Poems

The poems of Ewa Lipska offer a deeply private and personal vision framed by European and Jewish history, and articulating a struggle against the forces of evil—their reasoned, systematic violence. Our translation, The New Century: 1999 and Other Poems, builds a case for Ewa Lipska as a philosophical poet whose engagement with Benjamin, Adorno, Habermas, as well as Hannah Arendt, underlies her poetic project. Lipska's poems aim to build a world view in which evil and beauty, reason and the irrational, coexist in twenty-first-century, post-industrial Europe. She revisits social and political issues as a painter might, accumulating dream-like, seemingly incongruous, images a with the tools of skeptical surrealism. Distrustful of notions like poetic inspiration, beauty, and fate, Lipska writes, “There are no poets. There is only the inattentive moment.”

Since 1967, Lipska has published fourteen volumes of poetry, and a book a year since 1996. The twenty poems collected under the title 1999, articulating the vision which has developed, in part, out of her friendships with Wisława Szymborska and Simon Wiesenthal, are the focus of our translation. The volume begins with a poem dedicated to S.W. entitled “31 December 1999” and ends with “2001,” addressed to a fictitious Mrs. Schubert. The eighteen poems which construct the space between the last day of the old century and a future millennium oscillate between twentieth-century reasoned evil, and art, as she might define it—the accident of beauty and love in a century in which “God Asks/That you not call on him. That you not buy and sell him./That you not campaign under awnings of grace./That you not use the alibi Gott mit uns/for a godless crime.” Six years later, in Somewhere Else, Lipska is still haunted by a deity—absent, misunderstood—in a new, but equally dark, century: “Even God/asking for a light in the park's mortgaged darkness/is just helplessness which turns to dust.”

— Robin Davidson and Ewa Nowakowska

The Abyss

Otchłań

Sometimes you see plaster
falling from heads.
The facade of reason peeling away.

History again.
Why return to it
since everything is ahead of us anyway.
It is done. Cannot be undone.

I sit beneath any old sky
and listen to what mediocrity has to say.

In prayer books
a bookmark advertising
anti-wrinkle fowl.

From every nation you know that
Murderers can be wrung out.

Czasem widzisz jak z głów
sypie się tynk.
Łuszczy się elewacja rozumu.

Znowu historia.
Po co do niej wracać,
kiedy i tak wszystko przed nami.
Stało się. Nie odstanie.

Siedzę pod byle jakim niebem
i słucham co mówi przeciętność.

W książkach do modlenia
zakładka reklamy
przeciwzmarszczkowego ptactwa.

Z każdego narodu wiesz o tym
można wycisnąć morderców.

From Gdzie Indziej. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2005

11 September 2001

11 Września 2001

Poets undercover agents pious tax-payers
songwriters jewelers
will all be announcing
reports of the crime.

At times even poems. At times even songs.

Jewelers will polish the facts meticulously.
Proper shape. Proper shine.
Catastrophe's precise costume jewelry.

Naturally
everyone will submit themselves to print.

And only my dress-maker
with whom I talk quietly
in satin stitches
says
the world has unraveled.

And the sewing machine
Laughs maliciously.

Poeci wywiadowcy świątobliwi podatnicy
pieśniarze jubilerzy
ogłaszać będą
rysopisy zbrodni.

Czasami nawet wiersze. Czasami nawet pieśni.

Jubilerzy starannie będą szlifować fakty.
Odpowiedni kształt. Odpowiedni połysk.
Precyzyjna biżuteria katastrofy.

Naturalnie
wszyscy poddawać się będą do druku.

I tylko mój krawiec
z którym cicho rozmawiamy
ściegiem płaskim
mówi
że świat się spruł.

A maszyna do szycia
zjadliwie się śmieje.

From Ja. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003

Helplessness

Bezradność

The life that he was bequeathed
as grandma used to say
what kind of inheritance is that anyway

He drags behind him days
He'd rather not have known.
A camp childhood.
Barbed wire toys.

