Biographical note: Adam Czerniawski was born in Warsaw in 1934. Now lives in Wales. His publications in Polish include poetry, essays and short stories. His English publications include translations of poetry by Jan Kochanowski, Cyprian Norwid, Wisława Szymborska and Tadeusz Różewicz, his own memoir Scenes from a disturbed childhood and essays on poetry and philosophy.
Biographical note: Iain Higgins was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of Writing East: ‘The Travels’ of Sir John Mandeville (University of Pennsylvania Press) and the forthcoming volume of poems, Then Again (Oolichan). He teaches medieval English literature and medieval studies at the University of Victoria, Canada.
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EAN13: 9781844710911 ISBN-10: 1844710912 ISBN-13: 9781844710911 Author: Adam Czerniawski Title: The Invention of Poetry Series: Salt Modern Poets in Translation Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 01-Sep-05 Extent: 168pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 10 mm Weight: 252 gms Supplier:Gardners Books Supplier:Ingram Book Group Supplier:Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 9.99 Price: USD 16.95 Rights: World
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description/annotation: Majestic, universal, and supremely cultured, Czerniawski’s lyrical poems remain wonderfully accessible in Higgins’ new English translations. As Czerniawski says, “This book is not a text-book on astro-physics, neuroscience, German metaphysics, Fermat’s last theorem or nuclear biology. It is a collection of poems, a work of literature. It ought to appeal to people who appreciate poetry and will be ignored by people who have no time for it. That’s all that can usefully be said on this topic.”
Main description: ‘Adam Czerniawski’s poetry springs from a conjunction of Polish and English (or perhaps European) culture. Deeply rooted in the Polish language, he is at the same time a poet of universal themes observed from a wide perspective of the Western world. I would even claim that this poetry springs from a different basis of culture and literary tradition, that he has managed to set himself free from many complexes of contemporary Polish poetry, to grasp and see them from a global perspective. Additionally, there is his special position as a poet standing outside the émigré cultural life, which gives him the advantage of distance, of reserve and of being above the current disputes and entanglements. The art which he practises enables us to count him among poets of culture full of erudition and various tropes which bear witness to his inheriting the great tradition of European culture.’ –Konstanty Pieńkosz, Literary critic
‘My favourite poems by Adam Czerniawski include “Seaside Holiday”, “Interior Topography” (one of his best poems), “You and I”, “Man”, “Science Fiction”, “Listening to a Schubert Quartet”, “World”, “Bridge”, “Fish”, “Triangle”, “A View of Delft”, “Evening, or a Field of Vision”, “Token of Remembrance” and “Golden Age”. These poems display a dialectical synthesis of feeling and awareness; without falling below the level of the author’s understanding – and let’s note that it is a philosophical understanding rare among Polish poets (Miłosz is a philosopher of a totally different kind) – these poems do not leave feelings behind, and this is precisely what works in their favour.’
–Bogdan Czaykowski, Poet and scholar
‘Consistently labelled in Polish criticism as a “poet of culture,” Czerniawski, like Czesław Miłosz, belongs to the category of writers who express their struggle with culture and history in profoundly personal terms. His poetry is marked by a return to mythological topoi (e.g., “Love”) and to such classical motifs as ars longa vita brevis (e.g., “Token of Remembrance”). These returns, however, offer no consolation for the sense of historical and existential displacement; rather, culture tempts with the promise of aesthetic redemption (in this, Czerniawski also resembles Zbigniew Herbert) but ultimately agitates by bringing into the open that from which one longs to escape – the palpability of history, of “today, though somewhat far.” Czerniawski’s sense of history reflects both the experience of his generation and his own “obsessive memory [of an] annihilated childhood.” He comments, for instance, on the traumatic divide in his biography, “for those tainted with the consciousness of ‘other days’ biography falls into before and after.” He recalls the emotional impact of the outbreak of the war on the child that he was: “So not even a global picture of the September campaign, but simply stray scenes rooted in the memory of the child. They are enough. And who would have thought that already at that age it is possible to shoulder the humiliation of an entire people?” (“The Ages Speak, or what's new in History”).
‘Higgins strives to be faithful to Czerniawski’s style and tone (including the use of British English to reflect the author's environment), and those able to follow both the Polish and English can appreciate the consistency of his renditions. Higgins’s translations read smoothly and show respect for the original. Similar qualities come across in Higgins’s sensitive introduction to this generally laudable volume.’
