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editor
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 Posted: Sun Jan 16, 2005 2:55 pm Post subject: Gambling Polska |
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WELCOME!
Gambling Polska Rzeczpospolita Polska:
Native Realm
Paperback
By 1980 Nobel Winner Czeslaw Milosz
| Quote: | | I can presume that the masts of the nimble ships chasing after Spanish galleons around Jamaica and Barbados were mostly from my country. Records kept by shipping firms in the port of Danzig show that England was well supplied with a certain commodity that also came from the region where I was born; namely, live bears. Today this sounds like strange cargo. The fate of these cousins of mine, forced into the role of gladiators at "bear gardens" or torturers for mangling criminals, appears to have been no more enviable than that of the bulls in the corridas. If overseas trade consisted of natural products of this kind, the Lithuanian forests must have been scarcely touched by the axe, and the changeover from a system of simple farming to an export economy must have only just begun. As for the local population, testimonies left by contemporaries reveal that a sincere Christianity did not deter the Lithuanians from offering sacrifices to numerous gods and goddesses (just in case). -(- at p. 13) |
We picked up this 1968 paperback in an effort to understand what it is about Eastern Europe that makes for so many excellent poets. Even the politicians there are artists. Think of Vaclav Havel, the poet and playwright who led the Velvet Revolution, and Ignacy Jan Pederewski, the world renowned composer, pianist, humanitarian and first prime minister of free Poland after World War I. What would they say to this character, we wonder?
For more erudite analysis of this wonderful poet, we like this May 15/99 column by scholarly Frostback Robert Fulford, who was so badly treated by The Gobe and Mail that we nixed our subscription and never looked back:
| Quote: | The Triumph of Narrative
Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture
Hardcover
By Robert Fulford
| Quote: | A complex writer who enjoys plain statements, Czeslaw Milosz begins his recent book, Road-Side Dog, with the simplest and most traditional of opening phrases: "I went on a journey." He remembers riding in a two-horse wagon across the Lithuanian countryside, long ago. As each new village appeared, the barking of a dog announced the arrival of the wagon. Milosz briefly sketches this nostalgic scene, then mentions offhandedly where the trip is taking us: "That was the beginning of the century; this is its end."
Milosz, the 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize, 88 years old next month, has seen more of the 20th century's changes than almost anyone. "I come from a place without automobiles, bathrooms, or telephones," he said in his book Visions from San Francisco Bay. That rural isolation remains part of him: "I am still that same small boy who on his first visit to the big city was alarmed by the sound of water in the toilet"; he thought he had broken it by pulling the chain.
Since then, he has lived under the Nazis and the Communists and the capitalists. He has written for underground magazines in wartime Warsaw, and for The New Yorker. He's been desperately poor and comfortably prosperous. He's been a Marxist, of sorts, and today he remains a Roman Catholic, of sorts. Empires have risen and fallen around him. Hitler came to power in 1933, the same year Milosz, 22, published his first book of poems; for a dozen years, the Nazis dominated the lives of Milosz and everyone he knew. Then Hitler gave way to Stalin and his heirs, who lasted much longer and sometimes looked as if they would last forever.
As a young man, Milosz thought the Marxists were vital and bracing; he learned later that they were death under another name. But eventually they, too, went away. Lithuania, where Milosz was born to a Polish family, was erased from history when it was appropriated by the Soviet Union in 1940 -- and then was reborn in 1991 as the Republic of Lithuania. Milosz also suffered erasure. For nearly 30 years, from the time he defected to the West until he won the Nobel Prize, official Poland declined to acknowledge his existence. After he won the prize, however, the Communist government in Warsaw claimed and published him, or parts of him: It printed his Nobel Prize acceptance speech only after editing out the anti-Communist part. Later, in the post-Communist era, he went home as a hero. On the monument to Gdansk workers killed during the 1970 protests, Solidarity inscribed a Milosz poem ("Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You kill one, but another is born"), written in secret in 1950 when he was working as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington.
In old age, Milosz has split his life between Krakow and Berkeley, where he taught at the University of California for two decades. Why go back to California? To feel, as he might put it, not-at-home. The nomadic life, forced on him by history, long ago became essential to his personality. He will not give up his outsider status: A Polish patriot, he nevertheless regrets (as he wrote in a journal entry, published three years ago) that some of his poems "promote that moaning -- noble -- patriotic Polish blockheadedness"; he regrets "my bouts of national orthodoxy" even more than his flirtations with communism.
