The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II 9780674270183

Citation preview

T he Sound

of

Mode r n Pol ish Poe t ry

t he sound of

MODERN POLISH POETRY P E R­F O R­M A N C E

and

R ECO R D I N G ­A F T E R WO R L D WA R I I

Aleksandra Kremer

Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts & London, E ­ ngland  2021

 Copyright © 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing Cover photographs: Portret Tadeusza Różewicza by Benedykt Jerzy Dorys, courtesy Biblioteka Narodowa; Czesław Miłosz by Keystone Features / Stringer; Anna Kamienska (RF) Cover design: Lisa Roberts 9780674270190 (EPUB) 9780674270183 (PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Kremer, Aleksandra, 1986–­author. Title: The sound of modern Polish poetry : per­for­mance and recording a­ fter World   War II / Aleksandra Kremer. Description: Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts : Harvard University Press, 2021. | Includes   bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021013682 | ISBN 9780674261112 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Miłosz, Czesław. | Szymborska, Wisława. | Herbert, Zbigniew. |   Tuwim, Julian, 1894–1953. | Kamieńska, Anna. | Przyboś, Julian, 1901–1970. |   Białoszewski, Miron. | Wat, Aleksander. | Świrszczyńska, Anna. | Różewicz, Tadeusz. |   Polish poetry—20th ­century—­History and criticism. | Oral interpretation of poetry. Classification: LCC PG7070 .K74 2021 | DDC 891.8/51709—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2021013682

Contents

Introduction  1

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Postwar Currents  39 Julian Tuwim and the Evolution of Polish Poetic Culture Intonation in Exile  75 Czesław Miłosz’s En­glish Translations Home Literary Salons  124 Visiting Miron Białoszewski and Wisława Szymborska Taped Farewells  172 Elegiac Recordings by Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Anna Kamieńska, and Anna Swir Unbeautiful Readings  217 Tadeusz Różewicz against Julian Przyboś Epilogue  263 Notes  271 Acknowl ­e dgments  Index  355

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Introduction

the poet and Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz began the pro­cess of moving back to Poland from his lengthy exile in Amer­i­ca. In June 1996 he participated in a poetry reading or­ga­nized in Warsaw for his eighty-­fifth birthday. The president of the Polish PEN Club, Artur Międzyrzecki, welcomed Miłosz and informed the poet that his membership in Poland’s PEN chapter had been renewed on the occasion of his happy return. Międzyrzecki quoted Miłosz’s declaration that he “like[d] his poetry most in his own per­for­mances,” introduced the poet “in person, in his own voice,” and gave the floor to Miłosz. The poet, without further ado, read more than thirty texts from dif­fer­ent periods of his life and supplemented them with abundant commentaries.1 In a sense, nothing surprising was said at the event. From an American perspective, it is obvious that poets read their work at poetry readings. We may find it a bit curious, however, that Międzyrzecki felt the need to emphasize Miłosz’s preference for his own per­for­mances and to express joy that the audience would hear him live. The emphasis becomes more understandable when we take into account the fact that the poet who lived in exile could not participate in such events in Poland for many de­cades, nor would his preferences be widely known to the readers. In lieu of the author, professional actors and singers w ­ ere often invited to perform Miłosz’s poems on stage, first at under­g round meetings and then also above­g round (and the same happened to texts by many other Polish poets). In Poland of the 1990s, poets’ own readings w ­ ere not surprising, but neither w ­ ere they the default choice for the organizers of poetry events. Miłosz was not the only Polish poet who started to express a preference for their own per­for­mances. As this book documents, major Polish poets ­A FTER THE FALL OF THE IRON CURTAIN,

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born in the first de­cades of the twentieth ­century, especially in the 1910s and 1920s, became increasingly interested in their own readings, despite the strong presence of actors and singers in Polish poetic culture. Apart from Miłosz, poets as dif­fer­ent as Zbigniew Herbert, Aleksander Wat, Miron Białoszewski, and Tadeusz Różewicz w ­ ere all engaged in testing the possibilities of the physical voice and new aspects of poetic communication (often by means of sound recording). Their interest was not l­imited to reading texts at poetry events in Poland or abroad, depending on where they lived. Reflecting on their own per­for­mances made ­these poets rethink the relations between modern verse and voice and the role of sounds in their ­concept of poetry. Even though ­these experiments began many de­cades ­earlier, it was only around the 1990s that recorded voices started to become more accessible to readers and scholars. For example, Miłosz’s poetry reading from 1996 was instantly published on a CD, helping to pop­u ­lar­ize his own per­for­mances. Nevertheless, ­t hese poetry readings by Polish authors have not been thoroughly studied so far, and a few years ago the very idea of writing a book on this topic sounded controversial to several Polish literary scholars I talked to. They pointed to poets who ­were not the “best interpreters” of their own texts, or whose readings they simply disliked. More importantly, they doubted ­whether a vocal per­for­mance could be seen as something other than an incidental event from literary life, or part of the distinct art form of theatrical declamation. The consensus in Polish literary scholarship seems to reflect the poetic culture in which actors and singers retain their prominent position. It is assumed that a poem is an immaterial, intersubjective structure, something vocalizable rather than vocalized, which can be memorized, shared, and repeated, and which undergoes vari­ous material instantiations, with no prominence accorded to the author’s own readings. Even though the distinct reading styles of the Nobel Prize–­w inning poets Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska are t­oday popu­lar in their own rights, and select poetry recordings are discussed in a handful of essays, this has not influenced the theory or the history of Polish poetry.2 This situation is strikingly dif­fer­ent from Anglophone countries, where in recent de­cades ­t here has been a scholarly consensus on the importance of ­poetry readings and recordings of the poet’s voice. In the 1998 book Close Listening, poet and scholar Charles Bern­stein advocated for this approach,

Introduction

3

noting that many ­people “understand the work better ­after hearing the poet read it,” and that poetry reading should not be treated as something secondary, a mere interpretation of the written text.3 For Bern­stein, the poem should be viewed in terms of its multiple per­for­mances, and has a funda­ mentally plural existence: “The poet’s per­for­mance, both live and recorded, poses an arresting issue for poetry.” 4 Th ­ ese claims reflect the literary culture of North Amer­i­ca, where poets’ own voices dominate both audio archives of poetry and live per­for­mances. Writing about British literary culture, the critic Peter Middleton similarly noted that “an author is still the cynosure of ­every con­temporary poetry reading.”5 In the last two de­cades, poetry readings have thus received increasing scholarly attention in the United States and the United Kingdom, focusing not only on voice-­oriented per­for­mance poetry but also on more mainstream and non-­avant-­garde poetries that mostly circulate in print.6 This scholarship confirms the special role of authorial readings in Anglophone countries, and suggests several under­lying ­causes. First, the radio was instrumental in popularizing poets’ voices beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, as ­were studio recordings of poets, which started in the 1930s and 1940s. Second, elocution dis­appeared from the school curriculum between the 1930s and 1950s, and new forms of entertainment grew in popularity a­ fter World War II, replacing the tradition of f­ amily readings at home. In addition, the revival of oral poetics in the 1950s, with the Beat Generation, the Black Mountain School, and Dylan Thomas’s dramatic radio readings, contributed to a shift in the public’s interest from skill to authenticity. In other words, audiences became more interested in hearing the poet speak than in listening to professional actors’ recitations or memorizing and reciting texts themselves.7 Given my ­earlier remarks, it may be surprising to note that this description of Anglo-­American poetic culture could largely apply to Poland. Polish Radio, the national state-­run broadcaster, was launched in the 1920s; by the late 1950s it had several million subscribers and frequently broadcast poems read by their authors.8 A series of vinyl rec­ords featuring Polish poetry read by its authors was issued in the 1960s.9 Courses in Latin and recitation gradually dis­appeared from Polish schools ­a fter the war.10 The first cafés that offered poetry per­for­mances open to the public and led by the authors themselves w ­ ere established in the first de­cades of the twentieth c­ entury, and vari­ous author-­led poetry events, held in cafés, theaters, bookstores, libraries,

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and clubs, have remained a mainstay of Polish literary life. Public readings ­were so central to literary life that they w ­ ere written about by the leading postwar Polish poets.11 Since the late 1990s, numerous poetry recordings have also appeared on publishers’ websites and on CDs.12 It seems that Polish culture of the twentieth c­ entury was not so very dif­ fer­ent from the Anglophone world; if anything, it actively invited comparisons with Anglo-­American literary life and aesthetic categories theorized by Western scholars. This was already the case before Poland’s transition to democracy that began in 1989. During the Cold War, Poland managed to become the most culturally open of the countries of the Warsaw Pact; it was called “the liveliest barrack” in the Eastern Bloc.13 It could therefore be tempting to treat the aforementioned contrast between the Polish and American scholarly approach to poetry readings as merely a sign of belatedness in Polish academia, owing, perhaps, to the lack of electronic audio archives of Polish poetry. The delay would be around twenty years long, as two de­cades ago an approach similar to the Polish one was shared by the majority of English-­language poetry critics, whereas the subsequent shift in American scholarship was facilitated by the growing availability of Internet archives, initiated by Bern­stein.14 Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Polish humanities departments have been eagerly importing and adopting all the Western theories that remained unknown ­under communism—­and now that the “update” is complete, with the growing interest in sound studies, perhaps also the status of poetry per­for­mances w ­ ill be reconsidered. Actually, Białoszewski’s audio recordings, treated as an exception to the rule, have already become an object of a growing critical interest in Poland.15 Nevertheless, as we have seen with Miłosz’s returning from exile, the situation in Polish poetic culture has been more complex than the analogy to American culture may suggest. Western theories have never been perfectly suited to describing the history of poetic per­for­mance in Poland. As Polish humanities begin to embrace the study of poetry in per­for­mance, we need an approach that is contextualized by the par­tic­u­lar historical contours of Polish literary culture. Many patterns in the development of Polish poetic culture do resemble ­t hose of Anglophone countries, but ­there is an impor­tant distinction: in Poland, this development was not steady, and modernization of literary life was frequently followed or accompanied by returns to older forms of poetic communication.

Introduction

5

By modernization of poetic culture, I mean ­here the pro­cess we have observed with regard to Anglophone countries ­after World War II. Poetry was no longer read aloud and recited at private gatherings for ­family and friends, ­people no longer memorized poems, and public per­for­mances of poems no longer belonged to professionals trained in oratory and elocution. Instead, access to poets’ own, untrained voices became institutionalized in the form of poetry readings, radio broadcasts, and rec­ords, while live poetry dis­ appeared from everyday life. Modernization changed the way in which poetry was circulated; it promoted the availability of authors’ own voices. The gradual disappearance of home recitations meant also that poetry readings became more institutionalized, more alienated from everyday life and from nonliterary uses of poetry at home as a means of ­family entertainment. In Poland this pro­cess of modernization, initiated in the first de­cades of the twentieth c­ entury, was not continuous. This was especially true during World War II, Stalinism, and the period of martial law in the 1980s, when many authors could not be heard publicly, institutions w ­ ere fully controlled by the occupiers or the communist regime, and live poetry flourished in informal spaces. But even in other de­cades a­ fter the war, when it was easier to or­ga­nize public readings or to broadcast poetry on the radio, the po­liti­cal ramifications of the nationalized public sphere of authoritarian Poland made certain per­for­mances smack of e­ ither conformism or contestation. In Poland an obvious consequence of the politicization of culture between 1939 and 1989 was a renewed interest in alternative but often more traditional spaces, media, and per­for­mance styles: private and semiprivate, student-­run and ecclesiastical, foreign and illegal. This also explains the continual presence of non-­authorial performers of poetry in twentieth-­century Poland—of actors and ordinary readers, of cabaret singers and guitar poets. When poets are exiled, banned, or dead, ­others still remember and perform their work. Non-­ authorial per­for­mances of Polish poetry ­were enlivened due to politics of oppression, but their popularity was also maintained in the periods of greater freedom. This traditional approach to poetic culture, including memorization and non-­authorial circulation of poems, must have facilitated the view shared by many Polish scholars that recitation is something secondary, external, accidental—­that it is not part of a poem. This view was often derived from the words of Roman Ingarden, a phi­los­o­pher who wrote that the literary work exists neither in print, nor as a declamation, “in terms of ontic autonomy

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[it] is nothing . . . ​yet by its concretizations it evokes deep changes in our life. . . . ​It is a ‘nothing’ and yet a wonderful world in itself.”16 Friends reciting poetry at a home gathering versus authors reading their work at an official venue could serve as two prototypical situations representing the traditional and modern poetic culture as they w ­ ere pre­sent in postwar Poland. Yet the two currents w ­ ere not always so distinct. Even in the past, poets would read their work to friends and patrons in informal settings as part of the traditional culture, whereas the non-­authorial poetry performers in Poland gradually turned to new technologies, like radio and LPs, to pop­u ­lar­ize their renderings of texts. Nevertheless, such poetry per­for­ mances by professional actors and singers still belonged to the traditional current, as they maintained the non-­authorial circulation of texts and the old ideas of trained elocution and special delivery of artistic texts—­ideas that ­were gradually abandoned by modern poets. The coexistence of the two currents in poetry per­for­mance in twentieth-­ century Poland was additionally complicated by the influence of the Romantic vision of poetry, which had long-­lasting repercussions for Polish culture, especially in times of po­liti­cal upheaval and insecurity. To a large extent the Romantic legacy foregrounded the non-­authorial transmission of poems by actors, singers, and amateurs in times of danger. Yet it cannot be simply equated with the traditional poetic culture or with the modernized one. As we w ­ ill see in this book, this legacy was at times imposed on both approaches to poetry per­for­mances. The Romantic model became a lens of viewing poetry, a special function that could be imposed on both traditional and modern poetry circulation, which also included an expectation of expressive, emotional tone of per­for­mance. In po­liti­cally charged moments, Romantic views ­shaped the functioning of private recitations, of actors’ professional per­for­ mances, and of poets’ official readings. Below, I pre­sent a short overview of the role of poetry per­for­mance in Polish Romanticism, a movement that differed in Poland from its western Eu­ro­pean counter­parts.

Voice of the Poet-­P rophet In the late eigh­teenth c­ entury the Polish-­Lithuanian Commonwealth was gradually partitioned among the Rus­sian, Prus­sian, and Austrian Empires, a situation that lasted ­until 1918. For Poland, a country with a recorded his-

Introduction

7

tory and culture that spanned eight centuries, losing its status as an in­de­ pen­dent state came as a shock. As a response to this situation, the figure of the poet-­prophet, the national bard responsible for protecting the continuity of culture, was gradually established. Through nineteenth-­century Romantic poetry, the poet-­prophet became a part of a larger set of ideas about Polish culture in general, and poetic re­sis­tance in par­t ic­u ­lar, that have had long-­ lasting repercussions and have remained relevant to the pre­sent.17 As Andrew Wachtel has shown, the idea of “a national poet capable of ­capturing the nation’s collective spirit or essence” as well as of “a cult of national lit­er­a­ture in general and of national poets in par­tic­u­lar” was shared by most eastern Eu­ro­pean p ­ eoples, who lived in multiethnic empires and did not have sovereign countries in the nineteenth ­century.18 In the case of Poland, this cult also included a view of the nation’s unique suffering during Polish uprisings against the Rus­sian Empire, subsequent repressions and deportations, as well as ongoing Russification. Polish Romantic lit­er­a­ture was supposed to participate in an almost religious fight for freedom, too. Paradoxically, the new Romantic context, while elevating poetry itself to new heights of national significance, made authorial per­for­mances less central to the tradition. During the nineteenth ­century, the most impor­tant Romantic poets moved from the Rus­sian partition of Poland-­Lithuania to France in what is often called the G ­ reat Emigration. Such was the case of Adam Mickiewicz (1798−1855), the most significant poet of the Polish language, born in the Rus­sian partition. A ­ fter his arrest and exile in Rus­sia, he managed to escape and emigrate to France. Subsequently, many of his works ­were banned in the Rus­sian partition—­especially Part III of his famous drama Forefathers’ Eve, which idealized Polish rebels and included graphic descriptions of terror on the Rus­sian side. Mickiewicz’s texts continued, nevertheless, to circulate as handwritten copies; they w ­ ere published and staged in the Austrian partition, and learned by heart and performed. Mickiewicz became the “seer” and bard for Poles throughout the nineteenth ­century, with a posthumous cult around his persona.19 That criterion of being known and recited is still relevant for Poles, who seem to agree that one can become a national poet in absentia. In the twentieth ­century Czesław Miłosz similarly characterized a poet-­bard as one whose “songs linger on many lips,” who “speaks in his poems of subjects of interest to all citizens.”20 The idea is to be quoted and recited by ­people, or

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ideally to have one’s texts and phrases repeated so often that authorship is no longer attributed, as is the case for anonymous folk and religious songs, and the common idioms in a language.21 It is not the poet but the public that decides who becomes the bard.22 This dream of the poet’s phrases and poems merging with the language and poetry of the community was shared by Mickiewicz himself, and is representative of the Romantic fascination with folk culture. The importance of this kind of anonymous song was foregrounded in Mickiewicz’s own early narrative poem, Konrad Wallenrod (which was published in the Rus­sian Empire before the poet’s emigration and was not banned). Konrad Wallenrod is set in the M ­ iddle Ages, but it alludes to Mic­ kiewicz’s own time. The protagonist, a native Lithuanian, becomes the g­ rand master of the Teutonic Order but he preserves his old loyalty, and in a war between the Order and his native country uses his position in a Machiavellian way to help the Lithuanians defeat the Teutonic knights. What is crucial for us ­here is that Konrad’s national awareness, and the encouragement and pressure to act, come from the songs and narratives of an old Lithuanian bard, a singer of tales, who is at the court. The bard’s singing is featured in the plot, and one of his songs is devoted to the subject of the folk song, which he portrays as a guardian of national memories and a bridge between old and new eras. The durability of song is also mentioned; it survives the wars and fires that ravage material trea­sures. “The written rec­ords of nations are devoured by flames,—­treasures are destroyed by royal brigands,—­but song remains uninjured. It goes the round of ­whole generations,” sings the bard.23 This passage, especially the claim that song w ­ ill escape and survive unscathed, has been frequently quoted, itself becoming part of the Polish language.24 It has influenced Polish thinking about poetry as a kind of national property that should be shared among p ­ eople, as in a relay-­race, especially when culture is at risk. Mickiewicz’s poem also reminds us of a lexical difference that is hard to capture in En­glish. The singer of tales, the Lithuanian performer whom Mic­ kiewicz calls “wajdelota,” is an example of what in Polish is termed “bard,” and in the twentieth ­century it was precisely this word, the Polish “bard,” that Poles used to refer to Rus­sian and Polish guitar poets from communist times, such as Bulat Okudzhava and Jacek Kaczmarski. Their ­music was usually associated with moral guidance and po­liti­cal subversion, and was often pri-

Introduction

9

vately circulated. “Bard” thus refers to both premodern and twentieth-­century singers who share a cultural heritage through voice. On the other hand, ­those who write poems of national importance (as opposed to songs, a distinction more pronounced in the twentieth c­ entury), and to whom special insight is ascribed, as in the case of Mickiewicz himself, would be called “wieszcz”: poet-­prophet, inspired genius, seer, but not necessarily a performer. At the same time, Mickiewicz’s relation to voice was more complicated than the connotations of “wieszcz” imply. In fact, his written works w ­ ere complemented by a separate practice of poetic improvisation, the art of composing and reciting poetry without advance preparation. In some countries improvisation was generally treated as a form of entertainment by poetic craftsmen, but as we know from the works of Wiktor Weintraub, Mickiewicz turned it into a serious event of spiritual significance. Th ­ ere had always been an ele­ment of entertainment to Mickiewicz’s improvisational practice: it started with toasts and occasional improvisations for friends at student gatherings in Vilnius; ­later, during his exile to other parts of the Rus­sian Empire, Mickiewicz would improvise in French before an entirely Rus­sian audience. But it was in the salons of the Polish nobility living in St. Petersburg that Mickiewicz started improvising on national and historical topics, as well as on the role of poetry. Around this time Mickiewicz became convinced that a talent for improvisation was a divine gift, a sign of prophetic inspiration. He continued to improvise when he moved to France, and explored this belief in prophetic inspiration in his written work as well.25 Naturally, Mickiewicz’s per­for­mances ­were witnessed by only a narrow range of ­people (­those invited to aristocratic salons abroad), and of course ­there was no way to rec­ord them. We can surmise, however, that the performer’s body language, appearance, and vis­i­ble agitation, and the tone and the timbre of his voice, w ­ ere as impor­tant as his purely linguistic skills. The event-­ based nature of improvisation required a certain type of space, as well as a group of friendly, attentive listeners who would suggest a topic and react appropriately during the per­for­mance. Mickiewicz often asked for a few minutes to prepare, and needed a musical instrument to accompany him; as the improvisation began, he would often switch from humming to singing. He asked that his words not be written down, and the few lines that have been preserved in writing are not impressive (as is often the case t­ oday with per­ for­mance poetry and slam). Although t­ here w ­ ere debates about the poetic

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quality of improvisations, the poet had no doubt that it was poetry; however, it was poetry that existed only ephemerally, for the duration of a single per­for­mance.26 This feature becomes especially poignant when we consider that this individual act of expression depends not only on poetic inspiration, but also on the sympathies and expectations of listeners. In practice, an improvisation could be affected by friction between the author and his audience. In Mic­ kiewicz’s own life in emigration, this happened only once, in France: when one day his listeners did not react appropriately to his mention of the ­f uture king of Poland, the poet s­ topped his improvisation and never improvised poetry again.27 The two conceptions of poetry that we find in Mickiewicz’s written work and oral practice illustrate two extremes: the poetry from Konrad Wallenrod is an immaterial communal heritage that can escape fire, whereas improvisation is acoustic, short-­lived, and fragile, ­because it is embedded in the poet’s lived experience. While the poet dreams of leading the community, the physical immediacy of improvisation reminds him of the limits of mutual understanding. Mickiewicz clearly foregrounds the traditional, non-­authorial circulation of poems composed by the poet-­prophet, yet his improvisations add an in­ ter­est­ing inflection to that view. His improvisations remind us that at the core of the Polish Romanticism we can also find poems that exist only in par­tic­ u­lar, authorial, embodied forms, that cannot be shared by ­others. The poet’s practice shows traces of the phenomenon that I explore in this book—­self-­ conscious experiments with voice. But it does not mean that Mickiewicz automatically belongs to the modernized poetic culture. ­After all, his per­ for­mances took place in the salons of the nobility, in half-­private spaces, to which the majority of readers did not have any access. His failed improvisation actually tells us something crucial—­not about the traditional, nor about modern poetic cultures, but about the ­f uture functioning of the Romantic model in Poland. Namely, it shows us that the readers and listeners are interested in the national poet and his work as long as he fulfills their expectations, as long as he tells them what they want to hear. And Mickiewicz likewise preferred to emphasize the improvisations that seemed to confirm his divine inspiration, that made an impression on listeners, that ­were communal rather than dissent.

Introduction

11

Already rare, improvisations dis­appeared from Polish culture by the end of the nineteenth c­ entury, and since then no other poet has asked, like Mic­ kiewicz, that some of their poetry never be circulated in writing.28 Among twentieth-­century Polish theorists, only Stefania Skwarczyńska wrote about improvisation, in an article from 1931; Skwarczyńska related it to her interest in “applied lit­er­a­ture,” which she opposed to “pure lit­er­a­ture” and defined as a type of aesthetic communication that was closer to life.29 As an ephemeral event, Mickiewicz’s one failed improvisation could do ­little to subvert expectations regarding the power of Romantic poetry, or to influence the direction of literary theory. Moreover, in his l­ater reception, Mickiewicz’s own improvisational practice was overshadowed by the famous “­Great Improvisation” scene from the author’s drama Forefathers’ Eve. This scene did not spur interest in improvisation as a historically grounded, if obsolete, poetic practice among twentieth-­century audiences. As the scholar Zofia Stefanowska has argued, the scene of the protagonist’s improvisation in a prison cell was usually treated as an inspired monologue rather than an old poetic practice. When analyzing the scene, critics did not take into account the rules of poetic improvisation, which could help us understand why the inspired and blasphemous monologue of the main character, named Konrad, could not be sung before any audience but God.30 In the popu­lar imagination, the “­Great Improvisation” has overshadowed ­actual improvisations b ­ ecause, unlike them, it was hardly fragile. As arguably the most challenging, but also the most prestigious, scene in the Polish dramatic repertoire, it has been printed and reprinted, learned by heart, and repeated countless times, in countless incarnations, to countless audiences. This led to an in­ter­est­ing situation: while stagings of the scene emphasized the role of voice, the scene itself was learned as a written text. No one in the twentieth c­ entury could hear Mickiewicz in action, but every­body knew the prison monologue of Konrad, the inspired, but also possessed, poet and rebel, whose character was partly modeled on Mickiewicz himself.31 As a result, it was professional Polish actors, working together with theater directors, who de­cided what an improvising poet should sound like in the twentieth ­century. Other reciters, including teachers and amateurs, had their own ideas about proper Romantic declamation; their interpretations emphasized the dramatic and expressive, and aimed to show a full range of feelings. In fact, the recitation of any poem by Mickiewicz could become an impersonation of the

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inspired poet, involving constant searches for the unknown phantom of R ­ omantic per­for­mance. Within the Romantic paradigm of per­for­mance, two ele­ments have therefore been merged: the cult of the poet-­prophet and his interpretation by actors and readers. The poet is referred to and revered due to his special status, yet his words are spoken and interpreted according to actors’ and readers’ views. Similarly, voice and per­for­mance are celebrated as long as they foreground the view of poetry’s influential, expressive, lasting power. This framework of thinking about poetry is especially applicable to more traditional non-­authorial poetry per­for­mances, but poets’ own readings can also be viewed through the lens of t­ hese expectations. The Romantic paradigm has never monopolized all aspects of Polish culture, and not all listeners have found the Romantics convincing, as Mickiewicz’s failed improvisation vividly shows. Yet the paradigm exerted enormous ongoing influence throughout the twentieth c­ entury. It r­ ose to prominence especially during times of strug­gle and oppression, when poetry was used as a form of re­sis­tance, most notably during the time of World War II and martial law. In ­these years the traditional approach to poetic culture was enforced by a po­liti­cal situation that had silenced certain poets and ­limited access to official venues. The resultant private and unofficial circulation of poems additionally gained Romantic overtones at that time. B ­ ehind such twentieth-­century practices as reading banned authors out loud in private apartments, listening to cassette recordings of the bards of guitar poetry, or having actors perform poems in churches, we can find implicit references to the Mickiewicz tradition. Yet even in quieter times the Romantic paradigm was such an obvious legacy of Polish culture that poets felt the need to contest and negate its power. Moreover, in the expectations of the common reader or the school curriculum, the Romantic view of poetry has remained prevalent.

Poland as a Laboratory In twentieth-­century Polish culture, dif­fer­ent approaches to poetry per­for­ mance coexisted and converged in vari­ous de­cades. Traditional, non-­authorial per­for­mances prevailed, but modern poetry readings by authors w ­ ere in place, and the Romantic view of per­for­mance could be imposed on ­either of ­t hose poetic cultures, especially in times of upheaval. The traditional, non-­

Introduction

13

authorial per­for­mances by actors and schoolchildren bore the main imprint of the Romantic view. Yet the Romantic model could also shape ­people’s expectations regarding the function and style of poets’ own readings. The two modes of poetry circulation, together with the Romantic view of poetry’s role, all interacted, clashed, and merged with each other with varying strengths over the twentieth c­ entury. For that reason, we may think of Poland as a laboratory of poetry per­for­ mance. Poland’s po­liti­cal history and its complicated relationship with its neighbors to the east and west turned it into a kind of experimental space. As Czesław Miłosz put it, Poland “allows us to examine what happens to modern poetry in certain historical conditions.”32 ­Under t­ hese laboratory conditions, dif­fer­ent trends in poetry per­for­mances ­were also tested: they collided and influenced each other, creating crossroads of dif­fer­ent influences. To see ­these crossroads at work, let us start with memorization and recitation, which are impor­tant features of traditional poetic culture. Memorization was especially impor­tant in the countries with totalitarian rule. In the Soviet Union, the per­sis­tence of traditional prosody used as a mnemonic device lasted far into the twentieth ­century. As the poet and scholar Eugene Ostashevsky has suggested, it was related to repressions, which made memorization a necessity for the preservation of poems.33 For example, the Rus­ sian poet Anna Akhmatova never saw her poem Requiem published in its entirety; instead, a small circle of p ­ eople learned the poem by heart, as the poet herself was afraid to write it down.34 In Poland, poets w ­ ere not suppressed as severely as in Rus­sia, and the situation was more complicated. In the second half of the twentieth c­ entury, memorization and recitation of classical poems remained an ele­ment of school plays and ­were a crucial ele­ment of actors’ training in the postwar era. At the same time, memorization was in decline among poets, just as mnemonic devices like meter and rhyme started to dis­appear from Polish verse. Although metrical poetry (sometimes irregularly metrical, usually rhyming) was still the norm through World War II, the situation changed radically ­after the war: poets born in the 1920s turned to prosaic ­free verse in the late 1950s and 1960s. Syllabic verse, the traditional Polish versification system, was no longer the default and became a marker of classicism or stylistic imitation, and f­ ree verse, previously a feature of avant-­garde experimentation, became dominant.35

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As a result, poets no longer knew their own poems by heart. Some, like Zbigniew Herbert, could still recite classic poetry from memory but did not memorize their own texts. During a visit to the United States in 1968, Herbert lost a dozen of his new poems and became very upset; asked if he remembered any of them, he responded: “Not in the least! Only Rus­sians learn their poems by heart.”36 Miłosz—an older author who gradually switched to ­free verse—­and Tadeusz Różewicz have made similar statements: both poets emphasized that, unlike Rus­sians, they did not memorize their texts.37 It seems that in the United States Polish poets felt the need to distance themselves from presumed connections with Rus­sia, and to highlight their similarity to Anglophone poets, who in the 1960s also considered recitation from memory a bygone tradition.38 The lack of meter made it harder not only to memorize poems, but also to think of a free-­verse poem without reference to the printed page, or to the unsystematic prosody of someone’s reading. Scholars have strug­gled to define and theorize Polish ­free verse as verse, and for non-­authorial performers of poetry it became more difficult to find the right tone and register while reading a text. In other words, new poetics did not facilitate the non-­authorial, traditional per­for­mances, nor memorization of texts. Poets’ own readings ­were also changing, alongside the print-­oriented reception of poetry.39 The connection between meter, mnemonics, and memorization, on the one hand, and per­for­mance style, on the other hand, was noted by Ostashevsky with reference to Rus­sian culture. The per­sis­tence of traditionally metrical poems coincided with what he called “the declamatory mode,” noting that this mode of recitation dis­appeared from Anglophone poetry around the mid-­twentieth ­century.40 Similarly, in the context of mid-­twentieth-­century Poland, the declamatory mode persisted among older poets, who emphasized meter, which usually meant lengthening the last word of each line and reading this word with a rise in pitch. An even more popu­lar reading style in Poland, though, was the “theatrical” mode, which could work well with the Romantic view of poetry. Polish actors ­after the war frequently treated a poetic text as a role to be played: line endings would be subtly marked or disregarded altogether; instead ­t hese actors would accentuate the words they found most impor­tant, pausing in the m ­ iddle of the line and generally creating a more dramatic, the41 atrical effect.

Introduction

15

Some prewar poets could still combine the best ele­ments of t­ hese two modes and w ­ ere also happy to cooperate with actors; but in the second half of the twentieth c­ entury, Polish poets gradually started to read differently.42 They employed what could be called an “anti-­expressivist” or “anti-­ performative” style, as it is described ­today in reference to American poetry readings.43 ­These terms are not clearly defined. In theory, the new “anti-­ expressivist” readings could be perceived as more neutral, but the category of “neutral” reading is highly subjective, as Marit MacArthur and her collaborators have shown in their studies of American poetry readings. In the United States, neutrality can mean avoiding theatricality and expressivity, or ­else avoiding the style of reading with a detached, monotonous pattern of falling pitches at line endings.44 In Poland, it clearly means reading in a non-­ Romantic manner. For that reason, the division into “humanist” and “skeptical” reading styles, which has been used by other American scholars, is not applicable to the postwar Polish context. In Poland, emotional communion and heightened affect (typical of the humanist style) w ­ ere mostly associated with cultured and refined theatrical per­for­mances by actors, increasing the dramatism of a text, and with sung versions of poems; whereas in the United States the humanist style encompassed also authenticity, spontaneity, and authorial presence.45 Polish audiences ­were not so distrustful of theater and theatricality, which has always been an impor­tant part of Polish culture (in contrast to the American Puritan traditions).46 High culture was also promoted in schools and media in communist times, making it more accessible to all social classes. At the same time, more neutral, non-­Romantic poets did not necessarily give monotonous, flat readings, as the category of skeptical style would suggest. They often maintained well-­modulated, elegant diction, which sometimes bore traces of the declamatory mode. The opposition between theatrical, expressive per­for­mances (in the traditional-­Romantic current) and more restrained anti-­expressivist readings (in the modern current) seems thus to be the most operative for twentieth-­century Polish culture.47 Yet clashes between dif­fer­ent currents in Polish poetic culture ­were not ­limited to memorization, meter, and the reading styles. In po­liti­cally charged moments, they w ­ ere related to expectations about the moral and po­liti­cal stance of poets and their poetry: in some cases, audiences would prefer to have their myth of the rebellious poet rather than a real author with complex

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individual views. This tension could also be purely aesthetic, and could feed into the question of poetry’s ontology and owner­ship. In many Polish radio broadcasts on poetry, actors have been asked to recite poems even when the author was also featured in the program, thus emphasizing the separation between per­for­mance and composition. Composition belongs to the author, and per­for­mance to the actor, yet the serious, expressive declamations ­were often a poor match for the modern, ironic poems. ­These confusions and clashes between what I call traditional and modern, residual and emergent poetic cultures have not been fully resolved, which makes Polish poetry such an in­ter­est­ing test case: dif­fer­ent participants have very dif­fer­ent views about the nature and aesthetics of poetry, and they all have to somehow respond to the Romantic tradition—­contesting it, courting it, continuing it, manipulating it, or choosing specific aspects of it to engage with. To illustrate the intersection of speaking styles and audience expectations, traditional and modern currents, as well as the implicit burden of the Romantic tradition, let me refer to one event from the communist period that took place in the city of Poznań in the fall of 1980. On August 31, striking shipyard workers in Gdańsk had won major concessions from the state, mostly the right to or­ga­nize the in­de­pen­dent trade ­union Solidarity, which quickly grew into a broad social movement. A time of hope and greater freedom, including the liberalization of culture, had begun.48 Stanisław Barańczak (1946–2014), a poet and scholar known for his activity in the Committee for the Defense of Workers and in under­ground publishing, was invited to give a poetry reading or­ga­nized by the Dominican friars (starting in the 1970s, some churches had become spaces for in­de­pen­dent culture). As the poet’s wife, Anna, recalled, when they arrived at the priory the Barańczaks followed the organizers, assuming they would be led to a casual meeting space. Instead the corridors led them into the church, and unexpectedly they found themselves at the altar. A glance at the audience showed a far bigger crowd than poetry readings usually attract, and the crowd clearly expected to hear an anticommunist rally rather than the formal nuances of Barańczak’s poems. Audience members noticed his broken leg (he had expressed his euphoria for Solidarity by trying to ­ride his son’s skateboard) and started to whisper, “They broke his leg,” “they” meaning, of course, the communists. Barańczak saw that

Introduction

17

he had been cast in the role of a Romantic po­liti­cal martyr, and he wanted to remain a poet. He growled to his wife, “Let’s run.” 49 He did not run from this reading, but within the year the poet had moved to the United States and become a professor at Harvard (­because of the loosened restrictions during Solidarity he was fi­nally able to get his passport and begin an appointment he had accepted in 1978). Neither his hesitation at the altar in Poland nor his emigration to Amer­i­ca meant that he had ­stopped supporting the opposition or performing the activities of a public intellectual. In a way, he did follow the Romantic model: he was a dissident poet, and more than a de­cade ­earlier he had co-­founded the poetic movement Generation ’68, speaking on behalf of a society fed up with the manipulations of po­liti­cal and bureaucratic language and using that very language as poetic material. This search for truth in language was ­later reflected in his life choices, including his strug­g les with censorship, and his oppositional and under­g round activities, for which he was fired from his university in Poznań. This quasi-­Romantic biography was, however, accompanied by an increasingly skeptical outlook on history and a growing preference for nonauthoritarian poetry that encouraged in­de­pen­dent thinking and individual responsibility.50 ­There was another, closely related reason why Barańczak’s reading in Poznań could not fulfill its audience’s expectations: Barańczak’s physical voice, as we know from his poetry and rare recordings, was quiet and ner­ vous.51 He l­ ater devoted an entire poem to his voice, titled “Voice Coaching.” In the poem, clearly influenced by his new life in Amer­i­ca, the speaker—­ after pondering vari­ous voices heard on airplanes, TV, and radio, all optimistic, confident, soft, and blaring, the moving voices of pi­lots, TV evangelists, and pop stars—­confesses that he does not have such resonant vocal chords. Instead, he has “a raw respiratory tract,” . . . ​where the work h ­ orse of hoarse voice drags its cart (or is it hearse), its neighs and whinnies increasingly timid, too hurried, though, to observe the speed limit.52 Such a voice could hardly go unnoticed in a public intellectual, academic teacher, and poet. Yet the speaker seems not to regret having such a voice.

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­ oward the end the poem becomes more serious, and we learn that the poet T is not interested in speaking louder or more clearly ­because . . . ​to be heard, y­ ou’ve got to utter your words with the faith, not that they are true, but that they ­matter. Other­wise, you mutter. It is faith that becomes a means of voice coaching, as does confidence in the importance of one’s message. This conclusion might recall the impressive improvisations by Mickiewicz, which, as he believed, w ­ ere divinely inspired and allowed him to conjure po­liti­cal visions. H ­ ere, however, we have a skeptical and critical modern mind that does not share Mickiewicz’s optimism and resolve. As we know, by the time Barańczak wrote this poem the Solidarity movement had been crushed by martial law. The poet’s speech impediment, a physical condition, is therefore embraced as symbolic of an ethical stance: si­mul­ta­neously distrustful and h ­ umble, searching for spaces of personal freedom and nuance, letting the audience decide for themselves if they want to know what he thinks. Unsurprisingly, this put him at odds with, in Amer­i­ca, the soundtrack of TV preachers and celebrities, and in communist Poland, the longing for Romantic leaders and rebels to lead the nation into b ­ attle.53 Barańczak agreed to give poetry readings when asked, but his recordings remained very rare and actors’ recitations of his poetry became more popu­lar, especially ­those by Halina Mikołajska.54 His poem “Voice Coaching” allowed him to ironically comment on his own voice, undermine it, explain the paucity of his own recordings, and at the same time actually emphasize his “hurried muttering,” which had a significant impact on his readings and his poetic persona. Even as his physical voice remained hidden in print and inaccessible to many readers, its traces ­were officially preserved. It was no longer just a “bad” reading, an accidental ­mistake, a silence in the manner of Mickiewicz’s only failed improvisation. The imperfections of the voice, as well as notions of fragility and humility, started to be consciously embraced as a significant part of the poetic self. Barańczak belongs to a younger generation than the authors I study in this book, but his example vividly illustrates the crossroads of dif­fer­ent tendencies from which Polish poetry grew in the twentieth c­ entury and the appearance of new reading styles. Th ­ ese convergences included the poet’s

Introduction

19

complicated response to the Polish Romantic tradition and its view of voice. All canonical Polish poets I discuss in this book share this ambivalence; they differ only in the historical times, the forms chosen, and the extent to which they express this ambivalence. In her book Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics, Clare Cavanagh shows how Barańczak, but also Miłosz, transgressed the narrow politicization of their poetry in the 1980s. At that time, Miłosz was living in exile in Amer­i­ca, yet he started to play the role of a major prophetic voice for Polish society. The poet himself, while critical of Romantic clichés, was read through the lens of the Romantic paradigm. Cavanagh shows how Miłosz strug­g led with the label of the émigré poet-­prophet that was imposed on him by his Polish audience. Thus, when he came back from exile in the 1990s, and emphasized the role of his own per­for­mances at his readings in Poland, he did it not only to signal his preference for authorial rather than non-­authorial poetry circulation. He was also trying to get out of the Romantic paradigm, to regain his own, individual rather than national voice. Miłosz’s voice did not resemble Barańczak’s “hurried muttering” by any means; it actually included some ele­ ments of the declamatory mode, but it was similarly opposed to Romantic interpretation.

