by Robin Davidson

from The New Century: Poems, Ewa Lipska, translated from the Polish by Robin Davidson and Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska

Above the doorframe between the entry hall and the living room of Ewa Lipska's second-floor flat in Kraków, Poland, a collection of keys is carefully arranged on tiny nails, a collection I have considered on many occasions since my first meeting with Lipska and Ewa Nowakowska one brisk January morning in 2004. When asked about the keys, Lipska simply replied, "I collect them. They are from everywhere." I am reminded of something Walter Benjamin said in his essay "Unpacking My Library": "Thus there is in the life of the collector a dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder. Naturally, his existence is tied ... to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value ... but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate" (60). I take Lipska's seemingly offhand remark, much like Benjamin's reflection, as a comment on the domain of the poet; that is, keys signal metaphorically the role of the poet as both riddle maker and truth seeker; each poem, a system of both secrets and revelations. The translation of Lipska's poems—built as they are upon wordplay, punning in the poet's native language—is the task of entry into a mysterious text doubly resistant to being read. It is daunting work. Lipska herself sees the translator's task as heroic, for she asserts that it is translators who sustain an author's existence over time. The very nature of language, unlike music, requires this delicate tightrope dance between author and translator, between one language and another, between sign and meaning. Thus, Nowakowska and I came to the poet's door, to an apartment whose interior walls are built alternately of glass and of bookcases, to find entry into the crystalline, richly ironic poems of a woman who has lived through much of the twentieth century in a nation whose history is one of occupations: German Nazism, Soviet communism, and most recently the increasing presence of American and western European capitalism, what Clare Cavanagh has called the colonization of the Second World (83), or "Coca-Colonialization," as Polish university students are often fond of saying.

Since 1967, Ewa Lipska has published nineteen volumes of poetry, and nearly a book a year since 1996. Her poems have been translated into German, English, French, Dutch, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Serbian, Swedish, Danish, Greek, Spanish, and Hebrew. Without the work of translators Barbara Plebanek and Tony Howard, I might never have been able to read Lipska's poems, which I first encountered in English translation in a modern thought class taught by my friend and mentor, Adam Zagajewski, as part of my study of creative writing at the University of Houston. That class prompted in me a wish to learn Polish well enough to read the poems in the original. It was not until the summer of 2001, when Lipska sent me, at Zagajewski's request, a copy of her book 1999, that I longed to translate these poems myself. With the help of Ewa Nowakowska, to whom Lipska introduced me, that has become possible. The New Century begins with fifteen of the twenty poems making up 1999 and includes a total of fifty-nine poems selected from six volumes: 1999 (1999), Pet Shops (2001), I (2003), Elsewhere (2005), Splinter (2006), and Newton’s Orange (2007). These particular works were chosen to illuminate the growth of Lipska's poetic imagination since 1998, when she left the diplomatic position of director of the Polish Institute in Vienna, her home for seven years and a city she still frequents and loves. They 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. This vision has developed, in part, from Lipska’s deep friendships with Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal.

Born in 1945, in Kraków, Ewa Lipska was one of the first poets born in the Polish People's Republic. Like Adam Zagajewski and Stanisław Barańczak, she is among those Polish poets who followed two significant twentieth-century generations, first that of Aleksander Wat, Anna Swirszczyńska, and Czesław Miłosz, born between 1900 and 1911, and second that of Krzysztof Baczyński, Tadeusz Różewicz, Wisława Szymborska, and Zbigniew Herbert, born in the 1920s. Lipska has been described by some as one of the Nowa Fala, or New Wave poets, the younger generation of writers who led a democratic movement in Poland in the late 1960s. Ironically, neither Zagajewski, who was an activist in the 1968 political movement, nor Lipska herself consider her among the Generation of '68. She sees her work as emerging from an individuality unaffiliated with any group or school. Although her poems are at times deeply concerned with the events of World War II and have a rich political and historical consciousness, she is interested primarily in the fate of the individual without regard to national boundaries. She writes in her preface to our translation, "The boundaries of the soul and the boundaries of countries do not overlap."

