada Martynowska (2010), and Nielegalne związki by Grażyna Plebanek (2010).

Most of the books involved feature narrators or protagonists in their twenties for whom the stay abroad takes on the form of a rite of passage. The immediate consequence of the departure is a detachment from familiar (parental/national) surroundings that seems to mark the transition from adolescence and immaturity towards adulthood and self-development. In this paper, I will investigate the way these recent migration/coming-of-age narratives deal with the issue of inter-ethnic coupling in the diasporic space. While the decision to leave the body of the nation can be seen as a first form of transgressive behaviour (especially in the case of women, whose traditional role as reproducers of the nation has tended to put limitations on their mobility), entering into a mixed relationship (and creating “hybrid” children) might be said to present an even greater challenge to traditional notions of Polishness. Therefore, this paper will look into the various rhetorical and representational strategies that are used in the literary construction of migration as a narrative of masculine and feminine identity.

Cynthia L. Haven

MIŁOSZ: The Moment After Death

In this paper, I will discuss Miłosz, memory, and how we must now offer the kindness the poet so willingly extended to us: retrieving a legacy from oblivion, more specifically in this case, rescuing it from a world which might diminish it.

“It seems to me every poet after death goes through a Purgatory,” Czesław Miłosz told me a decade ago. “So he must go through that moment of revision after death.” Miłosz stands poised at such a moment in his own Purgatory, and, if what he said holds true, he will remain there for several decades to come. 

How do we retrieve him from redefinition, as the world that would contradict and correct such misimpressions vanishes?  I will address how my work (both for the new An Invisible Rope:  Portraits of Czesław Miłosz and Czesław Miłosz: Conversations in 2006) contributes to the scholarship on Miłosz. I will discuss how the effort to reconstruct what Znak publisher Jerzy Illg has called “the Continent Miłosz” complements scholarly interpretations and provides the background for other studies.  In doing so, I would like to discuss also, the very impulse to preserve memory – an effort central to Miłosz’s oeuvre.   

As he once spoke of the need to rescue people, places, and objects from oblivion, now it is our turn to perform the same service for him.  This is more than pennies on his eyes.  I will suggest that the very effort is a small movement from devenir to être. 

In the poet’s words to me at Grizzly Peak: “There was at a given moment a stable world where we could see, hold on to values that were a reflection of the eternal order of things. Now we are in a flux. This is a very peculiar way of life.” Miłosz respected what he called “a sense of hierarchy,” “a sort of piety, I should say, for the past, for some crucial points in our history.” Focusing on my two books on Miłosz, I will address the idea of Miłosz himself as one of those “stable points,” and what “service” to his memory of means for us, and for our relationship today to his legacy.

For those of us in America, where the poet spent four decades, Miłosz’s life, knowledge, and oeuvre are a through-the-looking-glass foray into a vanishing world of art, history, education, values, aesthetics. As I wrote in the introduction to my forthcoming An Invisible Rope, “His sense of hierarchy and values, puts him squarely, if reluctantly, in a select spiritual salon.” 

I would offer Miłosz himself as a cure to our present-day nihilism and spiritual malaise, from a culture self-obliterating in the Age of the Tweet.

P.O. Box 18530

Stanford University

Stanford, CA 94309

Wioletta Grzegorzewska

Looking for real poetry with Czesław Miłosz

After 1989 the Polish poetry scene was dominated by three authors: Tadeusz Różewicz, Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert. In 1996 (after receiving The Nobel Prize) Wisława Szymborska joined this poetic trinity. Most of my friends from the poetry background were looking for inspiration somewhere else: in the new issues of Brulion and Literatura na Świecie. At poetry meetings Czesław Miłosz was rarely mentioned. My literary contemporaries thought of him as an old school, inspirational sage who spoke in TV- interviews about his Daimonion.

I remember that straight after my debut in 1997, I bought an anthology: A Book of Luminous Things (Krakow, 1994) in a secondhand bookshop. It was a thematic anthology with over 300 poems written in different times and places, from ancient China to today’s Poland, all collected and translated mostly by Czesław Miłosz. In the introduction the poet writes that poetry – if it’s good poetry – should not show life with all its pain, threat, suffering and ecstasy in a single tone of monotony and complaint. Poetry is required to be on the side of existence and against emptiness. His words along with a quotation from Paul Cezanne, which was used by Miłosz in defense of poetry: This is the minute of the world, which is passing. Paint it as it is, become it, be a cliché - changed my ideas about my own writing.

A Book of Luminous Things become my poetic guide. Maybe even in some magical way it had an influence on my five poetic books. I trusted my experience and reconstructed my world of childhood and youth spent beside the river Warta, including the traditions, habits, folk rites and religious rituals of people from the Kraków-Częstochowa Uplands; the ritual blessing of the fields by the priest, the preparation of birds and animals (i.e. cleansing out their insides and stuffing them with cotton), hunting for muskrats, watching over the corpses of the dead, the peregrinations of the Black Madonna painting, and so on.

The Year of Czesław Miłosz is now at its peak and hundreds of poetry volumes and anthologies have been published (including recently in London, the Off_Press volume Free Over the Blood). I have noticed a continuous expansion of creativity, which spreads like a virus on literary websites, and whose main target is to play with words and weird games with the reader, who long ago said: pass. Czesław Miłosz was trying to prevent us from this state in the introduction to A Book of Luminous Things. Poetry has lost its meaning in society, it doesn’t describe or comment on current reality, it has become a hobby, a game, that’s why it has  only a few readers in Poland, and the sales of poetic volumes have definitely gone down; despite this the production of the pseudo-poetic is kept going by niche-publishers, poetry portals, festivals and competitions.

Wrapping up

We carry ripe poppy heads. So many violets bunched in hands.

Whispering hourglasses sift through us at the tail end of summer.

A trolley vanishes behind the mound. The battered road

hammers downhill. Dogs drag bones down back roads.

Sniff the tibiae of tree roots. Our baby-oak still clings

to the hillside. In stones burst the multi-celled hearts of berries.

Ants lick sunlight off the chalky earth. Rivers veer off underground

– Nothing for me here – you say  

An Easter verse

A cold April. Chicks coming to
in a cage under a giant light bulb.
I served them finely chopped feed:
boiled eggs, milfoil, water in a jar lid.
I admired these beings, fragranced with sand
and mucus, hatched in an alien darkness,
which was just like the all-night cuts in electricity.
I remember the rustling in the dark when the bulb went out,
spots of colour stiffening, flickers.

Spring, 1986
                       The night was heavy, but the air was alive
                       Mike Oldfield
At night, the Chernobyl cloud fell
on our pastures. Thyroids swelled.
The pond aglow with murmuring iodine.
Swallows kissing crooked mirrors.

‘Moonlight Shadow’ was playing on the radio.
A city girl scout took over a barn and opened
a virgins’ club. We smoked menthols,
took free lessons from Playboy in
“Preparing for life in a family set-up”.

No other end of the world was there to be,
and yet it kept repeating, like belly aches
and acne, until the time I found
spots of dark blood in my underwear.

Pips

I enter the printers with a basket of cherries.
The steel gate bearing sulphur etchings,
banners holding up the nation’s future.
The nation stumbles over woodchip tiling,
holds reams of paper, still warm,
which will only reach full maturity in office.                                                                                                                                                              

Night shifts crawl from intercity coaches,
stamp dates on time sheets.
Father smokes at the reception desk,
his hands shaking over the console
as he opens and shuts the gates by remote.

Ever since the day I discovered that we are mortal,                                                                                                                                                                             nothing has passed between us but time.

translations by Marek Kazmierski