Argument and Outline of the Book In this book I argue that key Polish poets born in the first de­cades of the twentieth ­century became increasingly interested in their own readings, despite the strong presence of actors and singers in Polish poetic culture. They w ­ ere also increasingly aware of the new possibilities of preserving and distributing their readings among audiences, facilitated by sound recording. As we can learn from their recordings, their free-­verse poems written and read in the same de­cades w ­ ere based on very dif­fer­ent concepts of prosody, which cannot be synthetized within one theory of verse. Moreover, ­t hese poets introduced several new poetic practices that challenge our thinking about the bound­ aries of a literary work of art. The novelty of ­t hese authorial per­for­mances was facilitated by the laboratory conditions offered by Polish culture in the twentieth c­ entury. On the one hand, the modern current in Polish poetic culture, institutionalized poetry readings, radio broadcasts, and the increasingly anti-­expressionist style of

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poets’ per­for­mances helped poets to rethink dif­fer­ent modes of reaching their audiences and to modernize their poetic diction. On the other hand, the less-­ clear status of the authors’ voices, the presence of traditional non-­authorial readings, and the less-­reliable official sphere helped the poets approach poetry per­for­mances more freely and personally, merging a modern sensibility with older habits, with memories of a time when poetry was still found in everyday life. Indeed, in the poets’ recordings we can hear the styles that resemble lamentation or church liturgy, that incorporate local pronunciation, urban folklore, and storytelling. And fi­nally, ­these reading styles ­were developed in the contexts not only of competing per­for­mances by professional actors and singers, but also of varying po­liti­cal expectations and pressures—­ including in the context of the Romantic model of a poet—­with which they played, and which they contested. It is not accidental that most of the innovative per­for­mances I study are not official studio recordings made for broadcasting or publication, nor illegally and semi-­legally distributed cassettes and tapes.55 Instead, I focus on homemade recordings for ­family and friends, recordings of live events abroad, private events reconstructed from memoirs, and recordings made for museums and research institutions. ­These contexts provided more freedom and in­de­pen­dence from politics and outside expectations, encouraged more openness, allowing more transgressive practices to emerge when they w ­ ere not yet readily accepted. The ability to restrict the scope of listeners afforded poets the courage to reveal their vulnerability and create a sense of intimacy. Many of the recordings I study still have not been published, retaining their noncommercialized, nonpoliticized, amateurish quality. In other words, ­these recordings use insights and technologies coming from the modern poetic culture, but employ them in a less modern, more personal way. In many cases, rethinking the relation between voice and poetry was prompted by a need to engage with the very t­ hings that made a per­for­mance sound nonprofessional: provisional, imperfect, vulnerable, homemade, peripheral, and intimate. In this book I am most interested in ­t hese moments of change, of embracing the nonprofessional (and non-­Romantic) sounds and contexts. In that sense I do not ­really focus on the most “neutral” or “anti-­ expressive” readings, but on the moments when poets transgress some convention, reveal some weakness, illness, or fragility, make use of sounds that seem peripheral, folksy, marginal, informal, or nonstandard. A weak voice,

Introduction

21

a Slavic accent in En­g lish, a low-­quality recording, or a consciously bad reading style are not r­ eally “neutral,” but neither are they declamatory or theatrical. Th ­ ese per­for­mances are themselves part of a broader set of changes within the cultural notion of poetic identity. In the recordings studied ­here, we start to hear how that changing sense of self was reflected in a poet’s voice and manner of speaking.56 As I mentioned, it was not just the style of speaking but also the venue and context that frequently added a homely, intimate, and amateurish flavor to ­t hese per­for­mances and recordings. Their personal nature allowed poets to avoid the direct politicization of their poetry, its nonliterary po­liti­cal uses. But at the same time, t­ hese per­for­mances often blurred the boundary between art and life, and in this way remained surprisingly close to performatives on a personal scale—to speech acts that change the surrounding real­ity, to nonliterary functions that poems could still have in the twentieth ­century as gifts, testaments, or a way of socializing with friends. In other words, while nonliterary, po­liti­cal uses of poetry in the Romantic mode ­were contested, some nonliterary uses typical of traditional poetic culture ­were maintained. This combination of personal and professional features is usually associated with the nineteenth-­century salon culture, when familiar letters and playful conversations between aristocratic amateurs, as well as improvisations by poets like Adam Mickiewicz, merged lit­er­a­ture and social life.57 In Western scholarship, the general consensus is that in subsequent de­cades, the institutionalization of art and literature was growing, and only the avant-­garde and neo-­avant-­garde movements of the twentieth c­ entury tried to overcome the autonomy and alienation of art, to merge it again with action and everyday life. However, the continuity of Polish traditional poetic culture can make us reconsider to what extent Polish poetry was actually alienated from everyday practices, given its historical conditions, the ­limited modernization of the country, and the consequent per­sis­tence of rural folk traditions and urban folklore.58 In some cases we may won­der if the practices of Polish poets are close to the neo-­avant-­garde or if they signal a continuation of traditional culture. For instance, it has been noted in the context of the art-­historical concepts of “correspondence art” or “mail art” (art sent through the mail), that the events of the 1980s in Poland made such networking an everyday need rather than a creative decision.59 This question is most relevant for the practice I call

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“poetic sound correspondence”—­t hat is, sound recordings of poetry sent to friends abroad. But this observation could be extended to other de­cades and other forms of art; thus, practices that look innovative to us ­were often a way of coping with and responding to historical limitations, or simply a consequence of absent and unreliable institutions. The prob­lem of identifying an “au­t hen­tic” Polish avant-­garde is additionally complicated by the fact that, in Poland, the greatest potential for po­liti­cal rebelliousness has always been associated with the Romantic tradition rather than the avant-­garde. Moreover, the socialist realist program imposed on Polish lit­er­a­ture in Stalinist years (1949–1955) has retained its strong negative associations with the enforced politicization of lit­er­a­ture, associations that extend to the accessible, traditional forms that marked its aesthetic. I discuss the prob­lem of Polish avant-­garde per­for­mance more thoroughly in Chapter 5, but h ­ ere we can already see how, in Poland, linguistically innovative poetics often signaled a break with social obligation and an attempt at in­de­pen­dent thought. Similarly confusing from the Western perspective can be Polish poets’ interest in tape-­recording, the main means that facilitated their experiments with voice and allowed them to combine the new (the distribution of authorial voice) and the old (reading at home, reading for friends). It is a well-­known fact that tape recorders radically altered the conditions for individual recording, and ­were crucial for the development of concrete m ­ usic and sound poetry in France, as well as the work of the Beat Generation in the United States.60 Yet homemade tapes, which ­were an impor­tant means of countering state media by American countercultural poets, ­were also significant to the practice of Polish authors, who would be more associated with the opposite, anticommunist po­liti­cal stance at that time.61 Tape recorders became popu­lar in Poland in the 1960s, but some recordings I discuss, like Czesław Miłosz’s and Aleksander Wat’s tapes, w ­ ere also made in North Amer­i­ca, on a tape recorder borrowed from the Slavic Department of the University of California at Berkeley. Zbigniew Herbert started to rec­ord himself on his own device in France in 1966; Miron Białoszewski bought a tape recorder in Poland in 1965; Tadeusz Różewicz was recorded in the early 1960s for the first Polish poetry audio archive. The cases I study complicate and challenge typical categories used to describe twentieth-­century poems, which are usually divided into the more con-

Introduction

23

ventional and experimental (or mainstream and avant-­garde) currents. Most of the Polish poets I study, like Miłosz, Herbert, and Wat, have been associated with the Polish school of poetry, with witnessing history and moral reflection, rather than with the experiments with sound that I highlight in this book. I show that t­ hese poets’ interest in homemade tapes is not so radically dif­fer­ent from that of Białoszewski, who would usually be called “experimental” or “linguistically innovative,” and whose interest in sounds has been treated as exceptional. In t­ hese poets’ approaches to voice, t­ here are oftentimes more similarities than we may expect a­ fter studying their texts in print only. Consequently, the readings and recordings by Polish poets undermine the Anglophone practice of distinguishing formal poetry readings, voice-­oriented per­for­mance poetry and spoken word, and more experimental sound poetry. The poems studied in this book ­were often intended for per­for­mance, yet they ­were not excluded from print circulation. As it turns out, published authors worked on the dictation and notation of per­for­mances, read their texts at home, recorded farewell messages, and translated their verse in a way that enabled special authorial readings in En­glish. Their readings ­were often too performative, provocative, or homegrown to be included in a category of a formal poetry reading, yet tape-­recorded and read from a manuscript unlike many per­for­mance poems; at the same time, they w ­ ere not as extreme in their experimentation as sound poetry usually is. Our received models of poetry per­for­mance cannot be easily applied in t­ hese cases. When studying Polish per­for­mances, we thus need to deal with the inadequacy of existing categories, but also with the fact that so many of the poets’ practices and tapes remained unknown to critics and wider audiences. They ­were developed at home, abroad, and in many dispersed locations. For that reason, in this book I do not focus on external, critical, and public points of view, or on con­temporary categories. Instead I try to reconstruct more “internal” perspectives, inferred from such sources as the analy­sis of poetry, personal documents and self-­commentaries made by authors themselves, the study of their close environments and the technologies they used, and comparisons of texts and recordings. I do not want to impose a priori the bound­ aries for their artistic practices. This is why I do not limit the scope of my analyses to only live per­for­mances, only vinyl rec­ords, or only radio broadcasts. All resources related to a poet are taken into account, but close analyses

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show us that, for dif­fer­ent authors, dif­fer­ent par­ameters and ideas about poetry come to the fore; in other words, two authors’ approaches to the same kind of reading might be so dif­fer­ent as to be simply incomparable. Similarly, some authors put special emphasis on specific kinds of recordings, such as homemade tapes, or par­tic­u­lar aspects of their readings, such as intonation. Only in this way am I able to identify and describe many novel practices developed by Polish poets. I analyze the first example of such practices in Chapter 1, where I describe the crossroads of poetic habits and historical and personal events that led to the creation of Julian Tuwim’s pioneering poetic sound postcard as early as 1943. Tuwim’s audio letter, a disc recorded in New York City and sent to his ­sister to London in 1943, in the midst of World War II, is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, preserved recording of an author’s reading of Polish poetry. It combines modern audio technology available at that time in the United States (but not in Poland) with the traditional idea of live poetry serving personal aims, shared with ­family and other close ones. It is a work that precedes other examples of poetic sound correspondence—­that is, of rec­ords and tapes mailed between poets, which reappear in other chapters. Older than the poets on whom I focus in the book, Tuwim is a liminal figure, and as such he becomes our guide to twentieth-­century Polish poetic culture. By exploring vari­ous war­t ime and postwar per­for­mances of Tuwim’s poems, Chapter  1 illustrates the conditions that facilitated novel practices in Polish poetic per­for­mances, which became especially vis­i­ble in the 1960s and 1990s. In this chapter, I articulate how traditional non-­authorial recitations, modern authorial readings, and Romantic views of poetry unfolded across the twentieth c­ entury, creating laboratory circumstances for Polish poets. This chapter, in other words, surveys the cultural context in which poets born in the 1910s and 1920s, which this book focuses on, came of age. At the end of the chapter I compare Tuwim’s pioneering audio postcard with one of the earliest recordings of a Polish w ­ oman poet, which was also made in the United States, and was facilitated by new historical and technological possibilities. The poet Halina Poświatowska was recorded on a tape recorder in 1959, just before tape recorders became popu­lar in Poland. In Chapter 2, I discuss another US-­based laboratory situation, out of which Miłosz’s poetic practice was born during his life in exile—­his privately re-

Introduction

25

corded tapes sent to friends overseas, the official poetry readings he gave in Amer­i­ca, his native regional intonation, which was no longer in use in postwar Poland, and the need to speak in a foreign language and translate every­thing to En­glish. I argue that in the United States, Miłosz worked on preserving the same phrasing, the same syntactical structures, in his En­glish translations, so that he could read them with similar intonation patterns as he read his poems in Polish. Intonation, heard in his tapes and in recorded poetry readings, can therefore explain Miłosz’s translation choices, as well as his wish to control his En­g lish texts. I call the resulting phenomenon “secondary originals”—­Miłosz’s poems in En­glish, both in recording and print, ­were authorized, but w ­ ere deliberately presented as imperfect reflections of the Polish texts. I compare Miłosz’s path with that of Julia Hartwig, a poet who similarly spent some time in the United States and valued clear, logical syntax in her poems. Like Miłosz, she simplified her diction ­after studying American poems. Her translations and readings ­were not, however, secondary originals, as this poet spent far more time in Poland. In Chapter 3, I move from the spaces of exile and travel back to Poland, where I examine the concept of “home per­for­mance” and the related idea of the “home literary salon.” I use ­t hese terms to describe, not secret or under­ ground meetings in apartments, but an artistic practice that transforms t­ hese unofficial customs and the narrow postwar socialist apartments into a consciously chosen space of literary life or per­for­mance. They are an escape from real­ity and from the official literary life, but they do not necessarily constitute po­liti­cal opposition. The main representative of this phenomenon is Białoszewski, a gay poet and outsider interested in urban folklore who was committed to living in the world of his poetry and performing it at home. I show that he drew on traditional practices such as ­family readings (typical of the prewar period), secret per­for­mances (a feature of war­time Poland), theater, and liturgy, to forge his unique approach to poetic per­for­mance and tape-­recording. I study the acoustics of poems that he recorded at home and compare them to his printed texts, in order to explain how sound and visual layout can be correlated and what they can tell us about Białoszewski as a performer. Białoszewski’s home readings and recordings are juxtaposed with other home-­based cultural activities of the time, as well as a dif­fer­ent kind of literary salon or­ga­nized by Wisława Szymborska in Kraków. Comparing the salons and recordings of t­ hese two poets, both eccentric but officially

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published to g­ reat acclaim, opens onto a larger discussion about dif­fer­ent uses of private space and strategies for shaping one’s image in a gendered and po­ liti­cal context. In Białoszewski’s case we have a clear preference for homemade tapes, and not edited studio recordings. Szymborska’s strategy was more complex: she made her official readings and recordings more homely, and she disciplined her private sphere—­her home salon excluded her own p ­ oetry per­for­mance. In Chapter 4, I argue that Polish poets worked on the genre that I call a “poetic audio testament” or a “taped farewell”—­that is, poetry recordings that can be considered the author’s last word. I discuss two recordings that w ­ ere made at home shortly before the poets’ deaths (Wat was recorded in France in 1967 and Herbert in Warsaw in 1998), as well as two tapes made at the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw, featuring Anna Świrszczyńska (known in the United States as Anna Swir) in 1979, and Anna Kamieńska in 1981. I discuss t­ hese recordings as peculiar speech acts, intended from the outset to be mediated by secondary orality and to reach listeners only a­ fter the death of the speakers (the Museum recordings w ­ ere also meant to preserve the poets’ voices for posterity). Th ­ ese speech acts thus combined an idea of summarizing one’s literary ­career for listeners using modern technology and leaving a deeply personal posthumous message. In Chapter 5, I return to the question of the Polish avant-­garde by studying poetry readings by Różewicz, and contrasting his practices with t­ hose of poets from previous chapters, and in par­tic­u­lar t­ hose of his poetic mentor Julian Przyboś. I show that out of all of the poets discussed, Różewicz was closest to Western modernity and subscribed to an idea of poetry as alienated from society and everyday life; as he once declared, his poetry was “­doing nothing.” I argue, however, that his unbeautiful poetry readings—­with their flat affect, clear lack of preparation, and intentionally “bad” delivery—do contribute something crucial to the space of literary institutions: they become a site of experiment, a critical tool, testing his listeners’ patience and challenging their aesthetic assumptions. Różewicz’s recordings and practices serve as a fun­house mirror, in which we can examine other poets discussed in this book. Różewicz allows us to better comprehend the con­temporary poetry scene in Poland, which increasingly functions in globalized conditions and in a society that confirms Różewicz’s views of the l­imited influence of poetry. In

Introduction

27

the last thirty years, poetry readings have functioned analogously to ­t hose in the West, and the modernizing, authorial current has become more prominent at poetry events. In the Epilogue, I discuss recent poetry readings by Krystyna Miłobędzka, a poet who became recognized only in her seventies and eighties. Her readings confirm that the changes introduced to poetry readings by Różewicz remain relevant to this day, but her case also demonstrates an impor­tant change: the critical attention that is paid ­today to her faltering, frail voice of an old w ­ oman. When studying recordings of all poets, I try to limit the impressionistic nature of my perception, though I know that some biases are unavoidable. I use the method of machine-­aided close listening—­t hat is, my own listening supported and augmented by digital tools, which in my case is the computer program Praat.62 Praat helps me to analyze the sound waves of recorded per­ for­mances, their pitch, duration, loudness, and timbre. ­These par­ameters map the prosody of the poets’ speech: pauses, stresses, tempo, intonation, and rhythm. I thus confront acoustic mea­sures counted by Praat (such as changes in fundamental frequency) with my auditory impressions (changes in pitch) and knowledge of linguistics (the resultant changes in intonation). Moving between t­ hese three planes is often necessary, due to unusual qualities of the poets’ speech. In the chapter on Miłosz I rely more on a linguistic approach to intonation, its properties, and regional variants. In the chapters on Wat and Białoszewski I discuss ­t hese poets’ nonstandard ways of accentuating words and shaping poems’ prosodic contours. Their unexpected changes of pitch do not match typical par­a meters of stresses and intonation units in Polish, so I turn instead to their acoustic par­ameters. I study each poet individually, trying to grasp their individuality at the crossroads of acoustics and linguistics. The sounds I discuss sometimes include minor noises, audible breath, laughter; but I study all sounds as they shape verbal and nonverbal communication, trying to assess their role for poetry rather than describe them on their own. Still, the breadth of the phenomena that can be discussed ­under the label of sounds and poetry is enormous, as we are reminded by, for instance, the book The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, edited by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin. The sounds of poetry can refer to both segmental and suprasegmental ele­ments of poems’ construction: their rhymes, onomatopoeias, and alliterations, as well as meter, rhythm, and pauses. While I do

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talk about the construction of texts, my main research questions are not related to the qualities of poems that are preserved in writing. I focus more on the sounds of the poets’ speech, and especially on ­t hose soundings that supplement or contradict what we learn from print. I ask which of ­t hose sounds and what aspects of sounds heard in recordings can inform our views of someone’s poetry. The sound waves that interest me are, naturally, the voice waves; when I speak of voice, I therefore assume the linguistic-­acoustic perspective presented above. To avoid confusion, I usually use the word “voice” in this most literal, physical meaning, avoiding the term “poetic voice” to name the speaker and style of the poem that can be inferred from print. Thus far, Polish audio recordings of poetry have made it impossible to collect wider representative data, or to track transgenerational trends and statistics of acoustic par­ameters; many recordings cannot be copied or have not been digitized, and radio stations’ poetry archives ­favor actors’ recitations over authorial readings. In cases where digital copies of authorial recordings are available, the greatest benefit is the digitization itself, ­because it allows one to listen to the same line in dif­fer­ent recordings, one ­after another, without the need to change the tape or disc. Comparing authorial per­for­ mances of the same text over a period of time can prove very informative. ­There are cases, however, when only one tape is preserved. For instance, I  know of only one poetry recording apiece of the authors Andrzej Bursa, Poświatowska, and Świrszczyńska.63 In fact, an entire book could be written detailing attempts to track down old tapes and discs of Polish poets, their lost or forgotten stories, studying their travels across dif­fer­ent continents, homes, and institutions. Unfortunately, many of the stories recovered in this book are incomplete, and some—­like Miłosz and Herbert’s first tapes, or Wat’s tape dictations from France—­are lost. Moreover, we can only guess at what other, more innovative practices have remained unknown to scholars or a wider audience. Some rare instances of Polish sound and per­for­mance poetry have been discovered only recently.64 Many recordings ­were lost during World War II and the destruction of Warsaw.65 One can only hope that t­ hese and other discs and tapes ­will emerge from private archives, that our knowledge of the recorded voices of Polish poets ­w ill be enlarged by new discoveries. They would be especially exciting in the case of ­women’s recordings, about which I have not said much so far.

Introduction

29

One might expect that the interest in less conventional soundings of poetry, in revealing one’s weaknesses or m ­ istakes, should make it more acceptable for ­women poets to experiment with their voices. I associate ­women with a more vulnerable position b ­ ecause of their ambivalent critical reception and marginalization in the Polish literary canon. They have often been described as soloists; throughout the twentieth ­century they w ­ ere not part of prewar or postwar male groupings and movements, and they remained on the sidelines of literary life and in the margins of poetry anthologies ­until recently.66 In their case, the label “feminine” or “­women’s” poetry was more burdensome than the expectation of serving as a national poet. This might have made them more suspicious ­toward more “physical” reading styles and amateurish tapes. This suspicion would have been strengthened by the absence of positive models in Polish culture for an improvising, inspired female poet and the existing negative cultural perception of higher-­pitched voices.67 In the following chapters I discuss dif­fer­ent responses to t­ hese challenges, and the dif­fer­ent strategies that we hear in the recordings of Poświatowska, Hartwig, Szymborska, Kamieńska, and Świrszczyńska. In general ­these ­women poets tend to sound as non-theatrical and non-declamatory as their male contemporaries, but they remain relatively formal, professional, and disciplined, without forays into very personal or provocative styles, at least in the recordings that are known to us ­today. Miłosz, Wat, Herbert, and Białoszewski recorded themselves at home in the 1960s; I do not know of any major w ­ omen poets from this period ­doing anything similar.68 Even in private situations, Szymborska and Kamieńska ­were reluctant to read their poems or declined to do so, whereas Miłosz and Białoszewski eagerly read their poetry to friends.69 The poet Ewa Lipska (a generation younger than the authors I focus on in this book) claimed that she had never read her poems to someone on the phone, and suggested that such readings w ­ ere popu­lar among male poets.70 This ambivalent attitude to voice shared by major ­women poets needs to be recognized. On the one hand, we need to follow the poets’ preference for print and discretion, but on the other hand, we need to take into account the cultural context that guided t­ hese preferences—­especially b ­ ecause w ­ omen poets did participate in many poetry readings, and also agreed to be recorded when this was asked of them. In the cases of Szymborska and Hartwig, we have numerous official recordings, including CDs and radio broadcasts, to work with. In Chapters  2 and 3, I listen to t­hese recordings and further

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problematize this ambiguous stance t­oward voice. I do not try to hide this asymmetrical position of w ­ omen and men in twentieth-­century Polish poetic culture. Yet it does not make the study of t­ hese cases less impor­tant, and we should always remember the reasons for t­ hese ­women’s cautious and ambivalent attitude to readings. In almost ­every chapter of this book, female poets’ readings follow my discussion of male poets, so that w ­ omen poets can have the last word and shed new light on male practices. We should also note that the situation has been changing in recent years. It seems that in the long run, the interest in new types of voices has broadened the spectrum of voices that enter the Polish poetic scene and find an audience ­today. An example is the critical interest in Miłobędzka’s poetry per­ for­mances, which I discuss in the Epilogue. It is hard to imagine all the attention paid to her frail quiet voice without the changes that ­were introduced to Polish poetry readings and poetic programs by the poets I discuss e­ arlier in this book. Miłobędzka can be treated as a con­temporary Polish poet, but she was born in 1932, soon a­ fter the authors this book focuses on. Modern Polish poetry is represented h ­ ere by major postwar authors born in 1910s and 1920s, by ­t hose poets who survived the war and subsequently introduced significant changes to Polish poetics and poetry per­for­mances. With them, we look at vari­ous de­cades of the twentieth c­ entury during which their recordings and readings took place. It is worth noting, however, that of the authors studied in detail, Wat can be treated as an outlier. He was born in 1900 but had his second debut as a poet ­after a long break, in 1957, parallel to Herbert’s and Białoszewski’s debuts. Two other poets from Wat’s generation whom I discuss in the book are Tuwim and Przyboś, whose war­time and postwar recordings inform us about the prewar approach to modernity and recitation, helping us to grasp the changes that happened with new generations.

Poetry Per­for­m ance As I argue, Polish poets’ readings and per­for­mances ­were a novel practice. They innovatively used inspirations that stemmed from modern and traditional poetic cultures. Yet the prevalence and innovativeness of t­ hese per­for­ mances does not clarify their status when compared with written sources. What is their relation to print? What arguments do we have in ­favor of fo-

Introduction

31

cusing on authorial readings rather than actors’ and singers’ renditions of texts? What ontology of lyric poetry should we assume? How can the Anglophone and the Polish views on that m ­ atter help us grasp the status of Polish tapes? Detailed answers to t­ hese questions appear in the chapters devoted to the specific authors, but I must emphasize that my focus on authors’ own readings does not mean that I always assign a special role to their sounds, or that the pitch of a concrete recording is always informative. As I broadly delineate per­for­mances and study their dif­fer­ent aspects, my aim is exactly to learn about the role of sounds in ­t hese poetic practices and in poems. My focus on authorial recordings means only that as authorial renditions they can potentially belong to some poetic practice that has not yet been described—­that we cannot decide a priori their role in Polish culture. Fortunately, the broad definition of the word “per­for­mance” allows me to refer to all of ­t hese situations and experiments, including per­for­mances mediated by recordings. The expressions “poetry per­for­mance,” “poetry in per­for­mance,” and “performed word” have gained popularity in Anglo-­American studies of voiced poetry of the last twenty years. ­These umbrella categories encompass a variety of per­for­mances: traditional recitations and declamations of verse, formal readings of modern poetry, as well as slam and per­for­mance poetry, the genres most strongly associated with spoken word. The breadth of the term “poetry per­for­mance” serves Polish poetry equally well, given the lack of clear divisions between dif­fer­ent types of voiced poetry in Polish literary history, as well as the diversity of reading styles, venues, and practices. By “per­for­mances,” I mean par­t ic­u ­lar voicings of poems, although other ele­ ments of t­ hese per­for­mances are also discussed. The breadth, or even semantic bagginess, of the En­glish expression “per­ for­mance” opens this category to many phenomena far removed from poetry readings, all covered by the discipline of per­for­mance studies in the Anglo-­American intellectual tradition. Similarly, as has already been noted with reference to Rus­sian studies, “per­for­mance” does not have a good equivalent in the Polish language, and the Polish word “performans” means mostly per­for­mance art, even as scholars try to broaden its scope to include other social practices.71 But when one focuses on per­for­mances of lyric poetry, and compares the word with its pos­si­ble Polish equivalents, a key advantage of the En­g lish term is its capacity to convey both a pre­sen­ta­t ion,

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repre­sen­ta­t ion, or staging, and a fulfillment, completion, or realization of something. In other words, “per­for­mance of a poem” may imply both a vocal pre­sen­ta­tion of an existing text—­its staging and oral interpretation—as well as an action that creates the poem through voice, that brings it to full completion at the moment when it is voiced. “Per­for­mance” does not determine ­whether a vocal version is primary or secondary, and in this way it approaches the Polish term “wykonanie głosowe” (vocal per­for­mance), without assuming or determining any par­tic­u­lar view of the relations between poetry and voice. Meanwhile, the terms that ­were most often used in the past, like “recitation” (“recytacja”), “declamation” (“deklamacja”), or even “reading” (“czytanie”), all imply a secondary voicing of a preexisting text. Per­for­mance studies have traditionally focused on live activities done in the presence of spectators, but mediatized per­for­mances are no longer strongly differentiated from live ones, and the very issue of liveness has been problematized as well.72 In this book I study many per­for­mances in the context of their archived “occasional” recordings. ­These are recorded poetry readings and radio broadcasts that allow us some access to live per­for­mances of the past. At the same time, I also study recordings that ­were conceived as mediatized, including ones that ­were edited, recorded in solitude, or aimed at making an impact long ­after the recording was made. Normally this category would primarily include studio recordings, but in Polish poetic practice, other institutions and spaces, including private apartments, ­were often used as recording venues.73 The bound­aries between an occasional recording of an event happening on the spot, and a sounding aimed at its mediatized circulation on tape, w ­ ere often blurred. Both the live and the mediatized aspect ­were si­mul­ta­neously pre­sent in some per­for­mances. Consequently, ­under the umbrella category of per­for­mance, I study both live readings and tape recordings. The scholar Charles Bern­stein goes even further, arguing that all written and sounded versions of poems constitute its per­for­mances. Not just poetry readings, but even discrepant printings in magazines and books—­for Bern­ stein, all ­these multifoliate versions could be called “per­for­mances” of a ­ ill not be using “per­for­mance” in this broadest sense, poem.74 Although I w with reference to writing, Bern­stein’s claim is impor­tant ­because live per­for­ mances have traditionally been contrasted with written texts, performativity with textuality, acting and d ­ oing with s­ ilent reading.75 Yet as we know, writing,

Introduction

33

printing, and publishing, like reading and recording, are pro­cesses, social actions whose impact unfolds over time. The inclusion of written sources in the category of per­for­mances should not be surprising; in fact, the signature as a type of written performative has been discussed by Jacques Derrida.76 One source of per­for­mance studies as a discipline was the study of speech acts, especially performative speech acts, and in an early discussion of performatives Derrida pointed out that ­every performative is impure, based on a form of repetition; moreover, a performative can be cited, even if its meaning changes with each new context.77 This observation, which undermines the difference between performatives and other verbal utterances, is especially true of poetry per­for­mances; ­after all, they are speech acts in themselves, and rely on language and textuality more than other phenomena covered by per­for­mance studies, ­whether rituals and theater, games and sports, or film and dance. In other words, poetry readings and recordings allow us to revisit per­for­mance theory by looking at the most basic, but also the most challenging, per­for­mances of language. Readings and recordings, like written documents, are never pure performatives; when encountered years ­later, they preserve only some traces of the original activities which led to their creation. Clearly, the repetitive, citational aspect of poetry per­for­mances goes beyond the standard linguistic ele­ments (that is, the text that is read). The script of a given reading may include the poet’s preferred media (like homemade tapes), preferred spaces and audiences (like a friend’s apartment), personal rituals and banter, individualized intonation, paralanguage (like audible breath), and vocal timbre, including the “grain” of the voice (and its affective qualities). Yet in the case of poetry per­for­mances, all ­these ele­ments can, in turn, challenge and modify our view of textuality and poetry rather than remain features of “per­for­mances” only—­t hey are that close to any speech act, that necessary for any use of language. Consequently, we may try to capture the nature of per­for­mances through references to textuality, as Bern­stein himself does by referring to Jerome McGann’s idea of “textual condition.”78 “Textual condition” was originally connected with bibliographic, social, and ideological studies of book editions, journals, and manuscripts; with texts as they appear in certain material and social contexts, specifically looking at ele­ments such as typography, cover design, and environment. By way of analogy, Bern­stein compares an actor’s

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rendition of a poem to a special typographic setting, and a poet’s own reading to the first printing of a work. Similarly, the curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room at the Harvard Libraries, Christina Davis, has likened Harvard’s collection of sound recordings to “an archive with several incarnations of a book—­its final published edition, but also copyedits and galleys, and a stray of handful orphaned pages of the original manuscript, and then, perhaps, a reading with in­ter­est­ing annotations from generations of passing visitors.”79 Polish audio resources fully support this approach to recordings, inspired as it is by thinking about archives and book history. In the realm of poetry readings and audio recordings, t­ here are no authoritative sound editions, which would gather ­every impor­tant audio variant into one place and provide commentary. ­Every study of poetry per­for­mance has to start from scratch, with analyses of “audio manuscripts” and “audio editions” of poems. We do not know the status of a given recording a priori, and it is up to the scholar to assign relative importance to that recording. Indeed, it was the editors of the collected poems of two Polish poets, Aleksander Wat and Miron Białoszewski, who ­were among the first in Poland to assert that audio recordings could have the status of authorial manuscripts and should inform critical editions of poems. The editors of t­ hese publications faced the challenge of dealing with poems that existed only as authorial dictations on tape—­audio manuscripts not matched by any print editions, or even by written manuscripts. In Wat’s case t­ hese poems w ­ ere posthumously transcribed by his wife, Ola. In the case of Białoszewski, a recent book edition includes a link to audio recordings available online; the decision was made that the written version should not be arbitrarily chosen by the editors, ­because the oral form of ­these texts was the only one that came down to us.80 Another tape recording by Wat, which I focus on in Chapter 4, pre­sents an even more complicated case in terms of analogies to textual condition, as it was first made at home and then sent to the radio station. This tape was referred to in Wat’s collected poems ­because it included textual variants that differed from the versions available in written documents. In the book, the tape was thus treated as a manuscript on equal footing with other, written variants. However, when a copy of Wat’s tape was received for radio broadcast, the radio station edited the tape heavi­ly and cut long pauses. We could say that, in the pro­cess of becoming a broadcast, the recording came to resemble a heavi­ly edited print publication of poems.81

Introduction

35

­ ese examples from Wat and Białoszewski confirm Bern­stein’s observaTh tion that the poem is not a stable object, that it is plural, and that it always comes to us in performance—in some textual condition. Considering this analogy to written documents, Anglophone scholarly focus on authorial per­ for­mances makes sense, given the emphasis literary scholars place on authorial manuscripts. Actually, the very idea of giving equal treatment to the written and audio documents does not oppose the old Polish way of viewing poetry. Roman Ingarden, whom I quoted before, saw recitation and print each as an external basis for the more abstract idea of the work. The difference appears only in the acknowl­edgment of the plural nature of the work and in the question of how much of this material basis r­ eally becomes the work per se—­how much physicality, ­whether print-­based or voice-­based, we are ready to include in our view of poetry. Whereas Ingarden’s phenomenology supports the immaterial vision of the literary work, Bern­stein and McGann support an opposite view: for them ­there is no escape from the textual condition; the poems exist only in per­ for­mance and as per­for­mance, in numerous concrete materialities. Yet one may won­der if this is r­ eally how we perceive poems, w ­ hether this is the assumption hidden ­behind our scholarly and editorial practices. From this more practical perspective, we can actually use the analogy with textual criticism to challenge the view that poems should always be studied as embedded in authorial materiality. The role of handwriting in authorial manuscripts and timbre in homemade tapes is indeed comparable, but we do not always consult archival manuscripts in order to study a poem. Professional publications complicate this analogy even further. When books are published, we usually lose the author’s handwriting, and are left with texts laid out in conventional typesetting, modified by copyeditors and proofreaders, and published inside a professionally designed cover. The materiality of the text is therefore significantly altered between the manuscript stage and the published work: a poem seems not to require all this authorial materiality. We may won­der what ­these changes can be compared to in the field of recording. Are they comparable to an audio recording being edited before being broadcast? Or maybe to an actor’s “professional” rendition of a poem? If the edits and layout of a publication have been fully approved by the poet, could we consider a favorite actor’s reading as analogously authorized by the poet to serve as that poem’s sound manifestation? Such “authorized” actors’ readings in Polish culture

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would actually require a separate study. But even if poets could “authorize” certain actors to perform their texts, some broader questions remain. How can we compare the materiality of a poem in print to its audio recording? Are ­these materialities of equal importance for each text? Clearly ­there are poems that exist only as authorial written and oral per­ for­mances, poems for which a certain kind of materiality is crucial and not transposable into a dif­fer­ent medium. Experimental sound poetry, visual and concrete poetry, and artists’ books all provide such examples. But in most other cases, both readers and writers are selective about the set of material features that need to be pre­sent in order to preserve the poem. Such se­lections, or hierarchizations, are made in e­ very readerly and publishing practice, and are inevitable for all citations and iterations, even though ­mistakes are made on the way and ­every context provides new meanings. As we know, Emily Dickinson’s unusual punctuation and spelling ­were initially not recognized, and w ­ ere conventionalized upon publication. An analogous case in Poland is that of Cyprian Kamil Norwid, a con­temporary of Dickinson: the role of his unusual punctuation, underlinings of words, and drawings in the margins remains an object of scholarly debate. Yet many authors prefer conventional, self-­effacing, “invisible” typography, and we may won­der which features of audio recordings r­eally mattered to Polish poets. How would t­hese poets delineate their poems in voice? In asking this question, I am thinking especially about the reading practices of two Polish poets, Tadeusz Różewicz and Czesław Miłosz. I use a similar methodology when studying their recordings. All t­ hese recordings are potentially informative in their acoustic physicality and changeability. Yet, as I discover, the theories of poetry that emerge from t­ hese analyses are strikingly dif­fer­ent. Not all authorial readings are impor­tant in the same way. A single recording by Różewicz does not tell us much about his reading practice, but comparing his practice across multiple recordings can be informative. It reveals that most of the time, Różewicz’s readings seem to undermine the authority of his own voice, showing how inconsistent and bad his readings could be, and suggesting that ­t hese readings do not function as a definitive audio rendition. ­These recordings are impor­tant as authorial textual variants, but their aim is not to highlight certain sound patterns and structures. They resemble authorial commentaries or footnotes, directing us to his poems in print. By contrast, listening to a broad se­lection of record-

Introduction

37

ings by Miłosz reveals that a preferred type of intonation (rather than speed, pausing, vocal register, or circumstances of recording) must have informed his concept of poetry. A single recording by Miłosz is not a model for all of his readings but is usually a representative sample of his reading style. In contrast to t­ hese two poets, Białoszewski’s view of poetry appears most strongly connected to a concrete experience of voicing and embodying his texts in a certain setting, to per­for­mance in the fullest sense of the word, to a special perception of time and place, which we can only glimpse from his book editions and home recordings. Similarly, Wat’s audio testament is impor­tant as a unique recording, a final gesture made at a certain time. We would not know, however, about ­t hese differences without turning to authorial recordings, without trying to reconstruct how ­these poets delineated their poetic works, what ele­ments of the rich physicality of their voicings ­were emphasized or repeated, and how they ­were contextualized. Polish poems cannot be thought of just as sets of written and voiced per­ for­mances, ­because though many of t­ hese per­for­mances exist in a material medium, their under­lying concept of poetry is not necessarily material. (This is especially true of memorized poetry and texts rooted in the more traditional poetic culture.) Różewicz’s readings undermine rather than reinforce his voicings. Miłosz’s readings focus on intonation, not on timbre or speed, thus disregarding some physical features. Similarly, authorized, conventional book editions from an author’s lifetime might (rightly or wrongly) suggest that visual materiality is not very impor­tant, and that a ­silent reading of t­ hese poems is also acceptable, given the l­ imited accessibility of authorial recordings in Poland. In other words, poems may be thought of not just as per­for­mances, but also as abstractions from vari­ous per­for­mances, copies, and editions. ­These abstract entities can also have plural instantiations. For instance, the plural existence of a poem by Białoszewski can include a single, ephemeral home per­for­mance by the author; a linguistic structure abstracted by readers from a book; and the replayable sound patterns that can be heard in his recordings and that stay in memory. Poets may see ­t hese dif­fer­ent variants as unequal, but they are also aware of the auditory culture that surrounds them and the consequences of “authorizing” ­t hese forms. It is impor­tant to emphasize that this view of poems as more abstract entities, with regard to which we selectively consider their material qualities and contexts, does not

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necessarily imply the existence or primacy of one finite structure, one ideal of the original, or any idea of metaphysical voice. Actually, the poets’ practices lead us to further questions: Is their poetic work just a set of abstractions from vari­ous vocal and written sources? It seems that Różewicz did not just undermine the role of voice for his poetry; he used his poetry readings as a critical tool, as a commentary on the format of poetry readings. Białoszewski, on the other hand, did not just create in­ ter­est­ing written and audio poems; he experimented with relations between the shape of his printed poems and the shape of his unexpected pitch contours: the two are repeatable in dif­fer­ent editions and tapes, and shed light on the structure of each other. Perhaps we could use once again an analogy to visual arts. In the twentieth ­century, conceptual art turned away from focusing on the artistry of a final material object, like a painting, to the idea ­behind dif­fer­ent parts of the work, like the juxtaposition of a dictionary definition of the chair with a real chair and its photo. Could we think similarly about poetry in print and per­ for­mance: that its core is not located in a single text or a single recitation, but in an idea of how to connect print and voice? Can we imagine a literary work conceptualized as a lifetime practice of translating one’s works following intonation patterns of the original, as Miłosz used to do, rather than as a single translated poem? My aim in this book is not to pre­sent a strict classification of dif­fer­ent types of recordings and readings; this would not be pos­si­ble, as dif­fer­ent practices overlap and are blurred. Nevertheless, ­t hese introductory remarks draw on certain models I use for thinking about Polish poems in voice and in print. The postwar readings and recordings I study are so striking, thought through, or consistent, that their concepts and materialities interfere with the way we imagine and delineate poems. They cannot be treated as random audio manuscripts, for they influence the way we view t­ hese poems. In general, however, I avoid any a priori determinations about the status of recordings or their role in a poet’s oeuvre. ­These determinations remain also least clear in the case of ­women poets studied in this book, for the reasons I mentioned ­earlier: their recordings ­were made by someone e­ lse and ­were less provocative. ­These per­for­mances need nevertheless to be studied on their own terms, and I further problematize their ambivalence in this book.

Chapter 1

Postwar Currents Julian Tuwim and the Evolution of Polish Poetic Culture

the Polish-­Jewish poet Julian Tuwim (1894–1953) and his wife, Stefania, had been living in New York for more than two years. They had escaped Poland just when Nazi Germany invaded, in September 1939, and had traveled through Romania, France, Portugal, and fi­nally Brazil in 1940, before they moved to the United States in the late spring of 1941. In 1940 Tuwim began his new and never-­to-­be-­finished work, a nostalgic and ironic narrative poem titled Kwiaty polskie (Polish Flowers), which commemorated the lost world of his youth and took the slightly obsolete form of a digressive Romantic poem. The work had a relatively loose structure, and the author sent excerpts, most of which could stand alone as autonomous texts, to his beloved s­ ister Irena, herself a poet and translator, whose escape route had brought her to London with her husband, Julian Stawiński. In 1943 Tuwim had not seen his s­ ister for more than three years, and their correspondence from this period included not only letters and poems, but also photo­ graphs and dried flower petals. They ­were both worried about their ­mother, who was suffering from m ­ ental illness and receiving medical care in Otwock near Warsaw. At the time, news of their ­mother still reached Tuwim with a delay; it was another two years before he learned that she had been killed by the Nazis in August 1942 during the liquidation of the Otwock ghetto.1 In New York, Tuwim felt guilty that his m ­ other had been left b ­ ehind; he also felt he should have stayed in Poland and shared the fate of its p ­ eople. The dissonance between his normal and supposedly joyous daily life and the real­ity of the occupation in Poland was unbearable.2 He had been diagnosed with neurosis well before the war, and his condition did not improve in the late 1930s; as the most popu­lar poet in prewar Poland, he was ­under constant attack from anti-­Semites, who claimed he ­wasn’t r­ eally a Polish poet but a IN NOVEMBER 1943

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Jew who happened to write in Polish and who was sullying the language.3 He began suffering from agoraphobia, and it did not fully abate in New York, where he could barely leave his apartment without Stefania.4 On November 22, 1943, Tuwim de­cided to prepare a surprise gift for his ­sister, which would arrive in London in time for the holidays.5 The siblings came from an assimilated and secularized ­family; they did not observe Jewish traditions, and like most Poles they celebrated Christmas Eve with a special dinner and the exchange of pre­sents.6 In planning the gift, Tuwim was possibly inspired by the new technology available in Amer­i­ca at the time: ­music rec­ords, jukeboxes, home phonograph-­recorders, and automatic coin-­ operated Voice-­O-­Graph booths, which w ­ ere placed throughout New York City and allowed users to rec­ord a one-­minute utterance onto a 78 rpm disc, which could then be sent as an audio postcard instead of a traditional letter.7 Tuwim’s interest in audio technology was not new; in December 1941 he had joined other emigrant poets in reading a Christmas message to Poland, to be broadcast on American radio, and before the war he had worked for Polish Radio—­though only for two months, as he could not stand the silence of the studio or the absence of a live audience.8 This was not a prob­lem when planning his Christmas gift for his ­sister—he knew his audience very well, and he de­cided to use a recording studio or booth to send his s­ ister a longer, six-­ minute audio postcard.9 In his recording, which he treated as a postcard, he addressed his loved ones, and ­after giving the date and place, he went on to offer the warmest holiday wishes from himself and Stefa. Only then did he move on to the gift, ­ nder the title to his reading of a fragment from Polish Flowers, known u “Grande Valse Brillante” (borrowed from the name of Frédéric Chopin’s waltz).10 The fragment he chose, almost a separate poem in its own right, was a very personal piece, written in 1941 and based on Tuwim’s past experience of dancing with his f­ uture wife at a party in the town of Inowłódz.11 In the opening lines, the speaker asks: “Do you remember the time we danced a waltz, / Oh lady, madonna, the legend of ­those years?” He goes on to describe the dance, his infatuation and admiration, his attempts to make a good impression on his dance partner, as well as vari­ous rivals for her affection. The poem also hints at the f­ uture that awaits the two dancers, when, ­toward the end, the dancer asks: “Do you remember / when I walked with you / into the dark forest of my life—.”12

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Though part of a larger w ­ hole, the piece Tuwim selected and read out loud for his ­sister sounds like an intimate reminiscence of a lost real­ity, an evocation of youthful joy and intensity, and altogether an intimate message rather than a part of a narrative poem. In his recording, Tuwim is enthralling; depending on which part of the waltz is being described, he ­either raises or lowers his voice, almost exclaiming or almost whispering. He changes the tempo from slow to quick, gasping while speaking of feverish moments, and he lengthens his vowels and raises his pitch, and at times literally sings. This is a smooth and expressive per­for­mance that embodies the changing feelings of the dancer: from fascination and desire, through self-­directed irony, and fear, to envy and anger, and back again to melancholy. Tuwim’s dynamics follow the irregular form of his verse, which he is always careful to articulate: all his line endings, enumerations, and rhymes. But he does more than reflect the written form—he gives his verse the melody and liveliness of a dance. In Tuwim’s recitation, the very first lines of the poem reveal the poet’s vivid manner of speaking, which takes into account the irregular accentual-syllabic meter of the text, its syntax and meanings. Tuwim marks the anapestic meter (˘˘ / ˘˘ / ˘˘ / ) of his Polish verse with clear accentuation, by lengthening vowels and changing the pitch. He emphasizes the following words (and syllables): “Czy pamiętasz, jak z tobą tańczyłem walca,” literally: “Do you remember as with you I danced a waltz.” The last foot, which includes the word “walca” (waltz), does not follow the anapestic pattern, as the stress falls one syllable ­earlier (˘ / ˘); Tuwim compensates for this metrical irregularity by drawing out the word “walca” and marking it with a strong change of pitch. The poet once remarked that this text requires a skillful recitation.13 Perhaps this is what he had in mind: carefully increasing or decreasing the speed when the irregular meter demands it, and placing emphasis on certain words. In the next line, where the speaker addresses his “lady, madonna, the legend of ­t hose years” (“Panno, madonno, legendo tych lat”), all four nouns (lady, madonna, legend, years) in Polish are accentuated by a change of pitch, and the first noun, which again disrupts the anapestic meter, is spoken with greater force. The vivid reading style of the first part of the poem conveys remembered emotions and the enthusiasm of the young dancer. However, as we know, the poem does not end on reminiscence, but goes on to reflect on the fate of the

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two dancers. In this final section, Tuwim’s manner of speaking changes radically; the intensity subsides to match the sadness of the verse. Perhaps this part of the poem, written two years ­earlier in 1941, feels too close to Tuwim’s pre­sent state in 1943. The lines: “Do you remember / when I walked with you / into the dark forest of my life—” (“Czy pamiętasz, / jak z tobą / W ciemny las mego życia wkroczyłem—”) are spoken in a very low voice, with very ­limited changes in pitch, and much more quietly. Tuwim’s tempo is also significantly lower, suggesting a feeling of resignation. ­There are moments when the muted, sad voice becomes even more expressive: the pitch changes slightly and syllables become lengthened, though the volume remains quiet. This effect, which resembles a lament, can be heard in the pronunciation of the Polish words for “remember,” “you,” “forest,” and “life.” Due to its autobiographical persona and special recitation requirements, “Valse” invites us to give par­tic­u­lar attention to Tuwim’s own reading and the sound qualities he envisioned for the poem, which writing could not preserve. Tuwim’s decision to send this text to his ­sister draws attention to the role of his own enactment of the poem, including his recollection of the dancing parties he is describing. He is still acting in his recording, and, of course, he is not actually asking his ­sister if she remembers the waltz (the addressee of the poem is the speaker’s wife), but he is playing with the “I” of the poem. He might be merely voicing the poem’s persona, but we also know that he, the author, could be saying t­ hese words as himself on a dif­fer­ent ­occasion, and the agitation in his voice reflects that. ­After the war and his return to Warsaw in 1946, Tuwim would sometimes read Polish Flowers, including “Valse,” aloud to his secretary, who described the feeling of being captivated and thrown into a dif­fer­ent real­ity.14 She remembered ­t hese readings as so poetic and intense that their endings felt painful. For her, Tuwim’s recitation had a performative quality—it was a speech act that transformed real­ity. It is pos­si­ble that Tuwim experienced this similarly; we know that he turned t­ hese readings into cele­brations, isolating himself from the rest of his h ­ ouse­hold and taking delight in the sounds of Polish Flowers, which, as he admitted, was the work closest to his heart.15 The emotional intensity of his 1943 recording for his s­ ister might have served a similar function, by allowing the speaker to become the dancer from the past, to feel not just the guilt and fear of the pre­sent, but also the exaltation he was once known for, even if the poem ends with a reminder of his

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fate. But the enchantment of the recording was unusual in that its effect was postponed; it was addressed to his ­sister, who was not ­there; the performative effect on the listener was separated from the moment of speaking; and it relied on the new technology of the time. Both the joy and the drama of the poem as recited by Tuwim ­were markers of his physical body, and became a way to connect with his s­ ister across a distance. This intimate recording shifted the poetic center of gravity from the artistry of the text to the tangibility and temporality of its per­for­mance. But this tangibility relied on the tangibility of the disc on which it was recorded. In the recording we also hear the sound of the playback, the noises made by the revolving disc, which remind us of its fragility. Perhaps the low quality of the recording was one of the reasons why Polish Radio, which received the disc in 1954, did not play it very often in broadcasts about Tuwim. For de­cades the recording remained an intimate per­for­mance for a ­family member, and readers knew “Valse” primarily from the print edition of Polish Flowers, published in 1949.16 Two years before Tuwim’s private recording for his ­sister, other segments of Polish Flowers circulated in very dif­fer­ent ways through Polish culture. Vari­ous written parts of the poem entered occupied Poland through private letters in 1941 and circulated anonymously as handwritten copies, both in the ghettos and on the “Aryan” side.17 The pieces that reached the Warsaw ghetto did not always meet with enthusiasm. Tuwim’s émigré reminiscences of the past ­were not a good match for the desperation of the ghetto’s inhabitants, who w ­ ere looking for some uplift and wondering what Tuwim even knew about the living conditions of Warsaw Jews—­not much, as it turns out. In a poem by Władysław Szlengel, a poet from the ghetto, the speaker bitterly resents and mocks the well-­being and safety of Tuwim in Brazil, and that of all Jews in Amer­i­ca.18 The Poland that Tuwim left in September 1939, and that dominated his thoughts during his stay in the United States, underwent dramatic changes ­u nder the Nazi and Soviet occupations. ­A fter Poland’s defeat in September 1939, Polish Radio blew up its main radio mast in Raszyn; the Nazi occupiers introduced the death penalty for the possession of a radio set; and ­later events, especially the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, led to the destruction of audio archives in Warsaw, as well as of private and public libraries.19 Many poems ­were only mimeographed or copied out by hand, even though ­t here ­were roughly four hundred under­g round printing h ­ ouses for books and