Years ago, talking to a journalist, he speculated on why he had chosen California. Perhaps it was because "it gave me a perfect feeling of estrangement and isolation," which "is part of being alive in the 20th century." That emotion has always been an essential force in his poetry; the ruptures he has experienced, and the tragedies he has witnessed, are lodged in every line, so firmly placed that they easily survive translation into English. His prose writing is equally persuasive. The Captive Mind, published in 1953, analyzes what his preface calls a "stupefying and loathsome phenomenon," the creation of Communist orthodoxy in Eastern Europe. Having outlived its subject, that book deserves to stand beside two works of fiction on the same subject, George Orwell's 1984 and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.
Milosz has always been anxious to remind us that dictatorship is not mainly a problem for intellectuals. Most of those who suffer are the anonymous, undocumented millions, their lives extinguished almost by whim. A 1960 essay, published in his collection Emperor of the Earth, tells in 14 heart-rending pages the story of Gilbert Brognart, a French teenager who went to Poland on holiday with a Polish friend in the summer of 1939, was caught there by the start of the war, blundered into trouble with the Soviet authorities when he tried to get home by way of the Baltic Republics, and vanished into a Siberian slave-labour camp, dying there 11 years later. His story eventually became known because, wherever he went, he wrote his name and home address on the prison wall.
Milosz, as much as anyone, has earned the right to pass judgment on his century and, in Road-Side Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the most striking passages describe the nihilism that has followed the decline of religion and the rise of science. But Road-Side Dog is no formal attempt at a summing up: Its quirky title (referring not only to the dogs encountered on that trip long ago but also to Milosz himself, barking at the passing world from the side of the road) introduces an unclassifiable selection of comments, myths and anecdotes, bits and pieces that have fallen off Milosz's mind. On one level, he's a modest man; on another, he's the sort of writer who believes his notebooks are worth printing -- and, in this case, he's right.
Road-Side Dog reminds us, in its remarkable breadth, that Milosz is a historical phenomenon, whose life in the post-Soviet period has given renewed meaning to the words with which he opened his Nobel acceptance speech in 1980: "My presence here . . . should be an argument for all those who praise life's God-given, marvellously complex unpredictability." (From a column by Fulford in The Globe and Mail May 15/99) |
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| Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 11:07 am Post subject: |
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Road-side Dog
Hardcover
By Czeslaw Milosz
Translated by the author and U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass
| Quote: | The gods of ancient Greece were capricious. Human fates depended upon their will, yet humans had a hard time trying to guess what would win the gods' favor, what would provoke their anger.
...Considering that the Creator of the universe had already lost much of His authority in the eighteenth century, when He was magnanimously granted the title of the Great Clockmaker who, once having put machinery in motion, did not meddle with its functioning; considering that the terrible suffering of people in the ensuing centuries, provoked by wars and genocide, made interventions by Providence seem even less probable; considering, finally, that the human mind learned to link the notion of scienfitic truth with empirical proof -- cosmologists attempting to find out how the universe came into being carefully avoided any ideas that would suggest their affiliation with religion. Some scientists, though, wondering at the precision of the laws governing matter after the Big Bang, were not loath to postulate the existence of powerful intelligences which act in a manner incomprehensible to us, possibly for their own amusement. One of these men of science, Sebastian Kuo, even expressed the opinion that our universe might be their experiment based upon quantum mechanics, or even a simulation. His book, however - which, he himself concedes, is on the border of science fiction - has for its primary subject our life on earth and examines the highly enigmatic role in it of chance and coincidence. We are inclined - goes the argument - to intuit a logic behind events which we can almost grasp, yet it eludes us and we are sentenced to ignorance again. Should we not imagine two teams, endowed with intelligence inaccessible to us, engaged in a sort of game of chess, using us as if we were symbols in a computer? This would explain glimpses of logic in our personal histories, so that we are inclined sometimes to believe in Fatum, when a sudden departure from regularity occurs, when obviously another hand has entrered the game. What the Greeks told themselves about the gods' councils, loves, and mutual entities, on which the adventures of mortals depended, was clever, for it proved - reasons the scientist - that they had an intuitive grasp of the distance separating our will from a higher sort of calculation, indifferent to our desires and laments. (From Olympians' Games at pgs. 167-169) |
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| Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 2:26 pm Post subject: |
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Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts:
Seventy Poems by Wislawa Szymborska
Paperback
Translated and Introduced by Magnus J. Krynski and
Robert A. Maguire
| Quote: | A Happy Love
A happy love. Is it normal,
is it serious, is it profitable -
what use to the world are two people
who have no eyes for the world?
Elevated each for each, for no apparent merit,
by sheer chance singled out of a million, yet convinced
it had to be so - as reward for what? for nothing;
the light shines from nowhere -
why just on them, and not on others?
Is this an offense to justice? Yes.
Does it violate time-honored principles, does it cast
any moral down from the heights? It violates and casts down.
Look at the happy couple:
if they'd at least dissemble a bit,
feign depression and thereby cheer their friends!
Hear how they laugh - offensively.
