Poets From Poland

"We live in a reality of polyphonic first-person narratives, and we are met from all sides with polyphonic noise. What I mean by first-person is the kind of tale that narrowly orbits the self of a teller who more or less directly just writes about herself and through herself. We have determined that this type of individualized point of view, this voice from the self, is the most natural, human and honest, even if it does abstain from a broader perspective. Narrating in the first person, so conceived, is weaving an absolutely unique pattern, the only one of its kind; it is having a sense of autonomy as an individual, being aware of yourself and your fate. Yet it also means building an opposition between the self and the world, and that opposition can be alienating at times."

"I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world. Western civilization is to a great extent founded and reliant upon that very discovery of the self, which makes up one of our most important measures of reality. Here man is the lead actor, and his judgment—although it is one among many—is always taken seriously. Stories woven in first person appear to be among the greatest discoveries of human civilization; they are read with reverence, bestowed full confidence. This type of story, when we see the world through the eyes of some self that is unlike any other, builds a special bond with the narrator, who asks his listener to put himself in his unique position."

"What first-person narratives have done for literature and in general for human civilization cannot be overestimated—they have completely reworked the story of the world, so that it is no longer a place for the operations of heroes and deities upon whom we can have no influence, but rather a place for people just like us, with individual histories. It is easy to identify with people who are just like us, which generates between the story’s narrator and its reader or listener a new variety of emotional understanding based on empathy. And this, by its very nature, brings together and eliminates borders; it is very easy to lose track in a novel of the borders between the narrator’s self and the reader’s self, and a so-called “absorbing novel” actually counts on that border being blurred—on the reader, through empathy, becoming the narrator for a while. Thus literature has become a field for the exchange of experiences, an agora where everyone can tell of their own fate, or give voice to their alter ego."

"Perhaps in order not to drown in the multiplicity of titles and last names we began to divide literature’s leviathan body into genres, which we treat like the various different categories of sports, with writers as their specially trained players."

"A dream fulfilled is often disappointing. It has turned out that we are not capable of bearing this enormity of information, which instead of uniting, generalizing and freeing, has differentiated, divided, enclosed in individual little bubbles, creating a multitude of stories that are incompatible with one another or even openly hostile toward each other, mutually antagonizing."

"I don’t want to sketch an overall vision of crisis in telling stories about the world. But I’m often troubled by the feeling that there is something missing in the world―that by experiencing it through glass screens, and through apps, somehow it becomes unreal, distant, two-dimensional, and strangely non-descript, even though finding any particular piece of information is astoundingly easy."

"The flood of stupidity, cruelty, hate speech and images of violence are desperately counterbalanced by all sorts of “good news,” but it hasn’t the capacity to rein in the painful impression, which I find hard to verbalize, that there is something wrong with the world. Nowadays this feeling, once the sole preserve of neurotic poets, is like an epidemic of lack of definition, a form of anxiety oozing from all directions."

"Literature is one of the few spheres that try to keep us close to the hard facts of the world, because by its very nature it is always psychological, because it focuses on the internal reasoning and motives of the characters, reveals their otherwise inaccessible experience to another person, or simply provokes the reader into a psychological interpretation of their conduct. Only literature is capable of letting us go deep into the life of another being, understand their reasons, share their emotions and experience their fate."

"I keep wondering if these days it’s possible to find the foundations of a new story that’s universal, comprehensive, all-inclusive, rooted in nature, full of contexts and at the same time understandable."

"So it could be best to tell stories honestly in a way that activates a sense of the whole in the reader’s mind, that sets off the reader’s capacity to unite fragments into a single design, and to discover entire constellations in the small particles of events. To tell a story that makes it clear that everyone and everything is steeped in one common notion, which we painstakingly produce in our minds with every turn of the planet. Literature has the power to do this. We should drop the simplistic categories of highbrow and lowbrow literature, popular and niche, and take the division into genres very lightly. We should drop the definition of “national literatures,” knowing as we do that the universe of literature is a single thing, like the idea of unus mundus, a common psychological reality in which our human experience is united. The Author and the Reader perform equivalent roles, the former by dint of creating, the latter by making a constant interpretation."

"I write fiction, but it is never pure fabrication. When I write, I have to feel everything inside myself. I have to let all the living beings and objects that appear in the book go through me, everything that is human and beyond human, everything that is living and not endowed with life. I have to take a close look at each thing and person, with the greatest solemnity, and personify them inside myself, personalize them."

"Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it. It has no special emblems or symbols, nor does it lead to crime, or prompt envy."

"The climate emergency and the political crisis in which we are now trying to find our way, and which we are anxious to oppose by saving the world have not come out of nowhere. We often forget that they are not just the result of a twist of fate or destiny, but of some very specific moves and decisions―economic, social, and to do with world outlook (including religious ones). Greed, failure to respect nature, selfishness, lack of imagination, endless rivalry and lack of responsibility have reduced the world to the status of an object that can be cut into pieces, used up and destroyed."

"That is why I believe I must tell stories as if the world were a living, single entity, constantly forming before our eyes, and as if we were a small and at the same time powerful part of it."

"Painting the sensual with thy hues divine,— Thou turn'st away thy face, while scattering Perchance upon his brow some fading flowers, Of which he strives to twine a funeral crown, Spending his life to weave a wreath of death!"

"Not that I rise against thee, Poetry, Mother of Beauty, of ideal Life! But I must pity him condemned to dwell Within the limits of these whirling worlds In dying agonies, or yet to be, Doomed to sad memories, or prophecies, Perchance remorse, or vague resentiments,— Who gives himself to thee! for everywhere Thou ruinest wholly those who consecrate Themselves, with all they are, to thee alone, Who solely live the voices of thy glory!"

