Contemporary Polish
Poetry:
A Short Anthology
Philip Rosenau
The article is the author’s
personal stroll through some of the main streets of the contemporary
Polish poetry, intended to show its breadth and unique scope. On purpose
he has excluded in this stroll the “grand trio”: Milosh, Herbert and
Szymburska. It is when the tallest trees are removed that one gets a
panoramic view of the landscape. The author, Professor of Mathematics at
Tel Aviv University, left Poland over 45 years ago at the age of 10, and
has “discovered” contemporary Polish poetry which, of course, is
completely different from the sounds of childhood nurseries, in a
second-hand bookstore in Manhattan. Poems by one Zbigniew Herbert,
translated by Milosh with an afterword by Brodski, were like a burst of
a super-nova in dark skies. They marked for him a beginning of a long
personal journey into contemporary Polish poetry, of which translation
of Polish poetry plays an important part.
One of the topics he muses over in
the article is the unique cultural climate prevailing in Poland after
World War II. On one hand there was a communist repression, which no
matter how bad, was still very mild when compared with the one going on
in the Soviet Union. But, since Poland was a free country prior to the
war, old cultural and literary traditions were very much alive and could
not be easily eradicated by the new regime. The amalgamation of the old
traumas and traditions with new ones created a set-up that soon was to
beget unique results. Since the mid 1950s, the central stage of Polish
poetry was taken by a new generation of poets who, when the war started,
were still teenagers, and thus, although badly impacted upon, were not
crippled by its events. What has become an essential trademark of this
generation was not a hope for quick victory or any victory for that
matter, but a preservation of human dignity in spite of the relentless
acoustic pollution induced by the communist propaganda that threatened
to contaminate irrevocably the language. Ten years of literary activity
– from the mid 1950s through to the mid 1960s – resulted in a body of
literature of which any nation would be proud.
The enhanced Communist repression
since the late 1960s and voluntary and even more so, involuntary,
emigration of many poets to the West, has transformed the literary
landscape from being uniquely Polish into an all-European affair. The
result of this transformation is that the poetry written in the last 20
years or so, although as good as any, no longer carries the unique
Polish characteristics which gave it its former uniqueness.
The presented translation includes
poems by Rozewich, Twardowski, Bursa and Zagajewski.