And the language they speak - it only seems to make sense.
And all those ceremonials, ceremonies,
those elaborate obligations toward each other -
it all looks like a plot behind mankind's back!
It's even hard to foresee how far things might go
if their example could be followed.
What could religions and poetries rely on,
what would be remembered, what abandoned,
who would want to keep within the bounds.
A happy love. Is it necessary?
Tact and common sense advise us to say no more of it
than of a scandal in Life's upper ranks.
Little cherubs get born without its help.
Never, ever could it populate the earth,
for it happens so seldom.
Let people who know naught of happy love
assert that nowhere is there a happy love.
With such faith, they would find it easier to live and to die. |
| Quote: | Milosc szczesliwa
Milosc szczesliwa. Czy to jest normalne,
czy to powazne, czy to pozyteczne -
co swiat ma z dwojga ludzi,
ktorzy nie widza swiata?
Wysyzszeni ku sobie bez zadnej zaslugi,
pierwsi lepsi z miliona, ale przekonani,
ze tak stac sie musialo - w nagrode za co? z nic;
swiatlo pada znikad -
dlaczego wlasnie na tych, a nie innych?
Czy to obraza sprawiedliwosc? Tak.
Czy narusza troskliwie pietrzone zasady,
straca ze szczytu moral? Narusza i straca.
Sporjrzcie na tych szczesliwych:
gdyby sie chociaz maskowali troche,
udawali zgnebienie krzepiac tym przyjaciol!
Sluchajcie, jak sie smieja - obrazliewie.
Jakim jezykiem mowia -zrozumialym na pozor.
A te ich ceremonie, ceregiele,
wymyslne obowiazki wzgledem siebie -
wyglada to na zmowe za plecami ludzkosci!
Trudno nawet przewidziec, do czego by doszlo,
gdby ich przyklad dal sie nasladowac.
Na co liczyc by mogly religie, poezje,
o czym by pamietano, czego zaniechano,
kto by chciat zostac w kregu.
Milosc szczesliwa. Czy to jest konieczne?
Takt i rozxadek kaza milczec o niej
jak o skandalu z wysokich sfer Zycia.
Wspaniale dziatki rodza sie bez jej pomocy.
Przenigdy nie zdotalaby zaludnic ziemi,
zdarza sie przeciez rzadko.
Niech ludzie nie znajacy mitosci szczesliwej
twierdza, ze nigdzie nie ma mitosci szczesliwej.
Z ta wiara lzej im bedzie i zyc, i umierac.
(From Wselki wypadek (There But for the Grace), 1972, at pgs. 144-145) |
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| Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 4:31 pm Post subject: |
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Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts:
Seventy Poems by Wislawa Szymborska
Paperback
Translated and Introduced by Magnus J. Krynski and
Robert A. Maguire
| Quote: | Report from the Hospital
We drew lots, who would go and see him.
It was me. I got up from our table.
It was almost time for visiting hours.
He said nothing in reply to my greeting.
I tried to take his hand - he pulled it back
like a hungry dog who wouldn't give up a bone.
He seemed ashamed of dying.
I don't know what you say to someone like him.
As in a photomontage, our eyes would not meet.
He didn't ask me to stay or go.
He didn't ask about anyone at our table.
Not about you, Bolek. Not about you, Tolek. Not about you, Lolek.
My head began to ache. Who was dying for whom?
I praised medicine and the three violets in the glass.
I talked about the sun and thought dark thoughts.
How good there's a staircase to run down.
How good there's a gate to be opened.
How good you're all waiting for me at our table.
The smell of a hospital makes me sick. |
| Quote: | Relacja ze szpitala
Ciagnelismy zapatki, kto ma pojsc do niego.
Wypadto na mnie. Wstatem od stolika.
Zblizata sie juz pora odwiedzin w szpitalu.
Nie odpowiedziat nic na powitanie.
Chciatem go wziac za reke - cofnat ja
jak gtodny pies, co nie da kosci.
Wygladat, jakby sie wstydzit umierac.
Nie wiem, o czym sie mowi takiemu jak on.
Mijalismy sie wzrokiem jak w fotomontazu.
Nie prosit ani zostan, ani odejdz.
Nie pytat o nikogo z naszego stolika.
Ani o ciebie, Bolku. Ani o ciebie, Tolku. ani ociebie, Lolku.
Rozbolata mnie gtowa. Kto komu umiera?
Chwalitem medycyne i trzy fiotki w szklance.
Opowiadatem o stoncu i gastem.
Jak dobrze ze sa schody, ktorymi sie zbiega.
Jak dobrze, ze jest brama, ktora, sie otwiera.
Jak dobrze, ze czekacie na mnie przy stoliku.
Szpitalna won przyprawia mnie o mdtosci.
