The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Bialoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic

Notes

189 INTRODUCTION 1. The title of what may be Białoszewski’s most popular poem from his debut volume Obroty rzeczy (1956; The Revolution of Things). 2. Wiech (Stefan Wiechecki, 1896–1979), a popular writer of fait divers ( felietony i humoreski) that preserved the dialect and lifestyle of Warsaw’s pre– World War II peripheral neighborhoods. 3. Michał Głowiński, interview with Janusz Majcherek, “Niezwykłe zwykłe,” Teatr 5 (1993): 5–7. Translation mine. 4. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 4. 5. Ryszard Nycz reads epiphany (à la Joyce) as the principle of Białoszewski ’s poetics. See “‘Szare eminencje zachwytu’: Miejsce epifanii w poetyce Mirona Białoszewskiego,” in Pisanie Białoszewskiego (henceforth abbreviated as PB), ed. Michał Głowiński and Zdzisław Łapiński (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL, 1993), 179–91. 6. Michał Głowiński, “Białoszewskiego gatunki codzienne,” in PB 144. 7. Miron Białoszewski, The Revolution of Things: Selected Poems, trans. Andrzej Busza and Bogdan Czaykowski (Washington: Charioteer, 1974). A small selection of Białoszewski’s prose in the translation of Beth Holmgren and fragments from “The Cabaret of Kitty Katty” in the translation of Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh were also published in Cross Currents 6 (1987): 195–215. A selection of reprinted and new translations of Białoszewski’s poetry (trans. Busza and Czaykowski, Mark Tardi and Katarzyna Schuster, Katarzyna Jakubiak and Rick Hilles) has been published in the journal Aufgabe 9 (2010), guest edited by Mark Tardi and dedicated to Polish poetry and poetics. Several leading translators of Polish into English have expressed their interest in creating A Białoszewski Reader for American audiences. 8. I borrow the notion of “transatlantic canon” from Bożena Shallcross, who applies it to describe Polish books in English translations, which are considered Notes 190 Notes to Pages 7–11 marketable for North American college and university curricula (unpublished manuscript). 9. I evoke here Czesław Miłosz’s The Witness of Poetry (1984) and Adam Zagajewski’s Solidarity, Solitude (1990). 10. I refer here to the well-known collection of essays Etyka and Poetyka (1979), by Stanisław Barańczak. 11. Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000). 12. Sławomir Mrożek, “Moniza Clavier,” in Dwa listy (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1974), 26. 13. Mrożek adds another satirical layer to the play, by having the hero impersonate a Russian because he (the hero) considers Russian identity to be more recognizable and marketable. In the logic of the play, the animosity of Poles toward Russians is overridden by the necessity to accommodate the “West.” 14. I distinguish here, however, between the Romantic paradigm (à la Lyotard ) and the strong influences of the Romantic imagination on Białoszewski’s work. Białoszewski himself in “O tym Mickiewiczu jak go mówie ˛” (“Of this Mickiewicz , as I speak him”), a manifesto of his relationship with the tradition, differentiated between his fascination with the power of Mickiewicz’s poetry and his distancing himself from the Romantic paradigm especially as a transmission of simplified communal values. The Mickiewicz that interests Białoszewski is not the Mickiewicz of the national messianic tradition. Białoszewski is fascinated with the pre-insurrectionary Mickiewicz, with his theatricality and folkloric roots. Białoszewski both playfully and seriously reads Mickiewicz’s Dziady Part IV (Forefathers’ Eve) as Mickiewicz’s take on opera “because there was no opera in Vilnius.” The very title of Białoszewski’s “O tym Mickiewiczu jak go mówie ˛” brings Mickiewicz down from the exalted national paradigm to a level as basic and familiar as one’s everyday articulation. “O tym Mickiewiczu jak go mówie ˛,” in Debiuty poetyckie 1944–1960, ed. Jacek Kajtoch and Jerzy Skórnicki (Warsaw: Iskry, 1972), 291–300. 15. “Aesopian language,” a type of communication with the reader in which the political is encoded in allegories and allusions (supposedly in order to outsmart censors), has had a long tradition in Polish literature. In the 1970s, Aesopian language was somewhat disqualified by the poetry movement of the Generation ’68, which sought to return to realism in order to represent “the unrepresented reality” of Polish life. However, commonplace themes were now charged with the political, while the everyday became configured as the sphere of dissent. 16. See the guidelines from the Polish Ministry of Education (MEN): http:// wiki.wolnepodreczniki.pl/Lektury:Lista_lektur_według_spisu_MEN#Literatura_ polska. 17. “Osiedlaja ˛c sie ˛ w królestwie ‘małoznaczności...