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periodicals. Under­ground theaters, classes, concerts, and poetry recitations ­were or­ga­nized secretly in private homes, and ­were accessible by invitation only, since regular venues, like universities and high schools, ­were all closed, and in­de­pen­dent publishing in Polish was outlawed. In Warsaw alone, ­t here ­were more than twenty secret salons hosted by writers and critics at their apartments, and one that met at the estate of the poet Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz in Stawisko near Warsaw.20 Despite the much harsher conditions in the ghettos, literary life, private recitations, and street singers ­were still pre­sent ­t here. Michał Borwicz has written about the role of poetry and songs in concentration and extermination camps. Poetry could inspire re­sis­tance, but memorized poems could also be compared to a last sip of drink before death, allowing a person to collect their thoughts and regain calmness.21 Circulating poems in a few written copies, and then copies of ­those copies, was often the only way to increase the chances that a text would survive. Tuwim found out about his critical reception in the ghettos during the war, and it confirmed his worst fears and deepened his sense of guilt.22 It made him even more ­eager—­both during and ­after the war—to find out more about his non-­Jewish Polish readership, where his works ­were better received and ­were featured in vari­ous secret under­g round poetry events held in private apartments in Warsaw.23 At t­ hese events, another fragment from the Polish ­ nder the title “The Prayer,” was of special imporFlowers, which circulated u tance. This fragment was also included in the famous clandestine anthology Pieśń niepodległa (The Invincible Song), edited by the poet Czesław Miłosz and published under­ground in Warsaw in 1942.24 Given the risks involved, the authors’ real names ­were not included in this anthology, but some readers could easily recognize Tuwim’s authorship of “The Prayer” ­because of the ­poet’s singularly distinctive style.25 The circulation of Tuwim’s “Prayer” in war­time Warsaw was not l­imited to the under­ground anthology. The poem continued to be copied in anonymous handwritten manuscripts. Among ­those who immediately recognized Tuwim’s style in private copies of the poem was a courageous Polish-­Jewish ­woman known as Krystyna Żywulska. In 1942 she walked out of the ghetto with her m ­ other and joined the Polish (most likely communist) re­sis­tance on the “Aryan” side.26 In early 1943, while looking for a safe place to spend the night before curfew, she came to a friend’s apartment, where she was

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shown some poems from the ghetto, including one text of unknown origin, titled “The Prayer.” Hearing the hostess read the text, Żywulska immediately recognized the author as Tuwim. She could not spend the night in this place, and before she left for another friend’s apartment, she asked to take the poems with her, despite the risks of carry­ing anti-­Nazi verse. In the second apartment, she and her friend had to conceal their presence, so they covered the win­dows and lit candles. They spent the night reading in a whisper and memorizing two of the texts brought by Żywulska: Tuwim’s “Prayer” and Szlengel’s “Counterattack,” a text about Jewish re­sis­tance in the ghetto, written during the fighting of January 1943, but before the uprising in April and May of that year, when Szlengel was killed. In the morning, before she left, Żywulska repeated the poems one last time and burned the paper.27 A few months l­ater Żywulska was arrested and sent to Auschwitz as a Polish po­liti­cal prisoner, her Jewish identity hidden. In the camp she began composing poetry and songs, which ­were disseminated orally, and which earned her the protection of another, better positioned prisoner.28 She was subsequently transferred to Birkenau, where she worked with other Polish ­women in the immediate vicinity of the mass killings of Jews. In Birkenau the other prisoners asked her to write a prayer that, rather than begging humbly, would convey all the outrage and horror of their circumstances. Faced with this request, Żywulska was reminded of Tuwim’s text, and gradually reconstructed it from memory.29 It began with the following words: Kindle the clouds into a glare, and Strike at our hearts with a bell of gold, Open our Poland as with a bolt You clear up the overcast heavens.30 Żywulska wrote the poem down so that ­others could memorize it, and soon the text became a collective prayer. In its ­later sections the poem makes a plea for the rule of wisdom and magnanimity, for social justice, equality, and goodwill, as well as for a renewed language, asking the Lord to give back “our words, altered / craftily by wheelers and dealers.”31 ­Toward the end, the text also expresses the distress of the prisoners, which they had wanted the prayer to convey, making its demands far less biblical than in e­ arlier sections. The Lord is asked to “tear off the cross” his “hands that bleed,” and to cover his eyes with them “when the time of vengeance draws near us.”32 The collective

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“we” of the poem is well aware that vengeance (the poem describes “Tatra Mountains of dead Germans”) is a far cry from the Gospels, but nevertheless demands it. The line “give us leave to break your commandment” was repeatedly heard in the whispers of w ­ omen from the barracks facing the cre­ eople reciting “The Prayer” ­were reported in matorium.33 Similar scenes of p other prisons and camps as well.34 “The Prayer,” so effectively memorized by Żywulska and other prisoners, was written in Polish in a regular iambic tetrameter, with a relatively ­simple syntax and mostly end-­stopped lines. This stable construction, which along with the rhymes facilitated memorization and did not require special recitation skills, also featured a nonspecific, collective speaker, a “we” who speaks to God about Poland. Readers who identify with this “we” can choose to perform this text as an expression of their own wishes, or even, as we saw, as a prayer. Rather than being mere readers, they can become users of the text—­and the text authorizes them to do so. The authorial vocalization is not required for this to take place; the textual “we” invites multiple voices to speak together in unison. The poem, brought to the camp by Żywulska and performed by w ­ omen with ­t hese new interpretations in mind, is reminiscent of the immaterial model of poetry’s ontology, of the idea that an abstract text becomes concretized through vari­ous recitations. This model of poetic ontology is supported by the poem’s regular meter and universal message. But in this case the poem was not merely recited, it was also transformed, moving from the sphere of lit­er­a­ture into something more like religious practice. Thus, the poem acquired its greatest performative power at the furthest remove from the per­ for­mances and meanings that Tuwim could have planned for it, when extreme circumstances transformed it into a radical prayer by camp prisoners. In the story of Tuwim’s “Prayer” memorized by Żywulska we can see how a piece of lit­er­a­ture modeled on the structure of a prayer became a real prayer; how a literary imitation of speech act (which is how lit­er­a­ture is sometimes defined) came close to becoming a regular speech act again, recitation turned into a prayer.35 A secondary speech genre reverted back to a primary one, without losing literary qualities. ­These war­time uses of poetry ­were strikingly dif­fer­ent from the institutionalized reception of art. Miłosz emphasized this feature of Polish poetry in the introduction to the American edition of his clandestine war­time anthology. In the United States, he noted, “poetry be-

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longs to a sphere of ‘culture,’ ” making it harder to visualize poems “as something on the level of essential h ­ uman needs, like bread, like the tools of work and weapons.”36 Żywulska’s story vividly shows how World War II foregrounded traditional poetic culture in Poland: poems w ­ ere used again in the private sphere, reenacted by diverse readers, distributed with the help of memorization. Memorized poems circulating in the community in the times of a strug­gle cannot, however, be viewed with reference to traditional poetic culture only. In Poland this situation additionally evoked the Romantic model of the functioning of lit­er­a­ture, which was imposed on that traditional circulation. The non-­ authorial circulation of poems gained an additional, patriotic-­Romantic function, traditional uses of poetry became merged with a patriotic aim of preserving national culture in the time of upheaval. Tuwim’s “Prayer” became so popu­lar not ­because it was modeled on a personal prayer, but b ­ ecause it expressed hopes regarding the w ­ hole country, its culture, language, and morality. Also, Tuwim’s own position resembled that of the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz: a g­ reat poet in exile, whose poetry is smuggled to the Polish lands. What we see in numerous recitations of “Prayer” in occupied war­time Poland is a grassroots reenactment of Romantic tradition, which sees poetry as a heritage to be voiced by the w ­ hole community. This model stemmed from Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod (as described in the Introduction), together with the famous quote that “the song w ­ ill survive unscathed.” And accordingly, Miłosz’s clandestine anthology of war­time poetry was titled Invincible Song, and a l­ater anthology of war­t ime poetry about the Holocaust, edited in 1947 by Borwicz, was titled Pieśń ujdzie cało . . . (The Song ­Will Survive Unscathed . . .).37 Clearly, in the 1940s, poetry that survives material destruction was still associated with collective voice and memory; in fact, forbidden songs performed during the occupation, which w ­ ere drawn from both street folklore and the patriotic repertoire, became the subject of the first Polish postwar film.38 In real­ity, versions of poems circulating during the war ­were not so resistant to changes, nor circulated through memory only. Per­for­mances and written copies introduced changes to punctuation, spelling, intonation, words, and even entire lines, since the laws of the copyright and authorization ­were suspended in the war­time private sphere. Indeed, it was a piece of

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paper, a handwritten copy, and not a per­for­mance, that allowed Żywulska to learn Tuwim’s text by heart before her internment. When the other prisoners asked her to compose a prayer, she also wrote down the memorized text, so that they could memorize it in turn. In many cases it was not memorization but written sources that helped preserve other­wise unknown materials, which ­were hidden, sometimes buried in the ground, often half-­destroyed. For example, the best-­k nown poem by Zuzanna Ginczanka survived the war in a single fragile manuscript. Writing about Polish-­Jewish lit­er­a­ture, Bożena Shallcross notes that genocide has undermined the possibility of relying on ­human memory, by destroying large swaths of the population.39 Nevertheless, this destabilization of texts and the role of communal per­for­mances did not mean that the poems ­were viewed as material objects. “The Prayer” remained hidden in Żywulska’s memory for almost a year, and in this immaterial form, it persevered throughout her arrest, interrogation, and hard l­ abor in the camp.

Tuwim as a Liminal Figure How should we make sense of the connection between Krystyna Żywulska’s collective prayer in 1944 and Julian Tuwim’s recording of a poetic waltz for his s­ ister in 1943? The two per­for­mances seem to belong to two dif­fer­ent worlds. The memorization and subsequent collective recitation of “The Prayer” fits neatly into the traditional-­Romantic model of poetic culture that was evoked during the war, which consisted of traditional, non-­authorial circulation of poems and their patriotic, Romantic function. Compared with that model, Tuwim’s sound postcard with “Grande Valse Brillante” stands out as a strikingly dif­fer­ent practice. The materiality of Tuwim’s audio postcard, the individualized sound patterns of the poetic dance, and the poem’s personal, autobiographical message are strikingly dif­fer­ent from the immateriality of the memorized “Prayer,” its mnemonics, its repeatable meter, and its collective speaker talking about Poland. Ultimately t­ hese two per­for­ mances suggest two dif­fer­ent views of poetry, with “Valse” being closer to the modernized culture of authorial readings and new technologies of sound reproduction. In the Introduction I argued that Polish culture can be seen as a laboratory of poetry per­for­mances, as a place where dif­fer­ent types of poetic cul-

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ture coexist and converge. Yet it may be surprising that t­ hese two views of poetry w ­ ere in place not only in the same war­time years, but that they w ­ ere also supported by the same poet. It was Tuwim who sent his manuscripts to Poland and who recorded his postcard; it was also Tuwim who ultimately published his Polish Flowers in 1949, and who continued to read his pieces out loud at home. It seems that the poet embraced the plurality of forms in which his poetry circulated, both the more abstract one, reliant just on the writing, meter and memorization, and the more concrete one, reliant on the poet’s own voicing. The poet’s sound postcard from 1943 was not, however, a ­simple proof of a modernized approach to poetry that one could associate with new technologies and authorial readings. The juxtaposition of the “Valse” and the “Prayer” is accurate only to a certain degree. Given the innovative use of modern technology in Tuwim’s postcard, it may not be clear why it is not an obvious example of modernized literary life. To see the difference, we need to recall the premiere example of the modern approach to poetry that Tuwim himself facilitated and pop­u­lar­ized long before World War II, during the interwar period of Poland’s in­de­pen­dence. In November 1918, together with his friends and other poets, Tuwim or­ga­nized the first poetic event of a new type in Poland. Instead of an aristocratic or middle-­class salon, or­ga­nized at home for l­imited circles of p ­ eople, like the salons where Adam Mickiewicz improvised in the nineteenth c­ entury, the new event took place in a Warsaw café, Pod Picadorem (­Under the Picador), and was open to anybody who would pay entrance fee. The readings ­were advertised, and the poets themselves, including Tuwim, performed their poems on stage.40 Even the artists’ cabaret Zielony Balonik (Green Balloon), which operated in Kraków a de­c ade ­earlier, had been more elite, requiring personal invitations, and only featured strictly cabaret-­style texts.41 Following Picador, open readings by authors soon spread to other cities and ­were ­adopted by a variety of Polish poets in the 1930s.42 During the war, the Picador poets who found refuge in the United States continued to give public readings t­ here, to Polish immigrants.43 Tuwim’s experience with reciting his own poems—­speaking to new audiences and foregrounding his authorial presence b ­ ehind his texts—­was therefore well rooted by the time he de­cided to rec­ord his sound postcard in 1943. Unlike ­these modern practices that he knew so well, though, Tuwim’s

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postcard was not made for the public. It did not reach the majority of his readers. It was made in a studio or booth accessible to all New Yorkers, but it was deeply personal in nature and sent to a ­sister to be listened to at home. Tuwim wanted to share his nostalgia with someone who could understand his feelings, perhaps relate to the same recollections. In a sense, his be­hav­ior was not so dif­fer­ent from Mickiewicz’s improvising for the circles of his followers, similarly prone to his enchantment. The very fact of speaking to a ­limited audience may thus be viewed as more traditional than modern. When it comes to the very idea of preserving the poet’s voice, however, we need to be more careful. Another modern ele­ment of prewar poetic culture that Tuwim knew very well was, of course, Polish Radio. When Polish Radio was launched in 1925, it was initially hard to encourage authors to do live broadcasts, but ultimately some poets w ­ ere convinced. An avant-­garde author, Jalu Kurek, wrote an enthusiastic poem for the launch of a literary program at the Kraków station, and recited it on air in 1927.44 In the 1930s, stations in Kraków and Vilnius ­were featuring more recitations by poets, and poets w ­ ere also working for Polish Radio as editors, administrators, critics, and writers of radio dramas.45 Nevertheless, Polish Radio did not start recording its broadcasts u ­ ntil the late 1930s, and prewar commercial recording studios ­were not interested in preserving poets’ and writers’ voices for posterity.46 The idea of recording a poet, therefore, was novel in Polish culture. This is also the reason Tuwim’s sound postcard might be the oldest preserved recording of a Polish poet reading their work. A fragile war­time disc turned out not to be so fragile: not only immaterial memorized poems, but also concrete sound waves of a rec­ord could survive the war. Tuwim’s sound postcard was a result of his creative response to the conditions in which he had found himself. This work was rooted in his awareness of the role of the poet’s voice and in his eagerness to experiment with new technologies, which accidentally he had at hand: such individual means of recording would not be available to poets in Poland ­until the 1960s. But his postcard was also a reflection of an older habit of reading poetry to ­family and friends, of using live poetry in everyday situations, for nonliterary means. His postcard served as a literal holiday gift, as a card with good wishes, as a means of surprising and enchanting his ­sister in London. Tuwim’s sound postcard is a pre­de­ces­sor of the works that came much ­later—­t he recordings I study in the remaining chapters of this book. ­These

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similarly combined modern and traditional ele­ments: authorial readings and private circumstances, new technologies and nonliterary uses of poems. Nevertheless, Tuwim himself was an author situated between two epochs in poetic culture, a liminal figure. The ­later poets I study in this book creatively used some ele­ments of traditional culture, but they ­were most convinced by their own readings and wrote free-­verse poems. In the case of Tuwim, it was not so obvious. Unlike the next generation of poets, Tuwim himself was happy to cooperate with non-­authorial professional performers of poetry. For example, at the innovative poetry readings launched at Picador in 1918, authors ­were not the only ones reading their texts. The main act was a declamation by the professional reciter and actress Maria Morska, who performed canonical poems as well as texts by her colleagues, including Tuwim.47 The best-­k nown Polish actors and actresses performed at the larger poetic events or­ga­nized by poetic groups of the interwar period, including Polish futurists.48 Tuwim’s poetry was recited by actors at two “poetry mornings” or­ga­nized by the famous Reduta Institute in the 1930s.49 Actors, not authors, dominated also in poetry broadcasts on prewar Polish Radio.50 Additionally, Tuwim himself was involved in popu­lar culture before the war. He wrote numerous lyr­ics for singers like Hanka Ordonówna, whose rec­ ords have been preserved; he also wrote poems, comic sketches, and lyr­ics for literary-­artistic cabarets, which ­were a prominent feature of the interwar Warsaw cultural landscape.51 The most popu­lar such establishment, Qui Pro Quo, opened in 1919, and throughout all its incarnations Tuwim remained closely involved with its artistic output, which brought him fame and prosperity.52 In other words, while Tuwim initiated the changes leading to postwar experiments, he was still rooted in the more traditional culture of non-­ authorial circulation of lit­er­a­ture and good recitation skills. He wrote metrical or irregularly metrical poems, which helped signal how to recite them; he was also a very competent performer himself, combining the declamatory and theatrical ele­ments, as we can hear in his sound postcard.53 His poems, like his recitations, w ­ ere expressive, contrastive, full of emotional tension and grandiloquence, suiting the audiences raised on Romantic expressivity. The culture in which the poet came of age was a mixture of new, modernizing trends, which started to promote the readings of young poets, and the

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more traditional approach to per­for­mance, according to which the majority of readings in the public sphere still belonged to professional actors and reciters. Authors ­were starting to be heard publicly, but good recitation skills ­were still valued and preferred. It is hard to call this culture simply traditional: an institutionalized series of literary events with actors performing new poetry or cabaret singers performing Tuwim’s lighter texts have a relatively modern outlook—­definitely more modern than ordinary readers reciting poems gathered at home. Institutionalization diminishes the role of ordinary readers, their reenactment of poems in everyday life. This modern outlook covers, nevertheless, a similarly traditional idea that the sounding of poems is not a task that belongs to authors.54 Tuwim, who died shortly ­after the war in 1953, might not seem the most obvious guide to postwar Polish poetic culture. Yet in many ways the historical conditions of the postwar era fostered a poetic culture suited to Tuwim’s generation. Polish literary culture continued to value expressive, competent recitations in the public sphere, while also allowing authors to be heard. Tuwim himself bridged the traditional and modern aspects of this literary culture—­from his pioneering sound postcard, to his authorial recitations at Picador, to his cooperations with singers and reciters, to the war­time circulation of his “Prayer” in occupied Poland. In the postwar period, dif­ fer­ent circulations of Tuwim’s poems allow us to see larger trends in poetic culture, as the relative dominance of traditional and modern approaches ebbed and flowed, and the two types of circulation w ­ ere at times merged with Romantic aesthetics and po­liti­cal functions. Against this mixed cultural background, the authors of the next generation—­born in the 1910s and 1920s, as a young Tuwim experimented with recitation at Picador—­matured as poets and performers. Tuwim’s postwar legacy thus offers a guide to the larger historical conditions that facilitated the poetic innovations of this next generation. Just as Tuwim’s stay in the United States helped him create his postcard, the experiments of ­these ­later poets w ­ ere inflected by the historical, technological, and cultural contours of postwar real­ity. I use Tuwim’s postwar legacy as a lens through which to illuminate the larger currents and trends in poetry per­for­mance, depicting the historical and cultural backdrop against which the next generation’s innovations would unfold. Three vignettes, each one about postwar per­for­mances of Tuwim’s “Prayer” and “Valse,” help illustrate the poetic currents that defined three distinct

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­ eriods of Polish history. In the Stalinist period (1947–1955), Tuwim’s own p per­for­mances reflect how the official communist literary culture merged a modernizing interest in poets’ own voices with Romantic expectations that ­those poets serve collective po­liti­cal aims. In the de­cades a­ fter the Thaw and de-­Stalinization of culture (1956–1976), sung versions of Tuwim’s poetry—­ less po­liti­cal, professional, highly emotional—­reflect the renewed interest in cabarets and non-­authorial per­for­mances, accompanied by the new availability of sound-­recording technologies and poets’ own readings. In the period of Solidarity (1980–1981), soon followed by martial law and several years of restrictions of culture, an actor’s recitation of Tuwim’s poem reflects the comeback of the traditional and Romantic trend in poetry per­for­mances developed in response to po­liti­cal upheavals. By taking a brief look at ­these three periods, we can see why traditional poetic culture had such a lasting presence in Poland, as well as some signals of the growing gap between non-­ authorial per­for­mances and poets’ own readings.

Stalinism The interest in making poets’ voices public, initiated by Tuwim and his peers in the interwar period, was not forgotten during World War II and was reinvigorated just a­ fter the war had concluded. Actually, even before the war had ended, in January 1945, less than two weeks a­ fter the Soviet Army had entered Kraków, a number of authors and actors gathered at the Old Theater to give an official poetry reading t­ here. They wore strange war­time clothes, the win­dow frames had no glass in them, the building had no heat, and audience members in sheepskin coats had to breathe on their hands to warm them. But the theater was full.55 This renewed interest in poets’ own voices accessible in public settings soon, however, became politicized. In 1947 Stalinist repressions ­were on the rise, and in 1949 socialist realism was pronounced the obligatory program for lit­er­a­ture and the visual arts. Czesław Miłosz described this period in The Captive Mind, a book of essays written in 1951, when he de­cided to leave his job at the Polish diplomatic ser­vice and remain in France. Communist leaders commemorated Adam Mickiewicz as a progressive revolutionary (diminishing some other aspects of his work) and expected con­temporary writers to become Mickiewicz-­like bards of the new regime.56 Władysław Broniewski

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was one of the poets who achieved broad popularity; he gave numerous readings to crowded rooms in factories and provincial clubs all over Poland, or­ ga­nized for miners and workers who at times ­really appreciated his poems, including t­ hose written before the war.57 Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński was in a more complicated po­liti­cal position, but he was known to recite “his verse magnificently in huge halls filled with p ­ eople.”58 As we know from the discussion of Mickiewicz’s improvisations in the Introduction, poetry that engages with national and po­liti­cal questions, that aims to guide and lead, works best if expressed through virtuosic per­for­mances that attest to the confidence of the speaker and the authority of the writer. The poets’ voices ­were cherished, but they also had to comply with certain aesthetic and po­liti­cal expectations. This was not a grassroots reenactment of Romantic princi­ples like during the war; in the Stalinist period it was a top-­down expectation that poets would be bards of the revolution, speaking on topics of interest to all citizens. As soon as Polish Radio reopened in 1945, poets w ­ ere featured in its broadcasts, but ­t here is a very l­ imited rec­ord of ­those programs b ­ ecause the tapes 59 ­were often reused. Polish Radio’s mast in Raszyn was rebuilt and put back into operation in 1949, allowing proper nationwide broadcasting and ­advancing the Soviet model for “building” a new citizenry through mass media. Over the next de­cade the number of radio subscribers indeed grew from 1.5 million to 5 million.60 Gałczyński’s recording from 1949, which consists of postwar poems about Warsaw and Kraków, might be the earliest postwar Polish poetry recording available to us ­today.61 Broniewski’s poetry was also frequently broadcast in the 1950s and 1960s.62 To this day, ­people remember the impression the voices of ­these two poets, Gałczyński and Broniewski, made on them in the late 1950s, though even at that point many radio recordings ­were not preserved or considered valuable.63 Julian Tuwim was supposed to play a similar role as a national poet within this framework of Soviet-­backed popularization of authorial recitations when he de­cided to return to Poland from the United States in 1946. He returned ­because he could not bear to live away from Poland and b ­ ecause during the war he had come to support communism and the leadership of the Soviet Union. It was in the United States that he had moved closer to communist circles and read excerpts from his Polish Flowers to the crowds of PolishAmerican workers. He believed Soviet declarations of equality and social jus-

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tice, and was convinced that the Soviets w ­ ere the only force that could defeat the anti-­Semitism he remembered so vividly from the prewar years. As he famously wrote in his 1944 manifesto “We, Polish Jews . . . ,” he considered himself a Pole in part ­because his “hatred for Polish fascists [was] greater than for fascists of any other nationality.” 64 In 1946 the authorities ­were glad to have the most impor­tant prewar poet on their side. When Tuwim returned to the ruins of Warsaw, they gave him a furnished apartment, and then a villa. In July 1947, when he was on vacation, he took part in the local cele­brations of the national holiday of communist Poland, where he read his “Prayer.” Tuwim was deeply moved when he was called a “Polish revolutionary poet.” His text, which Tuwim wrote during the war as a criticism of prewar Poland and an expression of hope for its renewal a­ fter the war, now sounded like a direct endorsement of the government program. The just Poland, for which the collective “we” of the poem was asking God, was to be built by the new regime. The references to God only helped in this religious country, where they could serve to ­legitimize the government. In his recitation, Tuwim’s authority and authorship ­were as impor­tant as his declamatory skills: the author of this well-­ known poem, the famous prewar poet, was t­ here, in the flesh, celebrating the national holiday.65 Tuwim officially remained a supporter of the regime, but he soon realized that he could not openly talk about anti-­Semitism. Prob­lems of the past w ­ ere not up for discussion in this era devoted to the optimistic f­ uture of socialist workers. Tuwim strug­g led to publish Polish Flowers, and though he wrote some occasional poems for the government, including a text on Stalin, he was not able to produce any major works. This was a challenging period for the poet: he and his wife ­adopted a d ­ aughter, he reinterred his ­mother in a Jewish cemetery, he learned about the extent of war­time destruction and the Holocaust, and he suffered from increasing guilt and agoraphobia, which ­limited his public activities. As his prewar colleague noted, he had returned a broken man, and in the rare recordings of Tuwim that are preserved from that time period, his voice seems tremulous and shaky. Fi­nally Tuwim ­stopped appearing at public events altogether.66 ­There is thus a striking difference between Tuwim as the first poet-­ performer of interwar Poland, a competent reciter and popu­lar author of poetry and lyr­ics, and the ­silent Tuwim at the end of his life who could not

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become the national poet that the Polish P ­ eople’s Republic expected him to be, who did not write any major work ­after his return to the homeland. The poet seemed to perform best b ­ ehind closed doors, reading his Polish Flowers to his secretary. Tuwim’s story illustrates a twofold lesson that Polish poets ­were taught during the Stalinist merger of the Romantic model and the Soviet-­style popularization of poetry in Polish culture. First, many authors became suspicious of any ­future direct politicization of their texts, of becoming Mickiewicz-­like, doubtless leaders in their poems, of applying their texts directly to concrete occasions. Th ­ ese questions w ­ ere raised in consequence of the war, when lit­ er­a­ture inspired so many p ­ eople, including poets, to fight and to die. Yet especially from the time of Stalinism onward, poetic po­liti­cal commitment became compromised. Since that time, we can see further growth of self-­irony and skepticism in Polish poetic diction, which influenced poets’ approach to their reading styles, too. Second, during the Stalinist period many texts could not be heard officially if they did not conform to socialist realist program or if the authors ­were banned. By necessity, the circulation of such poems was confined to readings in the traditional, private sphere, like Tuwim’s recitations for his secretary. As a result, the importance of traditional poetic culture was extended even as the official sphere was modernized.

­After the Thaw Julian Tuwim died in 1953, three years before big changes in Polish politics ­were launched. The Thaw, which began in October 1956, marked the beginning of a new phase in communist Poland’s official culture, including a reduction in censorship. Amid ­these developments in the 1960s, official literary life took on dif­fer­ent forms, some more liberal, some less. Almost every­one was involved in the gray sphere of negotiations with the authorities. It was pos­si­ble to find spheres of greater liberty, though to a ­limited degree: even a private circulation of a work of po­liti­cal satire could lead to imprisonment when it became too popu­lar.67 Yet in general, the early post-­Thaw years w ­ ere accurately summed up by Adam Zagajewski, a poet from Generation ’68 who would soon contest this state of affairs: “The Polish P ­ eople’s Republic was a very strange country: its culture was almost entirely sponsored . . . ​by the state, while most of the artists, film makers, theater ­people, writers, poets,

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and even composers ­were mercilessly, though in a slightly camouflaged way, criticizing the very same state.” 68 Examples of intermediary, gray spheres that w ­ ere allowed greater freedom in the 1960s included student theaters, clubs, and cabarets. At the Kraków cabaret Piwnica Pod Baranami (Cellar u ­ nder the Rams), one could hear, for instance, impressive sung versions of Polish poems. The new phenomenon of “sung poetry,” originally rooted in student and cabaret culture, became very influential for poetry reception in Poland and remains so to this day. One of the most popu­lar singers associated with the cabaret U ­ nder the Rams was Ewa Demarczyk, whose per­for­mances of Polish Romantic and con­ temporary poetry set to piano and violin melodies ­were released on LPs and became very popu­lar in the 1960s and 1970s. Her singing style was sometimes compared to that of Edith Piaf. Her choice of poems and authors, her dramatic flair, and the communal experience provided by the cabaret setting, combined to make ­t hese songs sound in­de­pen­dent and fresh in the cultural climate of communist Poland.69 According to one account, it was Piotr Skrzynecki, the founder of the Cellar ­under the Rams, who in 1961 gave a copy of Tuwim’s “Grande Valse Brillante” to the composer Zygmunt Konieczny and asked him to set the text to ­music. Konieczny did so, saying that the musicality of Tuwim’s words guided his composition, that the words of the poet had determined the rhythm. Although Konieczny’s song was originally written for a male performer (in accordance with Tuwim’s text), Demarczyk de­cided to include “Valse” in her repertoire for the Sopot Festival in 1964. Her version was slightly altered to impersonate a female speaker (and a fine had to be paid for this last-­minute change).70 Demarczyk’s version of the song immediately became a hit, and it was included in her 1967 LP.71 Demarczyk’s power­f ul voice reinvigorated Tuwim’s text, shifting its focus from a man’s self-­ironizing recollection to a ­woman’s ironic view of her dancing partner and his poverty. Konieczny introduced other changes as well; his composition starts with an ­earlier excerpt from Polish Flowers, which introduces the “Valse” before the scene of the dance begins, and it finishes before the end of the poetic waltz. Despite ­these changes, the 1967 recording became the canonical per­for­mance of “Valse” in the collective memory of Poles, many of whom did not know Tuwim’s own recording from his private postcard.

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Some listeners who had a chance to hear both renditions have remarked on the similarity between the melody of Tuwim’s recitation and Demarczyk’s song. Of course, Demarczyk sings rather than speaks; her per­for­mance is more expressive, and the dynamics and tempo are even more varied than in Tuwim’s recording. Upon closer examination, the two per­for­mances reveal some further differences in accentuation of words. Yet in general, the poem’s irregular anapestic meter; the questions and enumerations included in the text; the many short lines followed by meaningful pauses; the rhymes; and the emotions described by the speaker—­a ll this was evocative enough to create a similar impression, a similar interplay of accents and intonations. Interestingly, Konieczny and Demarczyk w ­ ere not familiar with Tuwim’s recording when they composed and performed their version of the song; Konieczny only encountered Tuwim’s recording l­ ater on. The existence of the two versions created possibilities for interplay; in some radio broadcasts we can hear Tuwim’s recitation gradually overlapping with Demarczyk’s voice, ultimately being replaced by her song altogether, highlighting the similarity of the two per­for­mances. However, listeners who first encountered Tuwim’s reading through this juxtaposition with Demarczyk’s per­for­mance did not necessarily gain a better understanding of the poet’s recording. One person even asked Konieczny if Tuwim had modeled his recitation on Konieczny’s ­music—­not realizing that Tuwim’s recording took place two de­cades before Konieczny’s m ­ usic was composed. Even more striking than the reverse chronology is the assumption that the poet’s reading is so secondary that it has to imitate the composer’s ­music, not the other way round. For this one listener, as well as many other Poles, Demarczyk’s rendition was the primary per­for­mance of the “Valse.”72 This story confirms the prominent position of non-­authorial performers of poetry in Polish culture and the audiences’ preference for skill over authenticity. This approach did not ­counter what we know about Tuwim’s own attitude to poetry. He was himself well rooted in cabaret culture and cooperated with ­women performers before the war. The time of the Thaw enabled new links between high and popu­lar culture: in this case, the text of Tuwim’s poem worked well with Demarczyk’s emotional, dramatic style. His meter helped to reconstruct the poem’s prosody when Konieczny was writing the ­music. Significantly, what Demarczyk and Konieczny did—­and what audiences loved—­took place in the 1960s, thirty years ­after the interwar period.

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The popularity of this professional, non-­authorial per­for­mance speaks to an impor­tant nuance in Polish postwar culture—­especially as compared with Anglophone literary culture during the same period. Professional performers of poetry did not dis­appear from Polish culture ­after the war. Non-­authorial readings w ­ ere not l­imited to home gatherings in the times of oppression. Prewar cultural patterns continued in the postwar era—­t hey ­were revived ­after the break caused by the war and Stalinism, which made them look attractive again. To some extent Demarczyk’s style and songs had also a Romantic flavor, especially when she sang Tuwim’s poems or ­those of Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, who was killed as a young partisan during the war. In this way she maintained the memory of the dead poets, but also of poets of Jewish descent.73 When communist authorities unleashed the anti-­Semitic campaign in 1968, Demarczyk continued to sing “Psalms of David” from her new repertoire, for which she was harassed and herself “accused” of being Jewish. She was not, but she refused to defend herself by discussing her origins.74 Demarczyk’s work clearly included an ele­ment of re­sis­tance and in­de­pen­dence, in this way assuming a more Romantic approach to poetry. At the same time, it is hard not to compare Polish cabarets from the 1960s with other combinations of ­music, poetry, and club atmosphere that we know from the Anglophone countries, where such venues supported poets’ own per­for­mances. The crucial difference is that in Poland ­t hese ­were not poets, but singers and actors who performed. In the 1970s and 1980s in Warsaw, ­these ­were also the guitar poets, the singer-­songwriters, who also performed classical poems. New technologies and media, such as radio, TV, and vinyl rec­ords, and ­later cassettes, increasingly helped to pop­u­lar­ize and even authorize concrete, material instantiation of poems, but again, frequently ­these ­were not the authorial voicings of texts. The development of new technologies in the 1960s, paired with the continued non-­authorial transmission of poems, could lead to paradoxical situations. Tuwim’s own recording from his sound postcard remained unexamined for many de­cades and was published only in 2013, alongside young artists performing Tuwim’s texts; in 1964, sound postcards appeared in Polish kiosks with Demarczyk’s rendition of the “Valse.”75 Audio postcards became popu­lar in communist Poland much ­later than in the United States, and they often served as a way of circulating songs that w ­ ere hard to buy on LP. Th ­ ese

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­ ere brief, at times semi-­legal, recordings to which one could add personal w greetings, though many postcards w ­ ere not sent, but bought instead of vinyl rec­ords.76 Unconsciously, the original aim of Tuwim’s recording was thus reimplemented in Polish poetic culture, now making his personal poem a background for any personal aims of any buyer. The autobiographical poem was first treated just as a piece of lit­er­a­ture and song, as an imitation of a real speech act, as a piece that anybody could relate to, and then reinstalled in ­people’s personal lives as a vague remnant of poetry’s presence in traditional everyday life. The 1960s ­were thus the time of an intense development of sound technologies that could be of interest to artists and poets, and authors could gradually register their voices. Regardless of the role of non-­authorial per­for­mances in popu­lar (though still highly literary) culture, poetry readings ­were never discontinued, and authors got access to new technologies as well. A series of eigh­teen vinyl rec­ords that featured Polish poets was published in the 1960s and 1970s. For the first time, poets’ voices w ­ ere available on demand for readers. Among o ­ thers, the series featured the recordings by certain poets affiliated with the prewar groups; Tuwim was not included b ­ ecause he died in 1953.77 Tape recorders started to be available to poets and scholars, and poets ­were invited to speak on the airwaves. In 1961, in a broadcast for Polish Radio, the poet Zbigniew Herbert declared that he specifically wanted to recite his own poems, and not to have them read by actors, b ­ ecause he liked his own recitations.78 At the same time his own radio plays w ­ ere produced 79 by Polish Radio. The authors’ renditions of poems did not become dominant on the radio, as many radio broadcasts still featured actors’ recitations. Poets also ­were not the default performers at live readings. A series of poetry readings or­ga­nized in the 1960s and 1970s at the historic Wawel Royal C ­ astle in Kraków can serve as an example of this practice. In 1971 Herbert was invited to read his work himself, but in 1975 Wisława Szymborska’s poetry on the subject of “unhappy love” was recited by the actress Anna Polony.80 Many years l­ater the poet admitted that she actually liked her texts in the renditions of two actresses, ­ ere thus Polony and Irena Jun.81 Some ele­ments of traditional poetic culture w accepted by poets themselves, though it is also clear that Szymborska did not perceive per­for­mances by other actors as an adequate way of conveying her texts. The authors did have opinions regarding appropriate per­for­mances.

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The 1960s and 1970s w ­ ere a time of updates in Polish culture. Poetry was no longer restricted by socialist realism; the poets who debuted in 1956 switched to ­free verse; new media offered new opportunities. Poetry festivals and readings w ­ ere or­ga­nized all over in Poland. Many authors, including Herbert, ­were allowed to travel to the West and participate in international fes­ ere thus able to compare dif­fer­ent reading styles and tivals abroad.82 They w habits coming from the cultures where the poets’ own readings ­were more obvious than in Poland. It is not surprising that around this time Polish poets began experimenting with their interest in sounds. This interest was marked, however, by some early splits from wider public culture and its ideas of successful per­for­mance. This interest was also overshadowed by t­ hose successful per­for­mances of actors and singers.

Solidarity and Martial Law The famous strike in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980 led to the formation of Solidarity, the first in­de­pen­dent trade u ­ nion in a communist country. In November, when the u ­ nion was to be officially registered in Warsaw, Polish actors or­ga­nized a poetry recital “Warsaw Artists for Solidarity,” which took place at the G ­ rand Theater. Major actors, many of them involved in the opposition and Solidarity, recited Polish Romantic and con­temporary verse for around two thousand workers. Halina Mikołajska, an actress known for her ongoing involvement in the opposition, was the first to perform; her reading of Romantic verse received a standing ovation. An ironic and witty verse by Wisława Szymborska, declaimed by Zofia Mrozowska, made the audience erupt in laughter.83 Interestingly, Julian Tuwim’s “Prayer” appeared alongside t­ hese Romantic and con­temporary texts. The opening section of Tuwim’s poem was recited by the actor Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, and it too received an enthusiastic ovation. The brief recitation was interrupted five times by applause, and the actor, known for his restraint and for avoiding lofty sentiment, gave a galvanizing per­for­mance. At that moment, Tuwim’s words from 1941 resonated perfectly with the demands of the striking workers: “Give the toilers owner­ship, the fruit / Of their l­abor in villages and / Cities,” “set up the skull of a dead man / On the desk of a growling ruler,” and “Let the law always denote law” ­were among the most appreciated lines.84 In front of the theater audience,

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Zapasiewicz was not praying with “The Prayer” the way war­time prisoners did, but neither was he merely voicing an assigned text—he was using this literary work to express his heartfelt convictions and to give voice to emotions shared by his audience. The same text that had been read in cele­bration of the communist government in 1947 was now being used to voice re­sis­tance to that government; Tuwim’s personal history was less impor­tant than the war­time legacy of his text. The hopes for a just Poland expressed in the poem ­were no longer perceived as hopes that the regime could help to realize, but as hopes expressed in spite of the regime’s activities. Th ­ ese two per­for­mances, from 1947 and 1980, as well as the war­time history of the poem—­when the hopes for a just Poland w ­ ere above all hopes for a f­ ree, non-­occupied country—­illustrate radical shifts in the poem’s meaning. One such shift took place when Tuwim’s text was transformed into a camp prayer in 1944; another occurred in 1980 when p ­ eople remembered the poem’s importance during the war but also treated it as an expression of their current strug­gle for justice. Such new uses of the poem, its concrete appropriations and applications, seem to suggest that the traditional poetic culture was still in place, that nonliterary uses of poetry and professional recitations at public events w ­ ere still at work. “The Prayer” was treated simply as part of a national legacy that every­body can quote and use. The recitation clearly had also a Romantic inflection to it, the conviction that such words about Poland require an expressive, galvanizing per­for­mance, and that Tuwim’s prophetic words supported the current moment, surrounded by Romantic poetry but also by con­temporary texts. Yet ­t hese ­were the actors who applied “The Prayer” to the sublime, po­liti­cal, and poetic cele­bration of the moment. Tuwim’s “Prayer” was clearly a poem open to many interpretations, but what changed was more than just its interpretation. The 1980 reading was of an excerpt, leaving aside the less applicable, war-­related parts. Tuwim’s “Prayer” was thought of as an example of immaterial cultural heritage that survived the war, but in practice it was destabilized, cut, modified (as we remember, changes w ­ ere also made for Ewa Demarczyk’s rendition of “Valse”). Tuwim’s poetry confirms the workings of the Romantic paradigm, in which a reverence for a g­ reat poet is helpful, but poetry and recitation style should speak to listeners’ needs. Solidarity marked a brief period of increased freedoms u ­ ntil the movement was crushed by martial law in December 1981. In this brief period the voice

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of the opposition could be heard in official cultural spaces, including the Writers’ Union, and became a prominent part of Polish institutions.85 Nevertheless, many of t­ hese institutions functioned according to traditional poetic culture and the Romantic paradigm. The two patterns, merged together, ­were also pre­sent in Polish culture for a few years before Solidarity and for a few years a­ fter it was crushed. Before and a­ fter Solidarity, this traditional-­ Romantic poetic culture was additionally confined to even more traditional and more Romantic under­ground and semi-­legal spaces. This pro­cess began in 1976 when the Committee for the Defense of Workers was formed ­after strikes in Ursus and Radom. Writers and poets involved in the committee and in the e­ arlier protest letters ­were banned, and many lost their jobs; this led to a flowering of under­ground cultural life, with home concerts, meetings, recitations, Flying University classes, and most importantly, in­de­pen­dent publishing.86 For example, the Walendowskis’ salon, launched in Warsaw in 1977, hosted readings by actors, poets, and bards of guitar poetry.87 Mikołajska and Maciej Rayzacher recited Czesław Miłosz’s poetry, banned since the time he defected in 1951, at under­ground events in parish rooms.88 And similarly, when martial law was established by communist authorities in December 1981 in order to crush Solidarity and regain po­liti­cal control over the situation in the country, many activists ­were arrested and interned, and the cultural sphere was heavi­ly restricted. Solidarity became illegal, and remained so also ­after the state of war was formally lifted in 1983.89 As a result, many poets used the semi-­institutionalized space of Catholic churches that participated in the Weeks of Christian Culture. The very experience of being in a crowded dark church, and the associations with the Romantic tradition, made t­ hese events seem attractive and subversive.90 At that time, anonymous poems and songs w ­ ere circulated, often as travesties of war­time texts. Under­ ground editions of cassettes ­were produced and distributed; for example, the NOWa publishing h ­ ouse began issuing a series of cassettes at the turn of 1983, beginning with songs recorded in two internment camps. Poetry was featured on other cassette recordings from that time as well, but it was usually shared in non-­authorial forms: it was e­ ither turned into sung poetry by bards, especially Przemysław Gintrowski, or recited by actors, especially ­t hose boycotting Polish TV and Radio.91 In other words, new technology of cassette recording was used, but it served an older vision of culture: actors and singers performing poems according to Romantic ideas of re­sis­tance.

