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

Catherine Grosvenor

Translating the moment: experiences in translating contemporary Polish drama for the UK stage

This paper will give a brief overview of the current attitudes to Polish drama among UK theatres, focusing on the National Theatre and the Royal Court. The massive success of “Our Class” seems more of a one-off than the first in a series of first-class Polish drama on UK stages. I will consider some of the reasons for this, before moving on to discuss the translation process in British theatres.

   Unlike the translation of novels or poetry, theatrical translations often go through a two-part process, featuring a  “literal translation” which is then passed on to a playwright who often has no knowledge of the original language. This is the process through which “Our Class” was created, with myself as the literal translator. I will explore some of the issues arising from this way of working and look in detail at a speech from the play to show how it changed throughout the process.

   I will then contrast that process with the way the Royal Court prefers to work, which is to find a playwright who speaks the language concerned, and commission them to produce a full translation of the play. I will use my experience working on a UK version of Paweł Demirski’s “Był Sobie Polak Polak Polak i Diabeł” (unperformed in the UK) to discuss the challenges here.

   A comparison of the work of Demirski and Słobodzianek is also enlightening because the two work within very different theatrical traditions. My aim as a theatrical translator is to “translate the moment” of what is happening on stage. After looking at what this means in general, I will compare the moments that each writer creates on stage and consider the implications of this for the translator.

Elwira Grossman

Transnational or bi-cultural? Challenges in reading post-1989 drama written ‘outside the nation’

ABSTRACT: 

By comparing and contrasting two plays written ‘outside the nation:’ Głowacki’s Antigone in New York (1992) and Grosvenor’s Cherry Blossom (2008), the paper explores the possibility of creating a transnational drama that is supposed to facilitate mutual understanding and intercultural experience.

Jan Kott pronounced Antigone in New York to be one of the three most important Polish plays in recent years, meaning the last few decades of the twentieth century.  And although, in my reading, the Polish version is hardly a clone of the English original, the texts’ differences have been mostly ignored by critics and scholars. Moreover, the mistaken assumption that the original play was written in English and its Polish ‘translation’ has been linguistically amended for the sake of the Polish audience has not been questioned either. This duality of perception indicates that the play has happily led a dual rather than a transnational existence and while it subverted one set of myths, it almost inadvertently perpetuated another due to the fact that the dramatic convention left the linguistic reality of migrants out of the text.

The challenge left aside by Głowacki was undertaken by the collaborative team who worked on the Scottish production of Cherry Blossom. The Traverse Theatre introduced it as ‘a bilingual performance with a Scottish and Polish cast, using a mixture of written, devised and verbatim text with a state of the art multimedia design to create a powerful production that explores the myths, ideas and realities of migration and identity in the 21^st century.’  The spectacle was performed in Scotland and Poland in the autumn of 2008 with the same script, cast and a mixture of the two languages. Yet, the reviews of the show focused on its different cultural aspects. The British press stressed the effort of breaking through the language barriers and the painfully confusing reality of such a process. The Polish press focused on the cultural differences and – unlike the British critics - did not treat the predictability of plot as a conscious design but a flaw. The emphasis on the linguistic issue was read as the main reason behind the play’s shallowness. So, who ‘got it right’ Poles or Brits?  

The questions that frame my discussion of both plays (and their bi-cultural perception) relate to

the phenomenon of transnational writing which escapes an easy definition in terms of nationality, linguistic belonging or a mono-cultural practice. What frame of cultural reference should we apply when reading a mobile/travelling wor(l)d?  What/who shapes the set of assessment criteria for artistic products of transcultural idioms?  How can such idioms be deciphered, if true ‘intercultural readers’ are – in most cases – still a dream only?  I shall address these and other questions when discussing the plays’ reception, the critics’ voices and the experience of both texts in my pedagogical practice.

Stepek Lecturer in Polish Studies

Comparative Literature Programme Director

SMLC – University of Glasgow

Hetherington Bldg

Bute Gardens

Glasgow G12 8RS

e-mail: elwira.grossman@glasgow.ac.uk

Knut Andreas Grimstad, University of Oslo

Revisiting the Other Side: Mnemonic Strategies in Piotr Paziński’s The Boarding House

A voice from Poland’s third generation of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Piotr Paziński has written a semi-autobiographical novel about a man who journeys back to a guesthouse where as a child he used to spend summers with his grandmother. The Boarding House (Pensjonat, 2009) is a philosophical tale about the passing of all things; an awareness that the past cannot be summoned underlies the narrator’s “feeling of life on an island, inadequacy and incongruity.” Hence the book is also a literary rite for the revival of memory, wherein the narrator’s identity is shaped by echoes, shadows and memories of memories.