(From Sto pociech (A Million Laughs, A Bright Hope), 1967, at pgs. 94-95) |
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| Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 5:39 pm Post subject: |
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View With a Grain of Sand
Paperback
By 1996 Nobel Prize Winner Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and
Clare Cavanagh
| Quote: | SEANCE
Happenstance reveals its tricks.
It produces, by sleight of hand, a glass of brandy
and sits Henry down beside it.
I enter the bistro and stop dead in my tracks.
Henry - he's none other than
Agnes's husband's brother,
and Agnes is related
to Aunt Sophie's brother-in-law.
It turns out
we've got the same great-grandfather.
In happenstance's hands
space furls and unfurls,
spreads and shrinks.
The tablecloth
becomes a handkerchief.
Just guess who I ran into
in Canada, of all places,
after all these years.
I thought he was dead,
and there he was, in a Mercedes.
On the plane to Athens.
At a stadium in Tokyo.
Happenstance twirls a kaleidoscope in its hands.
A billion bits of colored glass glitter.
And suddenly Jacks's glass
bumps into Jill's.
Just imagine in this very same hotel.
I turn around and see -
it's really her!
Face to face in an elevator.
In a toy store.
At the corner of Maple and Pine.
Happenstance is shrouded in a cloak.
Things get lost in it and then are found again.
I stumbled on it accidentally.
I bent down and picked it up.
One look and I knew it,
a spoon from that stolen service.
If it hadn't been for that bracelet,
I would never have known Alexandra.
The clock? It turned up in Potterville.
Happenstance looks deep into our eyes.
Our head grows heavy.
Our eyelids drop.
We want to laugh and cry,
it's so incredible.
From fourth-grade home room to that ocean liner.
It has to mean something.
To hell and back,
and here we meet halfway home.
(From The End and the Beginning, 1993, at pgs. 194-195) |
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 8:16 am Post subject: |
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Wislawa Szymborska
Poems New and Collected
1957-1997
Paperback
Translated from the Polish
by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
| Quote: | THE SUICIDE'S ROOM
I'll bet you think the room was empty.
Wrong. There were three chairs with sturdy backs.
A lamp, good for fighting the dark.
A desk, and on the desk a wallet, some newspapers.
A carefree Buddha and a worried Christ.
Seven lucky elephants, a notebook in a drawer.
You think our addresses weren't in it?
No books, no pictures, no records, you guess?
Wrong. A comforting trumpet poised in black hands.
Saskia and her cordial little flower.
Joy the spark of gods.
Odysseus stretched on the shelf in life-giving sleep
after the labors of Book Five.
The moralists
with the golden syllables of their names
inscribed on finely tanned spines.
Next to them, the politicians braced their backs.
No way out? But what about the door?
No prospects? The window had other views.
His glasses
lay on the windowsill.
And one fly buzzed -- that is, was still alive.
You think at least the note must tell us something.
But what if I say there was no note --
and he had so many friends, but all of us fit neatly
inside the empty envelope propped up against a cup.
(-- p. 167) |
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| Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 6:02 pm Post subject: |
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Summer Lightning
A Blandings Story
Paperback
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | She fell into a heavy silence again, her eyes peering into the gathering gloom. Somewhere in the twilight world a cow had begun to emit long, nerve-racking bellows. The sound seemed to sum up and underline the general sadness.
'Schopenhauer says that all the suffering in the world can't be mere chance. Must be meant. He says life's a misture of suffering and boredom. You've got to have one or the other. His stuff's full of snappy cracks like that. You'd enjoy it. Well, I'm going for a walk. You coming?'
'I don't think I will, thanks.'
'Just as you like. Schopenhauer says suicide's absolutely O.K. He says Hindoos do it instead of going to church. They bung themselves into the Ganges and get eaten by crocodiles and call it a well-spent day.'
'What a lot you seem to know about Schopenhauer.'
'I've been reading him up lately. Found a copy in the library. Schopenhauer says we are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses first one and then another for his prey. Sure you won't come for a walk?'
'No thanks, really. I think I'll go in.'
'Just as you like,' said Millicent. 'Liberty Hall.'
(From the chapter, More Shocks for Sue, at p. 169) |
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| Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2007 10:57 am Post subject: |
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Second Space
New Poems by Czeslaw Milosz
Hardcover
Translated by the author and Robert Hass
| Quote: | The beauty of nature is suspect.
Oh yes, the splendor of flowers.
Science is concerned to deprive us of illusions.
Though why it is eager to do so is unclear.
The battles among genes, traits that secure success, gains and losses.
My God, what language these people speak
In their white coats. Charles Darwin
At least had pangs of conscience
Making public a theory that was, as he said, devilish.
And they? It was, after all, their idea:
To segregate humans, write off as a genetic loss
Some of their own species and poison them.