Lipska’s rejection of nationalism is consistent with her vision of the artist's role in society. She would argue that the poet does not craft a work out of sheer will or calculation; rather, art depends on an innocence rooted in a fidelity to personal experience, an authentic response to one's life that is lost in politics, or any other highly organized, artificial social system. The solidarity of poets, unlike that of political regimes, or of activists organized against them, is not a matter of design. Poetry is not collective life. It arises from solitude; it cannot be planned. Lipska thinks of art not only as a rejection of political intention but also as a deliberate engagement with the irrational and with uselessness. When Benjamin says that the collector is not interested in objects for their utilitarian value but instead "loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate," he could have as easily attributed this tendency to the artist whom Lipska envisions when she writes, "There are no poets. / There is only the inattentive moment."

Lipska was educated as a painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, and her ars poetica is informed by twentieth-century artistic movements in the visual arts. Both the Dadaist and surrealist movements of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe were interested in chance and in the unconscious, developing first in response to the ascendancy of bourgeois materialism and then to the emergence of fascism as a political system. Lipska shares this painterly interest in the unconscious, the dream life of images, and in chance—though hers is a skeptical surrealism, meaning she calls into question even the surrealists' claim that images are purified of social or political motive, for any system of art may give rise to a fascist aesthetic. For Lipska, the poem itself is the site of an accident, an uncalculated intersection between the poet and history.

In the preface to this volume, Lipska recounts the autumn afternoon of an accident: a Volkswagen Passat drives off a bridge into the German Rhine, the waters open to the vehicle, the passengers, and their fate becomes "a dictatorship of the moment." She then asks if a poet has the right to speak on behalf of such a moment. Does the artist have a moral obligation as witness? From which particular vantage point should she speak? Does she look on with the cold, rational eye of death—as in Hannah Arendt's portrait of Adolf Eichmann, or like the rational, "perfectly sane" SS bureaucrat depicted by Thomas Merton? Does she speak as a survivor of the disaster, like Tadeusz Borowski's first-person narrator in his stories in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, or like Primo Levi, who recounts his firsthand experiences as an Auschwitz-Birkenau internee? Or does she dare to speak as a proxy—despite Paul Celan's cautioning, "No one / bears witness / for the witness" —by engaging the empathetic imagination, charging words with their most penetrating meaning? These questions haunt Lipska's poems, particularly the selections from the first three books represented here, 1999, Pet Shops, and I.

To situate Lipska's verse within twentieth-century Polish lyric poetry, it is important to see the work as arising from Poland's distinct encounters with European totalitarianism. The poems are shaped by the legacy of wars, both by Polish cultural memory of the German occupation and the horror of Holocaust atrocities and by the presence of Soviet communism, in particular the two decades of the 1970s and 1980s, during which Lipska matured as a poet. The intersection of history, politics, and the literary arts has typified East European culture for more than two hundred years. In the case of Poland, poetry's break from classicism was defined in great part by a nationalist impulse. Nationalism came to define the romanticism of nineteenth-century Polish poetry, as in the works of Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Zygmunt Krasiński. The role of the Polish poet became one of an acknowledged legislator, to reverse Shelley's depiction of British romantic poetry. In Polish lyric poetry, neither does the speaker stand outside time nor does the poem consist of epiphanic moments where time stops and human experience expands. Rather, the Polish lyric becomes the site of intersection between social forces and the individual, primarily because the genre has repeatedly served national political agendas.

The romantic vision informing contemporary Polish lyric poetry is most often enacted via the speaker's ironic stance in relation to history, at least in part as a consequence of modern Polish poets' struggle with totalitarianism. The poems typically address silence, both the censorship that characterizes a totalitarian political culture and the inadequacy of language to articulate the most highly charged human experiences. In this sense, Lipska's poems are contemporary lyrics. But perhaps more important for Lipska, as Susan Gubar has noted, "poetry after Auschwitz displays the ironic friction between the lyric's traditional investment in voicing subjectivity and a history that assaulted not only innumerable sovereign subjects but indeed the very idea of sovereign selfhood" (12). Lipska's poems in particular offer a unique opportunity to contemplate identities (personal, social, national) as constituting both personal and historical forces, and one's own interior life as the site of this intersection—what Lipska might call "the accident" or "spectacle of our lives," which one both participates in and observes as witness.

