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.