"The pride of the peacock is the glory of God,"
Wrote William Blake. There was a time
When disinterested beauty by its sheer superabundance
Gratified our eyes. What have they left us?
Only the accountancy of a capitalist enterprise.
(-- p. 25) |
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| Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2007 2:19 pm Post subject: |
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Staying Alive
Real Poems for Unreal Times
Paperback
Edited by Bloodaxe founder Neil Astley
| Quote: | The One Twenty Pub
The bomb is primed to go off at one twenty.
A time-check: one sixteen.
There's still a chance for some to join
the pub's ranks, for others to drop out.
The terrorist watches from across the street.
Distance will shield him
from the impact of what he sees:
A woman, turquoise jacket on her shoulder,
enters; a man with sunglasses departs.
Youths in tee-shirts loiter without intent.
One seventeen and four seconds.
The scrawny motorcyclist, revving up
to leave, won't believe his luck;
but the tall man steps straight in.
One seventeen and forty seconds.
That girl, over there with the walkman
- now the bus has cut her off.
One eighteen exactly.
Was she stupid enough to head inside?
Or wasn't she? We'll know before long,
when the dead are carried out.
It's one nineteen.
Nothing much to report
until a muddled barfly hesitates,
fumbles with his pockets, and, like
a blasted fool, stumbles back
at one nineteen and fifty seconds
to retrieve his goddamn cap.
One twenty
How time drags when...
Any moment now.
Not yet.
Yes.
Yes,
there
it
goes.
Wislawa Szymborska
version from the Polish by Dennis O'Driscoll
(-- pgs. 134-135) |
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| Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 12:05 pm Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
Jan Kochanowski
Laments
Translated by Seamus Heaney and
Stanislaw Baranczak
| Quote: | Jan Kochanowski (1530-84), the greatest poet of not just Poland but the entire Slavic world up to the beginning of the 19th century, was at the same time both the worst -and the best-equipped person to deal with personal tragedy. The entire experience of the first five decades of his life had been apparently consistent with the kind of outlook that he, the Renaissance poet par excellence, derrived from the spirit of the epoch and from his thoroughly Humanistic education. His cast of mind was formed by a philosophy of the golden mean and moderation, and this in turn produced a quiet acceptance of whatever life might bring, a tendency to handle the vicissitudes of earthly existence in a rational and orderly way, one always seasoned with a dose of healthy scepticism as regards both gain and loss, success and failure, happiness and misery.
The stable - or stable-seeming - foundation of such an outlook was provided by both ancient thought and Christian theology. For a 16th century Humanist - in this case, moreover, a poet whose earlier work included not only a Classical tragedy with a plot borrowed from Homer but also a poetic translation of the Psalms - elements of stoicism or epicureanism could merge conflictlessly with the belief in Providential protection bestowed on the just as a reward for their virtuous lives. (Calvinism was to score a huge, if short-lived success in Poland, but only several decades later.)
Yet it is precisely this kind of stable and secure philosophical foundation that may well be the first thing to crack 'when the Parcae cease to spin/Their thread, when sorrows enter in,/When Death knocks at the door'. And this is what happened to Kochanowski in middle age when Death snatched away his youngest child, a 2-1/2-year-old daughter called Ursula, devastating the poet's hitherto unshakeable equanimity. In such a case, the hiatus between the palpability of pain and abstractness of argument expands into an untraversable gap. All of a sudden, pain reaches a degree of intensity that cannot be explained away. No rationalization makes sense to us any more when its very philosophical basis is pulled out like a rug from under our feet -when we can no longer subscribe to the belief that each of us is to a large extent a master of his or her own fate, and that we therefore have the right at least to hope that our actions, if purposeful, timely and determined enough, may bring the desired result:
'You weep in vain,' my friends will say. But then,
What is not vain, by God, in lives of men?
If nothing else, the irretrievability of the loss alone suffices to make the attitude of rationalistic patience and stoical resignation just one of the numerous 'error[s] of our minds', a sorry product of humanity's 'insane conceit.' Our steady climb towards the heights of quasi-divine Wisdom has, as a rule, an abrupt and humiliating end:
Wisdom for me was castles in the air;
I'm hurled, like all the rest, from the topmost stair.
(From the Introduction by S.B. at pgs. vii-viii) |
| Quote: | Lament I
All Heraclitus' tears, all threnodies
And plaintive dirges of Simonides,
All keens and slow airs in the world, all griefs,
Wrung hands, wet eyes, laments and epitaphs,
All, all assemble, come from every quarter,
Help me to mourn my small girl, my dear daughter,
Whom cruel Death tore up with such wild force
Out of my life, it left me no recourse.
So the snake, when he finds a hidden nest
Of fledgling nightingales, rears and strikes fast
Repeatedly, while the poor mother bird
Tries to distract him with a fierce, absurd
Fluttering - but in vain! The venomous tongue
Darts, and she must retreat on ruffled wing.