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The role of the actors in this de­cade was not only a result of the public’s preference for professional, expressive recitations. Theater was an impor­tant part of Polish po­liti­cal life even before the 1970s. The large-­scale student protests against censorship in 1968 ­were provoked by the government shutting down the now-­famous staging of Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve, directed by Kazimierz Dejmek. Dejmek had not intended to rouse anti-­Soviet feelings; it was the audience’s reaction and the po­liti­cal context that made per­ for­mances so significant.92 Yet in the 1970s and 1980s, some actors themselves wanted to make their own choices about the repertoire they performed and the venues where they appeared. In a sense, a basic assumption of acting—­ “this is not me, I am just impersonating this role”—­was questioned. Now only a l­imited spectrum of poems and roles was considered: “even if t­ hese poetic selves are not me, what they say should be close to my own convictions.” Mikołajska was among the first professional actors to reconsider their role and responsibility. She became involved in “theatrical samizdat,” performing monodramas and reciting poetry in parish buildings and salons hosted by members of the opposition.93 During the strikes in Gdańsk in 1980, ­these w ­ ere also the actors from a local theater who came to express their support and recite Romantic poetry, which turned out to be in g­ reat demand among the workers.94 And during martial law some actors boycotted state media.95 Their role as transmitters of Polish national poems at dif­fer­ent events and on cassettes was therefore supported by their authority. This authority may also explain actors’ role at the Warsaw event at the ­Grand Theater. One can won­der where Polish poets w ­ ere in this situation, and why they ­were not pre­sent on stage at the Warsaw event. The two most impor­tant names of the 1980s ­were ­those of Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert. Neither of them was in Poland in August and November 1980, but in 1981 Herbert returned from his lengthy stay abroad.96 Miłosz was still in exile, but in 1981 he was fi­nally able to visit Poland. This was due to the fact that in 1980 he received the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture, just a­ fter the August strike and the beginning of Solidarity. Subsequently, he also had his poetry books published officially by Polish presses.97 In December 1980 an excerpt from his poem “You Who Wronged” was engraved (against his wishes) on a new monument in Gdańsk commemorating the shipyard workers killed ten years ­earlier during the 1970 protests.98 Andrzej Wajda’s new film on Solidarity, Man of Iron, opened with a scene featuring the actress Maja Komorowska reciting Miłosz’s poem

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“Hope.”99 The poet was clearly treated as a national bard, and his texts w ­ ere circulated and quoted. During Miłosz’s visit to Poland in June 1981, at his triumphant tour through the main Polish cities, he was welcomed by crowds as a hero, gave readings, met with fans and Solidarity members, and was recorded.100 Yet the author himself recalled his Polish homecoming with mixed feelings b ­ ecause he was greeted as a spiritual leader and personality rather than as a poet. He said of his meeting with students that their po­liti­cal temperature resembled that of the war­time Warsaw before the 1944 Uprising, and that he did not want to stoke ­these feelings, knowing how ­little hope ­t here was for any further po­ liti­cal change.101 At the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, he said he felt like an exhibition object.102 At the Catholic University in Lublin, where he received a doctorate honoris causa, he denied being a Catholic poet in the narrow sense. The labels of national hero, leader, and poet-­prophet w ­ ere clearly too narrow and felt false to Miłosz.103 At the same time, the poet did not want to withdraw from his e­ ager audiences, and in Lublin he listened to an actor reciting and a choir singing “You Who Wronged” during the solemn ceremony.104 The audience Miłosz had longed for was not interested in his authenticity, but in their own image of a Romantic émigré poet. And soon, when Miłosz had to be back in Amer­i­ca, the old, non-­authorial circulation of his poems could continue. Traditional, non-­authorial circulation was also typical of Herbert’s poetry. During Solidarity his poems ­were turned into theatrical per­for­mances and staged on TV; t­ hese became even more popu­lar and revered u ­ nder martial law.105 Herbert’s fame, both in Poland and abroad, meant that he was neither interned nor banned by the authorities. With so many imprisoned friends, however, he could not in good conscience publish new volumes with state presses and give official readings, but he read in crowded churches packed with thousands of ­people. Though he often read with distance and self-­irony, changed the mood and joked, the same texts listened to in a dark church w ­ ere treated as an anticommunist rally, as an embodiment of the national myth.106 During martial law, Herbert also eventually agreed to let Zapasiewicz stage a theatrical per­for­mance based on his poetry book, and gave Gintrowski permission to perform songs based on his poems “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” and “Report from the Besieged City,” which appeared on under­g round cassettes.107 He l­ater distanced himself from that rendition of his “Envoy,”

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suggesting that the musical version did not serve the poem and its meanings in the best way, ­because it shed the poem’s elegance and irony; but the poem in Gintrowski’s per­for­mance took on a life of its own, as an anthem of the opposition, making it harder to criticize the per­for­mance.108 In the 1980s t­here was a clear resurgence of the Romantic model of poetry: when authors appeared in person, they w ­ ere expected to fit the model of the national poet-­prophet. When they w ­ ere absent, their words ­were “on many lips”; they circulated as part of communal heritage. What is especially striking is that the role of actors and bards as poetry performers was reinforced so late in the twentieth c­ entury, undermining the modernizing current in poetic culture and strengthening the traditional approach to text and per­for­mance in the 1980s. Authors’ poetry readings did not cease to be or­ga­ nized at any point, yet w ­ hether official or oppositional they became po­liti­ cally marked at that time. Wider audiences that ­were again drawn to poetry, as they ­were during the war, meant also that the character and temperature of their expectations differed from purely aesthetic discussions, and gradually the rift between the popu­lar and poets’ views of poetry was deepening. Some poets w ­ ere e­ ager, of course, to play the role of the bards, but the major authors, while supportive of the opposition, ­were more ambiguous about po­ liti­cal interpretation and implementation of their poetry. ­After the Stalinist lesson, an expressive recitation of poems was more common for actors than authors. Tuwim’s “Prayer,” which opened our discussion of the 1980s, vividly shows how concrete situations and concrete performers reinforced certain meanings of texts, therein weakening other interpretations and the original contexts in which poems ­were written. Many texts ­were reenacted to express their speakers’ hopes and wishes rather than simply read or recited, and poets ­were well aware of t­ hese changes taking place during the readings.

­After 1989 It is an in­ter­est­ing coincidence that ­after the fall of the Iron Curtain and Poland’s po­liti­cal transition to democracy in 1989, three impor­tant poets from the de­cades that followed—­Marcin Świetlicki, Andrzej Sosnowski, and Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-­Dycki—­all combined their prominence on the Polish literary scene with their own special per­for­mance styles.109 In the case of many of the younger poets, it was clear that in their poetry they w ­ ere contesting

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not only the old poetic diction but also the style of its non-­authorial circulation in the 1980s. In a radio program from 1997, Sosnowski literally said that it is valuable to see how authors read, and that actors’ readings of lyric poetry are a complete misunderstanding. The radio followed this statement by playing an actor reading Sosnowski’s poem, illustrating the gap between the claims of the younger authors and the traditions of Polish radio broadcasting.110 Yet the 1990s and 2000s w ­ ere not simply a time when younger poets read and recorded their texts in opposition to actors’ renderings. In ­these de­cades the older poets also w ­ ere eagerly recorded. In 1996 Polish Radio Bis recorded Czesław Miłosz, and from 1996 to 1998 a ­whole series of CDs was issued by Radio Kraków, featuring Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, and Tadeusz Różewicz, as well as a generous se­lection of poems read by vari­ous authors.111 In the previous de­cades t­ hese poets w ­ ere themselves confused about, undecided, or unwilling to admit to the role of their own readings, while public opinion has stuck to its own strong preferences. But their convictions about readings gradually developed. The 1990s became another, ­a fter the 1960s, impor­tant moment for their work with recordings and sound. So it was not only a de­cade when younger poets chose to modernize poetic culture, but also a time when the poets born in the 1910s and 1920s could fully express their interests in readings. The opening vignette of the Introduction, with Miłosz reading in Poland in 1996, illustrates this trend. However, t­hese authorial poetic updates ­were not always in step with broader cultural patterns or audience expectations. Nowadays theaters continue to host poetry readings by actors only; actors recite poems at awards ceremonies for literary prizes; and on radio broadcasts featuring poets, actors are often asked to read the poems.112 Even if memorizing and reciting poetry are no longer popu­lar hobbies in Poland, recitation contests and workshops are still or­ga­nized in some schools and universities.113 Moreover, con­ temporary musicians are once more interested in adapting Polish poetry to new formats—­including merging punk-­rock energy with poems by Tuwim, especially ­those outside the repertoire of patriotic and melancholic works. His prewar poems, which reflect on growing authoritarianism, militarization, nationalism, and in­equality, have been performed more frequently in the last de­cade.114 As late as 2020, ­after the death of the singer Ewa Demarczyk, a critic

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wrote that “in several poems, Tuwim, Leśmian, and Mandelstam speak only in [Demarczyk’s] voice.” To this day the authority of per­for­mances by an expressive, popu­lar singer can be greater than that of a poet’s recordings.115 The ­earlier, divergent patterns of authorial and non-­authorial transmission had a lasting influence on the concept of voice in Polish poetry. Although more authorial recordings have been made in the last twenty years, this may be too short a time for a culture to view authors’ per­for­mances and written versions as equally valid, since in the past so many authorial readings had remained inaccessible to common readers and ­were supplanted by other types of per­for­mance.116 We have seen the reasons for the lasting presence of traditional poetic culture in Poland, and some signals of the growing gap between non-­authorial per­for­mances and poets’ own readings, through the lens of three moments in postwar Polish culture. In the 1940s and 1950s the Soviet-­style modernization of Poland’s poetry scene required po­liti­cal commitment, but was also modeled on a Romantic idea of the poet as a bard of the ­whole society, subsequently making this model compromised for many authors. In the 1960s the availability of new po­liti­cal liberties and new technologies created the conditions for Polish poets to rethink their attitude to voice and take a freer approach to public readings. For a wider public, nevertheless, their efforts ­were overshadowed by a flourishing cabaret scene, sung poetry, radio theater, and actors’ recitations. In the 1980s, meanwhile, traditional and Romantic patterns of poetry circulation ­were reinvigorated as actors played an impor­tant role for Solidarity movement; during this time, major poets associated with the anticommunist opposition w ­ ere perceived through the model of the poet-­prophet. To some extent Polish poetic culture is still located t­ oday between the traditional and the modern, as it was in Tuwim’s youth in the interwar period. Nevertheless, the proportions of ­t hese two currents and the poets’ convictions about their preferred mode of circulation have changed significantly in the last three de­cades. The style of the authors’ readings has also evolved throughout the postwar era between Tuwim and Sosnowski.

Recording W ­ omen’s Voices It is no accident that most of the poets discussed in this chapter w ­ ere men, whereas many of the non-­authorial performers w ­ ere ­women. This gendered

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pattern of per­for­mance reflects the par­tic­u­lar contours of Polish literary culture. In twentieth-­century Poland, w ­ omen’s poetry was often associated with a negative ste­reo­t ype of “feminine poetry,” which generally signified lyric poetry about love, marked by sentimentality, melody, and meta­phorical language. In theory, the Polish word for this type of poetry, “kobieca,” may simply mean “written by w ­ omen,” but it brings to mind associations with ste­ reo­t ypes of femininity.117 This ste­reo­t ype of feminine poetry, in turn, seems to have had repercussions on public perceptions of ­women’s poetry per­for­mances. For instance, Dominic Pettman has noted more generally the prevalence of cultural associations between female singers and sirens, and ­women and songbirds—as well as the seductive power of voice, reflecting the idea that men think and ­woman sing, that language belongs to men and voice to w ­ omen.118 This culturally accepted view of femininity, as related to voice rather than log­os, at times facilitated the appreciation for outstanding vocal renditions by non-­ authorial female performers: actresses, reciters, and singers, when their power relied on a gendered view of their bodies and voices. Prewar reciters like Maria Morska, prewar singers like Hanka Ordonówna, postwar singers like Ewa Demarczyk, and postwar actresses like Halina Mikołajska ­were all eagerly listened to in prewar and postwar Poland. They ­were accepted as transmitters of national heritage, as voices b ­ ehind the national poems. Though at times they w ­ ere also criticized as too feminine, too expressive, or too emotional, their expressive voices and distinctive per­for­mances s­ haped the vocal versions of poems and lyr­ics heard across Poland.119 While femininity was an asset for gaining wider audiences of popu­lar non-­ authorial per­for­mances, it was not an asset for ­women poets, especially as judged by literary critics. Many of the ­women poets featured in this book, as we w ­ ill see, tried to restrain the associations with gender. Consider, for example, the case of three ­women featured on a series of Polish poetry rec­ords issued in the 1960s and 1970s: Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna, Wisława Szym­ borska, and Anna Kamieńska. Compared with the fifteen male authors featured in the series, the three ­women read their texts in the least melodic, at times ironic, but also precise and well-­modulated tone. Th ­ ere is also surprising consistency among blurbs that described the recordings of ­these ­women poets. Their verse was repeatedly said to be concrete, concise, and disciplined, clear and controlled, as well as displaying a humanistic, philosophical attitude t­ oward the world. Claims to universalism, concreteness, and

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restrained feelings seemed to make the poets sound like proper mainstream authors.120 And indeed, a certain restraint and self-­irony ­were the staple of postwar Polish poetry a­ fter Stalinism. Nevertheless, one of the first Polish ­women poets whose voice was preserved by audio recording, Halina Poświatowska (1935–1967), offers a dif­fer­ent approach to womanhood. She seems to have responded to t­ hese cultural expectations by embracing the ste­reo­t ype of femininity rather than omitting it, while also complicating it in some of her poems and disciplined readings. She wrote love poems with all the flourishes characterized as feminine in Polish literary culture. Her works have been very popu­lar among w ­ omen and are frequently labeled as feminine. Yet some of her poems also discuss the darker sides of feelings and beauty. In one such text, a potentially romantic moment of penciling eyebrows does not lead to a date, but reveals attention that w ­ omen apply to stare piercingly at the corners of buildings and turns of the streets they pass e­ very day.121 A gaze can easily cross the boundary between affection and fear, interest and danger. I began this chapter with a study of Julian Tuwim’s sound postcard, an experiment with poetry recording that was enabled by his stay in the United States, inspired by the dramatic situation of a lonely refugee, and informed by his prewar experiences with a variety of poetic cultures. Personal sound recording devices—­matched by the further developments of verse, possibilities of travel, and opportunities for experimentation—­did not become widely available for poets in Poland u ­ ntil the Thaw of 1956. The next known example of a private poetry recording—­t he only known extant tape featuring Poświatowska—­was made in 1959, and it is one of the first preserved audio recordings of a Polish female poet. Made in the United States by Poświatowska’s distant ­uncle in 1959, the recording reflected a moment when poets ­were allowed to travel and when the new technology of reel-­to-­reel tape recorders had become more popu­lar in home use in Amer­i­ca (just a bit sooner than in Poland). Like Tuwim’s postcard, Poświatowska’s recording was also made for personal use, as a f­ amily keepsake. It was even shorter than Tuwim’s—in less than two minutes she read two brief love poems.122 Poświatowska’s tape in many ways resembles Tuwim’s sound postcard and the ­later experiments of Polish poets, while at the same time being the first such a recording of a w ­ oman. Poświatowska’s tape combines both modern and traditional ele­ments: it reinforces an authorial voice and relies on new

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technology, and at the same time it reveals some intimacy and remains close to the private sphere, f­amily readings, and nonliterary functions of poetry. Nevertheless, the tape is harder to interpret than Tuwim’s disc, and therein it illustrates the methodological prob­lem that we w ­ ill often face when studying Polish ­women poets: less provocative, recorded more rarely and by someone else. Poświatowska’s case shows that, indeed, the 1960s brought new opportunities for Polish poets. Poświatowska’s relatives in Amer­i­ca had a tape recorder slightly ­earlier, in 1959, and they immediately used it to preserve the poet’s voice. As in the case of Tuwim, new technology, personal history, and the moment and context of recording created apt conditions for the emergence of a new poetic genre or a new per­for­mance practice. However, we have no evidence that Poświatowska developed such a new practice. Juxtaposed with Tuwim’s recording, Poświatowska’s tape reveals to what an extent t­hese ­were the historical and personal circumstances in which Polish poets found themselves in the twentieth ­century, which made their recordings of poems so fascinating. It also reminds us that ultimately t­ hese conditions ­were reworked and transformed into new poetic practices or genres. Poświatowska’s tape bears resemblance to such practices, invites interpretations that emphasize ­t hese links, but ­t hese interpretations cannot be confirmed. Poświatowska went to the United States in 1958, when she was twenty-­ three, to undergo a difficult heart surgery. In that same year her first poetry book, Hymn bałwochwalczy (Idol Worship), was published in Poland. She belonged to the new generation of Polish poets who debuted a­ fter the Thaw and used ­free verse. ­After the surgery, Poświatowska felt so much better that she stayed for a while with her Polish-­American relatives near New York City. With the help of her cousin, she de­cided to apply to American colleges (­earlier, her health issues had prevented her from studying). Poświatowska received a full scholarship to study at Smith College, from which she graduated in two years, in 1961; then she returned to Poland, did her MA in philosophy, and took a ju­nior position at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She planned to write her dissertation on the ethics of Martin Luther King Jr. but died ­after her next surgery, in Poland, in 1967 at the age of thirty-­two.123 As her biography reveals, the tape recorded in 1959 was intended as a f­ amily keepsake. In June of 1959 her u ­ ncle took some photos of her and arranged to

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have her recorded on his tape recorder. Poświatowska’s personal recording was a gift for her American ­family, who knew that she would sooner or ­later move back to Poland and wanted a memento of their talented relative. ­Later the tape itself traveled to Poland when Poświatowska’s ­uncle brought it to her ­mother.124 It is striking how large a role history and accidents played in the making of her recording and Tuwim’s. Both poets happened to be in the United States in connection with World War II. Tuwim was a Polish-­Jewish refugee in 1943; Poświatowska came for heart surgery in 1958, due to illness that had been caused during the war when her ­family sheltered in a cold, damp cellar during the fighting in early 1945. The poet’s subsequent death additionally influenced the perception of her tape: it became a repository of her voice, her only tape. When she recorded it in 1959, of course, Poświatowska had hoped that her surgery would help prolong her life. Yet her awareness of her own illness continued to be reflected in her poetry, which expressed ­human fragility as well as an eagerness to live a full life and to love. The tape preserves not only a moment from the midst of her life but also her poems in an intermediary shape. The two poems on tape differ from the variants published in book form. The first of ­these texts, in par­tic­u­lar, allows us to see how much cutting and editing Poświatowska’s poems underwent.125 In one of the stanzas of the poem as recorded by Poświatowska, the speaker says, about thinking of her beloved: as if I clutched a butterfly in my hand you flutter wings of my golden hopes126 In the book version, the last meta­phor of winged hopes is cut, replaced by a much simplified, but also more ambivalent, comparison to a fluttering butterfly: as if a butterfly ­were fluttering in my hand imprisoned and blind127 This fragility of a butterfly from the poem may indirectly recall Poświatowska’s own fragility as she was reading the text, but the image of catching a butterfly may also recall her power. And indeed, in the recording Poświatowska’s voice is both intimate and carefully modulated. From personal documents we can infer that she knew how her poems ­ought to be read, and she also enjoyed declamations of clas-

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sical poetry. At the same time, her health usually did not allow her to speak for long, and she had to avoid literary meetings.128 The tape is therefore a rare and precious document of her reading style. She reads the poems with clear diction and precise articulation, as well as with a palpable energy. She likewise displays her acute precision and lack of melodicity; the poet’s voice combines intimacy with distance, expression with discipline, emotions with the awareness of one’s power. The effect of intimacy is only heightened by her short breath and her thin voice, which at times turns into whisper and rustle, especially as the tape recorder adds an impression of screeching, so common in ­women’s recordings made with the help of the early audio technology.129 Poświatowska’s tape gives us a rare glimpse into the world of w ­ omen poets’ voices in the late 1950s. It shows a w ­ oman poet who was potentially more ­eager to read her texts than w ­ ere the other female authors discussed in next chapters, thanks to her straightforward and confident approach to femininity. Yet on many occasions she could not do so b ­ ecause of her health, and as far as we know she was recorded only once, almost accidentally, thanks to her stay in the United States. While connections between Poświatowska’s poems and her reading style can be found, it is harder to link ­these poems with the pos­si­ble roles of her recording as a ­family keepsake, gift, or a testament. The two recorded texts do not discuss the poet’s fragility in any more direct manner, beyond the image of a caught butterfly. The poems are not any kind of a taped testament or farewell. Neither are they directly connected with the situation of recording her texts for her American relatives. While Tuwim consciously turned his 1943 recording into a holiday card, Poświatowska’s tape seems to be more accidentally embedded in a special time and place in her life. Tuwim chose timing, added greetings, and picked a poem that his s­ ister could relate to. Poświatowska’s poems seem to fit the situation very loosely, and ­there is no self-­reflective commentary. In the case of Poświatowska’s tape, all t­ hese possibilities of turning it into a special recording practice remain latent: interpretations are invited but not confirmed, as was also the case with many other ­women poets. Tuwim and Poświatowska, born forty years apart, are not usually studied together. They are unexpected guides to Polish poetry in the Anglophone world. While popu­lar among wider audiences, for many de­cades they w ­ ere not treated favorably by highbrow critics and scholars. Nevertheless, Tuwim’s

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disc and Poświatowska’s tape belong to the earliest examples of private poetry recordings in Polish culture and offer unique insights into the reading styles of Polish male and female poets from the past. This book’s focus on recordings and per­for­mances reveals more of such unexpected analogies between dif­fer­ent poets and suggests that we look at Polish poetry in new configurations. In the following chapters I juxtapose Czesław Miłosz and Julia Hartwig, Miron Białoszewski and Wisława Szymborska, Aleksander Wat and Zbigniew Herbert, and Anna Kamieńska and Anna Świrszczyńska. In Chapter 2 I study poetry recordings that started to be made only one year a­ fter Poświatowska’s tape, and that w ­ ere similarly facilitated by the accessibility of new technologies in Amer­i­ca. As we w ­ ill see, Miłosz’s readings and recordings in the United States did become a special poetic practice, mostly b ­ ecause of the length of his stay in Amer­i­ca.

Chapter 2

Intonation in Exile Czesław Miłosz’s En­g lish Translations

(1911–2004) had just moved to the United States in the fall of 1960 to start his new job, as a lecturer in Slavic lit­er­a­tures at Berkeley, when his good friend Zygmunt Hertz, who worked in France for the émigré publisher the Literary Institute, sent him a letter with an unusual request. “Dear Czesio,” he wrote in November, “May I ask you to rec­ord your poems on tape? We w ­ ill send them [with someone] to Warsaw, I think in February ­there ­will be a good occasion. . . . ​It ­will be fun! ­Will you do it?”1 In January 1961, in a postcard, he again urged the poet to send him the tapes; in March, more calmly, he asked Miłosz to compose and rethink the order of poems as he wished, but then to send the final version. “It is very impor­ tant,” Hertz explained; “your poems practically do not exist in Poland, t­ here are maybe 100 or 200 copies of Daylight, and 100 or 200 handwritten copies, while the population of that country is almost thirty million.”2 In his letters Hertz was referring to the fact that since Miłosz had defected from the Polish communist diplomatic ser­vice and asked for asylum in France in 1951, his poems had been banned in Poland, while his émigré publications from the Literary Institute, like the poetry book Daylight, ­were smuggled into Poland in very l­imited numbers. Hertz wanted to use the period of Polish cultural liberalization, which had started in mid-1950s and meant that more open intellectual circles appeared in Poland, to bring Miłosz’s poems to Poland; moreover, some prominent poets and trustworthy politicians with diplomatic passports traveled more often and could bring tapes in their luggage. Hertz explained the benefits of having poems on tapes: one could easily copy them and let them circulate among student discussion clubs in Poland, or even send them to the poet Miron Białoszewski, whose home theater had become very popu­lar. As Hertz ironically observed, Poles love “clandestine THE POET CZESŁ AW MIŁOSZ

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classes,” “under­ground meetings,” and “secrets spoken in loud whisper on trams and trains.”3 This humorous summary of Polish history and temperament also seems to suggest that, in the time of the “small stabilization” (marked by l­ imited liberties, compromises, and games with the authorities), the old channels of unofficial communication, which had been a gloomy necessity during World War  II and Stalinism, still persisted, now becoming more sanctioned and more tempting, and thus turning into a theatrical version of themselves. (We also need to remember that vari­ous émigré circles of the time ­were usually more critical of any kind of cooperation with the authorities than w ­ ere the intellectuals who lived in the country.) Poems on tapes, whose circulation retained an air of mystery, would thus help Miłosz reach readers. This was exactly Hertz’s aim, and in another witty letter in 1961 he presented himself as Miłosz’s ­f uture publicist.4 Hertz fi­nally received Miłosz’s tapes in early May 1961; he copied them and sent them to Warsaw with the help of Stanisław Stomma, a Polish member of Parliament.5 In the second iteration of Hertz’s initiative, in June 1965, new tapes w ­ ere sent with Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, now with the aim of reaching two relatively in­de­pen­dent Catholic institutions in Poland, the Catholic University in Lublin and the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny (Universal Weekly) in Kraków.6 Miłosz did not seem enthusiastic about recording, considering how long it took him to respond to Hertz’s request. In late December 1960 he wrote to Jerzy Giedroyc, the director of the Literary Institute (and his publisher): “I took the tape recorder from the university (our department has three), and I recorded my poems, fulfilling Zygmunt’s demand. I ­w ill send them soon.”7 But in the end he got involved—in June 1961 he ordered recordings of Polish poetry to be made in Poland for his department, and in the 1970s and 1980s he recorded many more tapes, which w ­ ere eagerly received and listened to by new immigrants and visitors to France, as well as by well-­ connected circles of p ­ eople in Poland.8 ­These tapes, which come from private circulation, yet w ­ ere aimed at a much wider distribution, have not been properly dated. We can only guess that a tape from the Polish National Digital Archives is Miłosz’s recording from 1965, as the poet reads from the books Rescue, Daylight, and King Popiel, the last of which was published in 1962. Half of this recording is also available at Harvard. Tapes Miłosz sent from the United States to Eu­rope can also be found in the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw and at the

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Institute of Literary Research in Warsaw, his recordings ­were also published online by Polish Book Institute.9 ­These recordings are an invaluable source of information about Miłosz’s voice and reading style from the long de­cades when he was not recorded by any institutions in Poland, including Polish Radio, nor by the US-­sponsored Radio ­Free Eu­rope, with which Miłosz did not want to cooperate. It was only in June 1981, when the poet could visit Poland ­after he won the Nobel Prize, that his readings w ­ ere publicly accessible and recorded in the country.10 ­Later, when he moved back to Poland from the United States in the 1990s, new recordings of the eighty-­year-­old poet ­were issued on CDs.11 Thus, Miłosz’s recordings from the United States give us a unique insight into what was happening with the poet’s voice in the 1960s and 1970s. They are also an impor­tant counterpoint to Miłosz’s English-­language ­poetry readings, which he started to give more frequently in Amer­i­ca in the 1970s. In this chapter, I discuss how Miłosz’s readings in Polish and En­glish are related. In effect, this chapter demonstrates how poetry readings can inform translation studies. I pay special attention to the structure of Miłosz’s American poetry readings, to the way he read his poems in Polish and in En­ glish, and to the features he prioritized in his En­glish translations, treating them as “secondary originals.” ­These readings also give us insight into the strategy Miłosz gradually developed to cope with his life as a poet in exile.

From Polish to En­g lish Czesław Miłosz’s growing interest in recording his Polish recitations in Berkeley resulted mostly from his lack of contact with Polish readers. He had anticipated this prob­lem as early as 1951, when he called his dramatic decision to break up with the Polish communist government and ask for asylum in France “a story of one par­tic­u­lar suicide case.”12 In the ­later de­cades of his time in the United States, he bitterly referred to himself in his poetry as “Professor Milosz / Who wrote poems in some unheard-of tongue.”13 In 1960, when he was appointed lecturer in Slavic lit­er­a­tures, he was forty-­nine, and he had never been an academic, nor dreamed of becoming one. Yet in Amer­ i­ca his new identity was that of a professor, and someone especially knowledgeable about po­liti­cal ­matters, a reputation based on his only known work, The Captive Mind.14 In 1964, despairing, he prepared a notebook with his

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seventy poems copied in handwriting for a friend visiting from Poland, so that he could share them with Poles.15 In early 1968 he wrote to the émigré writer Witold Gombrowicz, “I am in a phase of remote, almost posthumous life, and I do not receive any letters.”16 While ­these fears and feelings of failure may sound exaggerated, given how prolific and ultimately successful Miłosz turned out to be in the United States, his success should not be taken for granted. For example, Tymoteusz Karpowicz, a younger Polish poet who joined the University of Illinois at Chicago in the 1970s, in 1988 admitted in a letter to one of his friends: “No, we do not feel victorious ­here. The worst t­ hing is that I do not have time for my writing. I am ­dying h ­ ere as a writer.” A few years ­later, Karpowicz told Polish TV that the category of intended reader had dis­appeared from his poetic horizons.17 His poetry was heavi­ly influenced by his philosophical convictions about the possibilities of cognition, mathe­matics, and space, and was hermetic and linguistically complex; it was too difficult to translate for US readers, and far from the model of the Polish school of poetry that gradually gained recognition, while also an ocean away from the narrow intellectual circles who could appreciate it in Poland. Miłosz was also very aware of the prob­lems of translation. In theory, he could have given readings in Polish to an audience of émigré circles and Polish Americans. Yet most of ­these p ­ eople had never heard of him, and his relations with t­ hose who knew of him, the prewar and war­time immigrants, ­were often tense. Before Miłosz defected from the communist diplomatic ser­v ice and took residence in France, he had been a cultural attaché in Washington, DC, and in the 1960s he remained suspicious to many conservative émigrés.18 On the other hand, many Polish Americans at that time still lived difficult lives as poor working-­class immigrants who ­were subject to ethnic jokes and prejudice. Miłosz did not identify as a Polish American, and Polish Americans w ­ ere not p ­ eople who would come to his readings. When, much l­ater, American newspapers called him a poet of the Polish diaspora, he was appalled.19 As a last resort Miłosz could have returned to Poland, and in the 1970s he might even have been welcomed; his return might have been seen as a legitimization of the Polish government by the poet who had ­earlier escaped it.20 At that time Miłosz exchanged a few letters with Giedroyc about poets like Zbigniew Herbert, who w ­ ere issued passports and ­were allowed to travel and

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to come back, though not without complications and delays. Jerzy Giedroyc saw their be­hav­ior, and their need to come back to Poland, as a symptom of fear and a morally ambiguous stance.21 For Miłosz, traveling was just a benefit that the state granted t­ hose poets who w ­ ere “not irresponsible enough to emigrate.”22 In another letter, he disagreed with the idea shared by some older emigrants that all writers from Poland should be seen as traitors. As he soberly remarked, thirty million p ­ eople had been thrown into the po­liti­cal situation of that time—­should all of them emigrate?23 Yet sometimes, in a rage, Miłosz would accuse all visitors from the Polish ­People’s Republic of being nationalists and loyalists, and he was disappointed with Polish scholars from the United States who did not write about him ­because ­doing so would mean risking their ability to visit Poland. Miłosz himself did not consider the op­ fter the anti-­Semitic campaign of 1968 and tion of returning to Poland.24 A the rise of nationalistic rhe­toric and censorship, he was disgusted by the situation in Poland, not only in terms of politics but also more generally by what he saw as Polish language and thought reaching the bottom, becoming “mumbling” and “mud.” He therefore started to define his role in the United States as that of saving the rotting Polish language, seeing himself as one of the last users of the language who could retrieve its “clarity, reason, and form.”25 In this context we might understand the approach to poetry and voice that Miłosz began to develop in Amer­i­ca. His private recordings ­were an excuse to read in Polish, both for plea­sure and with the aim of documenting correct Polish language and proper diction, which Miłosz believed he had. He continued to write poetry in Polish, not only b ­ ecause of his strong attachment to the language of his childhood, but also ­because he wanted to serve his “Faithful M ­ other Tongue,” as he called Polish in a poem from 1968.26 In the 1970s he started to notice not only the limitations but also the poetic opportunities that exile provided him as an author, and ­these benefits corresponded with what he wanted to preserve and strengthen in his own use of Polish, isolated as it was from the bad influence of his homeland’s discourses. For example, in his “Notes on Exile” he observed that the loss of contact with the living speech when living abroad could be compensated for by maintaining “purity of vocabulary, rhythmic expressiveness, syntactic balance.”27 On the other hand, having accepted the possibility that he might never again have any direct contact with the larger Polish readership, Miłosz started

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to think about reaching American audiences, and he began working on translations into En­glish. First, he edited the anthology Postwar Polish Poetry in 1965. Then, in 1968, he and Peter Dale Scott translated a se­lection of poems by his younger colleague Herbert.28 His own book of poetry was published in En­glish in 1973, when the poet was sixty-­two years old, and the following year he received his first invitations to more prestigious poetry readings at Yale University, the Guggenheim Museum, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.29 Yet in March of that year, a­ fter a reading in Vancouver, he still complained in a letter that the event had been “unfortunately in En­glish.”30 This statement should not surprise us. According to Miłosz’s own assessment of translatability, his poems placed only in “the m ­ iddle range,” making them more difficult to translate than Herbert’s poems, which he published in En­glish before his own verse.31 The framework of translatability strongly ­limited Miłosz’s se­lection of Polish poetry included in his 1965 anthology, and in his l­ater books of translations, it also l­imited the choice of his own work. To this day, his Collected Poems does not include most of his syllabic and accentual-­syllabic verse.32 ­After the reading at the Guggenheim Museum, which was or­ga­nized by the Acad­emy of American Poets and took place on December 17, 1974, Miłosz similarly remarked that his poems in En­glish w ­ ere “so much weaker than the originals.”33 This event, however, changed Miłosz’s attitude t­ oward the possibilities that ­these “weak” translations could open for him. ­After the reading, he wrote to Giedroyc that the event meant he had been accepted as an American poet, that the audience was ­great, and that ­t here w ­ ere no Poles in attendance.34 During the reading itself he did not yet feel so confident, and he sounded like a debutant in En­g lish. The introduction he made before his reading, which was not repeated at other recorded events, revealed not only his anx­i­eties, but also some insights crucial for understanding all of his f­ uture En­glish per­for­mances. In his short speech, he said that he hoped the audience would be tolerant of his strange accent and difficulties with intonation, as he was accustomed to reading poems using the intonation of the original Polish, which sometimes interfered with the translation. In this way, he admitted that not only his poems in En­glish, but also his readings in En­glish, would be by necessity flawed, far from the perfection he was aiming for in his Polish text and Polish recitations. Nevertheless, what was initially a statement of hesitation or embarrassment in 1974, l­ater on became Miłosz’s conscious strategy.35

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This strategy of preserving one’s tone in En­glish was aptly discussed by a scholar who knew Miłosz well, Irena Grudzińska-­Gross. She writes about how his tone, rhythm, and diction w ­ ere maintained in En­glish translations, of his “recognizable voice”; Miłosz himself mentioned that he imposed the “rhythmical shape” within which his co-­translators had to work.36 The preservation of the “voice” was also quoted, though with more reservation, in Bożena Karwowska’s book on Miłosz’s critical reception in the United States, which discusses the opposite views of the effect made by Miłosz’s En­glish texts.37 All of the above-­mentioned terms remain vague in literary criticism, and are often used meta­phor­ically. So we can rightly ask: Which aspect of rhythm was ­really maintained? Is diction not a synonym for one’s poetic style? It is not surprising that in her recent book on Miłosz’s translations, the scholar Magda Heydel was puzzled by Miłosz’s insistence on having his own, “­simple” and “literal” translation of the poem “The World,” instead of the e­ arlier translation made by the American poets Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky. To reflect the metrical and rhymed Polish poem, Hass and Pinsky created an almost rhymed, metrical iambic text. On the other hand, Miłosz’s own translation abandoned any meter and rhyme.38 What kind of “rhythmical shape” did he thus wish to preserve? What aspect of diction did he r­ eally have in mind? The word “intonation,” used by Miłosz in his introduction to his 1974 reading, turns out to be a term more precise and helpful in explaining Miłosz’s priorities when it came to translations, along with his dedication to “syntactic balance.” In the following sections I ­w ill examine in detail what this translation strategy of concentrating on intonation looked like in practice. To understand the context for this strategy, though, we must first see how Miłosz’s American readings and his attitude to English-­language audiences developed ­because, naturally, many more poetry readings followed the one in 1974, especially ­after he won the Neustadt Prize in 1978 and the Nobel in 1980.39

The Image of the Poet at Readings Czesław Miłosz’s first impor­tant poetry reading in En­glish was not r­ eally the one in 1974. In June 1968 he participated in events at New York’s Lincoln Center and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, accompanying his younger colleague Zbigniew Herbert, whose translated poems w ­ ere 40 gaining popularity in the West. The organizers, when inviting Herbert, suggested that maybe his translator “Milocz” could also come and read two

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poems.41 Though the awkward situation was created by Miłosz himself, who had generously helped with the publication of Herbert’s Selected Poems in March 1968, it was not easy for him to be treated like a supporting character, and during the event in June he did not behave like one. B ­ ecause Herbert’s En­glish was very ­limited at that time, and Miłosz was already accustomed to his new professorial role, he de­cided to give a brief introductory speech, emphasizing that he and Herbert shared a mutual understanding of poetry and ­were close friends, in spite of the fact that Herbert was “much younger” (actually, Miłosz was fifty-­six and Herbert forty-­t hree).42 Herbert read his poems in Polish, in a restrained, elegant, and conversational tone. Some texts in En­glish w ­ ere read by the actress Elżbieta Czyżewska, who had recently emigrated to the United States, and who added a dramatic, piercing quality to her recitations. Other translations ­were read by Miłosz, who also presented his own two texts. Miłosz’s delivery was changing; he declaimed the first poem by Herbert with rising intonations, almost like he was reading one of his own texts, but read the other one as if he w ­ ere role-­ playing in a dialogue.43 Additionally, when reading both Herbert’s “Inner Voice” and his own “Cabeza,” Miłosz expressively emphasized onomatopoeias, respectively imitating the gurgling sounds of the inarticulate “voice” and the shouts of indigenous American tribes. Miłosz had not yet fully worked out his style of reading in En­glish, but he clearly wanted to be a performer who could entertain his audience. In fact, his introduction hinted at this playfulness in its first sentence, which said that poetry was not a solemn affair, nor a ­matter of sophistication; and Miłosz had chosen texts that would prove this. Interestingly, this and other characteristics of Miłosz’s reading in 1968 remained true for his ­later per­for­mances. Comparing Miłosz’s recorded public poetry readings from the years 1974 to 1998 allowed me to notice how much the poet wanted to connect with his American audience, to pre­sent himself in a lighthearted way, to amuse, joke, and sometimes even share in his audience’s laughter.44 Throughout ­t hese two de­cades, Miłosz had a few favorite texts that lightened the mood, most notably the poem he usually introduced as an example of his life philosophy or his Weltanschauung, and that started with the words: If I had to tell what the world is for me I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole and place him in a theater seat one eve­ning . . . ​45

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Consequently, the poet envisioned listening to what an animal in a theater seat can say about ­music and dance. This poem is section 3 from Miłosz’s poem “Throughout Our Lands,” the text most often chosen at the poetry readings I listened to, performed in nine out of eleven events. The effective contrast between Miłosz’s introduction and the poem itself usually evoked laughter—­the solemn poet speaking of philosophy was revealed to be someone who approaches the world with the curiosity and imagination of a child, who treats animals as his most trustworthy interlocutors, and looks at civilization and h ­ uman fate with real astonishment. Of course, t­ here is much more in the poem: the h ­ uman theater of customs is contrasted with the animal world, and l­ ittle mammals are shown to be more reliable judges of ­human civilization than ­people. ­There is also a reference to the old concept of the theater of the world, which portrays life as playing a role before God. Yet Miłosz’s poetry readings did not devote much time to this kind of reflection. Instead, it seems that the most memorable part of the event was the very intervention in the image of the poet as a wise, experienced man, h ­ ere unexpectedly self-­diminished, supposedly naive, interested in imagination, fairy tales, beliefs, and the natu­ral world. This kind of self-­fashioning can also be found in Miłosz’s poems “On Angels” and “In a Jar,” which ­were also often performed (seven and five times, respectively) in ­t hose same readings—­the former defending the belief in the existence of divine messengers as traditionally radiant, weightless, and winged, the latter featuring a speaker who remembers himself as a boy interested in biology and alchemy while pondering newts caught inside a jar.46 Another example used in the readings is section 7 from “Bobo’s Metamorphosis,” which starts with a striking sentence referring to c­ hildren’s lit­er­a­ ture: “Bobo, a nasty boy, was changed into a fly.” 47 Fi­nally, t­ here is the prose poem “Esse,” 48 which could be read as a secular epiphany—­the speaker’s admiration for a w ­ oman seen on the metro leads to a reflection on the limits of cognition and repre­sen­ta­tion, on the immensity of existence that cannot be absorbed. Yet the text was at times jokingly introduced by Miłosz as the story of love affair that lasted a minute and a half, to which the audience responded with welcome bursts of laughter. Miłosz’s se­lection of texts never concentrated on his war­time works. He felt obliged to include one or two such poems, but he did not like to read them (“Dedication” and “Outskirts” appeared only once in the eleven readings in question; “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto”—­twice; “Campo dei

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Fiori”—­never). In a 1982 interview with the Polish scholar Aleksander Fiut, Miłosz admitted that ­after his readings in the United States, young poets would ask him questions about po­liti­cally engaged poetry, b ­ ecause of his war­time anti-­Nazi poems and b ­ ecause of The Captive Mind. He did not feel comfortable giving his poetry this label, which he considered to be ­limited and biased, and he saw himself mostly as a philosophical author.49 This discomfort and Miłosz’s efforts to change his image may explain the se­ lections of poems at readings, though they did not succeed in changing the audience’s mind. In a videotaped interview with the poet ­after his 1988 Los Angeles reading, almost all of the questions Miłosz was asked w ­ ere about politics. A poem that more accurately pre­sents Miłosz’s thoughts on history and politics is the frequently read “Bypassing Rue Descartes.” The text describes the destruction of a par­tic­u­lar world order, killing “in the name of the universal beautiful ideas” and “seizing power,” the result of which is that the former “capital of the world” is no longer so, ­because “empires have fallen” and “­there is no capital of the world.” Universal ideas, abruptly implemented, contrast with the perspective of local mores and city habits, and especially with the point of view of the peripheries. H ­ ere Miłosz reflects on his own biography, as well as on ­others coming to see Paris before World War II, when it was still considered the capital of the Western world. ­These shy travelers and “barbarians” “from Jassy, and Koloshvar, Wilno and Bucharest, Saigon and Marrakesh” ­were ashamed of their incantations, prayers, and barefoot servants. Then History—­not just the war itself, but also the pursuit of doctrinal purity and the blunders that followed—­a ltered the order of the world, often directly interfering in the lives of ­t hese “barbarians.” Though t­ hese changes are murderous, resembling “the reeling wheel of the seasons,” the speaker finds them weaker than his deep, local, organically grown convictions. At the end of the poem, the speaker provokingly claims that, in fact, his entire fate was his punishment for having broken a local taboo by killing a ­water snake. Not only the new universal ideas, but even traditional Christian beliefs, look weaker than this ingrained, pagan, folk superstition, a taboo that originates in a dif­fer­ent, even more ancient kind of world.50 The speaker thus declares that he still belongs to that old, barely existent real­ity, resistant to revolutions and modernizations. Miłosz’s readings always foregrounded an imaginative, childlike perspective, and a fascination with nature and traditional beliefs. However, in “By-

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passing Rue Descartes,” t­ hese themes ­were not only juxtaposed with History, but also explained and justified by Miłosz’s Lithuanian origins. At his readings Miłosz always used the poem’s ending to describe Lithuanian pagan beliefs, which had not been erased by Christianization even by the time of his childhood, and to raise the prob­lem of his Lithuanian background, which distinguished him from the central features of Polish culture. Miłosz’s longtime readers prob­ably knew what this insistence on Lithuania meant, especially t­ hose who had read his book Native Realm, published in En­glish in 1968 with the aim of explaining the complicated history of Miłosz’s place of origin.51 Miłosz was born in 1911 in the Rus­sian Empire, in a f­ amily of small nobility in Šeteniai (in Polish: Szetejnie), now part of Lithuania.52 The nobility in this area had been Polonized long ago, and Miłosz’s ­family, surrounded by Yiddish, Lithuanian, and Rus­sian, was attached to both the Polish language and Roman Catholicism. Nevertheless, in relation to Poland, they practiced “a cult of separatism.”53 The f­amily had lived in that region since the sixteenth ­century,54 when the multicultural Polish-­Lithuanian Commonwealth, consisting of the Kingdom of Poland and the ­Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was created. Though the Commonwealth ceased to exist at the end of the eigh­teenth ­century and was partitioned by three neighboring empires, Miłosz’s ­family in the twentieth ­century still believed that “Our G ­ rand Duchy of Lithuania was ‘better’ and Poland was ‘worse,’ ” as Miłosz recalled.55 In 1918 both Poland and Lithuania declared in­de­pen­dence, and both made claims to Lithuanian territories. In the interwar period Vilnius was incorporated into Poland and Miłosz’s birthplace became part of Lithuania.56 In Vilnius, Miłosz attended school and studied law, all in Polish, but the local character of the area was still pre­sent. When the poet moved from Vilnius to Warsaw in 1937, a move within the same Polish state, he was so struck by the palpable difference between the two places that he treated this moment as the beginning of his emigration.57 ­After World War II Miłosz’s homeland was therefore neither the new Polish nation-­state, shifted to the west with its new borders, nor the small postwar Lithuania with Vilnius, now incorporated into the Soviet Union. His homeland existed only in the past. This also explains why caring for the Polish language (in its regional variant) was so critical for Miłosz a­ fter the war and why the old traditions of the Polonized Lithuanian Duchy made the poet feel even more attached to his Polish. In 1968, addressing his ­mother tongue in a poem, he wrote: “You w ­ ere my native land; I lacked any other.”58

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It is unlikely that every­one attending Miłosz’s poetry readings knew his Native Realm and understood all the nuances of the poet’s history when he spoke of the Lithuanian taboos of his childhood.59 It seems that Lithuania helped the poet declare his poetic sovereignty. Through what he called (in one of his lectures) “provincial exoticism,” he could introduce ideas other­ wise unfamiliar to audiences in the modern Western world.60 Lithuanian motifs appeared already in 1968, at the poet’s reading “alongside” Herbert, when Miłosz read two poems about Amer­i­ca: “Cabeza” and “I Sleep a Lot.” 61 They both refer to the experience and pains of exile, to Spanish explorers of the Amer­i­cas, and the question of their identity. As the scholar Clare Cavanagh has noted, both poems also introduced the topic of Native Americans, who appeared surprisingly close to Miłosz’s memories of Lithuanian folklore. The witch doctor whom the speaker addressed in “I Sleep a Lot,” a Lithuanian folk healer, is merged with a shaman from an American Indian tribe, making Miłosz’s new home in California and his origins in Lithuania almost internally linked.62 Miłosz uses imagery from t­ hese two cultures to discuss dreams, the soul, and the possibility of healing one’s suffering. In June 1968 Miłosz also had other reasons to introduce himself as a Californian proudly born in Lithuania, given the shameful rise in nationalism and anti-­Semitism in Poland in March 1968. On other occasions his Lithuanian origins allowed the poet to distance himself from the mainstream features of Polish culture, to claim his separateness, or even to exoticize himself. In the 1980s it also helped him to problematize the idea of poetry as a witness to wars and communism, which was the typical Western view of Polish poems, to which Miłosz’s own ­earlier publications had contributed.63 As we can gather from ­t hese observations, another peculiar feature of all of Miłosz’s readings, which some listeners w ­ ere already criticizing in 1968, 64 was the poet’s tendency to talk a lot. Miłosz added numerous commentaries to his poems, provided vari­ous contexts and details regarding history and biography, his translations and originals. This professorial be­hav­ior suggests that his lecture-­like readings ­were aimed at American audiences, and that the poet did not expect his listeners to have any of this knowledge. But at the same time his practice suggests that without the mini-­lectures, listeners’ access to his poems would be severely l­imited; and ­either way, only a hint of the full stories could be shared, just as only a hint of the original poetry was accessible in Miłosz’s necessarily imperfect translations.

