FROM Całopalenie jaszczurki
(The Holocaust of the Reptile)
BY Krzysztof Piechowicz
(Poland, Szczecin: Glob Publishing House, 1989)

While Piechowicz’s poetry is built on a dynamic of fluidity and disruption, Dziewanowski’s poetry is more about connection, about continuity, especially that between the past and the present. This sensibility certainly comes into play in his “Four Dreams of the Borderlands,” a poem in which his own family experience merges with Polish history of the past several centuries, including to a time in which both country and culture extended much further to the East than its current borders, not just in terms of settlement, but also as a place where many Poles ended up being sent into exile, or even worse, suffered under the various Romanov, Soviet and Nazi oppressions that rolled over the country. But the last line of the poem is especially hard to render to an American reader without a footnote, since it references a very famous short story by Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), himself a Jewish resident of these borderlands (of Drohobycz, currently in Ukraine) who wrote in Polish and perished in World War II. For a Polish reader, the image of the street of crocodiles renders up an image of both the absurdity and reality of a situation involving the everyday nature of danger. Just imagine having to shop on a street where there are crocodiles. In fact, Schulz himself perished while carrying home a loaf of bread, shot by a German officer who recognized him, and that he was a Jew illegally outside of the ghetto.

This continuity also shows up in “Two Journeys.” (Both of these poems, by the way, appeared in the Gdańsk-based literary journal Topos). Here, though, the past and present merges not in the pages of a family album, but in a journey on a train travelling over bridges that now exist only in memory. About interpreting the poem, Dziewanowski writes, “We participate here in a combination of the real and unreal, common for the world of dream as well as poetry, where no one element of ‘reality’ has the right of total control, and where everything has the same importance in revealing the mystery.” Thus, is the man and woman outside the train window an adult couple with their dog? Or are they the poet and his daughter with their own dog, who also appears a few lines later on the train? Dziewanowski pointedly declares that he does not know the answer to this question, and that it is not even the most important question to ask.

Dziewanowski’s vision of poetry and art does not center solely on what is happening on the page, but also about what goes on beyond the borders, about how poetry spills over into performance art (a part of his background dating back into the 1970s) as well as into his work in the tongue-in-cheek Gdańsk literary group of the late 1980s, The Tavern of Psychonauts, a period when I first made his acquaintance. It also spills over into his own non-writing life, the traditions of his own family. In fact, at the same time I was working on translating the two poems appearing here in Cerise Press, I also had the pleasure of attending what turned out to be my Thanskgiving holiday for the year — one of the theme-based dinners he often stages with his family. The theme for that evening was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, extant from 1867 till 1914, and as such one of the powers in control of partitioned Poland, split in three by Russia, Austria and Prussia. His sons cooked all the meal — potato soup, hot barbeque-intensity Hungarian goulash, baked fish with lots of bones, a potato/onion/mushroom casserole, and for dessert an omelette topped with prune jam and apple slices. There were also copious amounts of wine, including Kagor, the sweet plum wine from Moldova, purple and luscious like velvet. Everyone was dressed in costume. All through the dinner, Austro-Hungarian jokes kept flowing fast and furious.

Still, I do have a complaint about Tadeusz Dziewanowski. It is not that he needs to write more, but that he does need to set his poetic dinner table for those outside his family more often. Both these poets certainly deserve wider recognition — in Poland and elsewhere.

— Wooster, Ohio, 13 June 2010