'You weep in vain,' my friends will say. But then,
What is not vain, by God, in lives of men?
All is in vain! We play at blind man's buff
Until hard edges break into our path.
Man's life is error. Where, then, is relief?
In shedding tears or wrestling down my grief?
(-- p. 3) |
| Quote: | Tren I
Wszytki placze, wszytki lzy Heraklitowe
I lamenty, i skargi Symonidowe,
Wszytki troski na swiecie, wszytki wzdychania
I zale, i frasunki, i rak lamania,
Wsytki a wszytki za raz w dom sie moj noscie,
A mnie plakac mej wdziecznej dziewki pomozcie,
Zktora mie niepobozna smierc rozdzielila
I wszytkich moich pociech nagle zbawila.
Tak wiec smok, upatrzywzy gniazdko krjome,
Slowiczki liche zbiera, a swe lakome
Gardlo pasie; tymczasem matka szczebiece
Uboga, a na zbojce coraz sie miece,
Prozno! bo i na same okrutnik zmierza,
A ta nieboga ledwe umyka pierza
'Prozno plakac' - podobno drudzy rzeczecie.
Coz, prze Bog zywa, nie jest prozno na swiecie?
Wszytko prozno! Macamy, gdzie miekcej w rzeczy,
A ono wszedy cisnie! Blad - wiek czioieczy!
Nie wiem, co lzej: czy w smutku jawnie zalowac,
Czyli sie z przyrodzeniem gwaltem mocawac?
(-- pg. 2) |
Yes, and here's another loss just as bad or worse:
| Quote: | | As Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, has written of Kochanowski: 'His presence belies foggy notions common in the West about a barbaric Eastern Europe. And yet, the Renaissance literature of Poland is virtually unknown in the West because of the lack of translations. The Laments of Kochanowski should be ranked with the world classics. There were some attempts to translate Laments into English in the past, but now something has happened which allows the English-speaking reader to have nearly direct access to his work. Namely, the cooperation of two excellent poets, Professor Stanislaw Baranczak of Harvard and Seamus Heaney. That team has translated Laments, preserving its metres and rhythms. It is a rare accomplishment, which brings joy to me as an inheritor of Kochanowski's language and of the Renaissance tradition.' (From the back cover) |
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Last edited by editor on Tue Sep 22, 2009 10:00 am; edited 6 times in total |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2008 3:34 pm Post subject: |
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A Short History of
Tractors in Ukrainian
Paperback
By Marina Lewycka
| Quote: | My father goes to Nottingham for Valentina's appeal after all. How does she persuade him? Does she threaten to tell the bureaucrazia about oralsex? Does she cradle his bony skull between her twin warheads and whisper sweet nothings into his hearing aid? My father is silent about this, but he has a cunning plan.
... When it is my father's turn to speak, he asks in a quiet voice whether he may go into a separate room. There is some discussion amongh the Immigration panel, but their conclusion is that, no, he must speak in the front of everybody.
"I will speak under duress," he says. They take him through the same series of questions, and his replies are just the same as Valentina's. At the end, when he has finished, he says, "Thank you. Now I want you to record that all I have said is spooken under duress."
He is taking a gamble on her lack of English.
There is a flurry of note taking, but not one of the panel members looks up for a moment or meets my father's eye. Valentina raises one eyebrow a fraction, but maintains her fixed smile.
"What it mean, this dooh-ress word?" she asks him, as they are waiting for the train to take them home.
"It means love," my father says. "Like the French, tendresse."
"Ah, holubchik. My little pigeon." She beams, and gives him another peck on the cheek. (From Chapter Eleven, under duress, pgs. 118-119) |
| Quote: | "Vera said something about a correction block?"
"Aha, this was an unfortunate episode. Caused entirely by cigarettes. I have told you, I think, that I owe my life to cigarettes. Yes? But I have not told you also that I almost lost my life through cigarettes. Through Vera's adventure with cigarettes. Lucky that war ended then. British came just in time - rescued us from correction block. Otherwise we surely would not have survived."
"Why? What ... ? How long ... ?"
He coughs for a moment, avoiding my eyes.
"Lucky also that at liberation we were in British zone. Another piece of luck was Ludmilla's birthplace, Novaya Aleksandria."
"Why was that lucky?"
