Yet cultural transfer is always a complicated matter. I recall a conversation I had in late November with Mieczysław Orski, editor of the literary magazine Odra, in which he bemoaned the fact that it seemed the outside world is not turning its attention to Polish poetry in the way that it had just a decade or two ago, the heyday of Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert and Wisława Szymborska, of Adam Zagajewski and Stanisław Barańczak. But Polish poetry itself has changed, and for reasons that seem very logical within Poland. The politically-engaged poem, the poem of the big statement, is certainly experiencing a down-turn in the market of literary reputation. …Polish poetry is going in a direction that it needs to go, and this very general comment about it not being so influential to outsiders does not mean there is no wide-open landscape of different poetries and poets at work within Poland today, a landscape much more diverse and complicated than in the past, and one that continues to bear watching, reading — and translating.As a matter of fact, frequently I heard disparaging comments about Zagajewski especially, whose strong ongoing reputation in the West was explained away by his detractors by the notion that his poetry was glib and facile — easy to translate. Of course, contentiousness amongst poets and poetry readers is hardly rare, and the Robert Lowell-esque “raw” versus “cooked” poetry debate often flares up in American poetic discussions.

In Poland, I do think there is a “been there, done that” phenomenon at work, which has created an ironic situation to some degree — at least from an American reader’s standpoint — that as Polish poetry has become more and more influenced by American poetry in some ways, especially the New York Poets vein, it has become less special and unusual, less a place to go to find what there might be a comparative lack of in American poetry. (This question might not be of great importance to others, but it is to me. Polish literature has been my chance to find influences that — perhaps because of my own limitations as a reader — I could not find in American poetry. Indeed, to quote William Matthews from an Artful Dodge interview I conducted with him during my early years as a poet and translator: “Sometimes these resources are available in your own language, but for reasons of literary history you can’t find them.”) In any case, Polish poetry is going in a direction that it needs to go, and this very general comment about it not being so influential to outsiders does not contradict the notion of a wide-open landscape of different poetries and poets at work within Poland today, a landscape much more diverse and complicated than in the past, and one that continues to bear watching, reading — and translating.

Krótka historia liścia
(A Short History of a Leaf)
BY Krzysztof Piechowicz
(Publishing House "AB,"
Sofia, Bulgaria, 1999)

Which brings me to poets Krzysztof Piechowicz and Tadeusz Dziewanowski, poets I have decided to translate because over the years I have become attracted to their work, though for very different reasons. Krzysztof Piechowicz’s “The Day of the Dead, Powązki Cemetery” and “Ash Wednesday” are from a four-poem cycle that originally appeared in the Summer issue of the Warsaw-based journal Twórczość. Religious in their subject matter, these poems are even more so about intensity, about ecstasy in a lyrical sense, the outpouring of that which has been quelled and frustrated. Piechowicz’s poetry is often like a Renaissance painting whose images, perhaps even the brush strokes, are suddenly set in motion, a feel that works powerfully with his obsessions as a poet, with the way that spirituality often bleeds into eroticism and back again. Not that these are contradictory tendencies; rather, his poems are above all about a spiritual anguish that is often incarnated in the body, about how love cannot be separated out into the traditional categories of eros and agape. This ferocious baroque — its pressurized journey from the poet to the reader — also shows up in the forms of his poetry, the way that his frequent metaphors are couched in short and heavily enjambed lines, a structure that provides constant torque and disruption to the narrative flow of the poem. It is also a challenge to translate; to enjamb these poems in the English version in the same spots as in the original would not do service to either language. The two languages just do not walk the same walk. But I do think that the poem in English tries to recreate the feel of the way the voice moves in the original, its vibrant onslaught. I hope too, that Piechowicz’s language, arising from the Bible in Polish, has also landed into the language of the King James version of the Old and New Testament in an effective way, exhibiting not just Piechowicz’s echo of the Święte Pismo — the Sacred Word — but the variation he inserts as well.