"Alas! thou sufferest, too, although thy pangs Bring naught to birth, nothing create, nor serve!"

"ÉIRE (translation)"

"THE MORE (translation)"

"TYM BARDZIEJ"

"Our life is ordinary, I read in a crumpled paper abandoned on a bench. Our life is ordinary, the philosophers told me."

"Probably I am an ordinary middle-class believer in individual rights, the word "freedom" is simple to me, it doesn't mean the freedom of any class in particular."

"Don't allow the lucid moment to dissolve Let the radiant thought last in stillness though the page is almost filled and the flame flickers We haven't risen yet to the level of ourselves."

"December, herald of destruction, takes you on a long stroll through the black torsos of trees and leaves scorched in autumn’s fire,as if to say: so much then for your secrets and your treasures, the fervent trill of small birds, the promises of summer months."

"You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere, you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns."

"Kiedy spojrzę w kometę z całą mocą duszy, Dopóki na nią patrzę, z miejsca się nie ruszy."

"Basically, this modern Yiddish literature detected and depicted a paradox that casts a sharp light on the situation of Yiddishkeit at the start of the new century: it was a literature of rupture that the rabbis rejected as impious, a literature turned towards the realities of life, towards the world of the underdog, but if it testifies in this way to the earthquakes that were shaking Yiddishland, it did not take flight beyond the linguistic and cultural frontiers of this world and set foot in universal culture. Though very many Jews in Poland were moved by reading Adam Mickiewicz, how many Polish intellectuals between the two wars were aware of Peretz? This literature remained entirely focused on the Yiddish world, its fund of religious mythology, its customs and traditions, a literature that prospered at the heart of the crisis this world was undergoing, for the exclusive use of those who were its direct witnesses or its agents. Curiously, it is only posthumously, one could say, decades after the disappearance in fire and blood of the world from which it arose, that this literature has begun to enter the pantheon of human culture in general, and, paradox of paradoxes, the broad non-Yiddish-speaking public has begun to discover Sholem Aleichem and Shalom Asch by way of Isaac Bashevis Singer."

"Sound as a burrow'd marmot he slept On the straw where he'd tumbled fully-dressed that night."

"Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! ty jesteś jak zdrowie; Ile cię trzeba cenić, ten tylko się dowie, Kto cię stracił..."

"In spring's own country, where the gardens blow, You faded, tender rose! For hours now past, Like butterflies departing, on you're cast The worms of memories to work you woe."

"Monsters merge and welter through the water's mounting Din. All hands, stand fast! A sailor sprints aloft, Hangs, swelling spider-like, among invisible nets, Surveys his slowly undulating snares, and waits."

"Będę o to Pana Boga pytać, On to wszystko zapisał, wszystko mnie opowie."

"Tyran wstał — Herod! — Panie, cała Polska młoda Wydana w ręce Heroda. Co widzę — długie, białe, dróg krzyżowych biegi, Drogi długie — nie dojrzeć — przez puszcze, przez śniegi Wszystkie na północ! tam, tam w kraj daleki, Płyną jak rzeki."

"Ja i ojczyzna to jedno. Nazywam się Miljion — bo za milijony Kocham i cierpię katusze."

"Ty Boże, ty naturo! dajcie posłuchanie. Godna to was muzyka i godne śpiewanie. Ja mistrz! Ja mistrz wyciągam dłonie! Wyciągam aż w niebiosa i kładę me dłonie Na gwiazdach jak na szklannych harmoniki kręgach."

"We are like fish In this vast sea. And Satan fishes For you and me."

"the triumvirate of Yiddish masters, S. Y. Abramovitch, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz"

"Throughout all of Yiddish literature, beginning with the classical writers...there is an undercurrent of sympathy for the Jewish woman, as well as guilt about her double enslavement, both as woman and as Jew...Itzkhok Leybush Peretz was most aware of the Jewish woman's double bind and depicted it without embellishment. I would say that he was the first thoroughgoing feminist in the literature, as can be seen in his two strongest stories from Folkstimlekhe Geshikhtn (Folkloric Tales)."

"Modern Yiddish literature attained its maturity with the work of three classical masters: Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz. These three authors were the literary forebears whom subsequent generations of Yiddish writers both emulated and rebelled against."

"From Sholem Aleichem to Peretz and beyond, canonical Yiddish literature does not mince words when it comes to identifying the tormentors of Jews as Christians."

"Everyone knows, for example, about Yitskhok Leyb Peretz’s house in Warsaw, frequently visited by authors. He acted as a father to them. How many Yiddish writers would indeed never have become Yiddish writers if not for the help and encouragement of Yitskhok Leyb Peretz!"

"In modern Yiddish writing, the moral, spiritual, and emotional capital of generations of Jewish women was utilized by male and female writers alike. The founding father of this literature, Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, championed the liberation of Jewish women in his stories, poems, and plays, as did his protégés Sholem Asch, Avrom Reisen, and Yoysef Opatoshu, among others."

"Yiddish, the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bear the marks of our expulsions from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are the undried, uncongealed Jewish tears."

"I am a rainworm, buried deep Among the oozing, slimy things, Yet of an eagle's nest I dream, And eagle's wings."

"If the husband sits on a chair in the Garden of Eden, his wife is his footstool."

"In this world it is very dangerous to be weak."

"Man has been likened to an earthen pot.... You have but to tap the pot with your finger. If it rings back full and true, all is well; there is your perfect pot. And if not—man, alas, has been likened to a broken potsherd."

"The voice is on the borderline between the physical and the spiritual."

"Nobody ever stubs his toe against a mountain. It's the little temptations that bring a man down."

"Time is change, transformation, evolution. Time is eternal sprouting, blossoming, the eternal tomorrow."