"Lucky because Galicia was formerly part of Poland, and Poles were allowed to stay in West. Under Churchill-Stalin agreement, Poles could stay in England, Ukrainians sent back. Most sent to Siberia - most perished. Lucky that Millochka still had birth certificate, showed she was born in former Poland. Lucky I had some German work papers. Said I came from Dashev. Germans changed Cyrillic to Roman script. Dashev, Daszewo. Word sounds like same, but Daszewo is in Poland; Dashev is in Ukraina. Ha ha. Lucky immigration officer believed. So much luck in such a short time - enough to last a lifetime." (From Chapter Thirty, two journeys, p. 283) |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Tue Apr 07, 2009 12:27 pm Post subject: |
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From Omens and Lucky Charms:
With the Skin
Poems of Aleksander Wat
Hardcover
Translated and edited by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan
| Quote: | Paris Revisited
At every new return
my first day in this city -
like the first day of creation:
and I see, I see that it's good.
Here a thousand voices
sound reveille to life!
The memory of places sings,
a pathetic cantatrice -
and her voice is not getting old
and her echo never fades
refracted from venerable stones
in eternal repetition
ever the same, not the same,
live, never dying,
woven into a frivolous
tune in the street.
Here a thousand voices
sound reveille to life!
Call and forbid you to die!
Summon, restore to life!
A thousand lips entice you!
A thousand charms cast spells:
fulgurant reason
in eyes met by chance,
a smile that opens lips
like a flower after the night,
sweet tenderness of the air
in the avenue of trimmed chestnuts,
a call of a wandering tune
and the smell of earthly foods
and a rainbow on the pavement
of an old church across the square ...
And a young man's faded shadow
who - so long ago! - was discovering
this world for the first time.
Here a thousand voices
sound reveille to life!
Rise from the dead,
son of misfortune!
Bow humbly to this land,
kiss the calloused hand
of the old city of Paris.
(-- pgs. 40-41) |
| Quote: | Poet
Is the poet, I thought, the one who, uninvited,
came to the feast of the Philistines?
And stood there, at the head of the table,
his hair piled up as a helmet.
Oh, how he towers over the council of armed Philistines!
He arrives from the lands where none of them wandered
and never will.
Where the final things clash against each other
and break like icebergs
and sink
or float away
toward new risings and settings of the sun,
which no one of them will see.
He could have carried before him his scorn like two torches -
but ignited love in one eye,
in the other, anger.
He could have, out of birds steaming on golden platter,
prophesied their triumph or defeat. Defeat, multiple defeat.
He could have yelped and with his stony fist
split in half bronze armor.
For he arrived and yet refused to be invited ... Or
he could have charmed himself into a white teal
and by one movement of wings
soared away, then falling stonelike down
on black waters
on carmine waves
of Styx ... Or, or
on pure waters
native
distant.
(-- p. 31) |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 10:23 am Post subject: |
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From the Will to Win:
Tadeusz Borowski
Selected Poems
Hardcover
Translated by Tadeusz Pióro with Larry Rafferty & Meryl Natchez
Introduction by Stanislaw Barańczak
| Quote: | The Interrogation
for Wiket Piatkowski
They beat him all day, and the next. Nothing doing.
They beat him 'round the D, banged his head on the table.
"Say just one sentence! Just one word!"
They showed him his passport, foreign visas,
books and secret documents from the lining of his suitcase,
but then when they showed him his English tommy gun
he said, "take away the tablecloth, I'm going to throw up."
That's all he said. He was black and blue.
They took him to Majdanek, locked him behind the wire.
At night he cut the wire, escaped right under the sentries' eyes.
What use is glory if this memory dies?
Badanie
Witkowi Piatkowskienu
Bili dzien, bili drugi, nie idzie,
bili przez cala dobe. Tak wi kolko - przez tydzien.
,,Mow, mow - krzyczeli - przeciez wiemy wszytko!
Snamy twoj pseudonim! I twoje nazwisko!"
Pokazywali dowod, tlukli o stol glowaj:
,,Powiedz choc jedno zdanie! Chociaz jedno slowo!"
Pokazywali paszport, zagraniczne wizy,
ksizki, tajne instrukcje wyprute z walizy,
ksiazki, tajne instrukcje wyprute z walizy,
az gdy mu pokazali angielski Tumigan,
rzekl: "Wezcie obrus ze stolu. Zaraz bede rzygal."
I wiecej nie rzekl nic, cialo mial sine.
Zawiezli na Majdanek i zamkneli w drucie.
Przecial druty, na oczach warty noca uciekl.
Coz jest slawa, jezeli taka slawa ginie?
(-- pgs. 36-37) |
| Quote: | Friends
All my friends,
damn it,
knew how to live in the damp cells
of Pawiak.
All my friends,
the fools,
refused blindfolds
at the post.
All my friends,
the asses,
already have grass
on their graves.
All my friends,
all mad ...
Write the poem, hold the tears.
Nothing more.
Przyjaciele
Wszyscy moi przyjaciele,
mac taka,
syc umieli w mokrej celi
Pawiaka.
Wszyscy moi przyjaciele,
ze glupi,
ocz nie dali sobie wiazac
pod slupem.
