The Salt of Structure:
Miron Białoszewski &
the Future of Innovative Polish Poetry

by Mark Tardi

Nearly a decade ago I sat on my family’s porch reading an issue of the Chicago Review devoted to new Polish poetry. As somebody who grew up in Chicago with Polish grandparents, Poland was simply part of my consciousness. Figures like Wisława Szymborska and Czesław Miłosz were well known and well respected; and as my grandfather often reminded me, it was a Pole, Copernicus, who “set the world right.” But as I read through the issue, I remember having two distinct thoughts: first, that American poets like Frank O’Hara, Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery were having some impact on developments in Polish poetry; and my second thought––who is Miron Białoszewski? Since virtually all the poets in the Chicago Review issue cited him as a profound influence, I was resolved to familiarize myself with his work.

From that point on I started delving into whatever I could find of his in English––which wasn’t much––and talking about him to whomever would listen. There were a few scattered poems in a few anthologies (often the same poems, actually), and the incredible Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising. But when I looked for Polish publications, I found numerous volumes including poetry, prose, even theatre pieces. A few years later, working as an editor at Dalkey Archive Press, I chanced to meet Ewa Chruściel and Katarzyna Jakubiak, then both working on their doctoral dissertations. It was with Ewa and Kasia over tea that I first asked, “So why hasn’t Białoszewski been translated more?” At the time I found the awkward pause and look of exasperation they both wore puzzling; since then I’ve considered it quintessential, something of a given when discussing Białoszewski’s work.

But I kept talking, wondering, peskily asking questions––unaware that Białoszewski himself had a parallel appreciation for the necessity of conversation. As he reflects in his Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising:

For twenty years I could not write about this. Although I wanted to very much. I would talk. About the uprising. To so many people. All sorts of people. So many times. And all along I was thinking that I must describe the uprising, somehow or other describe it. And I didn’t even know that those twenty years of talking (I have been talking about it for twenty years, because it is the greatest experience of my life—a closed experience), precisely that talking, is the only proper way to describe the uprising.

Jennifer Moxley suggested in her preface to Imagination Verses that “poetry is the frustration of limits.” I can think of few places where that frustration is more evident or productive than in Białoszewski’s poetry––and in attempts to translate it.

His work is at once playful, meditative, provocative, perplexing, and elusive—and has a well-deserved reputation for simply evading. In no small part, for this reason, his poetry is largely unknown to readers of literature in English. In 1974, Andrzej Busza and Bogdan Czaykowski’s translation of The Revolution of Things was published, which turned out to be the first—and only—book of Białoszewski’s poetry to appear in English to date. As they write in their introduction:

Bialoszewski’s ‘return to things,’ although it is not without parallels in modern poetry, has interesting features of its own. Białoszewski responds to the pressure of ideological abstractions by fabricating a mythology of things and, in his later poetry, by abandoning himself willfully to the contingency of speech and situation. In a deeper sense, Białoszewski’s ‘return to things’ had also ethical and even ‘religious’ dimensions. Like St. Francis, who talked to animals, Białoszewski talks to things, and since they let him be himself, he celebrates them.

Thirty-five years later, I am honored and thrilled to be celebrating Białoszewski’s poetry in the pages of Aufgabe, including reprinting excerpts from the long out-of-print The Revolution of Things.

It turns out that Busza and Czaykowski’s working method––collaborative translation––has been an invaluable approach to translating Białosewski and breaking out of the limits of our own subjectivity. As Kacper Bartczak suggests in his accompanying essay discussing Białoszewski’s poetics in the context of public versus private functions of language, his poetry is “born on the boundary between usage and its deformations.”

My aim with this project was to offer some points of convergence and proliferation, both on Białoszewski and contemporary Polish poetry today. It in no way purports to be exhaustive, but it is my deepest hope that the selections here offer what Michael Palmer might call “the hum of the possible-to-say.”

In addition to three galleries of poems that span a wide range of Białoszewski’s life, and an essay by Kacper Bartczak framing the difficulties inherent in Białoszewki’s work, this section includes the work from a number of poets working in or from Poland. Some poets may be known to English readers; others are appearing for the first time––though certainly not the last.

Andrzej Sosnowski has been writing exceptional, elliptical poems for a couple of decades now, and also serves as an editor of the influential Literatura naŚwiecie. Others like Monika Mosiewicz and Przemysław Owczarek are connected with a loose association of poets called mŁódź Literackie (a pun on the Polish word “młody,” which means “young” and Łódź, the place I’ve called home for two years) and the literary journal Arterie. Mosiewicz’s work echoes aspects of Wallace Stevens, though her poems are ripe with neologisms, vibrant tonal shifts, and an appreciation for the absurd.

Owczarek’s is a poetry that interrogates and unravels vestiges of romanticism in smart and unsettling ways. Kacper Bartczak is both a fine poet and an astute critic. His poems too are unsettling in how they are built from fractures, the moving parts exposed, but his dislocations speak from a convergence of Ashberian aesthetics and pragmatic contingency.

Poets like Ewa Chruściel and Białoszewski speak to the complexity of our contemporary condition: both are identified as Polish writers, though find themselves living elsewhere. In the case of Chruściel, she writes poems in both Polish and English that can be at once spiritually contemplative and unabashedly bawdy, and are always teeming with astonishment. In Białoszewski I see a poet who extends some of Białoszewski’s ontological concerns with things and place, while having the rigor and daring to rebuild the sonnet form.

Poets like Justyna Bargielska, Aneta Kamińska and Katarzyna Szuster reflect energetic and divergent poetic possibilities. Bargielska’s poems provide exciting disruptions of surface, twists and turns of voice from line to line, and in her most recent book China Shipping, she engages in collaborations with the visual arts. Kamińska’s poems explore the space between the page and the possible: she works both within the frame of the book, as well as constructs hypertextual webs. Hers is a poetry that expands Białoszewski and Stein for the 21st century. Szuster, like Bargielska and Kamińska, shares a playfulness of tone, though her poems turn inward and evidence a sensitive yet biting emotional register with a flair for the occasional Jarnotesque odd animal.

This project was not without its challenges, and I am indebted to many. To E. Tracy Grinnell, for the editorial support, vision, and friendship; and without whom this project never would have seen the light of day. To Henk Proeme, for his blessing and support. To Ewa Chruściel, Gabriel Gudding, Kasia Jakubiak, and A.D. Jameson for those early conversations and coffees in Normal. To Justyna Jabłonska and Ilona Zineczko, for taking over with Widzewian gusto. To the Polish-American Fulbright Commission, for providing me the funding and time to make this project a reality. To my colleagues at the University of Łódź for welcoming me. To my family, for understanding. To Bill Martin, for his example and for reaching out. To Ray Bianchi, Waltraud Haas, Dominick Mastrangelo, Sawako Nakayasu, Agata Pietrasik, and Steve Thanos, for giving me perspective. To the Chicago Achievers, for abiding. To Kacper and Aśka Bartczak, for their kindness, friendship, and tennis court oath. And to all the poets and translators, whose work and generous spirit humbles me. Thank you all.

Lastly, my deepest gratitude to you, mój żółwiczku––for the support, patience, dedication, and sharp humor that made this all possible. Rock paper platypus.

This issue is dedicated to the memory of Bogdan Czaykowski, for starting the conversation.

Łódź, Poland
October 2009

© Mark Tardi. All rights reserved.