A suitcase from those days
airmailed
still pretends it is a bird.

He’s been living on borrowed time one might say
he’s managed to survive.

Till the end he will remain in his own
minority.

Who could make sense of that. Even God
asking for a light in the park’s mortgaged darkness
is just helplessness that turns to dust.

Źycie które otrzymał w testamencie
tak mówiła babcia
co to za majątek?

Wlecze za sobą dni
których wolałby nie znać.
Obozowe dzieciństwo.
Zabawki z drutów kolczastych.

Walizka z tamtych czasów
nadana na bagaż powietrzny
do dzisiaj udaje ptaka.

Podarowany los któs powie
udało mu się przeżyć

Będzie do końca w swojej własnej
mniejszości.

Kto to może zrozumieć. Nawet Bóg
który prosi o ogień w zadłużonej ciemności parku
to tylko bezradność która obraca się w proch.

Plum Cake

Ciasto Ze Śliwkami

I remove from your face
a crumb of plum cake.
A tiny print of tenderness.

Far from any ideas
I place it on the ancient china of the page.
Let it be recorded forever.

We don’t know when
a draft has blown everything away.
Someone has opened a window. Someone has opened a door.

After years
I still visit
pastry shops.
I resent your being but an illusion for me.
And even the night cannot guess
when we are together.

Zdejmuję z twojej twarzy
okruszek kruchego ciasta ze śliwkami.
Maleńka czcionka czułości.

Z dala od wszelkich pomysłów
kładę go na starej porcelanie kartki.
Niech się zapisze na zawsze.

Nie wiadomo kiedy
zdmuchnął wszystko przeciąg.
Ktoś otworzył okno. Ktoś otworzyl drzwi.

Po latach wciąż
spaceruję po cukierniach.
Mam żal że mi się tylko zdajesz.
I nawet noc się nie domyśla
kiedy jesteśmy razem.

From Gdzie Indziej. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2005

From “The Absurdity of Beauty”

Nietzsche believed that “an artist hates reality.” Above all, however, one is its slave and sometimes its victim. Reality repeatedly turns into a trap for us. Unexpectedly and cunningly, we are involved in a spectacle that our lives become.

A few years ago, on a September day, in a small German town something happened that takes us far beyond explainable coincidence and becomes for a writer an inconvenient metaphor, a nagging unrest, an inescapable prison of preposterous speculations and presumptions…

May a poet take advantage of fate in such a situation and describe everything that took place so unexpectedly and suddenly? To die on a sheet of paper playing the main part, at the same time avoiding compassion which leads to the inevitable corrosion of words? Whom to be in such a situation? An onlooker, a stray wanderer, an agitator? Can you hear the fear and uncertainty when I bend my head over a sheet of paper?

The boundaries of the soul and the boundaries of countries do not overlap. Decorators improve the landscape, shift furniture, carpets and numismatic collections. The twentieth century, the century of crime and the triumph of science, is coming to an end. On the great clearing of freedom one may eat hot dogs tasting of an afternoon gutter-paper. In the very heart of Vienna, on the wall of the Votivkirche, hangs a huge advertisement: “Mehr Bank, Mehr Chancen, Bank Austria”. . . There is no end of history, there is no end of poetry, new hunters set out; life, like an incurable phrase, bids us welcomes and farewells, the absurdity of beauty will continue to amaze us.

—translated from Polish by Robin Davidson and Ewa Nowakowska

ROBIN DAVIDSON is a poet and assistant professor of literature and creative writing for the University of Houston, Downtown. In 2003-2004 she served as Fulbright professor of American literature at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.

EWA ELŻBIETA NOWAKOWSKA is a poet and translator living and teaching in Kraków, Poland. Her poems were recently selected by Adam Zagajewski to be featured in Zeszyty Literackie as the work of one of Kraków's emerging younger poets.