            But unlike many postcommunist Polish-Jewish writers before him, the author does not focus on nostalgic idyllization or uncompromising critique. Rather, he crosses over to the other side, that is reconjures the long-lost world of Jewish life, by means of good-natured humour, subtle irony and elements of magic realism. In so far as he avoids excessive pathos and victimization, he betrays a kinship with American-Jewish writers who seek to recreate the prewar past in more optimistic and reconciliatory terms (Jonathan Safran Foer and Daniel Mendelssohn). Significantly, he also emulates Polish Holocaust survivors whose narratives are told from the perspective of a child or set in an old guesthouse owned by the remnants of the Jewish community (Michal Głowinski and Bogdan Wojdowski).

            And yet there appears to be a wistfully ambivalent dimension to Paziński’s memory project which sets him apart from all of the above. Here I will examine The Boarding House with the aim of assessing the balance between melancholy and wit. How do these the strategies help reconstruct the dead world? Keep pessimism at bay?

Hanna Gosk, University of Warsaw

What does the present-day Polish prose say about the Homeland/home country, twenty years after it regained sovereignty?

It is a well-known fact that long-lasting captivity and lack of sovereignty have resulted in a situation where for Poles, their home country or Homeland has become a phantasm, an object of martyrological contemplation bearing traits of an ideal and a victim experiencing heroic sufferings. The dominant current of Homeland stories was shaped over centuries in line with a poetics of wrongs done to victims of violent acts. Irrespective of the fact that our home country has been free and independent again since 1989, our national community’s imagination remains stuck in the attributes of its image as elaborated in the Romantic age (or it fiercely opposes them, thus confirming their constitutive power).

This image has earned its dominant position while non-heroic sub-stories have been eliminated, which might otherwise have generated a sense of shame or guilt associated with the condition of a victim. Polish prose works written in recent years have taken an interest in the construction-related aspect of the Homeland phantasm, as well as in the selective nature of its structure. Authors have embarked on adding threads that have so far been excluded from the dominant narrative mode, whilst at the same time living their underground (not infrequently hideous) lives. Authors, such as those I have chosen to serve as examples: Dorota Masłowska (Wojna polsko-ruską pod flagą biało-czerwoną) Dawid Bieńkowski (the novel Biało-czerwony), Ignacy Karpowicz and his Niehalo, Bożena Umińska-Keff as the author of Utwór o Matce i Ojczyźnie, or, Sylwia Chutnik with her Dzidzia, have entered into a dialogue with the Homeland phantasm whose characteristics are shown to be those of a fetish. What they attempt to do is to deprive it of its dominant position, or to display its structure’s ambiguity and interpretative nature; finally, they try to make a claim for the realities that enable the generation of Homeland/home-country narratives that compete with the dominant line.

Those excluded and marginalised by the violence exerted by the Homeland phantasm ‘translate’ it, in the works I discuss here, into the local languages of third-party non-heroic subjects that do not cherish patriotic rituals – all the Homeland/home-country narratives being thus indirectly defined by their traditional version. The latter is not willing to admit that cultural authorities are dictated by the present rather than by the past, and that a constant movement in exchanged meanings – of forgetting and memorising – occurs between them, thus determining the performative dimension of the Homeland phantasm.

George Gömöri

The Captive Mind examined today

This is a summary of my paper on Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind seen from a vantage-point of the 21^st century.

At the time of its publication The Captive Mind was an important contribution not so much to cold-war literature as to the literature dealing with the “conversion” or tactical collaboration with Marxism-Leninism by Polish writers and intellectuals. Miłosz invented the term (taken over from Gobineau) of “Ketman” and described various applications of this approach. The common denominator behind the various “Ketmans” was the recognition of “historical necessity” and a perception of “the weakness of the West”.

This argument may have had relevance in 1951 but was already undermined in 1956 by Marxist revisionist philosophers such as Leszek Kołakowski. In 1956 (Hungary) and in 1968 (Czechoslovakia) even the myth of “Socialist brotherhood” was utterly destroyed. In 1980 Solidarity arose, the Polish workers turning against the regime. The implosion of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall under Gorbachev showed that “historical necessity” is a fallacy.

            In my paper I would also like to examine the individual cases of Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta, all discussed in The Captive Mind. It is interesting to see what happened to them later, how they reacted to the changes of 1956 and 1970, and whether they attacked or challenged Miłosz afterwards. Also, what Czesław Miłosz himself thought later about his important book of 1951.