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It can seem that Miłosz read some of his poems only to be able to comment on them. The text “To Raja Rao” (read at seven out of the eleven readings I listened to) was presented as the only poem he wrote in En­glish, and it served as a pretext to emphasize Miłosz’s habit of writing in Polish, the language of his childhood.65 “Magpiety” was used to comment on the prob­lem of creating an abstract noun that would name the quality of being a magpie, with such a word formation being relatively easy in Polish, and more complicated in En­glish.66 Section 6 of the poem “Throughout Our Lands” allowed him to comment on the kinds of pears he had known from his childhood and enumerated in the text, for which En­glish substitutes had to be found.67 “The Thistle, the Nettle” evoked poetic banter on the associations that certain Polish plants have, which are absent from the American landscape.68 In other words, at his readings Miłosz was discussing what translation theory usually calls linguistic and cultural untranslatability. Yet the poet seemed not to believe in the possibility of achieving the kind of equivalence that traditional translation theory would posit—­for example, through compensating for lost devices in other places and by other means. At a reading in 1992 Miłosz summarized all t­ hese efforts with one sentence: “I am a better poet in Polish,” although in 1992 he had no reason to feel undervalued in Amer­i­ca.69 Though the names of Richard Lourie, Peter Dale Scott, Robert Hass, and Robert Pinsky as translators or co-­translators occasionally appeared in Miłosz’s comments, he would also sometimes say, very generally, that he had translated his poems with the help of students and friends, and in most cases he simply read texts in En­glish without any commentary, as his own. The impression that the translations ­were Miłosz’s own texts, but weaker than the originals, was especially strengthened by the poet’s habit of including in his readings at least one, and sometimes as many as five, of his poems in Polish. The frequent excuse would be to read in Polish “just for the sound,” and indeed, for that purpose he would often choose texts that w ­ ere rhythmical. The poem chosen most often for this purpose was “A Song on the End of the World.” The text was read at eight out of the eleven events I listened to, and always in both Polish and En­glish.70 Once the poet even interrupted his Polish recitation to ask the audience if they can hear the rhymes. In this Polish recitation, as in all other per­for­mances, Miłosz’s voice changed significantly:

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his poems in Polish ­were read more loudly, with greater plea­sure, livelier, emphasizing verse melody. Sometimes the poet seemed to be almost overdoing the effect, as if he wanted so much to convince his audience of the better quality of his poems in Polish. Similar experiences ­were reported by attendees of other Miłosz readings. Karwowska quoted the poet Jean Valentine declaring in 1978 that Miłosz’s “Song” was clearly a song in his Polish reading, whereas in En­glish this effect was not felt.71 A participant at Miłosz’s reading in Toronto in 1977 said that the poet “sang through” the “Song” in Polish and made it an incantation. He also mentioned more broadly that “when Miłosz switched to Polish an urgency and rhythmic power suddenly became more palpable.”72 Polish diaspora scholars in Canada, it should be added, invited Miłosz to read on vari­ous occasions throughout the 1970s; for example, he visited Toronto in 1970, Edmonton in 1972, Vancouver in 1974, and Toronto again in 1977 and 1980.73 Compared with his Polish recitations, Miłosz’s readings in En­glish ­were definitely less performative; they had more frequent moments of hesitation and m ­ istakes, and sometimes the strug­gle with articulation made it harder to add melodic features. Their status was not fully worked out in the 1970s: at the Guggenheim event from 1974, Miłosz read an En­glish version of “Ars Poetica?,” dif­fer­ent from the one we know now, that seemed not to fit his reading style. At a reading in 1977, all of his En­glish versions w ­ ere read, not by Miłosz, but by the scholar Louis Iribarne. During the event in 1978, many En­g lish texts sounded as if they resisted Miłosz’s efforts.74 Clearly, his En­ glish readings ­were weaker, or secondary, just like Miłosz’s translations. Yet their role and form grew and stabilized with time, and already at the earliest recorded readings, from 1968 and 1974, ele­ments typical of Miłosz’s Polish declamation can be heard in his En­g lish. Th ­ ese readings did not fully sound like his Polish poems, but they did preserve many of their original features.

Secondary Originals Czesław Miłosz’s readings of “A Song on the End of the World” allow us to study not only the differences but also the similarities between his Polish and En­glish per­for­mances of his poems. My analyses below are based on impressions from all eight Polish and En­glish per­for­mances of “Song” at Miłosz’s

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American events, with additional consideration of his Polish-­only readings. Both ­here and in further analyses I focus in detail on four dif­fer­ent renderings: Miłosz’s reading in En­glish and in Polish at Harvard in 1982 (available also online), Miłosz’s Polish recording accompanying his 1998 book of selected poems (published on cassettes), and Miłosz’s Polish recording from the 1960s (available at the National Digital Archives and partly online).75 ­These recordings span thirty years, and w ­ ere made u ­ nder very dif­fer­ent circumstances and in dif­fer­ent languages. Yet in each one of them we can hear the recurring intonation pattern related to the poem’s construction. The first line of “Song” in En­glish is the subordinate clause: “On the day the world ends,” which in Polish is just a part of a sentence “W dzień końca świata.” The rest of the lines, in both languages, are based on clauses. The poem does not have any regular meter (though it does have several rhymes in Polish), but its repetitive syntax, with parallel clauses and enumerations, justifies the poem’s division into lines. Moreover, it makes it pos­si­ble for Miłosz to treat each line as a separate intonation unit, in which the last word is marked by a pitch change, rising or falling, is lengthened, and followed by a pause.76 Intonation units, lines, and syntactical clauses overlap in this text, making it easier to preserve the same structure in English—­for which Miłosz used the translation made by his son, Anthony. When one listens closely to the poet’s recordings, we can discover that many of the rises and (more rarely) falls of intonation are not a full rise or a full fall. ­There can be a rising pitch, but at a lower level and quieter, or a falling pitch changed into a flat line, or a fall-­rise, but their presence and repetitive structure is audible and suggests a songlike, unbroken continuity of all lines of the poem. The Polish and En­glish readings both reflect this, and despite the phonetic complexity, allow us to recognize falls and rises. The first line, “On the day the world ends,” or “W dzień końca świata” (a rising pitch in both the Polish and En­g lish versions, as indicated by a forward slash:  / ) is followed by numerous sentences describing what is happening on that day, like “A bee circles a clover” (rise in both languages:  / ) and “A fisherman mends a glimmering net” (rise  / ). No m ­ atter what punctuation mark finishes each sentence (none, a comma, or a period), only the final enumerated sentence finishes with a fall (indicated h ­ ere and elsewhere by a backslash: \) and thus closes the stanza: “And the snake is gold-­ skinned as it should always be” (\).77 The structure of the stanza thus overrides

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the punctuation, and determines the continuous rises in intonation, followed by the final fall. In the next parts of the poem ­t here is more intonational diversity, due to a more frequent use of subordinated clauses. For example, “And ­those who expected lightning and thunder” ( / ) is a clear rise, followed by “Are disappointed” from the next line, a fall (\). ­Here, each subordinate sentence has a rising tone, and only the main clauses have a fall in Miłosz’s readings. Below I give some examples from the same excerpt in En­glish and Polish: And ­those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps ( / ) Do not believe it is happening now. (\) As long as the sun and the moon are above, ( / ) As long as the bumblebee visits a r­ ose, ( / ) As long as rosy infants are born ( / ) No one believes it is happening now. (\) A którzy czekali znaków i archanielskich trąb, ( / ) Nie wierzą, że staje się już. (\) Dopóki słońce i księżyc są w górze, ( / ) Dopóki trzmiel nawiedza różę, ( / ) Dopóki dzieci różowe się rodzą, ( / ) Nikt nie wierzy, że staje się już. (\)78 As we can see, the use of subordinate clauses, all syntactical divisions, and the consequent intonation of all lines are analogous for Miłosz in many readings in both languages. It is in­ter­est­ing that Miłosz chose this poem to illustrate the rhythmicality of his Polish poetry at American readings. The text, written in 1944 in occupied Warsaw, belongs to the war­time poems that abandon regular meter and the poet’s prewar incantational inclinations.79 Th ­ ese texts are heavi­ly influenced by T. S. Eliot, whom Miłosz read and translated at that time.80 Yet the poem does preserve and create some rhythmicality, a rhythmicality that relies on repeatable intonations of line endings and the identical structure of syntactical clauses in both languages. In terms of topics, Miłosz was prob­ably e­ ager to read the war­time “Song” at his American events ­because it offers an antidote to the simplified view of poetry as politicizing and witnessing history.

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The poem depicts a world in which every­thing seems to be in order, nothing is happening, no imagery from the Apocalypse is pre­sent, and so nobody believes that the end of the world has come, apart from one white-­haired man, who appears in the final lines of the text but is too busy to become a prophet. This ironic and philosophical poem could thus be applied to any place and time: not only to the end of the world as brought about by World War II, but also to the end of the eschatological thinking of all “hollow men,” who live only on the surface of t­ hings.81 At the same time, the surface appearances presented in the text, ­behind which the world has already ended, remain beautiful, their descriptions celebratory, while the would-be prophet is simply binding his tomatoes. This impression is strengthened by “the poem’s rhythmicity, which emphasizes the repeatability, one could think: unchangeability of t­ hings,” as the scholar Marek Zaleski has noted, and the contrasts of the poem highlight “the effect of unexpected alienation of the world, the real­ity of the catastrophe.”82 But is ­there an escape from this situation? A song about the end of the world becomes synonymous with a song about the world, and its repetitions signal the repeatability and apparent normalcy of the many times the world has ended. Yet beyond repetitions, Miłosz’s per­for­mances of “A Song on the End of the World” also reveal some differences in the intonation of lines. In some readings, what is usually a dominant rising intonation changes into a falling one; in other readings two lines are read quickly, without a pause or a prominent lengthening. But given the number of readings and their general similarity, typical features can be distinguished from accidental ones, and the continuity of returning patterns is more striking than their occasional modifications. The per­for­mances of “Song” show that smaller parts of a sentence can become intonational units for Miłosz. Such was the case of the first line in Polish, “W dzień końca świata,” literally “On the day of the world’s end.” This tendency can also be seen in Miłosz’s readings of other poems, where lines are divided by intonation into vari­ous smaller units, and Miłosz’s readings emphasize this more complex phrasing. H ­ ere, more nuanced methods of analy­sis are needed. An in­ter­est­ing example of this pro­cess comes up in the first line of section 7 of a poem I briefly mentioned before: “Bobo’s Metamorphosis”: “Bobo,

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2.1 Miłosz reads the words “Bobo, a nasty boy, was changed into a fly” from section 7 of “Bobo’s Metamorphosis.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording made at Harvard in 1982, archived in the collections of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.

2.2 Miłosz reads the words “Gucio, niegrzeczny chłopczyk, został zamieniony w muchę” from section 7 of “Bobo’s Metamorphosis.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from cassettes included in Miłosz, Antologia osobista (Kraków: Znak, 1998), archived in the collections of the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw.

a nasty boy, was changed into a fly.”83 Figures  2.1 and 2.2 show Miłosz’s reading of the same line in En­glish (in his and Richard Lourie’s translation) in 1982 and in Polish in 1998. The figures depict the relative amplitude of intensity and the contours of fundamental frequency as calculated by the computer program Praat, which has been used by linguists, and sometimes by verse theorists.84 To simplify, in both figures, the upper diagram with waveforms shows loudness (it marks when the poet pronounces vowels, as

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opposed to making pauses and using consonants, especially plosives, which look like short breaks). The lower diagram shows the rising and falling pitch contour of Miłosz’s voice, which we as listeners perceive as continuous, but is counted mostly for vowels (with breaks where consonants are pronounced). At first sight the figures, depicting the En­glish and Polish per­for­mances, look very dif­fer­ent in the way they pre­sent the sentence with the inserted phrase “a nasty boy.” However, when one listens to Miłosz, it is clear in both cases that he sets apart this phrase from the rest of the line. In the 1998 Polish version, he uses pauses, and they are vis­i­ble h ­ ere, as the waveforms are divided in the same places where commas appear in the line. In En­glish the pauses are minimal, but the ­whole fragment “a nasty boy” is pronounced prominently. In the pitch contour, a­ fter the rising pitch of “Bobo,” we can see “a nasty boy” as a horizontal s-­like rise-­fall-­rise curve. “Boy” is especially impor­tant ­here—­t his word takes the most of the s-­like pitch contour (its u-­ like part) and is clearly lengthened. The brief “boy” takes up more time and energy than any other word in this figure. It is much longer than the first “Bo” and second “bo” from “Bobo.” Such emphasis on “boy” distinguishes “a nasty boy” from the rest of line as if it was a separate phrase. The line then finishes with a clear fall on the lengthened “fly.” The two renditions of this line in Polish and En­glish depict the main prob­lem with the study of intonation—­that is, its gradient features. It is especially difficult when we want to grasp, as in the example above, vari­ous hierarchical ele­ments that emerge between prosodic words and full intonational units (like sentences). Th ­ ese ele­ments are sometimes called intermediate phrases, but below the level of syntactic clauses they can be non-­obligatory and depend on the tempo of speaking and other f­ actors. Moreover, they share with full units only select features, such as pitch change, lengthening of the final word, intensity, and subsequent pause.85 In their assessment, ­there is always some degree of indeterminacy, and in the study of poetry reading, where the word level can unexpectedly become the phrase level, a strict focus on larger units or systematic features (rather than concrete acoustics and phonetics) seems impossible. Moreover, a full reliance on automatic instrumental analy­sis can be problematic (­there are places where Praat should be manually corrected).86 Fi­nally, in the study of prosody (intonation, rhythm, stress) more generally, many issues are still understudied ­because they depend

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on a range of f­ actors rather than one pa­ram­e­ter.87 In the cases studied above, dif­fer­ent acoustic means w ­ ere used to distinguish the m ­ iddle part of the sentence: in Polish t­ here ­were mostly the pauses. In En­g lish, ­t here was a clear lengthening of “boy,” but t­ here w ­ ere barely any pauses. What is impor­tant for the study of Miłosz’s readings is not the par­tic­u­lar means but the internal divisions, the prosodic diversity introduced into the ­middle of a poem b ­ ecause of its syntax. Almost any syntactic construction can become a full phrase. In other poems, Miłosz’s enumerations of nouns become such phrases. Therefore, all places that are potential intonational phrases can play an impor­tant role for the prosodic shape of Miłosz’s poems, ­u nless we know for sure that the poet never distinguished certain non-­ obligatory places when reading them out loud. Syntax is crucial ­here, as the majority of poems that Miłosz read in the United States w ­ ere free-­verse texts, which are based on longer syntactic clauses or have lines that finish with coherent parts of clauses, without striking enjambments. This type of poem was typical for the poet’s style since the mid1960s. In such poems, lines of varying length gained certain repeatability in speech through prominent final words, marked with pitch and clearly lengthened. Sometimes, additionally, the last word of each line was quieter and appeared ­after a short pause. Such was the reading style of “Bypassing Rue Descartes,” which was written in 1980. The poet’s readings also included poems closer to the syllabic tradition and full of enjambments, which lets us observe the consequences of the interplay of verse and syntax for his prosodic contours. This aspect is in­ter­est­ing, ­because we know that despite his interest in intonation, Miłosz tried not to be too melodic in his reading style. When t­ here w ­ ere no specific stylistic reasons for his use of melody (e.g., when he imitated archaic stanzas or c­ hildren’s lit­er­a­ture, or when he ironically sang the world’s end), Miłosz searched for a “more spacious form” between poetry and prose. He wrote about the “odious rhythmic speech / Which grooms itself and, of its own accord, moves on.”88 In most cases his metrical poetry was not fully regular, his f­ ree verse was never fully f­ ree, his syntax-­based poems ­were rarely based on sentences only. ­There was always an attempt to move between the systems,89 and scholars noted the role of syntax in increasing the variability of his intonations and poetic rhythms.90

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Such a variety of intonations caused by enjambments can be seen in “Mittelbergheim,” a poem that Miłosz read in the United States several times, sometimes in both Polish and En­glish. The title “Mittelbergheim” refers to a small Alsatian town where, in the hospitable country ­house of his friend and mentor Stanisław Vincenz, Miłosz went through the pro­cess of healing and regaining hope ­after his dramatic decision to emigrate and remain in France in 1951.91 The poem is not, however, so much a description of the place, as a request, or prayer—to be allowed to stay ­there for a longer time, to draw consolation from this dreamlike place, full of an other­w ise lost harmony. The first stanza of the text depicts some features of that special space: Wine sleeps in casks of Rhine oak. I am wakened by the bell of a chapel in the vineyards Of Mittelbergheim. I hear a small spring Trickling into a well in the yard, a clatter Of sabots in the street. Tobacco drying ­Under the eaves, and ploughs and wooden wheels And mountain slopes and autumn are with me.92 Mittelbergheim, with its simplicity and traditional ways of living—­chapel bells, drying tobacco, ploughs and wooden wheels, cluttering sabots, vineyards and wine in casks—­resonates with Miłosz’s appreciation of his lost home region in Lithuania, and with the topics he liked to raise at his American readings. ­Later in the text, the poem’s speaker comes close to saying that Mittelbergheim has Eden-­like features, that it is more a state of mind than a geo­graph­i­cal place: . . . ​­Here and everywhere Is my homeland, wherever I turn And in what­ever language I would hear The song of a child, the conversation of lovers.93 As we know, this feeling of being at home when surrounded by foreign landscapes and foreign languages was not often shared by Miłosz, and so the poem was an especially appropriate poetic spell to be repeated at his foreign-­ language readings in Amer­i­ca. Moreover, the very idea, expressed in the text, of finding a home everywhere also suggested its opposite: that being in

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exile was not ­limited to Miłosz’s own biographical experience. Critics have indeed pointed out the mythical character of Miłosz’s lost Lithuania, and its creation in the poet’s writings as a mystic, harmonious center, where one ­ ere could feel rooted.94 At his American readings, such places of healing w not bound by geography, but could also be found among American Indians or in Alsace. With that idea of being uprooted in mind, Miłosz said at one of his readings that every­one was in exile t­ oday, extending the applicability of his poetic concerns far beyond immigrants.95 In that sense, his poetry readings offered a more universal sense of comfort for his listeners, and through the Mittelbergheim “prayer” Miłosz could bond with his readers. Yet in order for that to happen, Miłosz had to first test the prayer’s effectiveness; in order to talk about exile in Amer­i­ca, he had to first make his homeland in En­glish, to say “­here and everywhere” in that language. The rich and harmonious variety of Polish intonations needed to be translated first, if he wanted to share the poem’s dreamlike world with a new audience. Let us see how Miłosz’s and Lourie’s translation worked to transpose the same intonation, especially in fragments where the syntax is complex, with the run-on sentences of the first stanza. Below I quote that stanza in En­glish and Polish: Wine sleeps in casks of Rhine oak. I am wakened by the bell of a chapel in the vineyards Of Mittelbergheim. I hear a small spring Trickling into a well in the yard, a clatter Of sabots in the street. Tobacco drying ­Under the eaves, and ploughs and wooden wheels And mountain slopes and autumn are with me.96 Wino śpi w beczkach z dębu nadreńskiego. Budzi mnie dzwon kościołka między winnicami Mittelbergheim. Słyszę małe źródło Pluszczące w cembrowinę na podwórzu, stuk Drewniaków na ulicy. Tytoń schnący Pod okapem i pługi, i koła drewniane, I zbocza gór, i jesień przy mnie są.97

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Even without knowing Polish, one sees that the two versions have entirely analogous syntax: not only are all the enjambments preserved, but words with the same lexical meaning are placed in similar positions in both versions of the poem. In both cases the word “Mittelbergheim” concludes the second sentence in the following, third line. Then, “a clatter” (or “stuk”) is left alone ­a fter the comma at the end of the fourth line. Fi­nally, the sentence with “sabots” or “drewniaki” finishes in the ­middle of the line, and is followed by the opening of a new topic and new sentence on “tobacco” or “tytoń,” which runs on into the next lines. This perfect analogy in the interplay of versification and syntax in Polish and En­glish makes it pos­si­ble, at least in theory, to have a similar playfulness in prosody. This aspect seems more impor­tant for Miłosz than another feature of his poem in Polish: the dominance of ten-­and eleven-­syllable lines (in En­glish ­there are several shorter and longer lines, too). ­These dominant lines, as well as the rare thirteen-­syllable verses, are a reference to traditional Polish syllabic versification—­especially the lines divided into seven and six, or five and six syllables. Though they do not form any regular pattern and are interspersed with other formats, Miłosz uses them frequently to connect his f­ ree verse with the Polish literary tradition,98 and their repetition makes it easier for the listener to hear and notice the lines of similar length even when they end in enjambments. This feature is, however, lost in En­glish. In Miłosz’s reading, in the lines like the first one, that consist of entire sentences, we can hear the lengthening and change of pitch on the last word, followed by a pause. ­Th ings get more complicated in other places. For example, ­there is a clear enjambment between lines 2 and 3: I am wakened by the bell of a chapel in the vineyards Of Mittelbergheim. I hear a small spring In the three readings I studied in detail (in Polish from the 1960s and 1990s, and in En­glish from the 1980s), Miłosz marks the enjambment with a very short pause between the lines, a slightly lengthened pronunciation of “vineyards,” and a slightly raised pitch of “Mittelbergheim” (such exaggerated articulation of the next line is often used in recitations of enjambments). In all three cases, the word “Mittelbergheim” clearly concludes the intonational phrase with a pitch change and lengthening, and a prominent pause that

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follows it, making the sentence the main basis for intonation in this fragment, while the line divisions provide some additional variety. In the next conflicting case: Trickling into a well in the yard, a clatter Of sabots in the street. Tobacco drying it would be difficult to similarly express the enjambment in the Polish readings, as the word “stuk,” the Polish word for “clatter,” is short and framed by the stop consonants “t” and “k,” which makes it hard to lengthen it or melodically accentuate it. To illustrate ­t hese pronunciations, let us look at Figures 2.3 and 2.4, which cover the quoted lines, starting with “Trickling” at the left hand side, and finishing with “Tobacco drying / ­Under the . . .” on the right hand side. First we can see the English version, then the Polish one. Both figures clearly show the three intonational phrases: “Trickling into a well in the yard,” finishing with a fall-­rise and a pause, then “a clatter / Of sabots in the street,” finishing with a pause, and fi­nally “Tobacco drying / ­Under the . . .” In Miłosz’s readings both in En­glish in the 1980s and in Polish in the 1990s, “clatter” is clearly separated from the beginning of its line by a pause, and it belongs to the syntax-­based intonational phrase that finishes on “the street.” In both cases, ­t here is a very short pause marking the enjambment between “clatter” and “of sabots.” In Polish, this pause is actually enforced by the plosive “k” finishing the word “stuk,” but it is still audible. The En­glish case, which subtly but deliberately separates the words “clatter” and “of,” is therefore even more informative, given also the rising tone of “clatter.” The situation is even clearer in Miłosz’s Polish reading of the same lines from the 1960s, shown in Figure 2.5. There are no longer three distinct intonational phrases. Instead, the first two look both joined and broken up by short pauses, and in between them ­there is a small point in the pitch contour. This is the contour of the word “stuk,” “clatter,” pronounced ­here as belonging in part to its line (to the left of it) and in part to its syntactical and semantic unit (to the right of it). Apparently the younger Miłosz was even more ­eager or able to emphasize the nuanced tension between syntax and versification in Polish. As we can see, Miłosz’s En­glish translations follow the Polish syntax and verse, allowing for a potentially similar prosody, though sometimes the

2.3 Miłosz reads the words “Trickling into a well in the yard, a clatter / Of sabots in the street. Tobacco drying / ­Under the . . .” from “Mittelbergheim.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording made at Harvard in 1982, archived in the collections of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.

2.4 Miłosz reads the words “Pluszczące w cembrowinę na podwórzu, stuk / Drewniaków na ulicy. Tytoń schnący / Pod . . .” from “Mittelbergheim.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from cassettes included in Miłosz, Antologia osobista (Kraków: Znak, 1998), archived in the collections of the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw.

2.5 Miłosz reads the words “Pluszczące w cembrowinę na podwórzu, stuk / Drewniaków na ulicy. Tytoń schnący / Pod . . .” from “Mittelbergheim.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from undated tapes from the 1960s, archived in the National Digital Archives in Warsaw.

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foreignness of the language or perhaps his old age made it harder for the poet to consistently articulate the nuances with equal precision. Moreover, we can observe that enjambments are expressed by vari­ous phonetic means, just as ­earlier the inserted phrase in “Bobo” was signaled in two dif­fer­ent ways. It seems, thus, that no single individual reading by Miłosz can be treated as the “right” reading in all its concrete phonetic details. More impor­tant than a par­t ic­u ­lar execution is the abstract prosodic pattern noticeable across vari­ous recordings, as well as its traces in the En­glish texts, which follow the constructions of the Polish and allow us to imagine ­t hese same nuances in En­glish, to hear them in our mind. This rule is also vis­i­ble when Miłosz’s lines are divided by extended enumerations, each ele­ment of which can be read with a separate pitch and a subsequent pause. The first stanza of “Mittelbergheim” ends with a list: . . . ​and ploughs and wooden wheels And mountain slopes and autumn are with me. Figures 2.6 and 2.7 show two readings in Polish. In both figures we can see the pauses that divide the text into the following phrasal units: “and ploughs”; “and wooden wheels”; “and mountain slopes”; “and autumn”; “are with me.” The last unit in Figure 2.6 is only slightly separated from the previous one, though technically “are with me” breaks the pattern of enumeration. In both figures, it is difficult to locate the first line ending, b ­ ecause many ele­ ments of enumeration end with a similar intonational signal. Only the last unit—­where the end of the line coincides with both the end of the stanza and of the sentence—is emphasized; Miłosz reads it more quietly and slowly, with a falling pitch. In En­glish, on the other hand, as we can see in Figure 2.8, the division between the first two units (“ploughs” and “wheels”) is very subtle, almost imperceptible, while the last two units (“autumn” and “are with me”) are divided only by a change in pitch, with no pause. The strong pause ­a fter “mountain slopes” in the m ­ iddle of the second line quoted above is pre­sent in all of Miłosz’s readings; it is an inherent feature of the line’s prosody. ­These examples show that in his readings, Miłosz would vary the delivery of certain lines, emphasizing the same phrases to a greater or lesser extent by marking them phonetically. At the same time, the meticulously preserved syntactic construction is crucial to the way Miłosz’s poems are read in both

2.6 Miłosz reads the words “i pługi, i koła drewniane, / I zbocza gór, i jesień przy mnie są” from “Mittelbergheim.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from undated tapes from the 1960s, archived in the National Digital Archives in Warsaw.

2.7 Miłosz reads the words “i pługi, i koła drewniane, / I zbocza gór, i jesień przy mnie są” from “Mittelbergheim.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from cassettes included in Miłosz, Antologia osobista (Kraków: Znak, 1998), archived in the collections of the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw.

2.8 Miłosz reads the words “and ploughs and wooden wheels / And mountain slopes and autumn are with me” from “Mittelbergheim.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording made at Harvard in 1982, archived in the collections of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.

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languages, for instance, by creating repetitive divisions into prosodic phrases. Sometimes the foregrounding of syntax can almost blur the contours of a verse line. In “Mittelbergheim,” though, such lines are surrounded by lines that are strengthened, rather than weakened, by their intonation. The poem opens with the line “Wine sleeps in casks of Rhine oak,” a complete sentence with its own contour and one that sets a pattern for the lines that follow. B ­ ecause Polish verse lines have a similar number of syllables, and Miłosz reads longer lines more quickly, duration can help us locate line endings as well. In syllabic poems, or poems that are close to syllabic, such as this one, Miłosz de-­ emphasized line endings and was more e­ ager to include enjambment. The lines quoted from “Mittelbergheim” confirm Miłosz’s view of poetic sound: though the strength of his intonational contours varies to a certain extent, and can be motivated by subjective or discretionary ­factors, Miłosz’s prosodic phrasing is not external or arbitrary but depends on the interplay of verse and syntax; this original melody should be at least partly transposed into En­g lish. Moreover, although we can learn what a typical intonation meant for Miłosz only by listening to specific readings, ­there is no single per­ for­mance that should be taken as a model, especially in En­glish; rather, it is through the set of readings that we can reconstruct an ­imagined voice. This analy­sis can shed some light on two of Miłosz’s most controversial decisions regarding his translations to En­glish. The first of t­ hese decisions was made in 1975 and concerned “Bobo’s Metamorphosis,” which Miłosz had published in his 1973 Selected Poems. Two Polish-­Canadian scholars and translators based in Vancouver, Andrzej Busza and Bogdan Czaykowski, translated the poem u ­ nder a new title, “Gus Spellbound,” and shared it with Miłosz, asking for his permission to publish it. They felt that the more translations t­ here ­were of any poem, the better ­because a variety of translations could help non-­native speakers grasp more aspects of the original text. But Miłosz refused to give his permission, citing the rhythmical shape of his works as the reason.99 Given that ­these poems are mostly in ­free verse, the need to preserve “rhythmical shape” might come as a surprising argument. However, knowing how impor­tant syntax was for Miłosz, we can compare the extent to which it was preserved in the translation by Miłosz and Lourie and that by Busza and Czaykowski (which was eventually published in an anthology many years ­later). Some lines can illuminate Miłosz’s decision.

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­ ere, for example, is Miłosz and Lourie’s translation of an excerpt from H section 7 of “Bobo,” which, as we know, the poet frequently read in the United States: He flew through a win­dow into the bright garden. ­There, indomitable ferryboats of leaves100 And this is the Polish original: Leciał przez okno w jarzący się ogród. I tam, nieposkromione promy liści101 In both texts, “garden” (or “ogród”) is accompanied by a sense of closure and intonational fall. Additionally, the next line starts with “­t here” (or “i tam”), which must be marked by pitch and is separated by a comma from the rest of line. This strong division is not preserved in the translation by Busza and Czaykowski. They start the second line with the words “Where tireless ferryboats . . .”102 Not only does this line lack a clear division between the first two words, but the previous line about the garden remains open rather than closed, waiting to be continued. An even more striking example comes from the first section of “Bobo,” which is built up out of separate lines and thoughts. In Miłosz’s and Lourie’s version, one of t­ hese lines reads: Dusk and a bird flies low and w ­ aters flare.103 In Polish, the same line reads: Ten zmierzch i nisko leci ptak, i błysły wody.104 Busza and Czaykowski translate this as: Twilight. A bird flies low, and ­waters flash.105 All three versions of this line can be divided into three parts (pertaining to dusk, bird, and w ­ aters), and each part has a separate pitch contour. Though the Polish “zmierzch” is not separated from the rest of line by a period, it is pos­si­ble to imagine reading it with a falling pitch and a short pause, which could change to a rising pitch only in the next clause, about the bird. In other words, the syntax alone does not preclude Busza and Czaykowski’s translation. To know that “zmierzch” (and Miłosz and Lourie’s “dusk”) should be

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marked with a rising intonation and that it should not be followed by a period, one needs to have heard Miłosz read the poem.106 The only alternative is to cautiously follow the original syntax, without any modifications, in order to allow both readings, just in case. A similar line of reasoning, focused on syntax that preserves Miłosz’s preferred intonational phrasing, can be applied to a second controversial case. In 1981, a­ fter Miłosz had won the Nobel Prize, his friends, the poets Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky, together with the journalist and translator Renata Gorczyńska, collaborated on an En­glish version of Miłosz’s war­time poem “Świat (poema naiwne).” “The World (a naive poem)” was included in Miłosz’s next poetry book, Separate Notebooks (1984).107 However, in a 1987 interview the poet declared that he was working on a new translation of this poem for his forthcoming Collected Poems. His friends had done their best, but their “translations [­were] too far from the naiveté of the original.”108 Miłosz did, in fact, retranslate the poem, and it is this version of “The World” that has been reproduced in all his books since. I touched on the main prob­lem with this translation ­earlier in the chapter: the poem was originally written in syllabic verse, with ele­ments of accentual-­ syllabic meter, but Miłosz’s translation loses ­these features in order to accommodate the “naiveté.” Yet, as we can guess by now, what concerned Miłosz most was not the meter but the syntax, including the original poem’s simplicity. This syntactical simplicity is evident in the part of the poem titled “The Porch,” especially its first stanza. In Polish, this stanza reads: Ganek, na zachód drzwiami obrócony, Ma duże okna. Słońce tutaj grzeje. Widok szeroki stąd na wszystkie strony, Na lasy, wody, pola i aleje. In Miłosz’s own translation, we read: The porch whose doors face the west Has large win­dows. The sun warms it well. From ­here you can see north, south, east, and west, Forests and rivers, fields and tree-­lined lanes.109 Meanwhile, Pinsky and Hass’s translation reads:

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The porch, its doorway facing westward, With large win­dows, is warmed well by the sun. From ­here, on all sides, you can look outward Over woods, w ­ ater, open fields and the lane.110 The second line of the stanza is particularly striking; h ­ ere, in both his Polish and En­glish versions, Miłosz concludes the first sentence with a s­ imple statement, declaring that the porch “has large win­dows.” This is followed by an even shorter sentence: “The sun warms it well.” In the Polish version, “Słońce tutaj grzeje” sounds like a childlike observation. The line is thus broken into two intonational phrases, the first marked by a falling pitch and a pause a­ fter “win­dows,” and then another, separate phrase, which is also followed by a pause. This structure is absent from the translation by Hass and Pinsky, where the phrase “with large win­dows” occurs mid-­sentence and features a rising pitch. The third line of both authorial versions is made up of one intonational unit, with some minor prosodic divisions, whereas the Hass and Pinsky translation divides the line into three parts, thanks to the phrase inserted in the m ­ iddle: “from ­here”; “on all sides”; “you can look outward.”111 Miłosz’s insistence on following the syntax of the original can also be seen in the first part of “The World,” titled “The Road.” In the last stanza, the Polish original reads: Przed domem ojciec, wsparty na motyce, Schyla się, trąca listki rozwinięte I z grządki całą widzi okolicę. Miłosz translates t­ hese lines by following the pattern of clauses, commas, and conjunctions: In front of the h ­ ouse f­ ather, leaning on a hoe, Bows down, touches the unfolded leaves, And from his flower bed inspects the w ­ hole region.112 In the translation by Hass and Pinsky, the syntax is markedly dif­fer­ent: ­ ather leans on his hoe in the front garden, F Then bends down to touch a half-­opened leaf; From his tilled patch, he can see the w ­ hole region.113

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Once again, the link between Miłosz’s translations and the preferred intonational units of the original is rendered vis­i­ble; indeed, when he read this stanza in Polish in 1998, Miłosz marked the boundary ­after “bows down” (“schyla się”) with a rising pitch followed by a pause. In Miłosz’s translations, the text is a kind of score for a potential or ­concrete reading, allowing the poet to retain similar intonational units in ­En­glish as in Polish, and often similar declamatory practices as well. Though Miłosz did not always perform his texts in an identical manner (for example, his reading style became less declamatory l­ater in life), the syntactic scores of his poems are identical, allowing for dif­fer­ent instantiations of his trademark reading style. While in per­for­mance, vari­ous enumerations, interrogations, and clauses may become a full intonational unit, an intermediate phrase, or may be marked only slightly—­depending on the reader’s tempo, age, and language—in writing they have to retain all ­these possibilities of prosodic phrasing. For Miłosz, syntax and line bound­aries are the poem’s spine, the critical ele­ment that has to be preserved regardless of meter, rhyme, and other formal ele­ments. Miłosz’s practice thus poses a challenge to both classical translation studies, based on structural approaches to equivalence, and more recent developments in the field, which are culturally oriented and emphasize translators’ visibility and their influence on target cultures. Miłosz seems not to believe in the possibility of equivalence or equivalent effects; instead, he identifies a common denominator for his works in both Polish and En­glish (phrases), and is willing to lose nearly every­t hing e­ lse. By emphasizing his role as a translator of his own poems, he diminishes the efforts of other translators, but at the same time he downplays the creative aspect of this role, its orientation ­toward a target culture. It is impossible to understand the status of his translations without recourse to the Polish versions, and his poetry readings encourage us to compare t­hese texts.114 Miłosz’s readings in the United States emphasized the fact that although his poems in En­glish ­were controlled and authorized, and could even be treated as new originals—as Irena Grudzińska-­Gross has rightly suggested115—­they ­were never equal in Miłosz’s eyes. I therefore call ­t hese versions, authorized by the poet but considered pale and ­imperfect, his “secondary originals.” ­These comparisons show how difficult it was for the poet to separate his En­glish texts from the intonational contours of their Polish originals. The ap-

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preciation of his readers mattered less to him than staying true to his own feeling for language and his personal reading style. B ­ ecause prosody dictated the shape of his En­g lish translations, Miłosz in print and Miłosz on tape cannot be treated as “discrepant versions of the work,” nor can his poems be declared to have a “fundamentally plural existence.”116 Though t­ here is a degree of discrepancy and plurality to his body of reading style (qualities rightly emphasized by modern studies of poetry per­for­mance), it is only by focusing on similarities that we can understand what guided Miłosz’s readings and his translation work. Miłosz authorized his translations ­because he also authorized his own readings. What remains unclear is why syntax and intonation, rather than any other formal ele­ments, w ­ ere so critical to Miłosz’s view of his Polish poems. One could argue that his English-­language poetry readings focused his attention on his stubbornly Polish intonations, yet the same tendencies in his reading style can be heard on his e­ arlier tapes as well, where he reads the same poems in Polish. Moreover, around the same time as his first English-­language readings and translations in the 1970s, Miłosz published several articles about poetic diction and voice in Polish poetry. It seems that his time in exile, and the necessary work on translations, forced Miłosz to rethink, recognize, and name what had become increasingly crucial for his poetry. His American poetry readings and self-­translations into En­glish are therefore helpful for the study of his Polish diction as well.

His Polish Voice In the 1970s Czesław Miłosz received vinyl rec­ords with a per­for­mance of Forefathers’ Eve. This leading drama of Polish Romanticism, written by the greatest Polish Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, was staged by Konrad Swinarski at the Old Theater in Kraków in 1973. The per­for­mance ran for ten years, the rec­ords, published in 1974, sold out within three hours. Swinarski’s staging was as famous as Kazimierz Dejmek’s 1967 staging, the closing down of which in 1968 led to large-­scale student protests. Yet listening in the United States to recordings of Swinarski’s staging, Miłosz was far from elated. He was saddened by the actors’ “hysterical screaming,” and compared his emotions to seeing “the object of our fiery feelings behav[ing] shamefully.”117

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That Mickiewicz was close to Miłosz’s heart is not surprising. Critics have noted that Miłosz consciously transformed his biography into a personal myth, in which links with Mickiewicz could be seen. Aleksander Fiut summed up ­these parallels as follows: “Both poets are linked by Wilno [Vilnius], the city of their university studies and youthful friendships, the course of their foreign wanderings . . . ​, and fi­nally their lecturing on Slavic lit­er­a­tures at a foreign university.”118 Miłosz himself took ­these parallels even further: he declared that he owed his language to Mickiewicz, whose language was that of the Polish-­speaking nobility of the ­Grand Duchy of Lithuania (although in the late eigh­teenth ­century, when Mickiewicz was born, the Duchy was already non­ex­is­tent and belonged to the Rus­sian Empire, just as it did at the time of Miłosz’s birth in the early twentieth ­century). Mickiewicz, in fact, was born in the part of the former Duchy that t­ oday belongs to Belarus, and the language spoken in villages throughout this area was Belarusian, not Lithuanian; Miłosz was born in a Lithuanian-­speaking territory.119 However, the broader regional identity, as well as the legacy of the multilingual Duchy, ­were strong for both poets, and Mickiewicz famously opened his national epic Pan Tadeusz with the words “Lithuania, my homeland,” though this sentiment, like the rest of the poem, was expressed in Polish.120 The Lithuanian identity that Miłosz frequently emphasized in the United States signaled a very dif­fer­ent set of associations in Poland. In Amer­i­ca it suggested a mystic “provincial exoticism,” but for Poles it created an internal link with Mickiewicz, the most impor­tant poet in the Polish tradition. The linkage was also linguistic in a specific sense: both poets grew up speaking Polish in the provinces, far from the influences of central Poland, and then maintained their language in emigration. The association with Mickiewicz additionally reveals that Miłosz’s myth of a bygone Lithuania, although multicultural (and invoked as a counterargument to Polish nationalism), retained a Polish-­speaking perspective on the country’s history.121 This problematic aspect was apparent at a reading Miłosz gave with the Irish poet Paul Muldoon at the Library of Congress in 1991. On this occasion Miłosz compared the use of literary Polish to write about Lithuania to the use of En­glish in Ireland. While this analogy could be helpful for thinking about the Polonized nobility in Mickiewicz’s lifetime, from the perspective of the late twentieth c­ entury it significantly distorted the role of Lithuanian, the official language of in­de­pen­dent Lithuania even between the

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world wars. The importance of Lithuanian in this context was not r­ eally comparable to that of Gaelic; it also failed to take into account the long period of Soviet Russification in this small country. Though Miłosz sincerely supported an in­de­pen­dent Lithuania (at the time of the reading it had just been recognized internationally as a separate state), his associations about the country ­were still rooted in the time of his youth, when part of Lithuania belonged to Poland. In the 1990s, a­ fter all the border changes and resettlements, Miłosz could claim to be one of the last poets to grow up with a variant of literary Polish from that region, drawing him ever closer to Mickiewicz. What Miłosz liked most in Mickiewicz was linked with that region: Mic­ kiewicz’s ballads—­f ull of local stories, ghosts, and superstitions, but also of humor; the epic poem Pan Tadeusz, an idyllic and humorous paean to life and metaphysical order; as well as Mickiewicz’s early, classicist works. In Fore­ fathers’ Eve, it was folk spirituality that interested Miłosz, more than the theme of national martyrology or the visions of Polish suffering; in fact, Miłosz appreciated every­t hing that was least Romantic about Mickiewicz, every­thing that was farthest from the Romantic paradigm and its influence on Polish po­liti­cal thought. Miłosz valued the classical language that he could still find in Mickiewicz, in contrast to the styles of ­later Polish Romantic poets.122 All of this is impor­tant ­because Miłosz de­cided to rec­ord himself reciting Mickiewicz’s poems. He did so twice, first in 1974, when he recorded Mic­ kiewicz’s ballads at the Linguistic Laboratory at Berkeley, and then in 1996, when Polish Radio recorded him reading Mickiewicz’s earliest printed poems, ballads, sonnets, and late lyr­ics in his home in Kraków, where he moved from the United States ­after Poland’s po­liti­cal transition. As Miłosz explained on that second occasion, one could pay homage through recitation. As for the reasoning b ­ ehind his Berkeley recording, which was copied and published in Poland in 2004, he said: “the reason [to rec­ord] was only for my plea­sure”; “working closely with ­t hese poems was bliss”; “I felt a need at that time to get soaked in the Polish language.”123 However, Miłosz was ­a fter something more than just the plea­sure of reading when he included t­ hese recitations of ballads with the Mickiewicz volume in the “Lit­er­a­ture Lesson with Czesław Miłosz” series, which was aimed at teachers and students in Poland.124 ­There is a difference between reading ballads at home to ­gently scare his sons, as Miłosz had also done,125

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and reciting for a student audience. Miłosz was apparently convinced that he could recite Mickiewicz in an appropriate manner, at least for t­ hose poems closest to his own poetic ideals. In both recordings, the choice of texts matched his preferences—as Miłosz claimed, even in the ostensibly Romantic ballads Mickiewicz’s classicist phrasing could still be heard. Miłosz would also say that he felt a personal connection to Mickiewicz’s ballads b ­ ecause they reminded him of his own upbringing in a similar cultural milieu of impoverished Lithuanian nobility, with its regional variant of Polish, and of the ghost stories Miłosz’s grand­mother used to tell.126 Indeed, Miłosz’s recitations of Mickiewicz resemble his readings of his own poems, with the lengthening of the last syllable in each line, the rising intonation in the last word of a line, and a short pause before the word that concludes a sentence or a full intonational phrase, usually marked by a falling pitch contour. ­There are also slight rises in intonation around enjambments, marking both the line ending and the syntax, as was the case in the more nuanced Polish renditions of “Mittelbergheim.” Miłosz’s reading of some ballads sounds almost like singing, with constantly rising, melodic pitches. ­These recordings raise some further questions. Can we treat Miłosz’s recitations of Mickiewicz as a response to Swinarski’s recordings of Forefathers’ Eve? Would Miłosz have wanted to teach actors how to recite Mickiewicz? Why was he so dissatisfied with rec­ords from 1974? Naturally, the poet’s readings, like ­those by other traditional authors, ­were more declamatory than theatrical. Miłosz’s insistence on marking the repeatability of line endings contrasted actors’ attempts to play a role, to sound like a speaking character. Actors would follow the syntax, without emphasizing line endings; at the sentence level, their intonations ­were expressive yet modern, without constant rises in pitch, lengthenings, and melodic contours. Compared with Miłosz, their intonation was flat.127 In contrast to the ballads and other early poems, Forefathers’ Eve was the most Romantic of Mickiewicz’s texts, and Miłosz never recorded it, nor did he claim that he could recite it properly. He even remarked once that he had never heard a good per­for­mance of the ­Great Improvisation, the drama’s crucial scene.128 Thus, giving life to Mickiewicz’s ballads and sonnets was very dif­fer­ent from impersonating the inspired and improvising rebel from the drama. Yet even if Miłosz refused to perform this scene, he might have heard the “right” sounds in his mind when reading the text to himself.

