Beyond the Static of Language, Experience, and History: Four Polish Poets

Five years ago, frustrated by the relative dearth of Polish women’s writing in English—what Benjamin Paloff has called the “men’s club” of Polish poetry in translation—I decided to put together an anthology. In the end, I selected thirty-one poets, born between 1909 and 1985, who came of age both before and after the fall of Communism in 1989. Poets known in America—Wisława Szymborska, Anna Swir, and Julia Hartwig—appear beside their younger contemporaries. Instead of organizing the writers alphabetically or chronologically, I devised eight thematic categories—history, dreams, writing, myths, and so forth—after I saw such themes recurring in multiple poets’ works. White Pine Press will issue the finished anthology, Scattering the Dark, this spring.

The poems here suggest strategies of the anthology as a whole. Julia Hartwig, Urszula Kozioł, Marzena Broda, and Agnieszka Mirahina, representing different generations, all concern themselves with the transmission of the past, whether through ordinary artifacts, classical allusions, religious iconography, or the unreliability of language itself. Many of the poems touch obliquely on issues of gender. And all of the poets’ works show influences from other languages and literatures.

Julia Hartwig (b. 1921), the 2014 winner of the prestigious Szymborska Prize and one of her country’s most highly regarded poets, belongs to the generation of Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, and Tadeusz Różewicz. Collections of her work in English—In Praise of the Unfinished and It Will Return, elegantly translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter—reveal her to be a compassionate poet drawn equally to the realms of nature and culture. Her free verse employs ordinary language made intense by a careful shaping of cadence. “Inventory,” included here, examines the artifacts that accrue from a long life—the “foreign banknotes removed from circulation” and “newspaper clippings,” cherished enough to have been saved, but destined for “the fire’s prying eye.”

Urszula Kozioł (b. 1931), internationally renowned poet and longtime editor of the journal Odra, has fostered conversations with writers beyond Poland’s borders both during and after the Communist era. She’s associated with the Generation of ’56, writers who debuted in the period of relative openness after Stalin’s death. Her “Recipe for the Meat Course,” first published in 1963, functions simultaneously as an ars poetica and an ironic riposte to those who believed a woman’s place was in the kitchen. Opening with “You need only a knife,” it’s one of several poems in the anthology that depict housework or domestic life through motifs of violence and estrangement.

Marzena Broda (b. 1965) is linked to the Brulion school of writers, established in 1986. The group’s name—Polish for “rough draft”—comes from a journal also called bruLion, which challenged the literary status quo. Brulion poets, influenced by Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara, favored a poetics of the ordinary over a rehashing of their country’s troubled history. Broda’s poem “Kneeling before the Statue of a Saint” makes a typical Brulion move in its ironizing of the sacred. While a conventionally religious poet might employ the same title out of reverence, Broda begins with an O’Hara-like “I did this, I did that” stanza, which keeps our focus on the poet’s conscious observations in this Catholic church. It’s she, after all, who notices an Augustinian nun, praying before a carved saint “Whose flat buttocks and exaggerated round breasts / Reek of cheap cologne.”

Agnieszka Mirahina (b. 1985), only four years old when the first free postwar elections were held in Poland, is the author of four poetry collections. “All the Radio Stations of the Soviet Union” evokes the cadence, tone, and distorted syntax of propaganda broadcasts. The poem hints at the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish officers by the Soviet secret police in 1940, its Orwellian doublespeak simultaneously confirming the atrocity and denying responsibility for it, and also indicts the Soviet army’s refusal to aid the Polish insurrectionists in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

Such historical subject matter is atypical for writers of Mirahina’s generation, but her form shows influence...