–Prof. Joanna Niżyńska
‘Thus the reader will find here not only the long and the short of him – as in the concise “Oxford” (an almost sentimental statement of the poet's affection for a mythic England) and the extensive “Mirrors and Reflections” (a moving meditation on being in the world) – but also the more familiar middle ground, Czerniawski’s preferred poetic dwelling-place, where the lyric readily admits other modes of writing without necessarily giving up its own character altogether. Here the reader will find poems as different from one another as “You and I” (an unsentimental celebration of childhood pleasure and friendship), “Cape of False Hope” (a striking portrait of life in an imaginary European colony), “triangle” (a brief parable on order and cruelty), “Teatro della guerra” (a dark look at the homologies of war, theatre, and children's games), and the remarkable prose poems from the cycle “Commentaries” (essays on such matters as memory and oblivion, the poet’s reading both early and late, and the nature of artistic perception). Indeed, there is nothing quite like these poems in English, although it is possible to gesture towards some analogies: the brilliantly opaque poems of John Ashbery, for instance, offer a partial analogy of their probing and self-undoing manner, if not of the sensibility they conjure up, while the wittily erudite poems of Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon offer a partial analogy of their heterogeneous cultural and historical matter, if not of their tone and formal qualities. For Czerniawski’s poetics derives in part from a tradition little known outside Polish literature, the tradition established by Cyprian Norwid (1821–1883), who is a kind of combined Hopkins, Dickinson and Eliot-cum-Pound. In Norwid’s view, “a perfect lyric should be like a plaster cast: those boundaries where forms miss each other and leave cracks ought to be preserved and not smoothed over with a knife.” But where Norwid chose a sculptural analogy, strangely thinking of his own dynamic verse in spatial terms, Czerniawski would choose a musical one, thinking in terms of the temporal and the dramatic, as in Beethoven or Bartok, or even in some forms of jazz. Here the preserved cracks become dissonant notes deliberately exploited, and the plaster cast, the compositional whole that contains and attempts to govern them.’
–Iain Higgins, Introduction to The Invention of Poetry
Table of contents: Introduction by Iain Higgins Author’s Note Part I The Invention of Poetry Pentagram Teatro Della Guerra A View of Delft Concerning the Internal Contradictions of Classical Solid Geometry Hunting the Unicorn Mythology Man Science Fiction Evening, or a Field of Vision Transformation of Matter Spring Towards Evening Paul Klee: A Gloss Part II Cape of False Hope Petrol, or Life in Żarnowiec Interior Topography Knowledge by Description Gaunilo’s Island Self-judgement First Snow Somewhere Near Babylon Incident in a Valley Incident in a Temple Incident in Heaven Fragment Listening to a Schubert Quartet Knowledge and Experience Oxford Landscape with No King Words and Dust Part III Poetry Lesson Stripping Last Poem Discourse on Poetry Lingua Adamica The City Yesterday and Today Cleaning an Old Poem Babylon II St Sebastian From an Album Family Portrait Token of Remembrance Part IV Golden Age Apparently in 1911 Seaside Holiday You and I Ode to Youth Provocation Broadstairs 1937 A Wasp in the Beer Love Infinitely And the Pleached Medlars of Oxborough Hall A Small Elegy Suddenly Part V Ex Libris Girl at the Window Words Durobrivae, Or Rochester Desolation Sound, Or the Voice of Despair Aschurbanipal and Others The Ages Speak, Or What’s New in History? Death In Memoriam Max Sebald (1944-2001) Part VI Sir David Ross Lectures on Aristotle’s Politics Noise and a Definition Bavaria, 1956 Loop At the End of the Twentieth Century And Above Him The Moral Order of the Starry Heaven Veiled for the Moment by the Sun’s Afterglow Mirrors and Reflections In the Order of an English Landscape For the Muses’ Return
He had an outline of the past happy and warm yet fierce but from time to time someone died then again someone destroyed papers and letters then again someone broke a vase or a plate auctioned silver a mouldering wardrobe was also removed in autumn the lilac bush withered finally the house too was sold and all the time he thought that nevertheless the past stalked him quietly until on a certain sleepless night he glanced over his shoulder O restore the voices the sea has drowned Return the toys lost in the sand!
Review quote: This is a book about how seemingly insignificant moments may be the ones that turn out to matter most. It’s about disappearances and exile, love and loss, mystery and poetry. It’s a book to live with – not just read.
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