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In his 1976 essay “Mickiewicz,” in which Miłosz expressed his disappointment with Swinarski, his actors, and their delighted audiences, we can also find a broader reflection on voice, the implications of which go beyond Fore­ fathers’ Eve or Mickiewicz. Miłosz notes that in a museum, we never know what another person actually sees in a painting, even when we view it at the same moment: “Similarly, when we take into consideration a printed page with a poem or prose, we can check it only to a small extent against what our neighbor understands and sees. . . . ​It is pos­si­ble that this applies to the perception of the ­whole language and culture, so that Polish sentences are pronounced by me differently than by ­others, and what for many is pretty, for me is ugly, and vice versa.”129 Miłosz elaborated this pertinent observation with an image of the poet as someone who stores banknotes inside a mattress. A ­ fter the poet’s death, bags of banknotes are found, but their value could be minimal if they have been withdrawn from circulation. Comparing his style of reading or speaking with expired banknotes is a caustically revealing meta­phor. In 1976, having lived in exile for more than twenty years and maintained ­limited contact with the living speech of Poles, Miłosz realized that Polish speakers might no longer be able to access or appreciate the kind of declamation that both his and Mickiewicz’s texts required. He realized that not only ordinary ­people, but even actors from the country’s best theaters (along with their educated audiences) could have dif­fer­ent aesthetic preferences, or simply speak a dif­fer­ent variety of Polish. It was pos­si­ble that they would not know how to match the poetry on the page with the melodic phrasing Miłosz thought it implied.130 Miłosz’s insights have been borne out by research. Polish verse theorists agree that lengthening the final syllables of lines is a local declamatory habit. Teresa Dobrzyńska and Lucylla Pszczołowska, who studied the recitation habits of several Polish poets, suggested that Miłosz’s tendency to lengthen the last word of a line, and to combine repetitive half-­rising and half-­falling cadences of similar intensity, could be related to the poet’s background in the former eastern territories of Poland.131 As we know, Polish intonational phrases are characterized by both a change in pitch on the last word and the lengthening of that word, but in Miłosz’s per­for­mances the prominence and regularity of ­t hese changes suggests that he wished to distinguish his readings from everyday speech, and even from the recitation style of his contemporaries. It is pos­si­ble that Miłosz’s accentuation of the poem was yet another

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sign of his attachment to his former homeland, as was his articulation of the Polish letter “ł” as a dark “l,” typical of that region. In his conversation with Fiut, the poet openly declared that while reading his poems, he “marked strongly the end of each line.” Yet the changes in thinking about poetry go deeper than recitation habits. For Miłosz, it was obvious that ­t here was a rhythmical structure to his poetic texts, which was dif­fer­ent from prose. When Fiut, who was familiar with Miłosz’s f­ ree verse, tried to suggest that the poet’s mea­sure could just be his breath, or that his poems w ­ ere based solely on notation, Miłosz disagreed. He insisted instead on the “incantational” ele­ment of his poetry, and seemed convinced that incantation, which resulted in strong line endings, was an intrinsic part of his poems, and not just a quality of his recitations. In this re­spect he distinguished his f­ree verse from such con­temporary poets as Zbigniew Herbert or Tadeusz Różewicz.132 Indeed, a­ fter the war it was increasingly rare for Polish free-­verse poets to read their texts with a clear pitch curve at the end of each line, or to treat lines as repetitive intonational phrases. This is also why Polish verse theory strug­gled to capture the structure of ­free verse: leading theories from the turn of the 1960s still claimed that the final intonational signal was an inherent part of verse: it could be inferred from written poems, they insisted, and provided repeatability.133 However, Miłosz’s younger colleagues Herbert and Różewicz seemed not to share this conviction. Miłosz characterized Herbert’s poetry as being a bit farther, and Różewicz’s as farthest, from his own texts in terms of incantation. Similar changes w ­ ere taking place in Anglophone countries; repetitive rising tones w ­ ere no longer the obvious reading style for poetry. Miłosz rightly compared Różewicz’s f­ ree verse to the new type of poetry introduced in the United States by William Carlos Williams,134 though select Polish poets retained some ele­ments of the incantation in their readings.135 Faced with such diversity, it is only by studying a poet’s personal convictions and reading style that one can learn about intonational types and their relation to written poems. In fact, a study of this kind had been conducted in the early 1920s, as part of a pioneering research proj­ect by the Rus­sian scholar Sergei Bernshtein. Bernshtein noticed that the reading practices of vari­ous Rus­sian poets could be located between two poles: the declamatory and the non-­declamatory. In the case of the declamatory tendency, poets

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composed poems in their heads, hearing their prosodic contours, and subsequently recited their texts in a recognizable, repeatable way—in a sense revealing the original sounds. In the non-­declamatory case, poets composed texts in the act of writing, did not associate any par­tic­u­lar prosody with their poems, and recited them differently each time, without any repeating sound patterns.136 The latter tendency gained prominence in Poland and elsewhere in the West ­after World War II, but Miłosz was definitely closer to the former type (in Bernshtein’s understanding of the term). It seems that through his consistent reading style the poet tried to reinforce the view that some prosodic patterns inhered in his poetry. Miłosz’s view of intonation focused on versification as much as on syntax, and he saw a direct link between his incantatory style and his “sensitivity to the rhythmical structure of a sentence.”137 The word “incantation,” as Miłosz uses it, can be misleading, given that he uses it to refer to the melody of clauses and sentences, the contours of half-­rises and half-­falls that accompany his phrasing. As we saw, it is this aspect of intonation that Miłosz valued most in his En­glish translations of “The World” and “Mittelbergheim.” In terms of auditory perception, Miłosz’s phrasing was more emphatic and melodic than ­today’s reading styles, but far from the line-­based incantatory recitations of Rus­sian poets. The poet also seemed to believe that prosodic phrasing was far more impor­tant than the meter and syllable count. Given Miłosz’s interest in Mickiewicz, his translations and his reading style in both Polish and En­glish could be seen as attempts to modify, not just our view of Miłosz’s ­free verse, but also our ideas about Polish syllabic verse more generally. For Miłosz, syllabic meter seems to function merely as a background against which the interplay of intonations, the interplay of phrases based on syntax and line endings, is built. This attachment to phrasing seems to have resulted from Miłosz’s intuitive grasp of the Polish language. Once, Miłosz even asked Fiut w ­ hether it was pos­si­ble to wrest poetry from such a weakly accented language as Polish.138 Especially when compared to En­g lish, which would have been Miłosz’s main point of reference in the 1970s and 1980s, the poet was right. While En­glish has a rhythm of a stress-­timed language (which was traditionally associated with similar intervals between stresses), Polish has a stable stress pattern, syllables of similar duration, and no reduction of unstressed vowels—­a ll typical of syllable-­timed languages. Yet compared to other

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languages from this category, such as Italian or Spanish, Polish has many more consonant clusters and tends to lengthen vowels at the end of phrases.139 While its word stress is considered stable, and falls on the penultimate syllable of each word, its acoustic correlates are sometimes not clear; moreover, stresses in one-­syllable words are often context-­dependent or elective, and it is arguable w ­ hether secondary stresses in longer words actually exist.140 Furthermore, in poets’ own readings of accentual verse (whose rhythm is based on stress-­count), authors ­don’t always accentuate the words one would expect.141 Given the unclear status of accentual verse, the importance of syllabic poetry in the Polish literary tradition is understandable; initially, syllabic verse was developed and defined as having the same number of syllables per line, feminine line endings, and frequent rhymes. Miłosz’s attention to the level of intonational phrases, rather than syllables and line-­ending word stresses, complicates this picture by suggesting that phrasing, too, is a critical ele­ment of a poem’s rhythmic effect. This observation agrees with the current linguistic research, which sees rhythm not as a s­ imple effect of dividing speech to units of similar length, but as a much more complex phenomenon. ­Today, prominence and phrasing are considered crucial to the rhythm of Polish, which relies on prominent intonations of longer phrase-­ending vowels.142 Miłosz was disappointed by weak stresses, so instead he used phrasing to ­emphasize and accentuate certain words, and to build the melody of his ­syllabic and free-­verse poems. Miłosz discusses syntax at length in his essay “Mickiewicz,” in an ­earlier article titled “Język, narody” (Language, Nations) (1973), and in his response to a polemic with this text. All three texts ­were published in the émigré journal Kultura (Culture), edited in France by Jerzy Giedroyc.143 ­These essays proposed that historically t­ here w ­ ere three “Polish languages,” each with its own variant of rhythmical, harmonious, concise, clear, and s­ imple diction, but that they ­were abandoned by the next generations of writers. The most notable examples of this “stabilized tone,” or, literally, “well-­coached voice,” ­were Psałterz puławski (Puławy Psalter) from the fifteenth ­century, the sixteenth-­ century Re­nais­sance poetry of Jan Kochanowski, and poetry from the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries, including the classicist poets and Mickiewicz.144 Other trends, such as Baroque, l­ ater Romanticism, symbolism,

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and vari­ous avant-­gardes, w ­ ere considered deviations from the center; this was especially problematic ­because for long periods the center was not developed and remained practically invisible. In his essays Miłosz wrote about the lexical and syntactic aspects of ­t hese styles, but what he mostly looked for w ­ ere a “strong rhythmicity of sentence” and a “dense rhythm,” which could stand up to the kind of wordiness, wordplay, embellishment, and allusiveness that lead to long, labyrinthine, unclear, and lethargic sentences.145 ­Here, Miłosz openly posited a relation between syntax and intonation. Accordingly, his own poetic language avoided meta­ phor and paronomasia, preferring synecdoche, montage, and both regional and archaic semantic nuances.146 On the one hand, Miłosz claimed in his essays that En­glish should not be treated as a benchmark for assessing other languages; on the other hand, he admitted that only living abroad and constantly switching between languages allowed him to see tendencies in the Polish language that ­were overlooked in Poland.147 In another essay, he admitted that “one of the most serious and frustrating dilemmas resulting from prolonged residence abroad is having to repress the constantly intruding thought: How would this sound in En­glish?”148 In fact, a­ fter Miłosz moved to the United States, his poetry became increasingly translatable, especially compared to his early poems, where he sometimes used accentual-­syllabic patterns that overshadowed his intonation. The scholar Andrzej Vincenz—­who suggested that the Baroque was far more central to the Polish literary tradition than Miłosz admitted—­observed that the poet’s theory could simply be a model for his own poetry.149 Moreover, the idea of a stabilized tone dovetails with Miłosz’s program, as announced in his 1968 poem “Incantation,” where ­human reason “saves austere and transparent phrases.”150 For Miłosz, the fight for form was a fight for rigor and reason, and also for a corresponding idea of Polishness; he once asked if the lack of a sense of form could lead to the fall of a country.151 At the same time, his interest in classical, rational diction did not preclude a fascination with spirituality and imagination. We need only consider Miłosz’s paragons of stabilized tone: the biblical psalms and Mickiewicz’s harmonious epic.152 ­These works show what Miłosz was aiming for: a rhythmical but not alluring language, capable of embedding a b ­ itter reflection within a hopeful metaphysics of order. He summarized this program in a

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short fragment from the book Unattainable Earth: “An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.”153 Of course, this was not the only way that poetic form could be established, nor was it the only path for Polish poets in Amer­i­ca. An in­ter­est­ing counterpoint to Miłosz’s stance is expressed in a poem by Miłosz’s friend Stanisław Barańczak, a poet and scholar who joined Harvard’s Slavic Department in 1981. His poem “Voice Coaching,” written in the 1980s and discussed briefly in the Introduction, was interpreted by the critic Piotr Bogalecki as a polemic with Miłosz’s idea of stabilized tone (in Polish, the poem’s title is the exact same phrase as Miłosz’s “ustawienie głosu”).154 In the poem, the speaker is unable to coach his voice ­because only confidence in his message or faith could make him speak loudly and clearly. And this is exactly what Miłosz was ­doing: reciting in confident Polish with the conviction that his poetry was “dictated by a daimonion,”155 an inner voice that spoke directly to the poet. Barańczak’s speaker is strikingly dif­fer­ent, his attitude to the world and to metaphysics much more dramatic; this difference also affected Barańczak’s style, full of wordplay, rhymes, and elaborate stanzaic structures. Though this style was based on an acute sense of form and precision, it could also exemplify the “aberrant” tendency that Miłosz described in his essay, just as Barańczak’s translations of his own poems concentrate on meter and rhyme rather than syntax, and most of his texts are barely translatable. Once, at a poetry reading in the United States, Barańczak contrasted Miłosz’s habit of reading the Polish original “just for the sound” with his own habit of reading “just for the pun.”156 In a sense Barańczak read for the sound, too, as his puns w ­ ere often based on etymologies, homophonies, and rhymes. But this was a dif­fer­ent type of sound, and a dif­fer­ent type of form, from what we find in Miłosz’s poetry. It was built on the repetition of phonemes, on verbal play at the segmental level, and on increased polysemy, ambivalence, and meta­phor, all of which could only interfere with the suprasegmental clarity of intonation and syntax that Miłosz strove for. Miłosz’s vision of poetry, with its deep motivation for clear syntax and rhythmical prosody, can explain why the author was so frustrated with recordings of Mickiewicz in the 1970s, and also why he was so keen to preserve his own poetic phrasing in Polish and En­glish. For Miłosz, syntax and into-

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nation implied a vision of metaphysical order and rationality that opposed nothingness; they also preserved traces of his childhood past. The strong intonational rhythms he aimed for in the Polish language w ­ ere no longer reflected in the speech of actors. We even know that some con­temporary actors tried to imitate Miłosz’s diction and voice, but found it too idiosyncratic and hard to do,157 as if the poet’s rhythms ­were more personal than they seemed, more rooted in phonetic patterns from another time; indeed, they belonged to a lost world. Not only American, but Polish audiences, too, need to hear Miłosz’s voice to know how to read his poetry silently. As the poet and critic Susan Stewart wrote, when we read a poem, we “bring to a text our memories of speech experience, including what we may know of intended speaker’s speech experience.” In Miłosz’s case, we can literally “reconstitute t­ hese auditory conditions of the poem’s production,” and it seems that the role of our imagination, which Stewart mentions, should be ­limited.158 Only through his recordings can Miłosz teach us his rhythms, and the poet’s readings and recordings from the time he moved back to Poland in the 1990s suggest that he considered his per­for­mances an impor­tant ­educational activity. At the 1996 PEN Club meeting in Warsaw, Miłosz showed that even when he treated his recitations in En­glish as secondary, the very structure of a poetry reading was, for him, primarily American.159 In the United States he had fully recognized the role of his voice, and had worked out a format for his per­for­mances, as well as his stage persona. In Warsaw in 1996, he not only read poems that w ­ ere familiar from his American readings (“Rue Descartes,” “Esse,” “Mittelbergheim,” “A Song on the End of the World,” “Magpiety,” “Bobo’s Metamorphosis,” “ ‘If I had to tell . . .’ ”), he also provided the same banter about Lithuanian snakes and one-­a nd-­a-­half-­minute love affairs. Moreover, he openly compared the Polish event with his American readings, joking that now he could allow himself to read more rhymed poems. In 1998, in a recording made for a Polish anthology of his poems, he commented on his texts in a similar vein, though he read in a calmer, almost tired voice. It’s almost a shame that his Polish readings and recordings did not include poems in En­glish, “just for the sound.” His secondary originals could have been a helpful hint for his Polish listeners, demonstrating which poetic features he found crucial enough to be preserved.

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Syntax and Hope During his time in exile, Czesław Miłosz strove to preserve the rhythmicity of his sentences, the stability of his tone, and the clarity of his syntax. ­These goals—­supported by his eastern intonation patterns, which clearly marked all phrases with vivid pitch contours—­reflected Miłosz’s hope that the order of sentences in his poetry could express some deeper, metaphysical harmony of the world. According to this view of exile, one might expect that Miłosz was simply trying to preserve his Polish syntax from the influence of En­glish, but in fact it was more complicated. During World War  II in Warsaw, and during Miłosz’s stay in the United States as a cultural attaché in the years 1946–1950, the poet was intensely reading and translating Anglophone poetry, including T. S. Eliot. Miłosz learned from Anglophone poets how to make his poetry more focused on objects and metonymies rather than on catastrophic visions and symbolist thinking, and how to make it less metrical and more free-­verse. The phrasing in his Polish poems, which he tried to preserve in exile, w ­ asn’t thus straightforwardly “Polish”; it had been developed in response to English-­ language poetry. He needed Anglophone poets in order to coach and stabilize his Polish diction. Studies have described how t­ hese lessons from the 1940s helped Miłosz’s poetry gain recognition in his ­later years, making it easier for American poets to appreciate his work.160 We know also that he continued to learn in exile. Miłosz himself admitted that he noted certain features of the Polish language only when surrounded by foreign languages, and that he felt a constant need to translate his own words into En­glish. This pro­cess must have influenced his exilic view of what constitutes clear syntax in Polish. ­After his return to Poland in the mid-1990s, many younger poets and critics did not find his latest poetry linguistically in­ter­est­ing at all. This was in part a response to Miłosz’s overwhelming presence in literary life, which younger authors found oppressive, and his preference for higher registers and solemnity, lexical choices that w ­ ere not as 161 vis­i­ble in his En­g lish translations. Yet some poets and translators noted something more. For instance, in an interview from 2000, Piotr Sommer suggested that in his l­ater years, Miłosz had fallen u ­ nder the influence of En­ glish syntax, that his poems worked in En­glish better than they sounded in Polish.162 Perhaps the need to have the same phrasing in Polish and En­glish

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not only influenced Miłosz’s translations but also preemptively determined aspects of his Polish poetry. Not every­body in Poland shared the negative view of Miłosz’s late poems. One author who valued them precisely for their beauty and solemnity was Julia Hartwig (1921–2017), a poet whose work gained national recognition around 2000, when Hartwig became very prolific. Her views on this m ­ atter are especially in­ter­est­ing ­because she shared Miłosz’s interests in syntax and harmony as well as in Anglophone poetry, she used to live in the United States, and she was only ten years younger than he. A juxtaposition of her texts and c­ areer with Miłosz’s allows us to see Miłosz’s work and impact in the context of other Polish poets. Hartwig’s poetry, like Miłosz’s, was directed ­toward external real­ity, concrete objects and situations, which subsequently led to more philosophical and metaphysical questions. She too strove for the clarity of solemn language, albeit marked by a lighter touch or occasional humor. She avoided confessions and was by choice a poet of hope rather than despair.163 A striking similarity of poetic convictions can be found in Hartwig’s poem from the 1980s titled “A Sentence,” known as “Potrzeba” in Polish. The text starts with a claim: “I depend on a sentence” and ends with the following declaration: “But a sentence a reliable sentence / restores ­under my feet the firm earth.”164 On a dif­fer­ent occasion, Hartwig said that she built her poems on sentences rather than lines, ­because logical, coherent sentences increased clarity, even if the work of creating clarity and simplicity was often arduous.165 Interestingly, in Hartwig’s case, as in Miłosz’s case, this poetic diction ­free of unnecessary ornament and meta­phor was developed with American help. Hartwig did not spend as much time in the United States as Miłosz, but her longest stay, from 1970 to 1974, was an impor­tant experience for her. In 1970, together with her husband, the poet Artur Międzyrzecki, she was invited to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. This helped the ­family survive a­ fter their works ­were temporarily banned in 1968, following Międzyrzecki’s support for student protests against censorship. ­After their stay at Iowa, the c­ouple taught poetry at Drake University, and then Międzyrzecki got an appointment at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.166 Unlike Miłosz, Hartwig and Międzyrzecki left Poland legally (though not without effort and months of waiting), and so they ­were able to return to Poland, write for Polish readers, and remain in touch with the living

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language. Their ­daughter, however, settled in the United States, and they frequently returned for shorter fellowships, and to visit her. Many critics have noted that her stay in the 1970s changed Hartwig’s writing. Her ­earlier translations and monographs focused mostly on France, where she had lived in the years 1947–1950. Her poetry of that period used more meta­phors, symbolism, and surrealism. In a sense, her switch from French to American influences paralleled an e­ arlier shift of Miłosz’s poetic interests, which had been oriented t­ oward France before World War II (and then Miłosz lived in France throughout the 1950s). Spending time in Amer­ i­ca encouraged Hartwig to use longer lines, to write more narrative, reportage-­ like poems inspired by newspaper articles, and to simplify her language, all the while interrogating questions of identity formation and belonging. Her ­earlier poems had not revealed a stable authorial consciousness or persona. Having experienced the vastness and loneliness of Amer­i­ca, as well as her own foreignness, she introduced new subject ­matter to her poetry, including her new cycle of “American” poems.167 To some extent this older, de-­personified strategy was a response to a lesson young Hartwig learned from Miłosz during the war in Warsaw: she was then in her early twenties, he was already a well-­k nown author, and ­after reading some of her juvenilia, he advised her not to write about love and feelings.168 Hartwig followed this advice and avoided love poetry throughout her life, straying quite far from the Polish ste­reo­t ype of “feminine poetry.” Her time in Amer­i­ca allowed Hartwig to include more everyday details, empathy, and identity-­related questions, which Polish readers could perceive as an expression of a new and unusual “American” rather than “­woman’s” voice. Yet even in 1996, editors of a radio program on Hartwig had trou­ble finding male critics willing to discuss what they considered to be “feminine” poetry.169 When the poet fi­nally gained national recognition in the 2000s, some critics (including w ­ omen) still talked about Hartwig’s work as “­women’s poetry,” called certain features in her texts “feminine,” and expressed regret that the poet devoted very few poems to her d ­ aughter and maternity. The poet indeed did not mythologize childhood; her memories of her own youth ­were mixed. Neither did she mythologize her home, preferring to be a poet-­traveler, asking about the possibility of belonging. Fi­nally, she disliked h ­ ouse­hold chores, hired a helper, and did not write about domestic ­labor in her poems (though she mentioned it in the American context).170

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Some of Hartwig’s remarks suggest she was aware of the misogyny around her, and of her decades-­long marginal position as a poet, though she was very involved in literary life and recognized mostly as a translator and critic. When asked about poetry, she emphasized forging her own path.171 Yet she clearly wanted her poems to speak from a position that would be seen as nongendered, classical, rooted in the very heart of the literary tradition, and thus universal.172 Hartwig’s discretion was a conscious choice, related to her upbringing and her preferences, as well as her view of poetry’s dignity. In a recording for the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture, her biography is ­limited to her bibliography; she names all of her books and prizes, but omits personal details.173 Her discretion also came across at her poetry readings, where she read her texts calmly and distinctly, slightly raising the register of her voice, carefully following the syntax of her mostly sentence-­based free-­verse poems or prose poems. Her sentences and lines did not require special per­for­mance skills. She did not use a special eastern intonation; she read in a modulated, but modern way. She was known for her understated elegance. This body-­effacing be­hav­ior was echoed by her responses to personal questions, which she tried to steer ­toward prob­lems of art and creation.174 Although the first book of her poetry in En­glish translation was published only in 2008, following the late recognition of her work in Poland, even her ­earlier readings in the United States ­were framed very differently than in Poland.175 For instance, when Hartwig and Międzyrzecki visited the United States in 1986, the ­couple ­were recorded at a poetry reading at Harvard, introduced by Stanisław Barańczak; at the PEN Club in New York, where they ­were introduced by Allen Ginsberg; and at Iowa, where they gave lectures on lit­er­a­ture.176 The se­lection of poems that the c­ ouple read in Polish, accompanied by En­glish translations, comprised more or less the texts that ­were ­later included in the anthology Spoiling Cannibals’ Fun, edited by Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh. The poems neatly fit the Polish poetic model of witnessing history. “In your eyes, Eu­rope, we are history’s reservation / with our dated ideals,” began one of the texts read by Hartwig, while another declared “But of course you too would make a good martyr / with that poor health of yours.”177 Even at Iowa, where Hartwig spoke on Apollinaire, she was introduced as a former member of the under­ground Home Army during the war. The war and the Polish school of poetry ­were also invoked at a much ­later reading at Boston University in 2006, where Hartwig read a dif­fer­ent se­lection

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of poems, translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter (and ­t here she read them in En­glish).178 The political-­historical reading of Polish verse in Amer­i­ca has been a burden to some authors whose work was reduced to witnessing history, and it excluded some poets who did not fit. As we saw e­ arlier, Miłosz himself, who established this poetic brand in the United States, tried to challenge this one-­ sided perception of his works at his readings. Yet it seems that for Hartwig, this American perspective was more liberating than burdening. She did not become popu­lar, but whenever she was discussed, she was placed alongside Miłosz and Herbert. She entered American consciousness with a delay, but she was seen as part of the same tradition, without the burden of accounting for her very dif­fer­ent path. In the United States, Hartwig did not see a need to emphasize her path of a soloist, and she did not mind being grouped together with the poets she admired, whom she could never call her equals in Poland. At her reading at Boston University in 2006, the eighty-­five-­year-­old poet strug­gled when reading her texts in En­glish. One could still hear her elegant, Slavic intonations moving through the En­glish poems, but she stumbled over the pronunciation of some words. The translations she read modified her original syntax but retained the originals’ clarity and conciseness. Hartwig read them as if they ­were separate texts, and the syntax did not interfere with her reading. Clearly, her readings w ­ ere not meant to foreground ­mistakes and corrections, her translations ­were not secondary originals, and her poems did not rely as much on the rhythms of her reading as Miłosz’s did, since her work had fewer interplays between line endings and syntax. The status of her readings in her poetic oeuvre is much harder to capture than in the case of Miłosz, who was more provocative in his choices, recorded himself, and commented on his intonation. This methodological prob­lem pertaining to many ­women poets was already mentioned in Chapter 1. Yet it is also in­ter­est­ing that in 2006 in Boston, Hartwig was not afraid to show her age and foreignness in her readings. It is striking that a­ fter all of Miłosz’s efforts in Amer­i­ca, Hartwig did not feel a need to apologize for her reading, as Miłosz had in 1974 at the Guggenheim Museum. The status of Polish poetry allowed her to show some weakness. Eventually Hartwig’s recognition in Poland was also taken for granted. Gradually, younger ­women poets began to demand that all spheres of ­women’s

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lives, and not just ­those expressed through Miłosz-­like diction, be properly acknowledged in a poetry scene still dominated by male voices.179 Even though it was not easy for Hartwig’s poetry to gain recognition in the first place, it is true that in the late 1990s and 2000s, poetry festivals co-­organized by Miłosz and devoted to older authors and classical topics of Polish poetry featured more female poets than the more provocative readings or­ga­nized by younger poets, which often did not include any female authors at all. For instance, Hartwig participated together with Miłosz in the 1997 Meeting of the Poets of the East and the West, an international poetry festival in Kraków.180 Yet the change in the gender balance of t­ hese big events was precipitated not just by Miłosz’s efforts, but also by the presence and growing fame of Wisława Szymborska. As we w ­ ill see in Chapter 3, Szymborska’s attitude to poetry readings and her views of gender w ­ ere in many ways similar to Hartwig’s, but also more complicated.

Chapter 3

Home Literary Salons Visiting Miron Białoszewski and Wisława Szymborska

when the fear of being banned, surveilled, or imprisoned intensified during certain periods, Polish poets’ lives corresponded more closely to Western clichés about Eastern Eu­rope, rife with the “dark glamour of suffering” and repressions.1 Yet for many authors ­after the 1956 Thaw the obstacles w ­ ere far more quotidian. In one of his essays, Adam Zagajewski summarized the cultural milieu of the Kraków Writers’ House on Krupnicza Street: “Hundreds of writers’ meetings, a unit of the Party, dozens of perfectly mediocre p ­ eople, ground coffee served in glasses with boiling ­water poured over it, lipstick traces on cheap cigarettes, the primitive newspaper ­People’s Tribune staining fin­gers when bought at kiosks, invitations from writers’ u ­ nions of fraternal countries of the Bloc, tired tulips given on ­Women’s Day, [and] artificially festive book fairs in May.”2 Zagajewski goes on to won­der how, in such a mediocre, vulgar, and monotonous literary life, the miracle of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry could ever appear. How could an author reclaim poetic sovereignty in the midst of servile bureaucratic language, perpetual compromises and negotiations, daily meals in the writers’ cafeteria, and choices l­ imited to state radio stations, state publishers, and state magazines? Not every­body assessed the Kraków Writers’ House and its milieu so harshly. The institution was heavi­ly mythologized, especially in the early postwar years, when its first members included prewar authors from dif­fer­ent parts of Poland who w ­ ere overjoyed that the war was over.3 Yet Zagajewski’s observation, written many years ­later, was an accurate snapshot of the aesthetic, material, and ideological limitations of public spaces in Poland, and it remained true even if the House also provided a genuine feeling of community. Unsurprisingly, all of the famous authors associated with the House IN THE POLISH P ­ EOPLE’S REPUBLIC,

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moved out of the building as soon as they w ­ ere able to live on their own. Collective life in one h ­ ouse, communal dining, and omnipresent ideology w ­ ere not as attractive as the seclusion of private apartments. It was also characteristic for poets from other Polish cities to look for diverse spaces of freedom, as if for a breath of fresh air that would help them bear the stifling atmosphere of their homeland more generally. Zbigniew Herbert eagerly traveled to the West, especially to see the art galleries and historic sites of France, Holland, and Greece. Julia Hartwig and Artur Międzyrzecki lived for some years in France and Amer­i­ca. The poet, singer, and vagabond Edward Stachura wandered over dif­fer­ent continents and Poland’s peripheries, sleeping on trains, often without money. Jan Krzysztof Kelus, a bard of sung poetry, would hide and hike in the Polish mountains, especially in the Tatra and Gorce ranges. For poets as well as other participants in Polish culture, encounters with nature and with Poland’s forsaken provinces—­just like singing bards’ songs by campfires—­provided a temporary feeling of escape from the dominant discourses.4 For ­people who did not travel much, the basic place of seclusion remained, however, their home. In The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz described how precious it was for certain acclaimed writers ­under Stalinism to preserve the “luxury of splendid isolation” within the four walls of their home, even at the price of compromises and writing propaganda. Prewar apartments, reproductions of Western art, modern ­music rec­ords, rich book collections— to Miłosz such objects w ­ ere crucial but overlooked, and he reminded his readers that writers needed access to aesthetic experiences, which ­were usually ­limited in Stalinist cities, where the architecture and ­people looked gray and uniform, new buildings w ­ ere stiff, institutional, and monumental, and “lightness and charm” w ­ ere “condemned as formalistic.”5 Though in the following de­cades this monumentality, stiffness, and other restrictions w ­ ere loosened, and younger poets w ­ ere not granted beautiful prewar apartments (if they got an apartment at all), the role of the home remained impor­tant, regardless of one’s po­liti­cal convictions. A new attribute of the intelligent­sia was the small socialist apartment, filled with overflowing bookshelves, including precious publications that ­were hard to find in bookstores and libraries.6 But it was not only their libraries that made ­these homes such special spaces. In Warsaw, at the flat of the poets Jan Śpiewak and Anna Kamieńska, one could see original folk sculptures and images of saints from

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the countryside, and during meetings that the hosts or­ga­nized for young authors, tea was served in porcelain cups.7 In their apartment in Poznań, the poet Ryszard Krynicki and his wife, Krystyna, set up an unofficial private art gallery.8 Even more crucial than such private book and art collections was the possibility of using a dif­fer­ent kind of language and building dif­fer­ent types of social relations than official life allowed. Home-­based cultural activities went beyond private meetings and under­ground activities; apartments could be used for all kinds of discussions, advanced university seminars, meetings of student associations, parties, and other entertainment, often blurring the bound­aries between t­ hese spheres. Th ­ ese traditions, which valued private spaces over institutional ones, w ­ ere already in place among Poles during the nineteenth-­century partitions and remained impor­tant for the intelligent­sia and other intellectuals throughout the twentieth ­century.9 Dropping by or hosting ­others at one’s home w ­ ere also basic modes of communication for ­t hose who did not have a telephone, a situation common in Poland even in the 1980s.10 Yet in order to be considered a literary “salon,” the subject of this chapter, ­t hese home-­based events would have to occur regularly and have a clear format, as well as an emphasis on lit­er­a­ture and the arts.11 The idea of a salon as a space governed by special rules and focused on the art of courteous conversation is usually associated with the seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century French aristocracy. In Poland it could also bring to mind the Thursday Dinners which the last Polish king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, or­ga­nized at his summer and primary residences in the late eigh­teenth c­ entury.12 ­These associations with aristocracy, or at least with nobility and the wealthy ­middle class, and with spacious elegant interiors, remained strong u ­ ntil World War II, when the idea of the salon was revived in the ser­v ice of illegal, clandestine literary meetings; it was similarly revived in the late 1970s when under­ground cultural life was restored in Poland. Still, the very word “salon” brings to mind elegance and the needs of the highbrow intelligent­sia, who viewed themselves as the cultural heir of the nobility. ­These associations evoked by the “literary salon” are not, however, entirely fitting in the case of two poets who are particularly well known for hosting salon-­like literary meetings in postwar Poland, in their one-­and two-­room socialist apartments (in Poland an apartment is defined not by the number

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of bedrooms but by the total number of rooms, and the rooms are usually multifunctional). What Miron Białoszewski (1922–1983) and Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) or­ga­nized in their Warsaw and Kraków apartments in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively, amounted to a transformation of the old idea of a literary salon into a new cultural phenomenon that fit ­these poets’ social situation. Perhaps the word “salon” should not be used at all. Białoszewski simply called ­these events “wtorki,” “Tuesdays,” for the day when they ­were held; Szymborska’s events ­were called “kolacyjki” and “loteryjki”—­ diminutive, affectionate forms of the words for “dinners” and “lotteries” (what the latter meant w ­ ill be explained l­ ater in this chapter). Nevertheless, like the salons of the past, their meetings had a stable framework and certain rules established by the hosts, who also carefully selected their guests and created their own literary-­intellectual environment.13 Aside from their resemblance to old salons, the meetings in Białoszewski’s and Szymborska’s apartments differed significantly from each other; each was rooted in its own distinct cultural patterns, in which the poet’s background and gender also played a role. In this re­spect the roots of Białoszewski’s fascination with the spoken word are especially in­ter­est­ing. Białoszewski was not born into the prewar intelligent­sia, and his living conditions ultimately improved ­after the war, yet in his search for informal, in­de­pen­dent spaces, he shared in all the needs and practices described above. Białoszewski and Szymborska also differed in their attitudes t­ oward poetry readings at salon meetings, making recordings at home, and the interactions between poetry and privacy in general, but t­ hese differences corresponded with their poetics. This was also true of other endeavors that blurred the bound­aries between art and private life: collages mailed to friends, interior decorating, collections of objects, and wordplay, such as puns and word games. They demonstrated how the rules of one’s poetry could materialize in one’s physical surroundings. All ­these proj­ects, including home meetings, readings, and recordings, ­were planned deliberately for personal, rather than professional, spaces and interactions, remaining si­mul­ta­neously artistic and private, amateur and serious. As such, they have not been adequately studied in twentieth-­century culture. Benedetta Craveri, in her study of aristocratic salons in eighteenth-­ century France, pre­sents salon conversation as an end in itself, a game for shared plea­sure.14 The home literary salons hosted by Polish poets also w ­ ere an end in themselves and could not be reduced to the po­liti­cal situation. In

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fact, both Białoszewski and Szymborska ­were published authors in ­People’s Poland, and Szymborska’s dinner parties flourished even a­ fter the po­liti­cal transition of 1989. It should be emphasized, however, that neither of ­t hese salons can explain how poets from the communist era managed to gain artistic in­de­pen­dence in the first place. Instead, they show what poets did to support their in­de­ pen­dence. It was only ­after Szymborska and Białoszewski had published their first impor­tant books that she moved out of the Kraków Writers’ House to a small studio in the early 1960s; and he moved from a shared room in a prewar Warsaw building to an apartment in a new block of flats on Dąbrowski Square in the late 1950s.15 At the same time, their salons, which emerged years ­later, embodied and exposed some of the sources and styles of ­these authors’ poetic in­de­pen­dence, which they had always cultivated. If Chapter 2 focused on Miłosz’s strategy for survival as a poet in exile, on the way he maneuvered between writing his poems in his native Polish and participating in American literary life, in this chapter we look at the survival strategies of poets who did not leave the Polish P ­ eople’s Republic. I discuss Białoszewski’s and Szymborska’s homebound artistic activities, studying their vari­ous functions and the cultural models they followed. I ask about the bound­aries between the poets’ private and public personas and about the relationship between their audio recordings and their at-­home literary gatherings. I begin this discussion by reconstructing the genealogy of Białoszewski’s participation in diverse homebound poetry per­for­mances. As I show in the following sections, the “Tuesdays” that he or­ga­nized in the 1970s can be seen as a continuation and artistic transformation of the traditional poetic culture he had participated in since his childhood.

Orality and Community Miron Białoszewski was born in Warsaw in 1922, in the working-­class neighborhood of Wola. Even as a child, living in one room with his extended ­family (parents, grand­father, aunts, and an ­uncle), he was exposed to vari­ous genres of spoken word and oral culture.16 The poet did not come from the intelligent­sia: his grand­father was a carpenter and his f­ ather worked as a postal clerk, and yet arts and lit­er­a­ture ­were an impor­tant part of his f­ amily life. His grand­father used to read aloud the poetry of Alexander Pushkin and

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Adam Mickiewicz, the w ­ hole ­family would stage per­for­mances of vari­ous scenes, and l­ ittle Miron could imitate the voices of his aunt’s friends and recite poems from memory. With so many p ­ eople living together in a small space, sharing stories, anecdotes, and gossip was an everyday experience, though Białoszewski also liked more ceremonial forms of the spoken word; for example, he was fascinated by the theatricality and songs of the Catholic liturgy and pro­cessions.17 This fondness for church m ­ usic, which ­later included Gregorian chant and Baroque composers, Orthodox liturgy, and grassroot expressions of folk piety, lasted throughout his life and was supplemented by his interest in the melodies of other religions, including t­ hose coming from the Far East.18 Urban folklore and street ballads w ­ ere an impor­ tant source of inspiration for him, too; ­t hese ­were still pre­sent in prewar and early postwar Warsaw.19 During the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, Białoszewski studied Polish lit­er­ a­ture at the clandestine University of Warsaw. During one of the secret lectures, it turned out that his classmates could recite several poems by Jan Kasprowicz.20 Another friend of Białoszewski’s at the time, Stanisław Swen Czachorowski, could declaim a ­whole narrative poem by the Romantic poet-­ prophet Juliusz Słowacki.21 In the 1940s the group or­ga­nized a series of secret, illegal literary-­patriotic events, a clandestine theater for around ten to twenty guests. Though they did not belong to an under­ground organ­ization, like other Varsovians they wanted to celebrate forbidden Polish lit­er­a­ture and arts. The “eve­nings” they or­ga­nized usually took place in private apartments; guests w ­ ere required to know a knocking code in order to be let in. Win­dows ­were covered in blackout paper, obligatory during the occupation, and decorations w ­ ere made of paper and linen. They listened to old scratched rec­ords of Chopin, ­t here ­were recitations and poetry readings, discussions and competitions, as well as stagings of Romantic and Symbolist plays. Apart from the more serious repertoire, ­t hese eve­nings could also include parodies of Słowacki’s texts, which evoked bursts of laughter. Also memorable was Białoszewski’s poem “Jerozolima” (Jerusalem), written in 1943 and recited by his friend Irena Prudil.22 It referred to the gates of the Warsaw ghetto, next to which Białoszewski lived a­ fter the ghetto was reduced in size, in a formerly Jewish, now “Aryan,” building. He shared this apartment with his m ­ other and the f­ amily’s Jewish friend Stefa, who lived just outside the ghetto walls with false documents.23

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At the same time, Białoszewski strug­gled to find the language to describe his war­time experiences. This was especially true of the Warsaw Uprising, which took place in August and September 1944, which Białoszewski experienced as a civilian—­moving from place to place, avoiding death, enduring hunger, witnessing the destruction of his fellow Varsovians and their city, ultimately escaping from the ruined Old Town through its sewers while carry­ing a wounded partisan. Among the voices of the Uprising that he would ­later recall, t­here ­were desperate ­women praying out loud in cellars and shelters. He claimed that at one point a litany he had composed with Cza­ chorowski became especially popu­lar in the cellars, as it directly named all the dangers and fears affecting every­one at the time. Both friends would recite in the crowded shelter, though Czachorowski’s recitation of prayers was more influential, due to his charismatic persona, acting skills, and sense of urgency: “From bombs and airplanes—­save us, Lord, / From tanks and Goliaths—­save us, Lord.”24 Another striking moment that Białoszewski recalled was a collective recitation of the Hail Mary prayer. When every­one said the words “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,” t­ here was a strong sense of the now of the text, the now of per­for­mance, and the moment of death all coming together.25 This intensified “now” of per­for­mance, when a ritual becomes real­ity, would remain impor­tant to the poet throughout his life. Just ­after the war, Białoszewski’s f­ amily registered for a room in a prewar apartment on Poznańska Street, in a less ruined part of downtown Warsaw. He and his friends quickly gathered once more to or­ga­nize their literary-­ artistic events, which featured piano ­music, songs, and poetry recitations. Especially memorable was an event devoted to the Uprising: the friends built a barricade right in the room out of broken sidewalk flagstones, chairs, bricks, and metal, and they acted out scenes from the sewers in darkness, imitating the sounds of bombs, shootings, tanks, and airplanes. Poems about the Uprising ­were recited, ­music was played, and the audience cried.26 For the poet, this event was one of the earliest examples of the link between reenactment, trauma, and talking, which had a lasting effect on his conception of per­for­mance. The opportunity to or­ga­nize events in Białoszewski’s room did not last long. Białoszewski’s parents moved to dif­fer­ent apartments, and the city administration divided the room on Poznańska Street into two units separated

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by wooden boards. Białoszewski had to share his living space with other ­people, owing to the serious housing prob­lem in ruined Warsaw. On his side of the room, he welcomed one of his prewar acquaintances to stay with him, who soon brought his nephew. In Białoszewski’s small, shared, communal space, t­ here was always someone visiting or staying over, and the odor of the subtenant’s cooked cabbage was always in the air. U ­ nder Stalinism, Białoszewski worked for a few years as a journalist, then he wrote for a youth magazine, but he lost his job in 1951. On Poznańska Street, the poet learned to sleep during the day and to get up only at night, when he could write in peace or just lie in bed and save energy. ­Because he worked and wrote only occasionally, ­t here ­were periods when the room was barely heated and he would go hungry, fortifying himself with strong tea, cigarettes, and drugs that ­were available over the ­counter at the time.27 In the late 1940s Białoszewski’s friend Czachorowski started renting a cottage in the village of Kobyłka near Warsaw, which provided an escape from the crowded room. Czachorowski’s ­humble home became the meeting place for a new, alternative group made up of poets, writers, and artists who did not participate in the new literary real­ity and could not hope to be published. On Czachorowski’s porch they read poems out loud, discussed banned authors, listened to ­music, painted, drank condensed tea, and took walks around the area, sometimes shocking the locals. Around that time Białoszewski became fascinated by folk art, such as the shrines, sculptures, crosses, gardens, and churches he saw in the nearby countryside.28 For his readings in Kobyłka, he would also bring a trea­sured object, a menorah found in the ruins of Warsaw.29 Some critics have compared the group to the American Beat Generation and in fact, fifteen years ­later Białoszewski did meet Allen Ginsberg in Warsaw, but the poets could barely communicate.30 It was also in Kobyłka that the idea of organ­izing a private avant-­garde theater first took shape. This theater made its debut in June 1955 on Tarczyńska Street, in the Ochota district of Warsaw, at the apartment of Lech Emfazy Stefański; as the theater grew in popularity, up to a hundred p ­ eople would cram into the one room where plays ­were staged. In addition to Białoszewski and Stefański, such artists as Bogusław Choiński, Ludwik Hering, and Ludmiła Murawska ­were involved. By this time, just before the Thaw, avant-­ garde artistry was no longer condemned; at some point the minister of culture himself made an appearance in the audience.31

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And indeed, in May 1956 Białoszewski’s debut book, The Revolution of ­Things, was fi­nally published, with support from the critic Artur Sandauer, who had attended several meetings in Kobyłka and become interested in Białoszewski’s work.32 In October, Białoszewski gave his first official poetry reading in Warsaw.33 The following year the poet was registered in a one-­room apartment in a new building on Dąbrowski Square in downtown Warsaw, where he moved in 1958. H ­ ere, between 1958 and 1963, he founded his own theater, Teatr Osobny (Separate Theater), together with Hering and Murawska.34 The apartment on Dąbrowski Square was the first place that the poet could properly consider “his,” and where he could officially live with his partner Leszek Soliński, for whom the kitchen was converted into an additional room and library. Together, first as a couple and then as friends, they created the atmosphere of the place. First-­time visitors w ­ ere occasionally shocked by this small apartment, since it resembled a museum of broken objects. In the corridor and single room of the apartment, Białoszewski had displayed half-­ destroyed angel heads from a burnt Orthodox church in southeastern Poland, damaged icons, fragments of an altarpiece, frayed liturgical vestments, the black remnants of a tallit, sculptures found in the ruins of postwar Warsaw, paintings, bookshelves, spare boards, batons, pieces of glass, dried weeds, several mirrors, and drying laundry. The most impor­tant piece of furniture for Białoszewski was his bed, where he often spent ­whole days, listening to a gramophone he bought in the 1960s, reading, and even receiving guests in his pajamas, often while lying ­under a quilt. He was also in the habit of covering up his win­dows and taking walks at night.35 It is in­ter­est­ing to see the extent to which Białoszewski’s poetry from the 1960s had its material counterpart in his daily habits and the design of his apartment. The poet’s interest in ugliness, in sacralizing everyday objects, in folklore, in broken ­things and words, was shared by both his poems and his home, and the two can hardly be divided into lit­er­a­ture and life. While his apartment was a place of self-­creation and per­for­mance, it was also his real (and only) home, where he could escape not only the prescriptive normalcy of life in the Polish ­People’s Republic, but also his parents’ expectations regarding a “normal” life and ­career.36 His writing, on the other hand—as proved by his life choices—­was the basis of his existence. In one late interview, he admitted that for him ­t here was “no life without writing” and that

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all other activities, such as reading, walking through the city, or g­ oing to the cinema, w ­ ere enjoyable only as experiences that could lead to writing.37 In her book The Kingdom of Insignificance, Joanna Niżyńska has shown the extent to which Białoszewski’s prose life writing both revealed and hid the facts of his biography, especially his queerness, to wider audiences, making us feel familiar with his everyday real­ity yet ignorant of basic facts about his life.38 This critical skepticism about the reliability of Białoszewski’s writing, as well as the complexity of self-­creation in his autobiographical work, could also be applied to his other be­hav­iors and per­for­mances. Some friends, for example, doubted Białoszewski’s authenticity in their conversations with him, as if he w ­ ere still playing a role.39 Ultimately it seems that self-­creation permeated most of his activities: his unofficial events could not be distinguished from his socializing, his literary environment from his closest friends, his aesthetic choices from his home décor, his long hours spent in bed from the desire to preserve all his energy for the writing that remained his core life activity. Białoszewski’s lifestyle was not just the social per­for­mances and social roles in which we all participate; nor did it simply amount to making his private life public, given that for many of his events the audience was ­limited and select. If we have reason to doubt ­whether his writing was fully faithful to his life, we can say with certainty that his life was truly faithful to writing and art-­making. This lifestyle became more difficult to maintain in the mid-1960s. A ­ fter the end of the Separate Theater, Białoszewski no longer had a steady stream of audiences and guests. During this lonelier period, a­ fter twenty years of talking about the Warsaw Uprising, Białoszewski fi­nally found the right form for his recollections. His Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, published in 1970, made him famous.40 This book, as Niżyńska has argued, managed to “represent the survivor’s ongoing strug­gle to transform his traumatic memory into narrative form.” He achieved this by means of diction that re-­created the effects of orality—or rather, exaggerated ­these effects, illustrating the strug­ gles of the traumatized subject.41 The book also had personal implications for Białoszewski. It soon helped him gain a new group of friends and listeners, who became his closest community and chosen ­family. Agnieszka Kostrzębska, a student at the University of Warsaw, was writing her master’s thesis on Białoszewski when she began visiting him. Tadeusz Sobolewski was impressed a­ fter reading Białoszewski’s Memoir, and arranged

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for Kostrzębska to introduce them. Soon their friends from Polish and ­En­glish studies joined them: Malina Gamdzyk, Anna Sobolewska (Sobolew­ ski’s wife), Anna Żurowska, and ­others.42 In the early 1970s the meetings in Białoszewski’s apartment became more regular, and soon they turned into “Tuesdays,” a kind of unofficial home literary salon. Another impor­tant person whom Białoszewski met through this group was Sobolewska’s m ­ other, Jadwiga Stańczakowa, who had been saved from the Warsaw ghetto as a young ­woman.43 She not only visited Białoszewski with the group, but also formed a special friendship with him, which involved mutual encouragement and helped them both to write poetry and keep diaries. He motivated her to write poetry from her perspective as a blind person, while she helped him practice the skill of providing quick, vivid descriptions.44 The details and atmosphere of Białoszewski’s Tuesdays can illustrate to what extent his salon was a continuation of his older practices from e­ arlier years. Many ele­ments of ­t hese gatherings—­darkened win­dows, handpicked guests, ­music and poetry, theatricality, Romantic poems, a community of friends in a domestic space—­had been features of under­ground events in occupied Warsaw. But the presence of official guests, as well as Białoszewski’s growing fame, undermined the strictly private nature of t­ hese meetings and inevitably raised the question of Białoszewski’s politics. Who came to his meetings? What did it mean in practice to be seen as apo­liti­cal a­ fter the Thaw of 1956? What is b ­ ehind Białoszewski’s apo­liti­cal image?

