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 History again. I sit beneath any old sky In prayer books From every nation you know that |
Czasem widzisz jak z głów Znowu historia. Siedzę pod byle jakim niebem W książkach do modlenia Z każdego narodu wiesz o tym From Gdzie Indziej. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2005 |
11 September 2001 |
11 Września 2001 |
Poets undercover agents pious tax-payers At times even poems. At times even songs. Jewelers will polish the facts meticulously. Naturally And only my dress-maker And the sewing machine |
Poeci wywiadowcy świątobliwi podatnicy Czasami nawet wiersze. Czasami nawet pieśni. Jubilerzy starannie będą szlifować fakty. Naturalnie I tylko mój krawiec A maszyna do szycia From Ja. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003 |
Helplessness |
Bezradność |
The life that he was bequeathed He drags behind him days A suitcase from those days He’s been living on borrowed time one might say Till the end he will remain in his own Who could make sense of that. Even God |
Źycie które otrzymał w testamencie Wlecze za sobą dni Walizka z tamtych czasów Podarowany los któs powie Będzie do końca w swojej własnej Kto to może zrozumieć. Nawet Bóg |
Plum Cake |
Ciasto Ze Śliwkami |
I remove from your face Far from any ideas We don’t know when After years |
Zdejmuję z twojej twarzy Z dala od wszelkich pomysłów Nie wiadomo kiedy Po latach wciąż From Gdzie Indziej. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2005 |
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.