Wszyscy moi przyjaciele,
ze osly,
juz na grobach im zielen
wyrosla.
Wsyscy moi prozyjaaciele
szalency.
Wiersz napisac, lzy powstrzymac.
Nic wiecej.
(-- pgs. 52-53) |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 11:56 am Post subject: |
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Monologue of A Dog
Hardcover
By Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and
Stanislaw Baranczak
| Quote: | A Contribution to Statistics
Out of a hundred people
those who always know better
- fifty-two,
doubting every step
- nearly all the rest,
glad to lend a hand
if it doesn't take too long
- as high as forty-nine,
always good
because they can't be otherwise
- four, well, maybe five,
able to admire without envy
- eighteen,
living in constant fear
of someone or something
- seventy-seven,
capable of happiness
- twenty-something tops,
harmless singly,
savage in crowds
- half at least,
cruel
when forced by circumstances
- better not to know
even ballpark figures,
wise after the fact
- just a couple more
than wise before it,
taking only things from life
- forty
(I wish I were wrong)
hunched in pain,
no flashlight in the dark
- eighty-three
sooner or later,
worthy of compassion
- ninety-nine,
mortal
- a hundred out of a hundred.
Thus far this figure remains unchanged.
(-- pgs. 61-63) |
Yes, and get this:
| Quote: | | Most impressive is how Szymborska's poetry manages to be plainspoken and mysterious at the same time. There is no trace of gratuitous obscurity here, where the poet uses language to hide from the reader. Szymborska knows when to be clear and when to be mysterious. She knows which cards to turn over and which ones to leave facedown. Her simple, relaxed language dares to let us know exactly what she is thinking, and because her imagination is so lively and far-reaching - acrobatic, really - we are led, almost unaware, into the intriguing and untranslatable realms that lie just beyond the boundaries of speech. Her poem Stage Fright announces that "Prose can hold anything including poetry, / but in poetry there's only room for poetry." And that is all there is in this volume - the real thing, nothing but. (From the Foreward by Billy Collins, p. xiv) |
| Quote: | A Note
Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;
to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;
to tell pain
from everything it's not;
to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.
An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;
and if only once
to stumble on a stone,
end up drenched in one downpour or another,
mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.
(-- pgs. 79-81) |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 1:08 pm Post subject: |
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From Omens and Lucky Charms:
Zbigniew Herbert
Elegy for the Departure
and other poems
Hardcover
Translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter
| Quote: | What Our Dead Do
Jan came this morning
- I dreamt of my father
he says
he was riding in an oak coffin
I walked next to the hearse
and father turned to me:
you dressed me nicely
and the funeral is very beautiful
at this time of year so many flowers
it must have cost a lot
don't worry about it father
- I say - let people see
we loved you
that we spared nothing
six men in black livery
walk nicely at our sides
father thought for a while
and said - the key to the desk
is in the silver inkwell
there is still some money
in the second drawer on the left
with this money - I say -
we will buy you a gravestone
a large one of black marble
it isn't necessary - says father -
better give it to the poor
six men in black livery
walk nicely at our sides
they carry burning lanterns
again he seemed to be thinking
- take care of the flowers in the garden
cover them for the winter
I don't want them to be wasted
you are the oldest - he says -
from a little felt bag behind the painting
take out the cuff links with real pearls
let them bring you luck
my mother gave them to me
when I finished high school
then he didn't say anything
he must have entered a deeper sleep
this is how our dead
look after us
they warn us through dreams
bring back lost money
hunt for jobs
whisper the numbers of lottery tickets
or when they can't do this
knock with their fingers on the windows
and out of gratitude
we imagine immortality for them
snug as the burrow of a mouse
(-- pgs. 29-31) |
| Quote: | Song of the Drum
The shepherds' flutes have gone
the gold of Sunday trumpets
green echoes French horns
and violins have departed as well -
only the drum remained
and the drum continues to play for us
festive marches funeral marches
simple feelings walk
to a beat on stiff legs
the drummer plays
and thought is one and one is the word
when the drum summons the steep abyss
we carry wheat sheaves or a tombstone
whatever the wise drum foretells
when the step strikes the pavement's skin
our step so proud that shall transform the world
to a single march a single shout
at last all men are walking
at last each one has fallen into step
a calfskin and two sticks
have broken towers and solitude
and silence is tranpled
and death does not frighten when we are a crowd
above the parade a column of dust
the obedient sea will part
we'll descend to tis depths
to empty hells and also higher up
we'll check the fairness of heaven
and free from fear
the whole parade will change to sand
carried by a jeering wind
so the last echo will pass
over the rebellious mildew of the earth
leaving just the drum the drum
dictator of defeated music
(-- pgs. 36-37) |
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