Tuesdays Miron Białoszewski began meeting with his new friends in the early 1970s in his apartment on Dąbrowski Square. In Białoszewski’s autobiographical pieces from 1971, the poet already uses “Tuesdays” as a name for t­ hese gatherings, though at first the meetings took place on other days as well. In that early period, young p ­ eople would come to the poet in search of an alternative space; he would lie in bed, while they would talk, listen to ­music, dance, burn incense, and have him read his latest poems and excerpts from the Memoir, occasionally spending the night on his floor.45 ­After some time t­ hese Tuesdays became institutionalized enough to host Białoszewski’s editors from his publisher, PIW (the State Publishing Institute), who would use this time

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as a chance to do paperwork.46 In the mid-1970s, guests could include researchers from the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Acad­emy of Sciences, including Anna Sobolewska, who would receive her PhD in Polish lit­er­a­ture in 1978, but also more se­nior faculty, such as the structuralist c­ ouple Janusz Sławiński and Aleksandra Okopień-­Sławińska, or the renowned scholar of Romanticism, Maria Janion, as well as two other critics from the Institute, Maria Żmigrodzka and Małgorzata Baranowska; t­ hese last three usually came together and ­were compared to the Eumenides, the three ancient Greek furies.47 As long as the meetings took place in his apartment in Dąbrowski Square, Białoszewski’s partner, Leszek Soliński, played an impor­tant role, often standing in the m ­ iddle of the room to declaim exalted poems by w ­ omen poets from the turn of the twentieth c­ entury, speak in dialect, improvise stories, and talk about books and films. The improvisational nature of the Tuesdays was always apparent, and Białoszewski would sometimes test out new pieces on his listeners, or read audience favorites. Some participants compared him to a Romantic poet and preacher, o ­ thers to a Tzaddik, whose life anecdotes 48 ­were shared among the faithful. ­Music and conversation ­were also pre­sent, as ­were tea, juices, and sandwiches, prepared by Białoszewski’s partner or friends, with ingredients usually bought by the host, though the guests sometimes brought cookies, so that the events resembled a party.49 Moreover, Białoszewski generally knew who was invited and expected at each event: some guests used knocking codes that allowed him to recognize them; for ­others he left the door open and a note.50 Hosting the Tuesdays became more complicated in 1974–1975, when ­after his first heart attack, long recovery, and conflict with Soliński (with whom he remained friends), feeling a growing need to be on his own, Białoszewski de­cided to move to what became his last apartment, located in a dif­fer­ent, more peripheral part of Warsaw, a new neighborhood built on the other side of the Vistula river. The building on Lizbońska Street, constructed out of prefabricated ele­ments in the style of the de­cade, had twelve floors and eight staircases and elevators. From the quiet neighborhood and five-­story building where he lived in the 1960s (alongside neighbors who complained about his events), the poet moved to a place where every­t hing could be heard through the thin walls, nothing worked properly, and the neighbors w ­ ere noisier. Moreover, his new one-­room apartment was almost empty. Although he

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brought with him some of his treasures—­saints painted on glass, a Persian rug, a gold dalmatic, an Orthodox cross, and a Jewish candlestick—­the atmosphere of Dąbrowski Square was left ­behind.51 Yet even ­here, Stańczakowa recalled a Tuesday from August 1975, with guests impressed by a new poem, a rec­ord playing Baroque ­music, and a combination of thin, slow, and hushed voices—­a charming summer night that made the place feel truly like Biało­ szewski’s home and the event like a real Tuesday.52 A new kind of decoration for his Tuesdays, which Białoszewski had first tried out in Dąbrowski Square, was bouquets of flowers and weeds. Białoszewski initially bought them from florists, but ­after moving to the new flat he became increasingly interested in searching for uncultivated areas and meadows around Warsaw and making the bouquets himself, combining unknown bushes, weeds, flowers, leaves, and branches. As Stańczakowa recalled, one of t­ hese compositions had to stand in a bucket and was taller than she was.53 The improvised, homemade decorations and the marginality of the useless weeds matched Białoszewski’s poetry and prose. Buying flowers and decorating one’s home was an activity undertaken for its own sake, nonpractical, ephemeral, oriented only t­ oward the de-­automatization of the everyday, just like the poet’s writing.54 By then, regular home cultural events ­were no longer popu­lar in Poland, and Białoszewski’s contemporaries thought them unusual. Their unofficial character, and the manifestations of Białoszewski’s individuality and privacy that occurred t­ here, w ­ ere ­later interpreted in light of the neo-­avant-­garde preference for happenings and per­for­mances. ­These tendencies are even more apparent in Białoszewski’s nighttime visits to his friends, Ada Buraczewska and Roman Klewin, in the Żoliborz neighborhood of Warsaw, during which they experimented with new filming techniques.55 Although Białoszewski’s Tuesdays ­were indeed an artistic choice, they ­were not so much an experiment as a continuation of practices with which the poet had always surrounded himself. Białoszewski’s Tuesdays amounted to the artistic preservation (and transformation) of forms that had been part of mainstream Polish culture just a few de­cades ­earlier. Białoszewski’s readings during the 1970s w ­ ere therefore not an innovation but a restoration, a reenactment of his war­time and early postwar habits. The poet merely added some new ele­ments, especially the unusual m ­ usic and burning incense that gave his events a more countercultural feeling.

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The situation grew more complicated when Tuesdays became increasingly fash­ion­able in Warsaw literary circles: vari­ous writers, critics, and journalists w ­ ere interested in attending; one of Białoszewski’s young friends, now a teacher, came with her pupils; and acting students visited Białoszewski with their professor. Meanwhile, Białoszewski himself grew tired of his events.56 He no longer controlled who came, and guests could appear any time between 5:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. In 1976 he suspended his Tuesdays for a few months, and the eve­nings ­were subsequently or­ga­nized in new spaces, mostly at the homes of his friends Stańczakowa on Hoża Street and Olgierd and Małgorzata Wołyński on Poznańska Street.57 In 1977 Stańczakowa felt that the Tuesdays had become so rare that they seemed like a holiday.58 In this period, some Tuesdays ­were again a very private affair, consisting of only four ­people, all close friends.59 A Tuesday could sometimes be moved to a dif­fer­ent day if t­ here was a time conflict, or canceled in f­ avor of a public event. Białoszewski’s readings could also take place outside the usual schedule, in other ­people’s homes, or even in a hospital.60 During a vacation spent at a writers’ resort in Obory near Warsaw, Białoszewski or­ga­nized his Tuesdays in his room at the resort, inviting several fellow poets.61 Another Tuesday-­like eve­ning was held in Obory on one Sunday, with the three Eumenides, Stańczakowa, and a radio journalist in attendance. A ­ fter the win­dows ­were covered and snacks and fresh flowers w ­ ere placed about, the lights ­were switched off in Białoszewski’s room, Hindu m ­ usic was played, a candle and incense ­were lit, and Białoszewski read from his new poems and prose; before that, he discussed history and Adam Mickiewicz with his companions.62 The presence of Warsaw critics and journalists at Białoszewski’s events in the 1970s should come as no surprise: he was a published poet, and in t­ hose years he would give official readings all over Poland, at universities, student ­ ere clubs, libraries, book clubs, and schools.63 In other words, his Tuesdays w not born of necessity, w ­ ere not caused by bans or any lack of appreciation for his work. They w ­ ere not under­ground events by any means, though they w ­ ere certainly informal. In the 1970s they w ­ ere a deliberate choice grounded in the domestic sphere, traditional culture, and the selfless involvement of the poet and his friends (­these events w ­ ere f­ ree, naturally, and Białoszewski would bring food and put up decorations; Stańczakowa often volunteered to clean his bathroom).64

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Nevertheless, by the mid-1970s the context of Białoszewski’s home meetings had changed. In December 1975 a letter protesting the changes to the Polish constitution was circulated among Polish intellectuals. In 1976, a­ fter strikes in Ursus and Radom, the Committee for the Defense of Workers was formed. In response, many writers and poets who had signed the letter or joined the Committee ­were banned. Under­ground cultural life was or­ga­nized on a bigger scale.65 Home readings and other noninstitutional events ­were no longer an artistic choice, but once again a po­liti­cal necessity, as they ­were in Białoszewski’s youth, during the occupation and Stalinism. Białoszewski, however, did not participate in under­ground meetings in the 1970s. In the 1980s, a­ fter the suppression of Solidarity, he learned about poetry readings that w ­ ere being given in churches by fellow poets. Białoszewski’s diary describes how curious he found the description of one such event, where poets of vari­ous backgrounds and beliefs sat in the presbytery and took part in a mass before the reading, in the presence of Poland’s Primate.66 For Białoszewski, shared po­liti­cal aims could not erase his surprise at the poets’ willingness to participate in a religious event. Białoszewski’s habits and the stories told about him reinforce this view of him as an apo­liti­cal outsider. During his visit to Amer­i­ca in 1982, at a reading he gave in New York City, he asked not to be interrogated about politics; at one Tuesday in Poland, he supposedly did not know who the current president of France was.67 This image is also reflected in his life practices, which are consistent with his interest in orality: Białoszewski did not own a TV or telephone, and he did not listen to the radio or read any newspapers. This lifestyle, seemingly rooted in prewar habits, made direct contact with p ­ eople both the main form of entertainment and the main source of information about current affairs.68 According to one anecdote, Białoszewski did not notice the beginning of martial law in Poland; when, ignorant of the curfew, he went for a night walk in December 1981, he was s­ topped by a police officer who could scarcely believe that someone d ­ idn’t know martial law had been declared several dozen hours before.69 While Białoszewski himself was not involved in the opposition, several of his acquaintances ­were. Among them was Jan Józef Lipski, a founding member of the Committee for the Defense of Workers and a friend since the Kobyłka days, who often came to Białoszewski’s Tuesdays.70 Another Committee member, Stanisław Barańczak, wrote his doctoral dissertation on

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Białoszewski and hosted him, first in Poznań and then in the United States.71 Professor Maria Janion was involved in teaching under­g round university classes. Thanks to t­ hese friendships, his continual self-­presentation as an apo­ liti­cal person, and his alternative lifestyle, Białoszewski was not labeled a regime author, while his friends did not expect him to be po­liti­cally involved. ­People saw his home as a safe space, and him as an author who was safe to publish on both sides of the official / unofficial divide.72 This view of Białoszewski as an apo­liti­cal eccentric was shared by his friends. In this re­spect, it is especially telling to recall Lipski’s account of 1976, when vari­ous protest letters ­were being circulated. In his much ­later recollection of this period, Lipski, who had collected the signatures, publicly revealed the fact that Białoszewski had signed one of the letters (as part of an additional list of signatures). Lipski found it impor­tant to emphasize this fact, ­because this list had been lost and had not been published in 1976. In his recollection, Lipski highlighted the fact that Białoszewski had signed the letter even though, of all his friends, he had the least interest in politics; he ignored the po­liti­cal sphere completely and seemed to know l­ ittle about the issues at stake. In fact, Lipski had not expected to get his signature.73 It is in­ter­est­ing to compare this recollection with Białoszewski’s own account of the same incident, included in his Tajny dziennik (Secret Diary), which was only published de­cades a­ fter the poet’s death. This story does not entirely confirm the consensus about Białoszewski’s po­liti­cal ignorance. A ­ fter mentioning how Lipski rang the doorbell and called his name, Białoszewski wrote: “I immediately knew that it was about signing the protest letter against the changes to a certain article of the constitution and against limiting individual freedoms. Jan Józef L. showed me what was to be signed. But I looked at it and said: ‘I ­will not read this, as I ­will not understand the details anyway, but I ­w ill sign it.’ ‘You w ­ ill sign it?’ ‘Yes, I w ­ ill.’ ”74 As we can see from the poet’s own account, Białoszewski de­cided to si­mul­ ta­neously take po­liti­cal action and hide his po­liti­cal awareness. Maintaining this innocent image became even more crucial a few days l­ater, at one of his Tuesdays, when Białoszewski heard several friends and editors enumerating authors whom they could no longer publish b ­ ecause they had signed the letter. Białoszewski worried about pos­si­ble consequences, but was also glad that his friends apparently had no idea that he had signed and did not suspect that he was involved. Lipski, who participated in this conversation as well, did not

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give the poet away, and l­ ater explained that due to some m ­ istakes, the list had 75 not been made public. ­These interactions with Lipski, as well as other conversations Białoszewski had about his friends who mention too many names over the phone or have husbands in the Party, show that the poet was well aware of the real­ity he was living in, and conscious of his choice of words even among his friends.76 This does not mean that he was secretly well informed about the details of po­liti­cal life or that he followed Polish politics very closely. On the contrary, the description from his Secret Diary shows that the letter he did not read was not actually the letter he thought he was signing—­the letter about the role of the Party and individual freedoms was circulated in December 1975, not February 1976, when Lipski came to his door. Still, Białoszewski knew enough—­enough about the role of Lipski, about their friendship, and the general importance of signatures that year to make a decision. It was more about showing who he was than any belief that he could influence politics. Like many other writers, he was afraid of the consequences and unsure about the purpose of ­these actions.77 Białoszewski’s self-­presentation as an apo­liti­cal, eccentric, nonengaged author was not a cynical or hypocritical strategy. His journal suggests that he was mistrustful of ideologies as a rule, and that although he remained full of re­spect for Lipski, he was generally skeptical about the possibility of change: he believed that changes to borders and po­liti­cal systems came about only through hell and war.78 He was doubtful about some of his friends’ radical oppositionist views; ­later on he saw Solidarity as a time of anarchy, and he stayed aloof from all expressions of mass feeling.79 He was especially suspicious of discourses pertaining to heroism and sainthood. For instance, during a weeklong hunger strike by the Committee for the Defense of Workers, held in May 1977 in Warsaw’s St. Martin’s Church to protest the imprisonment of several workers and Committee members, Białoszewski had an event scheduled at the University of Warsaw, which was canceled. According to Ewa Berberyusz, a friend who was one of the few to show up for the event, Białoszewski stood at the university’s gates and tried to convince p ­ eople to come to a reading at his home instead.80 In his journal Białoszewski describes how he ­later disagreed with Anna and Tadeusz Sobolewski in their assessment of the day: they treated it very seriously, contrasting Białoszewski with the starving protesters, while he wondered what

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kind of hunger strike it was if the protesters had access to w ­ ater, glucose in81 jections, and a bathroom. The young Sobolewskis brought up international conventions; perhaps Białoszewski had in mind his own experiences with hunger in the 1940s and 1950s. The extreme experiences of war and the price paid for life ­under Stalinism, as well as encounters with state surveillance in the 1960s, must have s­ haped Białoszewski’s expectations and fears. Białoszewski was aware that secret police agents sometimes came to his home theater—­for instance, when following guests from the American embassy.82 He knew that some of his acquaintances worked for the police; t­ oday we also know that collaborators working for the state security ser­v ice came to Białoszewski’s Tuesdays in the early 1970s.83 ­After the anti-­Semitic campaign of 1968, Białoszewski’s friendships with Poles of Jewish descent, whom he met thanks to Stańczakowa, ­were also viewed as suspicious.84 Białoszewski’s strategy of maintaining an apo­liti­cal image therefore had consequences not only for him, but also for his friends, while moving his Tuesdays between apartments might have helped ensure some mea­sure of privacy. In 1967 Soliński, Białoszewski, and Hering w ­ ere interrogated for hours in relation to a mysterious murder from the 1950s; the investigators treated every­one involved with the theater on Tarczyńska Street, and Jews and gays, with par­tic­u­lar suspicion. To prove his innocence and the fact that he was working for a Kraków theater at the time of the murder, Soliński recited huge extracts from Juliusz Słowacki’s drama Balladyna, making the officer doubt his sanity.85 Though homo­sexuality was not criminalized ­under Polish law, it was taboo to talk about it, and surveillance of gay subjects frequently led to discrimination or harassment. It could also have been one of the reasons Białoszewski lost his job in 1951, as much as the fact that Soliński was arrested at that time for possessing American currency and selling icons from southern Poland. In his Secret Diary, Białoszewski admitted that secret police had interrogated him and Soliński about the provenance of the art they had at home, and Soliński was furious whenever Białoszewski talked openly about their findings in the ruins.86 As we can see, Białoszewski’s self-­creation as an apo­liti­cal, private person was not the result of naiveté, but a deliberate response to encounters with authoritarianism; it also stemmed from the conviction that politics should not become one’s only focus, that peace as such should be cherished, and that

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freedom of thought should be cultivated individually. Białoszewski’s self-­ fashioning went far beyond omitting direct references to his gay identity in his published life writing, and included referring to p ­ eople solely by their initials or pseudonyms, and avoiding po­liti­cal and sensitive topics with p ­ eople he did not know well.87 In a sense, what Białoszewski practiced was self-­ censorship, a habit shared by most citizens of the Polish ­People’s Republic. In his case, however, his artistic self-­creation and lifestyle both invited additional pressure and surveillance (due to his night walks and home theaters) and functioned as a defense mechanism (projecting the image of an eccentric poet, an apo­liti­cal fool without a TV). In a way, his writings did not so much hide aspects of his private life as depict a real­ity where caution and self-­ limitation ­were the rule, a real­ity of talking without saying. At the same time, they illustrate a practice of separating oneself from that real­ity through poetry and poetic per­for­mances. As Joanna Niżyńska has shown in her analy­sis of Białoszewski’s prose from the 1970s and 1980s, the experience of the war was still so embedded in the everyday of t­ hese small narrations that it had the potential to retraumatize the speaker. As she writes, surviving and survival inflect Białoszewski’s life writing.88 This observation could be applied to Białoszewski’s other life practices as well. Limiting his access to news, distrusting ideologies, celebrating the h ­ ere and now, and creating intense, poetry-­oriented communities through his Tuesdays could be viewed as a deliberate strategy of survival through art.

Books and Tapes Given the importance of Tuesdays and other communal events where poetry was read and performed, one might expect that Białoszewski would not be interested in tape-­recording or in seeing his works published. Yet we know that his prose and poems ­were regularly published, and that the poet was one of the first Polish authors to buy a tape recorder. How do we reconcile ­t hese seeming contradictions? What was the role of audio recording for Miron Białoszewski? Why did the poet, with his commitment to live per­for­mance and community, rec­ord so many of his poems on tape? The answer to t­ hese questions is twofold. Let me start with Białoszewski’s first reel-­to-­reel tape recorder, which he bought in 1965 while working on his Memoir. He did not like typewriting and wanted to rec­ord his Memoir and

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have it typed up by someone ­else. Additionally, recording allowed Białoszewski to test his works in voice, by allowing the text to go “through his ear” during dictation.89 Białoszewski was using this pro­cess of recording and rewriting during his work on his Memoir.90 Yet the tape recorder’s other, equally impor­ tant function was to rec­ord Białoszewski’s per­for­mances: his rendition of vespers sung with Leszek Soliński, and his recitations of Romantic poetry. As we saw, the period in the mid-1960s ­a fter the dissolution of the Separate Theater was a lonely time for the poet. Recording became a substitute for the audience that the poet now lacked.91 He was less interested in having the tape for the ­future, and more focused on the living, ephemeral moment of recording. The musician Adam Repucha has speculated that the act of recording intensified both Białoszewski’s experience of speaking and his awareness of time passing, making the moment more ceremonial.92 Such was surely the case with Białoszewski’s idea to rec­ord fragments from Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve, which he did at home on December 25, 1965, a day ­after the anniversary of Mickiewicz’s birthday and name day.93 Białoszewski celebrated his patron poet by bringing his characters back to life, devoting his Christmas Day to reanimating their voices and thus merging the holiday’s idea of word becoming flesh with the Polish literary tradition. ­These associations with ritual w ­ ere made stronger still by the fact that the text of Part II of Forefathers’ Eve, one of the parts that Białoszewski recited, refers to an ancient rite for communicating with the dead, and the play itself had long been a sacralized work of Polish theater. In his essay from 1967, “O tym Mickiewiczu jak go mówię” (On This Mic­ kiewicz as I Say Him), Białoszewski expressed his preference for voiced poetry and his fascination with communal songs, prayers, and pro­cessions. He also discussed his montage of fragments from Part IV of Mickiewicz’s Fore­ fathers’ Eve, which he first staged at the Separate Theater and subsequently recorded on the above-­mentioned tape in 1965. Białoszewski identified with Gustaw, the unhappy lover and Romantic protagonist of Part IV, and not with the martyrological-­patriotic contents of Part III. In Białoszewski’s rendition, ­these scenes sounded anything but standard, with odd reverberations, echoes, knocks, and rhythms.94 Białoszewski sang parts that are usually spoken, varied the tempo of his reading, changed his voice register, shouted a ­couple of lines in one breath, and read other lines in a flat manner, interspersing them with pauses to increase rhythmicality. Some critics who attended this

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­ er­for­mance at the Separate Theater thought that it verged on parody, but p ­others pointed out that playfulness and ritual w ­ ere never separable for Białoszewski.95 It was an unusual per­for­mance, but Białoszewski’s goal was not to shock his audience. As we know from his essay, he believed that he knew how Mickiewicz wanted his texts to be performed, and that he was merely realizing his textual instructions.96 Białoszewski’s early interest in home recording, taken up in the 1960s, did not last very long, and dis­appeared altogether ­a fter the publication of his Memoir, when the author switched to writing prose. It was thanks to Jadwiga Stańczakowa, who owned a Grundig MK 232 cassette recorder, that a­ fter moving to Lizbońska Street in the mid-1970s the author once more began re­ eople w ­ ere surprised to learn that cording and composing poetry.97 Some p he was still recording himself in the 1970s; by then his peers’ fascination with tapes had faded, only to be revived in the 1980s with under­ground editions of cassettes featuring bards of guitar poetry and actors’ recitations of Romantic and con­temporary poetry.98 But Białoszewski’s interest in recording had nothing to do with under­ground activities, and his cassettes ­were not distributed. When Białoszewski became interested in tapes again in the 1970s, he simply wanted to rec­ord his works for Stańczakowa, who was blind, so she could have access to his writing. Soon, however, recordings became an impor­ tant part of his creative pro­cess, as it had been the case with his Memoir. Białoszewski would share with Stańczakowa almost every­thing he wrote and test it by reading it out loud. His poem manuscripts needed a voice in order to come to life, which meant that Białoszewski would visit her even at night. The resultant enormous corpus of recordings—­created with Stańczakowa on Hoża Street ­until Białoszewski’s death of a second heart attack in 1983—­was preserved and kept in order by Stańczakowa. She made note of the dif­fer­ent recording practices, which included prose pieces dictated with punctuation marks so they could be typewritten, recordings of their private conversations, poems recorded soon ­after being handwritten, tapes with mixed poetry and prose, as well as his dictated secret diary.99 As we can easily see, reading for Stańczakowa and her tape recorder was a practice even more intimate than Białoszewski’s Tuesdays, as it included his secret journal. None of ­these recordings had been easily available to the wider public ­until selected pieces ­were published on four CDs in 2013, ­after which numerous

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scholarly works and more popu­lar articles on Białoszewski’s tapes have appeared, making Białoszewski perhaps the only Polish poet whose recordings are now a central part of his oeuvre.100 The scholar who analyzed Białoszewski’s homemade tapes before their publication is Jacek Kopciński, and he was the first to interpret the tapes from the 1970s—­when Białoszewski made recordings with Stańczakowa right ­after writing a text—as a cele­bration of mystery, a way to return to the moment of creation.101 Kopciński described his own experience of sitting in Stańczakowa’s room where Białoszewski had made the recordings, of talking to her, and seeing the cassettes in their original, intimate context.102 ­There, it must have been easier to imagine reading out loud, not as a mere repetition or vocal interpretation of the text, but as a ritual, a reenactment, giving life to a poem and sharing this moment with a friend (even though some of the recordings w ­ ere more routine). As we can see, Białoszewski’s recording practice throughout the 1960s and 1970s was mostly an occasion for the reenactment of a text, celebrating the ­here and now of living speech, and creating a poem through voice. Białoszewski viewed tape-­recording as per­for­mance in the fullest sense of the word; above all, it was focused on the h ­ ere and now, which was crucial for Białoszewski’s thinking about poetry.103 We also know that Białoszewski’s recordings had an audience; his homemade tapes ­were played at some public meetings in the 1960s.104 In the 1970s Białoszewski was recorded several times for Polish Radio, as well as for the Studio of the Talking Book of the Union of the Blind.105 Moreover, Białoszewski regularly published his poetry and prose. While his Tuesdays ­were dedicated to ephemeral per­for­mances for a select audience, he was also interested in popularizing his poetry, both in recordings and in print, as well as at public poetry readings. In one of his texts Białoszewski suggested that his own manner of reading would signal to his readers how to silently read his poems. Moreover, he claimed that his reading style was the only adequate approach to reading his poems. His poetry in print, in turn, employed carefully chosen visual poetics, unusual punctuation, and onomatopoeia.106 As a result, Stanisław Barańczak first pointed out (in a claim that was ­later elaborated by other scholars) that Białoszewski’s printed texts can be treated as scores.107 The score hypothesis in its variants proposed that the printed text was directed ­toward some oral, musical, or theatrical per­for­mance. As the critic Piotr Bogalecki pointed out, this view of the poems as scores usually

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implied that the most in­ter­est­ing and fullest form of the work existed only in Białoszewski’s per­for­mance, and not in the printed text. When researchers found a printed text particularly in­ter­est­i ng in itself, they did not call it a score.108 Bogalecki was right, of course, to emphasize the in­ter­est­ing interplay between both the aural and the visual in the poet’s scores; Białoszewski’s ­ ere poems should be studied both in print and in the poet’s recordings.109 Th are features of the print versions that cannot be performed, just as ­t here are features of the per­for­mances that elude notation. Based on t­ hese insights, I would like, however, to add a few observations. First, the poet’s artistic practice shows that his live per­for­mances, with their sense of community and reenactment, ­were in fact the fullest form of his works, rather than his written pieces. Knowing this, of course, does not change the fact that t­ hese live events are not accessible to us anymore. Therefore, when studying Białoszewski’s poetry, we should pay attention to both his printed texts and his audio recordings ­because they are what Białoszewski has left us. We should also consider what Białoszewski taught us about how the two versions shed light on each other. The scores that Białoszewski left are not regular scores. They are not accessible to just any performer or interpretation, even though they are highly enigmatic and their barely codified instructions might appear to invite interpretation. Sometimes the instructions can be easily guessed, but at other times Białoszewski’s recordings can surprise us, and remind us that only Białoszewski himself (along with his closest collaborators, Ludwik Hering and Ludmiła Murawska) knew how a text should be performed and what sounds ­were codified by his printed poems. I infer this idea of the “right” per­for­mance from the repeatability of sound patterns in Białoszewski’s recordings of the same text, which I analyze below. This was likely Barańczak’s assumption when he spoke of Białoszewski’s “declamatory” tendency, as Sergei Bernshtein would call it—­t hat is, writing poetry with certain sound patterns in mind. The unusual sounding of Białoszewski’s scores does not make them random. In my discussion below, I also juxtapose some written versions of a Białoszewski text with the figures showing his pitch contours to further support this claim. I ­w ill begin with poems that originated at the Separate Theater, since Białoszewski’s theatrical experience is our strongest clue for the expected repeatability of per­for­mances of a single text. The texts from the early cycle

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Pieśni na krzesło i głos (Songs for Chair and Voice) have a history of remarkable and repeatable per­for­mances. This cabaret program was Hering’s idea; some texts ­were authored by Hering, some ­were performed by Murawska. However, Białoszewski also included ­t hese songs as poems in his poetry book Rachunek zachciankowy (Calculus of Whims),110 and he sang the program at his individual poetry readings.111 For instance, in dif­fer­ent recordings of the comic text “Zbiorowe ustalanie charakteru Pani Doktór” (A Collective Investigation of Our Doctor’s Personality) the rhythmical speech and drumming are a consistent feature.112 In the per­for­mances of “Wypadek z gramatyki” (A Grammatical Accident), the two columns of the text indicate that each line of the poem is to be read as divided into two symmetrical prosodic phrases.113 The poem titled “Wypadek” (Accident), whose subtitle (or note) suggests that this “krakowiak” should be sung ­until it stops of its own accord, is sung by Białoszewski to a popu­lar folk melody in the two recordings I know of.114 Yet traces of Białoszewski’s theatrical background can also be heard in other poems, in recordings from vari­ous de­cades. For instance, in a poem recorded in the 1970s, “Aniela w miasteczku Folino” (Angela in the Town of Foligno),115 we hear a striking change of registers between dif­fer­ent lines. The poem refers to a thirteenth-­century mystic, who is depicted shouting at night about her sins. This scene prompts the Białoszewski-­like speaker to imagine himself shouting at night from the win­dow of his apartment building in Warsaw, and then hearing the furious responses of ­people around him. The ­imagined words of Angela of Foligno, the speaker’s shouted confession, as well as the pos­si­ble reactions of his neighbors, are included in the poem as direct speech, and each of ­these shouted phrases is performed by Białoszewski in a higher register of pitch, with dif­fer­ent tones. The poet is playing dif­fer­ent roles, imitating voices. Interestingly, the poem and its per­for­mance from the 1970s bear many similarities to Białoszewski’s ­earlier texts and ­earlier recordings. A similar imitation of voices happens in the poem “Barbara z Haczowa” (Barbara of Haczów) from his 1956 volume and its undated recording from the 1960s.116 In this poetic dialogue between a speaker and a figure of Saint Barbara from a roadside shrine in the countryside we can hear a similar imitation of voices. The speaker describes the colors and materials of which the figure is made, and she explains what can be found in the nearby church. In a ­later

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per­for­mance of the same poem, from the 1975 recordings for the Union of the Blind, ­these register changes are less vivid, but the poet still tries to mark each time the speaker changes with a pause and a change in pitch, while Barbara’s affectionate utterances similarly become more melodic, with rises and lengthening of pitch contours. Quoting dif­fer­ent characters, Białoszewski imitated their voices, just as he did when he performed Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve, showing that ­there are similarities in his approach to poetry and theater, or perhaps that ­t here is no clear boundary between the two. Indeed, ­t here are certain features that repeat across Białoszewski’s readings. Per­for­mances of the same text bear a clear resemblance; moreover, t­ here are practices when quoting characters (or, in certain poems, quoting ­music) that can be found in poems across a range of printed volumes and tapes. The inspiration for Białoszewski’s per­for­mances ranges from folksy melodies to highbrow religious ­music, from colloquial oral stories and angry shouting to exalted lamentations. They do not contradict his textual instructions; in fact they often aptly supplement and transform his texts, merging Białoszewski with his narrators and storytellers, making the anecdotes, ballads, and songs even more convincing in their traditionally oral form. Białoszewski seems to identify with eccentric saints shouting at night and childlike interlocutors talking with folk sculptures, just as he did with Mickiewicz’s Gustaw. The per­for­mances imply a speaker similar to Białoszewski, and their sound is also far more creative than their notation suggests. In this re­spect Białoszewski’s scores differ from the texts by Czesław Miłosz analyzed in Chapter  2, which did not rely on external melodies, sounds, and imitations, and did not approach m ­ usic and theater, but simply depended on a specific variant of spoken Polish and the nuances of syntax. Białoszewski’s scores are more surprising in this re­spect, harder to read, more reliant on innovative use of pitch contours. The last two poems I discuss in this section are even more striking in their use of unexpected sound patterns. Białoszewski’s short poem “Potęga mrówkowca,” the title of which can hardly be translated to En­glish, is a meditation on the “mightiness” or “grandeur” of huge socialist-­era apartment blocks, like the one Białoszewski lived in. ­These buildings w ­ ere colloquially called “mrówkowiec” in Polish ­because they made p ­ eople and their individual apartments seem as tiny and numerous as ants (“mrówki”). In a rough translation of this very brief text, the poem simply declares: “The scaffoldings

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3.1 Białoszewski reads the words “Coraz wyżej rusztowania / coraz wyżej. / / Kosmos w klatce!” from “Potęga mrówkowca.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from the 1970s from the collections of the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw, published on the CD Białoszewski do słuchu (Warszawa: Bołt Rec­ords, 2013).

higher / and higher. / / The universe in a staircase!”117 It expresses the awe of the speaker who looks up at the scaffoldings and staircase, which seems to encompass the entire cosmos. The only instruction for the poem’s per­for­ mance comes from the longer space before the second sentence as well as the final exclamation mark. In Figure 3.1 we can see the pitch contours of this brief poem in Białoszewski’s per­for­mance from the 1970s.118 In the first, lower part of the pitch, ­there are two moments of striking, u-­like fall-­rise tones, and this is how Białoszewski pronounces the Polish words “coraz wyżej,” in the two places in which he declares that the scaffoldings are higher and higher. He not only emphasizes the word “higher” with a change of pitch, but also gives it a melodic quality, the sense of rising, of moving upward, which is central to the meaning of the text. While the pronunciation of the word “higher” matches its semantics perfectly, it is hardly the usual way to say it. The final exclamation of the text is also emphasized significantly, as it is shouted at a much higher register. Thus, a ­simple two-­sentence observation becomes an in­ter­est­ing per­for­m ance, which embodies the vertical movement of the poem. Though no mystics appear in this poem, the urban real­ity seems to evoke an imprecise feeling of infinity and awe. If the “semantic” score and per­for­mance of the poem above are more abstract and unexpected than singing krakowiaks or imitating voices, then the

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use of the score and sounding in one of Białoszewski’s most famous texts “ ‘Ach, gdyby, gdyby nawet piec zabrali . . .’ Moja niewyczerpana oda do radości” is even more experimental. The title of this text from the 1950s was translated by Andrzej Busza and Bogdan Czaykowski as “ ‘Oh! Oh! Should They Take Away My Stove . . .’ My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy.” The poem refers to the first place where Białoszewski lived a­ fter the war, the prewar room on Poznańska, which had a huge and very beautiful tiled stove. ­There had been plans to take apart the stove and remove it, and in Białoszewski’s poem this anticipated loss is first reported, then mourned, and fi­nally transformed into wordplay. The poem begins in the following way: I have a stove like a triumphal arch! ­ ey’re taking away my stove Th like a triumphal arch!!119 As we can see, the first stanzas of the text (two of which are quoted above) reflect the speaker’s love for the stove, and his subsequent rage when it is taken. The poet uses respectively one, two, and three exclamation marks at the end of ­these stanzas. Unsurprisingly, scholars have thus expected this text to serve as a score for a per­for­mance. In his analy­sis, Barańczak noted, for instance, the growing loudness of the lines with exclamation marks.120 In the two recordings of the text in Polish, which I refer to below, made at the Union of the Blind’s Studio of the Talking Book in 1975 and at home for the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in 1983, t­ hese patterns are indeed followed. Th ­ ere is, however, an additional, striking ele­ment, which occurs in the following lines. ­After the stove is lost, the poet declares that what remains is: a grey gaping hole a grey gaping hole.

And that’s enough for me: grey gaping hole . . .121

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3.2 Białoszewski reads the words “szara naga jama / szara naga jama. / I to mi wystar­ czy: / szara naga jama” from “ ‘Oh! Oh! Should They Take Away My Stove . . .’ My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from 1983 from the collections of the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw, published on the CD Białoszewski do słuchu (Warszawa: Bołt Rec­ords, 2013).

Out of the loss, out of a grey gaping hole, a palpable and increasingly abstract set of syllables emerges, in Polish in the form of the repeated “szara naga jama.” Additionally, at the moment when “grey gaping hole” is uttered for the first time, on the page it is written down as steps. Let us see the pitch contours of the quoted lines in Figure 3.2. At the left, the steps in the poem’s notation are apparently matched by the steps of the pitch contour, which consistently falls on “grey gaping hole,” on “szara naga jama.” The reading style introduced by the steplike notation is not, however, ­limited to the first instance of t­ hese words. As we can see in Figure 3.2, the second “szara naga jama” also appears as three steps; then we have the short contour of the line “And that’s enough for me,” and one more “szara naga jama,” also as steps.122 This pitch contour might be surprising, so let us look what happens in the final four lines of the poem, following “And that’s enough for me.” In ­t hese lines, the wordplay with “grey gaping hole” is continued: grey gaping hole grey gaping hole grey-­gaping-­hole greygapinghole.123 ­ ese lines suggest that the words are spoken with increasing speed, that they Th become glued together. Yet a closer look at two dif­fer­ent recordings (in

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3.3 Białoszewski reads the words “szara naga jama / szara naga jama / szara-­naga-­ jama / szaranagajama” from “ ‘Oh! Oh! Should They Take Away My Stove . . .’ My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from 1975 made for the Union of the Blind, archived in the collections of the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw.

3.4 Białoszewski reads the words “szara naga jama / szara naga jama / szara-­naga-­ jama / szaranagajama” from “ ‘Oh! Oh! Should They Take Away My Stove . . .’ My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from 1983 from the collections of the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw, published on the CD Białoszewski do słuchu (Warszawa: Bołt Rec­ords, 2013).