We open The New Century with the poem "December 31, 1999" because it enacts not only the death of a century, a millennium, but also the birth of another: "But the night won't be childless. /Taking by surprise the doubting suicides / and gullible priests, / the New Year's infant / will scream at midnight." And it is also the birthday of Simon Wiesenthal. Thus, this particular New Year's Eve offers an opportunity to penetrate, move beyond, the barrier to the human spirit imposed by the century's genocides. For Lipska, Wiesenthal is a guide to rendering the impossible possible, "a compass drawing square." Not only did he manage to survive internment in Nazi camps at Ostbahn, Janwska, and Mauthausen; more remarkably he lived to avenge victims of the Shoah by assisting in bringing to trial as many as eleven hundred war criminals, including key Nazi miliitary personnel. The particular human voice of the "New Year's infant [who] will scream at midnight" defies the imposed silence of the former century. To launch the volume with this poem is to root the work that follows in the integrity of the individual life, the sovereign self posited against erasure.

Because they offer English-language readers the trajectory of Lipska's thought into the twenty-first century, the poems selected from 1999 and from Newton’s Orange are the focus of our translation. In these poems in particular, Lipska's relationship to language is richly complex, and in them we see contradictory impulses at work. This dialectic moves between her loss of faith in language's ability to communicate meaning (whether it fails for the social purpose of enabling justice or for the more personal purpose of enabling human empathy and intimacy) and her deep reliance on words as a poet's artistic medium. One stylistic strategy Lipska uses to address this paradox is the stereotypical language of the cliché. The poet recognizes that human communication is essentially derivative, based on rhetorical patterns we inherit, cannot escape, and that render genuine communication of our personal experience impossible. Lipska enjoys rupturing such clichés—colloquialisms or jargon ranging from religious to technological discourse—in order to create a singular, individual voice. For example, in "God Asks" Lipska substitutes grzech (sin) for brzeg (side or riverbank), which sound nearly identical, as a satiric pun on the Polish idiom for death; rather than "cross over to the other side," the poet writes "cross over to the other sin." Similarly, in "Hannah Arendt" she describes Arendt and Heidegger as "not having regained death" (śmierci), rather than employing the typical Polish idiom for "not having regained consciousness." But I believe that Lipska would argue that even in these cases, language fails, for it can offer us little more than a highly idiosyncratic, and perhaps impenetrable, code or the superficiality of stereotypical language. The task of the poet—this tension and struggle between the authentic human voice and rhetoric—is a central theme in Lipska's work and one permeating all the poems included in this volume.

Readers will find resonances of the philosophical and artistic themes infusing 1999 and Newton’s Orange in selections included from the other four volumes represented here (published by Wydawnictwo Literackie between 2001 and 2007). Ewa Lipska's poems defy categorization. They are unique among those by other East European poets in their use of a surrealistic imagination to enact a subversive, ironic wit in the service of skepticism. Metaphorically, Lipska's poetic oeuvre employs the hermetic methodology of a besieged people: it is buried cultural treasure; it is a system of secrets and revelations; it is a collection of keys. And the work relentlessly engages centuries of social systems (political, economic, scientific, technological, artistic) and their vocabularies to examine the viability of human knowledge and the motivations underlying it. For Lipska, to look forward is to look back, in that each new century is fundamentally no different from the old one, yet it always trembles with the possibility of newness without regard to being doomed in advance. Given the inevitability of human error, greed, and the illusory nature of our perception, Lipska may well be asking, how does one craft a place for love, the consolation of its redemptive power in our lives? The life of Simon Wiesenthal offers one possible response. The poems presented here are most certainly a tribute to Wiesenthal, whose life and work, imbued as they are with a capacity for authentic human connection, signify the complexity of what it has meant to be a survivor of the twentieth century.

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About the Author
Robin Davidson is a poet, translator, and assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Houston-Downtown. In 2003-2004 she served as the Fulbright professor of American literature at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. She is the recipient of a 2009 Literature Fellowship for Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The New Century: Poems
Northwestern University Press