Figures 3.3 and 3.4) reveals that the striking falls of pitch are also pre­sent in ­these last four lines. As we can see, the last four lines of the poem are indeed read with increasing speed, gradually gluing the three words together. Additionally, the falling pitch of “szara naga jama” is maintained in all four instances. The feared and ­imagined loss is thus transformed not only into experimental

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wordplay in print, but also into an experimental per­for­mance. As a result, it teaches us about the experimental nature of Białoszewski’s notation, which remains oblique when studied in print only. First, we would need to guess that the steps in his notation suggest the gradually falling pitch, that the steps in print and the steps in pitch resemble each other. Then, we would need to know that this way of reading should be maintained throughout all instances of “grey gaping hole,” that it is not ­limited to the first steps. Białoszewski’s per­for­mance is experimental, but it is also repetitive, stable, almost ritualized. The poem and its reading can be treated as emblematic of Białoszewski’s approach to his work in general and to his poetry per­for­mances in par­tic­ u­lar. His poems and per­for­mances are a strategy for, and a means of, survival, transforming loss and fear into experimental recordings, changing the problematic ­here and now into playful sounds. His poems, which are frequently based on oral genres, turn out to have relatively stable intonational contours and repetitive per­for­mance expectations, but their ingenious melodies go far beyond the instructions in the text, suggesting that only the poet (or sometimes his closest collaborators) knew how to read the scripts, play his games, and conduct his rituals. Białoszewski, a nonbeliever, thought of his readings as cele­brations of secular mysteries, demarcations of a special time and space that w ­ ere rooted not only in the intensity of war­time per­for­ mances, but also in the poet’s ongoing interest in forgetting about external circumstances and sacralizing unexpected moments.124

The Private and the Public When Miron Białoszewski gave a poetry reading in Kraków, Wisława Szymborska was the only person in the audience who laughed. One listener tried even to silence her inappropriate be­hav­ior, but ­after the reading Białoszewski approached Szymborska to thank her; she was the only listener who had understood his texts.125 At first glance the two poets’ sense of humor and attitude to poetry differed significantly, as did their life practices. Nevertheless, both Białoszewski and Szymborska or­ga­nized home events that w ­ ere carefully delineated from outside real­ity by means of special rules and creative uses of the domestic space, making t­ hese regular meetings a site of play, laughter, and performative

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self-­creation. Though the two poets behaved very differently, assumed dif­ fer­ent roles at ­these meetings, and had very dif­fer­ent poetic styles, the events they hosted undermined the solemnity of official culture and the po­ liti­cal system in similar ways: for a moment, this real­ity was simply ignored and replaced by marginalized objects, laughter, and local codes. In this aspect their salons resembled the Re­nais­sance carnival as described by the Rus­ sian phi­los­o­pher Mikhail Bakhtin.126 Like carnivals, the poets’ practices ­were not a direct protest against the system and ­were thus tolerated, but at the same time they provided a temporary escape and played with the arbitrariness of any imposed order and ideology. In the case of Szymborska, t­ hese meetings continued to provide a safe, domestic playfulness even a­ fter the transformation of 1989 and her 1996 Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture. Before we move to Szymborska’s salon-­like meetings, we need to remember that her point of departure was very dif­fer­ent from Białoszewski’s, as was her poetic and po­liti­cal biography. Moreover, in the case of Szymborska, the public perception of the poet and her image within her close circles interacted in more complicated ways than in the case of Białoszewski. Both aspects should be taken into account as we study Szymborska, who, like Białoszewski, was born in the 1920s, though in her case it was to an affluent ­family with roots in the nobility. Szymborska spent the war in Kraków, attending clandestine school classes and working, before joining local literary life u ­ nder communism. Comp­ ared to Warsaw, culture developed swiftly a­ fter the war in this undestroyed city. As the scholar Anna Zarzycka wrote about Kraków: “On the one hand, traditional tastes and conservative po­liti­cal worldviews dominated. On the other hand, especially in the younger generation, a growing number of ­people held socialist and communist views, which led to a strong polarization of that environment and its clear division into ‘Catholics’ and ‘Marxists.’ ”127 In 1948 Szymborska married her mentor, the poet Adam Włodek, and moved to the Writers’ House on Krupnicza Street. In 1950 she enrolled in the Party, and subsequently followed the official line in poetry and supported the Party’s actions. In 1953 she was admitted to the Writers’ Union. Gradually, the experience of her youthful faith in Stalinism and socialist realism made Szym­ borska suspicious of any shared beliefs, mass movements, communal feelings, and po­liti­cally engaged poetry, and she began to form her own voice. In 1954 she divorced Włodek, with whom she remained friends. In 1957 her first

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proper poetry book, Calling Out to Yeti, appeared, and in 1963 she moved to a small studio, which she often compared to a drawer. In 1966, in solidarity with the phi­los­o­pher Leszek Kołakowski, who was expelled from the Party, she resigned as a member. As expected, this led to her losing her job as poetry editor of the journal Życie Literackie (Literary Life), though she stayed on as a columnist.128 In the late 1960s Szymborska began а relationship with the prose writer Kornel Filipowicz. Filipowicz lived a few blocks away, just a short walk from her “drawer,” and he was her partner u ­ ntil his death in 1990, though they continued to live separately; Szymborska used to say that they did not want to interrupt each other’s work. Together with Filipowicz, Szymborska became closer to oppositional circles. In December 1975 they both signed the Letter of 59 protesting the changes to the constitution, as well as the founding declaration of the Society for Academic Courses in 1978, which or­ga­nized under­ground university classes in private apartments. However, Szymbor­ ska kept her distance from the more ardent feelings and actions of the opposition.129 ­After martial law and the dissolution of the old Writers’ Union, it was Fili­ powicz who revived the old concept of uncensored “live journals,” first or­ ga­nized during the Nazi occupation, where the contents of each issue w ­ ere read out loud at clandestine meetings rather than published. In 1983 Szymborska opened the first eve­ning of the Kraków-­based spoken journal NaGłos (OutLoud) with her poem “An Opinion on the Question of Pornography.” The semi-­official meetings w ­ ere or­ga­nized in the Kraków Catholic Intel­li­ gent­sia Club—­a space new to Szymborska, who throughout her adult life remained a declared agnostic.130 The poem with “pornography” in the title was in fact a poem about thinking. It begins with the words “­There is nothing more debauched than thinking” and goes on to declare “Nothing is sacred for t­ hose who think.”131 The text can be treated as the manifesto of an in­de­pen­dent mind, but also as an explanation of Szymborska’s involvement in the spoken journal, understood mostly as a space for thinking and discussion. The meetings of the journal, however, ­were devoted to more than just thinking. As a “forbidden fruit” they ­were very popu­lar, and usually turned into a party ­after the readings ended. At one of the meetings Szymborska spent the night drinking vodka and talking to the Warsaw songwriter Agnieszka Osiecka.132

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In 1982 Szymborska moved from her small studio to a two-­room apartment on Chocimska Street in the same neighborhood, and fifteen years ­later, ­after winning the Nobel Prize in 1996, she moved to her final, three-­room flat on Piastowska Street, located slightly farther afield on the map of Kraków.133 ­These two apartments allowed her to host more guests and to or­ ga­nize her famous salon-­like dinners, which started in the early 1980s.134 ­Here we move away from Szymborska’s public cultural activities and closer to her private life and the events she hosted at her home. We know more about the latter ­today, thanks to the publication of Szymborska’s biographies, documentary films, her humorous rhymed verse, as well as the recollections of her friends, but this side of her life and work was not so well-­k nown to the wider public before. Szymborska’s published poetry and columns did not reveal much about her private life; as the scholar Clare Cavanagh has put it, she was a poet without a biography.135 In 1999 during a recorded radio conversation between Czesław Miłosz, Tadeusz Różewicz, and Renata Gorczyńska, the interlocutors ­were not sure if they should mention Filipo­ wicz’s name in connection with Szymborska.136 At Szymborska’s funeral in 2012, some critics ­were surprised to discover that her ­legal last name was Szymborska-­Włodek, unchanged ­after her divorce in the 1950s, preserving the memory of her almost forgotten husband.137 While names w ­ ere also absent from Białoszewski’s life writing, his prose still managed to reveal a lot about his social activities, home meetings, bouquets, interior design, and interests. Szymborska, on the other hand, revealed very ­little about herself in her poems and columns. She refused to include any dates, places, or dedications in her writing.138 Moreover, whereas the composition of Białoszewski’s prose and poetry was strongly connected to his social activities (talking with friends, and then reading and recording for friends), Szymborska’s published poems w ­ ere written in solitude and never discussed at her dinners.139 As we know now, Szymborska’s private sphere, her social life and circles of friends, contributed to dif­fer­ent kinds of works: collages made from newspaper and mailed to friends, collections of kitschy figures both given and received as gifts, collaboratively composed limericks and other comic rhymed poems, many of whose new types, rules, and genres Szymborska herself in­ ven­ted. For her Kraków friends and guests, including poets, editors, and professors from the Jagiellonian University, Szymborska played a role not so

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dif­fer­ent from that of Białoszewski: an eccentric poet whose followers mythologized her image through anecdotes, building up the legend of a person far removed from the concerns of daily life. This image from within her circle of friends, while not devoid of truth, was of course as self-­fashioned as Białoszewski’s legend, and was a result of Szymborska’s conscious strategy to maintain etiquette, smiles, and discretion, and to treat her social life as a space with its own rules for games, jokes, and courteous conversations. In other words: while recent publications and gallery exhibitions reveal Szymborska’s home activities and personal contacts, which the public had not known about for a long time, and document her merry, highly sociable image, they still do not touch—­and cannot touch—­her most intimate, personal experiences.140 Even her correspondence with Filipowicz turns out to have been highly stylized, written in the voices of a countess and her plenipotentiary, which, given that letters w ­ ere frequently intercepted and read, could be seen as both literary self-­creation and innovative self-­censorship.141 Szymborska herself admitted that the smiling image was not an entirely accurate repre­sen­ta­tion of her character: for example, she told her biographers Anna Bikont and Joanna Szczęsna that in an early version of their work she came across too funny.142 Paradoxically, to learn more about the other, darker side of Szymborska, it might be more helpful to read her published philosophical poems rather than examine her domestic habits and meetings.143 A striking example of that is the poem “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” which begins with the words: “Die—­you c­ an’t do that to a cat.” As we know now, the poem was written a­ fter Filipowicz’s death, a fact that the text—­written from a perspective of a cat—­tries to conceal. A link between the poet’s life and the painful origins of this poem was indirectly revealed at public readings, however, as Szymborska refused to read the poem aloud.144 The separation of the two spheres—­the “serious” poetry presented at public events and the funny homebound works shared with friends—­was therefore much stronger in the case of Szymborska than in the case of Białoszewski, who hinted at his circles in his published texts, allowed p ­ eople he did not know well to attend his home events, and most importantly, presented the same poems both in public and in front of his friends. Yet even in the case of Szymborska, the two spheres cannot easily be separated into “serious” and “funny” sides of her work, as the spheres shed light on each other and bear certain similarities.

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As I suggested regarding the poem “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” Szymborska’s poetry is restrained when it comes to expressions of feeling. Her poems avoid dramatism and sentimentality; during her gatherings, games, jokes, and courteous conversation ­were meant to substitute for personal confessions. I mentioned ­earlier that she made sure to keep traces of her personality and biography out of her poems, but this discretion was also a staple of her presence in private and official spaces. Similarities also can be noted between the absurd humor and surreal imagination of Szymborska’s homemade collages and the witty, paradoxical, and speculative construction of her published poems, like “An Opinion on the Question of Pornography.” In the poems, humor and irony are frequently used to undermine lofty seriousness. In the poet’s collages, called “wyklejanki,” photos and words cut from newspapers are juxtaposed in unexpected ways; for many years she included ­t hese in letters sent to her friends. A special subtype of collages ­were the poet’s New Year wishes, which she prepared in larger quantities t­ oward the end of the year. The poet Ryszard Krynicki, one of the main advocates of treating Szymborska as a visual artist proper, compared her practice to artists’ postcards and mail art, though in the case of Szymborska each card was unique. In terms of visual composition, resemblances to surrealism, especially to Max Ernst and René Magritte, have been noted.145 ­There ­were plenty of absurd, almost surreal situations at Szymborska’s dinners, too. A popu­lar story from the early days of t­ hose dinners comes from the 1980s, a time of shortages and a much harsher period than the relative prosperity of the 1970s, when Białoszewski could easily buy fruit, juice, and cookies for his events. In the 1980s, West German society or­ga­nized many actions in support of the Polish p ­ eople. For instance, a German translator of Polish poetry, Karl Dedecius, sent parcels with food, especially instant soups, to Szymborska. The poet, who did not like to cook or wait in line, shared ­these gifts from abroad with her guests. Her friends often recalled dinners from this time period, at which they drew instant soup packets at random (sometimes switching to get their preferred flavor) and received empty cups and hot ­water. Sometimes Szymborska cooked or bought some prepared food, and much ­later, in the years ­after the Nobel, she also ordered dishes from her favorite Kraków restaurant, but food was never at the center of t­ hese events.146

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In contrast with Białoszewski, Szymborska’s dinners ­were never improvised, but always carefully planned around a selected theme or a special guest visiting from abroad. The dinners took place once or twice a month and usually lasted ­until midnight. Stanisław Balbus, a scholar of Polish lit­er­a­ture, remembers a dinner at Szymborska’s featuring the poet Stanisław Barańczak, who was visiting from the United States. As the story goes, Szymborska asked Barańczak about a rhyme she did not know how to develop into a limerick, and Barańczak immediately finished the poem. This kind of collaborative composition of limericks, both at dinners and on other occasions such as her travels, was strikingly dif­fer­ent from her work on more serious poems. It was a social activity taking place during quick interactions, out loud rather than only on paper. However, t­ hese word games and limericks also depended on the poet’s guests. Szymborska usually hosted no more than eight to ten p ­ eople, careful to invite p ­ eople who liked each other and had common interests. Some of her guests, coming from dif­fer­ent circles, have never met at her dinners.147 The poet Adam Zagajewski, another regular guest at Szymborska’s dinners, openly compared them to the eighteenth-­century Paris salons led by educated ­women. He saw the similarities mostly in the art of polite conversation, skillfully led by Szymborska, and also in the hostess’s elegance—on display not so much in her clothing as in her gestures, movements, and speech, and in her preference for order and proper form.148 The ladylike characteristics of her self-­creation ­were also frequently mentioned by other ­people: her charm, discretion, shyness, restraint, and wit, but the writer Jerzy Pilch also noted ele­ments much farther from the salons of the French aristocracy: the narrow space of her flat, the postwar furniture imitating wood, the poet sometimes wearing a wig and odd clothes, her collection of kitschy figurines and old magazines, and her love of popu­lar culture.149 This description of Szymborska’s two-­room apartment remained to some extent true even ­later, when her dinners would end with tea, brandy, and lotteries (“loteryjki”) during which guests drew tickets for vari­ous silly gifts, like ashtrays, pens, mugs, and figurines, often brought back as souvenirs from her foreign travels: the uglier, the better.150 The playfulness we see at ­these dinners did not begin in the 1980s; it could already be observed in the 1950s, u ­ nder very dif­fer­ent circumstances. At the Writers’ House on Krupnicza Street, Szymborska composed limericks with

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her friends and husband, with whom she in­ven­ted one of her new genres, ­later called “moskalik,” based on a playful reworking of a stanza from a nineteenth-­ century patriotic song.151 This atmosphere was also maintained when Szymborska moved to her “drawer” and spent her ­f ree time with the poet Ewa Lipska, the writer Barbara Czałczyńska, and the scholar Marta Wyka, all of whom lived nearby and with whom she played creative games with words—­ such as writing short stories collectively, with each person adding one sentence at a time. This circle of friends, which also included Filipowicz and Włodek, called itself the “Biprostal Group” ­after the highest building in the area.152 Their games can serve as an illustration of Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s idea of play as ­free be­hav­ior delineated from ordinary life, creating its own order, and bringing no real profit. Playing games, in this sense, creates islands of freedom, a special time and space, which, as we see, could happen even within the four walls of a flat on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.153 In many ways Białoszewski’s home events shared the same selfless, extraordinary playfulness; they ­were similar islands of performed freedom. His rules, however, w ­ ere more dependent on improvisation and spontaneity, and more oriented ­toward evoking intense experiences, whereas Szymborska preferred to control the situation and not to read her “serious” poems in this domestic setting. This difference between Szymborska’s and Białoszewski’s indirect preferences for the Age of Reason and Romanticism can be partly traced back to the models ­t hese epochs offered in a gendered context, at least in their popu­lar Polish reception. To some extent t­ hese preferences can explain not only the style of the poets’ home salons, but also the differences in their poetics, public images, and reading styles.

Poetry and Gender In Polish cultural memory, the Romantic-­Symbolist literary tradition offers dif­fer­ent models for male and female poet-­performers. On the one hand, the legacy of the poet-­prophet and improviser Adam Mickiewicz, reworked with the help of unexpected and peripheral soundings, was openly referred to by the experimental author Miron Białoszewski, and the link to this heritage was cherished by his friends, who ­were scholars of Romanticism. On the other

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hand, the Romantic legacy of female improvisers in Poland brings to mind Jadwiga Łuszczewska, a popu­lar nineteenth-­century author who wrote u ­ nder the pen name Deotyma. She performed poetry at her ceremonial Warsaw home salon, elegantly dressed, and was frequently an object of ridicule.154 If ­women poets wanted to be more performative (which Wisława Szymborska most likely was not interested in), ­t here was no tradition of Polish female poet-­performers they could safely refer to without being mocked. Szymborska commented on the popu­lar image of a “poetess” and female performer in her poem “Stage Fright” from the 1980s, in which the speaker won­ders how she should react to the winged lyre’s strings in the poster advertising her reading. Perhaps she should not walk in, but fly: And ­wouldn’t I be better off barefoot to escape the clump and squeak of cut-­rate sneakers, a clumsy ersatz angel— If at least the dress w ­ ere longer and more flowing and the poems appeared not from a handbag but by sleight of hand155 The speaker does not meet ­these expectations of the poet as an ethereal being—­lofty, delicate, and musical. The poem problematizes the general differences between “poets” and “writers” as they appear in the popu­lar imagination, and it invites us to consider this distinction from the perspective of a ­woman. The ste­reo­t ype seen above clearly acquires some feminine characteristics and attributes; this inspired poetic figure does not r­ eally match the popu­lar view of male poet-­prophets. This image and its implied expectations of what a poetess should be are clearly not a product of high-­brow literary criticism, and we can sense the irony in how they are presented. Yet the question remains: Was any other model of poetic, inspired per­for­mance available to ­women authors in Poland? The broader prob­lem of the cultural models for inspired, prophetic ­women can also be found in a poem by Szymborska that reaches beyond the Polish tradition to ancient Greece, and touches upon the more serious topic of prophecy about the ­f uture of a community—in this case the destruction of

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Troy as predicted by Cassandra. The poem, titled “Soliloquy for Cassandra,” is written in Cassandra’s voice: ­ ere I am, Cassandra. H And this is my city u ­ nder ashes. And ­these are my prophet’s staff and ribbons. And this is my head full of doubts.156 In the poem Cassandra seems to regret her life as a prophet—­not the fact that no one listened to her, or that p ­ eople did not believe in her words, but her own attitude to ­others. Her prophecies came to pass, and she looked at other ­people “from heights beyond life. / From the f­uture,” but she realizes that her voice was hard and inhuman, that divine perspective did not allow her to live “within life,” in the moment, or to realize that her face “could be beautiful.”157 While the ste­reo­t ype of the ethereal poetess in “Stage Fright” is very dif­ fer­ent from Cassandra’s inhuman, prophetic view of the world, t­ here is something that ­these two inspired ­women have in common: they both stand apart from the everyday, from their community, from the ephemeral and ordinary. They are not presented as good models. In both poems Szymborska seems to challenge the idea of looking down “from [the] heights” as well as the style associated with inspired modes of writing (and being). Her soliloquy “for Cassandra” does not resemble the lofty speech of Greek tragedies; the language of her soliloquy is anti-­t heatrical, ­simple, casual.158 Szymborska was wary of false tones, g­ rand narratives, and unsupported claims, and like most Polish postwar poets she sided with distrust, irony, and doubt. Yet it seems that the focus on ­women figures rejected by their milieu made it that much easier for Szymborska to undermine poetry’s special claims to leadership, insight, and importance. Szymborska’s views of the marginal role of poets went farther than ­t hose of her famous contemporaries, and one may won­der to what extent her own perspective as a female poet ­shaped her observations. One of her best-­k nown texts deadpanned “Some ­People Like Poetry,” comparing it to liking one’s old scarf or a noodle soup.159 This calls to mind a postwar poem by another Polish ­woman poet, which went even further, declaring “It is impossible to drink it or eat / I ­don’t like it, I ­don’t like poetry.”160 When we compare t­ hese ­women’s quotes to Czesław Miłosz’s postwar poem that asks “What is poetry which does not save / Nations or

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p ­ eople?”161 we find a very dif­fer­ent view of poetry’s role in the world in general and Poland in par­tic­u­lar. Some critics considered Szymborska to be on the border between modernism and postmodernism due to her lighthearted view of the poet’s place in society and her reluctance to serve any ideological proj­ects.162 Szymborska’s comparison of poems to noodle soup is in keeping with her relative openness to popu­lar culture, best illustrated by her love of kitsch, souvenirs, and figurines. I have also mentioned her anti-­theatrical stance, expressed as suspicion t­ oward pompousness and seriousness. Similarly, Szymborska’s texts about opera verge on parody, while classical m ­ usic more generally is seen as separate from the imperfections of ­human life.163 Szymborska had a much higher opinion of jazz, and ­toward the end of her life she even performed texts together with the Polish jazz musician and trumpeter Tomasz Stańko. Poland has a long tradition of fusing jazz and poetry, g­ oing back to the 1960s and the work of composer and pianist Krzysztof Komeda. In one of his proj­ects, Komeda and his quintet composed and performed jazz ­music for the ­album My Sweet Eu­ro­pean Home, recorded in West Germany in 1967. This ­a lbum contained Polish poems, which w ­ ere recited by an actor in German translation, including one by Szymborska; one of the performers on this ­a lbum was Stańko the trumpeter.164 Yet Szymborska and Stańko d ­ idn’t appear onstage together u ­ ntil thirty years ­later, during a poetry festival in Kraków in 1997. In a per­for­mance at Kraków’s Tempel Synagogue, Stańko followed Szymborska’ poems with improvisations on the trumpet.165 The two artists performed together a few more times, including at a poetry reading in Warsaw in 2002, and fi­nally, in 2009, at the Kraków Opera. This live event was recorded, and a CD was released in 2012, soon a­ fter Szymborska’s death.166 In theory, the aim of the 2009 event was to promote Szymborska’s poetry book ­Here, published in the same year. In practice, Szymborska declared onstage that she had only come to hear Mr. Stańko’s trumpet, but the publisher had demanded that she interrupt the concert with some texts. The CD cover calls the event a “concert” rather than a “poetry reading.” And indeed, Stańko’s improvisations responded to Szymborska’s texts, creating a new work, a fusion of jazz and poetry, even if Szymborska modestly downplayed her role and admitted to making ­mistakes in her reading. It seems that when

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it came to performative readings and improvisations, collaborating with Stańko was an ideal setup for Szymborska: her readings w ­ ere still u ­ nder her control, and the improvisational ele­ment was relegated to the trumpeter, but at the same time her poetry acquired a new musical quality. One of the poems Szymborska read that eve­ning was itself devoted to jazz, and in par­tic­u­lar to Ella Fitzgerald. Szymborska apologized during the event for calling the singer by her first name in the poem “Ella in Heaven,” explaining that she felt an intimate bond with her.167 That bond was confirmed in 2012, when, in accordance with Szymborska’s request, Fitzgerald’s per­for­ mances of “Black Coffee” and “I Cried for You” ­were played during the poet’s funeral, instead of the usual classical repertoire.168 This final request can be seen as yet another attempt by Szymborska to undercut the gravity and formality of an event. Stańko himself noted that poets, Szymborska included, read their poems differently than actors did—­t hat Szymborska was speaking rather than reciting.169 Indeed, Szymborska was quite critical of overly dramatic and theatrical per­for­mances of verse, though many of her own poems w ­ ere set to ­music and sung by a variety of performers. Her own preference was to read her texts as if she w ­ ere thinking out loud, or having a conversation. She did not like the artificial distance created between the poet and the audience during a reading. And although the poet suffered from stage fright—­ understandably, given that hundreds of p ­ eople came to her readings a­ fter the Nobel Prize (which her friends used to call the “Stockholm tragedy”)—­she showed no sign of it at her readings. Instead, she sounded self-­possessed and conversational. She emphasized key words without overdoing the effect, creating a sense of intimacy through the kind timbre of her voice.170 Her sentence-­based free-­verse poems facilitated this focus on thought and conceit rather than melody. Szymborska’s interest in imperfection did not mean she read carelessly; she modulated her voice, paused, and changed tempo whenever the poem required it. She did not use dif­fer­ent voices for characters, but her readings nevertheless sounded as though she ­were reading a book to ­children or curious listeners. ­Because of how the poems ­were constructed, t­ hese readings did not feel very poetic; line endings ­were not marked, except for the many lines that ended in a period or comma, which w ­ ere audible in Szymborska’s per­for­mance.

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In order to better grasp her reading style, let us compare the pitch contours in two recordings of the same excerpt from the poem “Dinosaur Skeleton,” one made for radio in 1971, and the other recorded live in 2003.171 This is the excerpt of the text in Polish, as Szymborska read it: Drodzy Przyjaciele, na lewo ogon w jedną nieskończoność, na prawo szyja w drugą— And ­here is the En­glish translation of the quoted excerpt: Dear Friends, on the left we see the tail trailing into one infinity, on the right, the neck juts into another—­172 In both languages, the text has a similar structure: first the speaker addresses her dear friends in a solemn manner, then we see what is on the left and the right in the dinosaur’s skeleton. This juxtaposition takes up the next two lines. The Polish text is shorter, based on sentence equivalents rather than full sentences, and one can easily divide each line into two lower-­level intonational phrases: “na lewo ogon”—­“w jedną nieskończoność” in the first line, and “na prawo szyja”—­“w drugą—” in the second. Szymborska’s pitch contours clearly demarcate ­t hese three lines, and the latter two have more complicated intonation patterns. In Figure 3.5 we can see how the m ­ iddle line is marked by a rising pitch at “ogon” (“tail”), and then again on “nieskończoność” (“infinity”). The last line, which closes this entire intonational phrase, has two falling moments—on “szyja” (“neck”) and “drugą” (“another”). The pitch contours show very vivid, careful intonation, which follows the syntax. In Figure 3.6, we see the same excerpt read in 2003. The poet marks the same moments in this reading, but in the ­middle of the second line her rising intonation is less pronounced than in the past: it smoothly continues up u ­ ntil the clear rise at the end of this line. Similarly, the falls in the last line are less vivid, but also pre­sent. This repeatable pattern in Szymborska’s reading of the same excerpt does not rely on unusual sound patterns, like Białoszewski’s reading; ­t here are no melodies we cannot guess or regional intonations that have become obsolete.

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3.5 Szymborska reads the words “Drodzy Przyjaciele, / na lewo ogon w jedną nieskoń­ czoność, / na prawo szyja w drugą—” from “Dinosaur Skeleton.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording for Polish Radio from 1971, archived in the National Digital Archives in Warsaw.

3.6 Szymborska reads the words “Drodzy Przyjaciele, / na lewo ogon w jedną nieskoń­ czoność, / na prawo szyja w drugą—” from “Dinosaur Skeleton.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from 2003 from the CD included in Szymborska, Wiersze wybrane (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2012).

Szymborska follows the notation of her syntax and punctuation very carefully. Even though her poetry does not ­really rely on sounds and rhythms, her recordings still offer a helpful lesson in how to read out loud—­one that many performers of her poetry would have benefited from. Szymborska’s efforts to ­counter pompousness and aloofness in her official readings and recordings also drew on additional strategies besides speaking plainly (rather than reciting) and commenting on her own ­mistakes. Her 2006 and 2010 recordings made in the studio of Radio Kraków intentionally

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left in the rustling of paper and small talk about coffee, cigarettes, and short breaks.173 Moreover, ­a fter the Nobel Prize, Szymborska started to publicly share her humorous verse. At a reading in 2003 in Kraków, she read both “serious” and humorous texts; the latter ­were also published in book form that year. The final text she read, a type of “podsłuchaniec”—­that is, something overheard—­sounded like a verbatim retelling of someone ­else’s story. Unlike Białoszewski, Szymborska did not treat this kind of text like a real poem, emphasizing that a “podsłuchaniec” is not a poem; but like him, she re-­created in her work the experience of chatting, gossiping, overhearing the kinds of conversations that occur during private dinners and parties rather than at official poetry readings. The last documentary film about Szymborska made during her lifetime, the 2011 Dutch production End and Beginning—­Meeting Wislawa Szymborska, directed by John Albert Jansen, showed the poet reading her texts in her apartment.174 In other words, Szymborska’s public readings, recordings, and films created a homely atmosphere for her audience. We feel as though we visited her at home, watched her sitting in an armchair drinking coffee, listened to her tell jokes—­and read some poems with the same casual air. But this was a performed homeliness, an impression of domestic poetic activity that did not match her private life, in which, as we know, she did not read her serious poems out loud or rec­ord herself. Even though she did sometimes read her humorous verse in the com­pany of friends, she did not want to be recorded on ­t hese occasions ­either.175 The idea that we could hear her at home sharing funny anecdotes and reading her poems at the same time was just an illusion. Similarly to Szymborska, Białoszewski did not like formal occasions or the gloss of edited studio recordings; his view was that poetry should retain a ­human touch. He did not like to listen to his own radio broadcasts, and he was even more critical of actors’ readings of his work.176 This preference can be heard when we compare Białoszewski’s readings on the radio and at home: the former are less energetic, more formal, more flat. Consequently, in Białoszewski’s case we have a clear contrast between the homemade tapes he preferred and the more professional, edited studio recordings. Szymborska’s strategy was more complex. Rather than dividing her life between a preferred private sphere and a stuffy official sphere, Szymborska complicated this binary: she made the official sphere more homely, and she

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disciplined her private sphere, limiting the presence of spoken poetry t­ here. Her official readings ­were her true “literary” salon, which made every­one feel welcome. Her home salon excluded her own poetry per­for­mance. This strategy (or rather a set of preferences and decisions that grew into a habit) makes a lot of sense, given her specific circumstances. Białoszewski had ­free reign to explore his interest in improvisation, mysticism, and cele­bration; he took his emotional identification with Gustaw and Mickiewicz to an extreme, incorporating it into his domestic holy rites. We know how w ­ omen ­were perceived within this tradition, and Szymborska’s reluctance to reveal her feelings was both true to her own character and in keeping with her position as a w ­ oman poet. On the other hand, Białoszewski’s domestic activities, amateurish tapes, and peripheral sounds matched Szymborska’s own idea of countering loftiness. She simply did not go as far as him. Her modesty and warmth, her interest in details and the everyday, ­were a close enough match for the ideas of femininity accepted in the culture of her time, but in greater amount they could also lead to her marginalization on the poetry scene, to her work being pigeonholed as “­women’s poetry.” Szymborska maneuvered between, on the one hand, her interest in the minor and the diminutive, driven by her curiosity, humility, and doubt, and, on the other hand, a wish to make ­these topics universal, to show their wider, ungendered relevance. In addition to the quoted poems about ­women poets and w ­ omen prophets, she also wrote about the figure of the poet—­“poeta”— in the masculine grammatical gender, which in Polish can refer to both male and female poets; this more general term was applicable to Szymborska’s speaker as well. As early as the 1960s Szymborska published a poem titled “Poetry Reading,” in which she compared a lively crowd watching a boxing match with twelve p ­ eople sitting bored at a poetry reading. In this text Szymborska’s speaker was “poeta” in the masculine form.177 A similar text is “The Courtesy of the Blind,” which is about the awkwardness felt by a poet reading to blind ­people, or the text “The Poet’s Nightmare,” about a world and language devoid of any “unnecessary” words and meanings. Fi­nally, in Szymborska’s Nobel lecture, the “poeta” in the title of her talk served as a label for authors of both genders.178 The use of the masculine noun “poeta” should not be surprising. Though the feminine noun “poetka” is in Polish a neutral term and the usual way of

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referring to w ­ omen authors (in contrast with the En­glish “poetess”), whenever generalizations are to be made with one word only, the masculine form is needed. This bias of the Polish language led to a controversy surrounding the scholar Michał Głowiński’s speech when Szymborska received an honorary doctorate in Poznań in 1995. He called her a “­great poet” in the masculine, since “wielka poetka” would suggest she was only being compared to other ­women poets, while Głowiński saw her as equal to Czesław Miłosz and Tadeusz Różewicz. But at the same time, describing a w ­ oman using the masculine “poeta” sounded incorrect, and was criticized by feminist critics, who in recent de­cades have been trying to revive abandoned feminine forms of vari­ous professions, as the masculine gender of nouns in Polish is strongly associated with men. To avoid the trou­ble, one could call Szymborska one of the greatest among poets of all genders, simply by using more words, but the prob­lem of the dif­fer­ent meanings of the singular feminine and masculine nouns still remains unresolved.179 As we can see, maneuvering between a gendered and a more universal identity is reflected not only in Szymborska’s poems and her persona on stage, but also in scholarly and critical approaches to her work. As the scholar Bożena Karwowska has noted, the majority of Polish scholarship on Szymborska’s poems assumes that their author’s female identity is irrelevant, whereas Karwowska shows that Szymborska’s texts are usually written from intriguing, eccentric, and marginalized perspectives, frequently female, from which traditional narratives have not usually been told. For Karwowska, Szymborska’s stance seems to come from a postfeminist world in which one does not have to fight for her voice to be heard but can simply ignore the ­patriarchal order and feel equal to ­others.180 To some extent Szymborska also created this kind of real­ity for herself beyond her poems. In Polish scholarship of the time, the above-­mentioned “universalist” reception of her poetry was proof that her minor poetic voices ­were indeed seen as impor­tant enough to be discussed beyond what ­were then the niche fields of “­women’s lit­er­a­ture” and “feminist criticism.” Similarly, she made Kraków elites re­spect her “kolacyjki,” “loteryjki,” “wódeczki,” “moskaliki,” and “wyklejanki”—­not just the dinners, lotteries, vodkas, comic poems, and collages, but also their Polish names coined from morphemes that sound minor, gentle, low-­key, and childlike, even if formally they are not always diminutive.

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A similar pro­cess of unconventional writing gaining ac­cep­tance can be observed in the case of Białoszewski, whose published works had to balance his discussion of unusual relations and friendships and his silenced gay identity. B ­ ecause homo­sexuality was a taboo topic in Polish culture, critics writing about Białoszewski in the past would not directly bring up his identity to diminish his position, the way femininity was used. ­Because of that same taboo, the categories of queer and LGBTQ lit­er­a­ture ­were absent for a long time in Poland.181 The category of “feminine poetry,” on the other hand, used to be applied to Szymborska, and her balancing between a delicately marked female identity and universal recognition could yield dif­fer­ent results. Both Miłosz and Szymborska’s own secretary, Michał Rusinek, admitted that they had treated her works as “feminine poetry”—as texts somewhat l­ imited by “female” topics and thus uninteresting to men, an opinion they both revised.182 Szymborska’s gender still played a role in her l­ater contacts with Miłosz; sometimes it also was helpful, b ­ ecause it lessened her obligations as a national poet, allowing her more in­de­pen­dent interests and a more disillusioned attitude to writing. In the late 1990s, when Miłosz was in the pro­cess of moving back to Poland from the United States and settling in Kraków, and Szymborska had just received the Nobel Prize in 1996, their paths had to cross, and Miłosz started to attend her dinner parties. On such occasions Szymborska carefully chose guests who would be able to discuss the challenging topics that Miłosz brought up, but also some En­glish speakers to converse with his American wife, Carol Thigpen. The poets clearly liked each other, and at that point Miłosz already had ­great re­spect for Szymborska’s poetry. In a 1991 article he pre­sents her texts as existential meditations, studies of their culture’s consciousness, and as an application of essay-­like forms to poetry—­which, given his interests, can be read as the highest pos­si­ble praise.183 This re­spect did not mean that they treated each other as equals. Of the two, only Miłosz was playing the role of the national poet-­prophet, a hierarchy that came naturally to both of them. According to the scholar Teresa Walas: “The fact that the second Nobel for Polish poetry was given to Szymborska was for Miłosz a fortunate circumstance. If a man had received it, especially a ‘strong’ poet, like Herbert or Różewicz, it would somehow have weakened his position. On the other hand, Szymborska’s femininity, domes-

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ticity, her lighthearted attitude to fame, and, fi­nally, the character of her poetry, all this placed her beyond any pos­si­ble rivalry with Miłosz.”184 Moreover, even before the Nobel, critics had already started to call Szymborska the first “lady” or “dame” of Polish poetry, an expression that made it easier to think of Miłosz and Szymborska as a kind of Polish poetry Nobel ­couple. “First lady” was certainly one way to avoid the aforementioned prob­lems with “poeta” and “poetka,” to suggest that b ­ ehind the greatness of Szymborska ­t here was a ­whole salon of Polish poetry, not just the ­women; but it was also a way to emphasize her gender, in a sense implying that as a “lady” she does not need to enter into any rivalry with Miłosz, Różewicz, and Herbert.185 Though one can criticize this term on vari­ous grounds, it does capture the ambivalence of Szymborska’s self-­fashioned image. The Polish word “dama” was, in this context and time period, mostly a cultural and intellectual distinction, a reflection of her manners and education, not of possessions, privileges, or formal honors (which w ­ ere made irrelevant or barely existent by the Polish P ­ eople’s Republic). The dignity of “dama” did not connote images of overly emotional or doomed poets. This phrase pointed to a sphere of Polish culture whose codes, at least in theory, required of both genders self-­effacing be­hav­ior, discretion, and courtesy.186 Szymborska was raised within t­ hese spheres as a child before the war, and formed her local literary and intellectual circles ­after the war.187 As a poet and a single ­woman, she could play with ­these rules more than o ­ thers, building her own codes, undermining the solemnity of her image as a lady, emphasizing disinterested playfulness and eccentric observations rather than the typical obligations of the intelligent­sia, and expressing an interest in popu­lar culture. Nevertheless, the style of her widely accepted autonomy—­her games and dinners, her strictly guarded privacy and distance, and fi­nally her success—­seem to stem from a skillful use of t­ hese older cultural codes, and not from a more con­temporary approach to gender. ­Needless to say, this subtle manner of countering the roughness of outside real­ity was also well suited to Kraków, a city that valued traditions and the place where Szymborska spent most of her life.

Chapter 4

Taped Farewells Elegiac Recordings by Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Anna Kamieńska, and Anna Swir

in August 2004, a poetry event was or­ga­nized at the Gothic Church of St. Catherine in Kraków. Poets and artists gathered in the eve­ning to commemorate Miłosz by reading his verse aloud, thereby giving breath to his poems and showing that his legacy was still alive. Afterward they played a recording of Miłosz’s reading from 1996. In his account of the eve­ning, the or­ga­nizer of the event, Jerzy Illg, described the uncanny feeling he had when he realized that Miłosz’s voice did not stop ­after the end of the poem, but continued to speak, adding “and perhaps now my last poem . . . ,” and then: “Pure beauty, benediction: you are all I gathered / From a life that was ­bitter and confused.” Miłosz’s words sounded like an intervention in real time, so that the poem with which the meeting ended was, appropriately, a summary of the poet’s life. This apt coda was added accidentally, simply ­because someone had not switched off the CD player in time. Yet this incident was more than just a m ­ istake; its effect relied on the choice to play the final parts of Miłosz’s CD, and ­t hese ended up coinciding with the end of the poetry event. Illg could indeed feel as if it ­were Miłosz himself communicating with him from the other world.1 Recordings have been associated with death since the first use of sound reproduction technologies.2 The link between recording and death was suggested by the inventor of the phonograph himself, Thomas Edison, who envisioned recording the last words of the d ­ ying as one of the potential 3 functions of his new device. While the use of gramophones as a l­egal tool to rec­ord last ­wills and testaments never became popu­lar, the scholar Jonathan Sterne has described cases of early phonograph users recording homilies and eulogies for their own funerals, as well as ­people leaving messages for ­future generations.4 It was only in the second half of the twentieth c­ entury, ­A FTER CZESŁ AW MIŁOSZ’S FUNER AL

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however, that Polish authors discovered the potential of sound reproduction for poetry. With the growing availability of tape recorders, which increased the privacy and accessibility of this technology, they started to work in a new genre that could be called the “poetic audio testament.” It’s not surprising that poets became interested in technologies of recording; ­after all, written poems often serve similar purposes, such as presenting a poetic credo, communicating with absent and unknown listeners, or leaving a message of farewell. Some of ­t hese poetic trends are captured in the titles of two books by the scholar of English-­language poetry Helen Vendler: Invisible Listeners and Last Looks, Last Books. Especially fitting both for the last books of American poets and for audio testaments by Polish poets is Vendler’s observation that they offer “a very late look at the interface at which death meets life,” and display a “strange binocular style [poets] must invent to render the real­ity contemplated in that last look.” The question that emerges from this situation is how to be “fair to both life and death at once.”5 In the Polish context, this last look at one’s life and work was combined with a last ­will and testament addressed to invisible listeners. While ­these age-­old functions of poetry, which abound in world lit­er­a­ture in the form of apostrophes and elegies, may explain poets’ interest in sound recording, they also work to undermine it. What can tapes offer that written media cannot? We know that presence and absence are intertwined in e­ very form of writing—­written script functions as both an index of a living body and mind and a substitute for one’s ­actual presence. A delay between expression and reception is typical of letters and literary works, not to mention testaments and suicide notes, so we must look elsewhere for what makes poetic audio testaments exceptional as a form. When it comes to tapes, the common associations between speech, presence, and consciousness are what make recordings in general, and last recordings in par­t ic­u ­lar, so in­ter­est­ing. Poetic audio testaments can make the tension and interference between presence and absence, life and death, even more dramatic. Though an unproblematic view of voice as smoothly linked to consciousness was unsettled as early as 1967, when the French thinker Jacques Derrida published Speech and Phenomena, taped farewells serve as a more explicit illustration of the complexity of spoken language. The exploration of this topic by Aleksander Wat (1900–1967) in his final recording, which I analyze in detail in this chapter, was conducted in parallel with

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Derrida’s theoretical work; the poet recorded himself two months before his death in 1967, during his exile in France. Yet in both Wat’s last recording and a 1998 recording by Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998), which I study l­ater in this chapter, the tension between life and death, between presence and absence, was not l­ imited to the features of spoken language or to the boundary moments of poets’ lives. Sterne has compared the early phonographic preservation of voices to the practice of embalming, a chemical alteration that enables mourners to view the dead and preserves the functioning of their exteriors.6 Recordings pre­sent a kind of a parallel alteration, leading to the effect of preserved voices. Similarly, the researchers Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut—­whose scholarship aims to overcome the schism between presence and absence—­have noted that out of the “dead” ­labor of technology and the literal h ­ uman dead, unpredictable 7 ­futures and retraced worlds might emerge. This is also true of Wat’s and Herbert’s poetic audio testaments, in which “liveness” is an effect of “deadness”: Wat’s audible breath, recorded at close range, is machine-­amplified, whereas Herbert’s voice was so weak at this point in his illness that it would not be comprehensible without professional sound editing. The recordings sound like “au­then­tic” voices that have been “preserved” at home, but this effect and the accessibility of ­t hese voices rely entirely on technology. In their unedited state, some parts of Wat’s tapes are too quiet, while o ­ thers strangely deform the timbre of his voice. Th ­ ese odd moments reveal the mechanical deadness at work b ­ ehind the voice and remind us that the impression of liveness is only achieved through technology. Similarly, the liveness of Miłosz’s “otherworldly” intervention at his own memorial reading was an effect caused by a CD and a CD player. In Poland ­these effects of deadness are closely tied to the Phonetic Archive that has been maintained by the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw since 1976.8 While the Archive also collects recordings made elsewhere, one of its proj­ects has been to create its own series of tapes, in which writers’ voices are preserved for posterity; each entry in the series includes both a reading and a commentary. Crucial to the proj­ect are the stipulations that recordings cannot be erased once they have been made, or broadcast during the author’s lifetime. The sense of privacy afforded by the second stipulation, and the idea of recording for an archive for unknown f­ uture generations, makes the link between recording and death even more con­spic­u­ous.

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Not all poets who made recordings for the Museum treated this proj­ect as a kind of testament. However, some authors clearly used this occasion to approach the act of recording and their choice of the poems in novel ways—­ creating, in effect, dif­fer­ent variants of poetic audio farewells. Listening to poets’ recordings resembles opening a sealed time capsule or reading a message in a b ­ ottle. Deadness permeates t­ hese recordings from their very inception, and we are aware that the tapes ­were made and archived only ­because their authors would one day be gone. We ­w ill study this effect in the final part of this chapter, when I listen to two recordings preserved at the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture, one by Anna Kamieńska (1920–1986) and the other by Anna Świrszczyńska (1909–1984) (known in the United States as Anna Swir). The Museum’s policy of inviting poets to read their work gives us a rare chance to hear the messages left by female poets. The main difference between the Museum collection and Wat’s and Herbert’s final tapes is that at the time of their recordings t­ hese authors’ deaths ­were imminent. Each of t­ hese mediated poetry per­for­mances was thus not only an artistic proj­ect, but also the last recording of a living voice and a document of the reader’s physical condition. The recordings provided a message to unknown ­future listeners, but w ­ ere just as much a farewell and precious souvenir left to f­amily and friends. For that reason, the recordings need to be studied in the context of the poets’ biographies. In the case of Aleksander Wat, the two circumstances that defined his interest in voice w ­ ere his life in exile and his deteriorating physical health.

Emigrants and Tape Enthusiasts Aleksander Wat and his wife, Ola, found themselves in exile in 1963. For several years prior to that they had lived abroad in southern Eu­rope, searching for a climate that would soothe Wat’s incurable facial pain caused by Wallenberg syndrome, the consequence of a stroke he suffered in 1953. The stroke happened in winter, shortly ­a fter a heated debate at the Warsaw Writers’ Union, where Wat was attacked for not conforming to socialist realism, and where he openly voiced his critical opinions. Though he was only admitted to the hospital ­after a long wait, Wat was eventually offered help, and even allowed to travel abroad to see doctors and to avoid the cold winters that exacerbated his pain.

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Wat was a persona non grata u ­ nder Stalinism, but he was never totally ignored. ­People remembered his prewar fame as an editor of the communist journal Miesięcznik Literacki (Literary Monthly), a job that landed him in jail in the early 1930s, when the Communist Party was illegal in Poland. Wat did not remain a communist for long; in 1940 he was arrested by the NKVD in Soviet-­occupied Lviv and spent several years in Soviet prisons, followed by a period of exile in Kazakhstan. His former colleagues knew that in the Soviet Union, his views had changed radically in the direction of Catholicism, but in 1946 they helped arrange for him to return to Poland from Central Asia. His beliefs did not change ­after his return; indeed, with the spread of socialist realism in the arts, he became increasingly convinced that his mission was to oppose communism as a kind of penance for his prewar choices. He also came to see his stroke as direct result of communist evil. Only in 1956, a­ fter Poland had under­gone a change in cultural politics, was Wat able to publish again, and a 1957 collection of metaphysical poems, Wiersze (Poems), was even awarded a literary prize. Beginning in 1959, Wat was also able to stay in southern Eu­rope for longer periods of time, first thanks to a Ford scholarship, then in connection with his work for an Italian publisher, and fi­nally thanks to funds from the New Land Foundation. In 1963, when this financing had run out, a new opportunity presented itself: an invitation from the Berkeley Center for Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Studies, whose members had heard Wat speak at a conference on Soviet lit­ er­a­ture at Oxford. In order to travel to the United States, Wat needed to have his passport validity extended. Meanwhile, in Poland he was increasingly seen as a suspicious emigrant. The embassy did not respond to Wat’s requests, and the poet and his wife had to decide: e­ ither give up the Berkeley fellowship or surrender their Polish passports, request asylum in France, travel to California as French residents, and never see their homeland again.9 The Wats chose to leave, but life in Berkeley came with its own difficulties. The California climate and the proximity of the ocean turned out to increase rather than reduce Wat’s pains; his new painkillers diminished his ability to think; and he felt increasingly guilty for not working during his fellowship at the Center. Fi­nally, the chairman of the Center, Gregory Grossman—­who had noticed that Wat could not write but was nevertheless willing and able to talk about life and politics—­suggested that Wat’s friend Czesław Miłosz, then a tenured professor of Polish at the university, interview Wat and rec­ord his responses.

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Miłosz had experience with taping, but more importantly he was the perfect interlocutor. Eleven years younger than Wat, he remembered enough about prewar Poland, and about his own leftist inclinations, to ask good questions, recognize names and dates from Polish intellectual history, and be an engaged and curious listener. Their recording sessions started in early 1965 and lasted ­until the end of Wat’s stay in June; in August, Miłosz joined Wat in France in order to continue recording over the summer. However, Wat only managed to get up to 1943 in his “spoken memoir.”10 Though he bought a Grundig TK-41 tape recorder to continue the proj­ect in France, his attempts to rec­ord himself alone did not succeed.11 Knowing that Miłosz had to leave Paris, Wat considered dif­fer­ent ways to facilitate further recordings: looking at a photo­graph of Miłosz, thinking of his tapes as letters to be sent to Miłosz, whispering his memoir, and recording in front of another exile, Józef Czapski. Ultimately Wat gave up trying to continue his taped book proj­ect without Miłosz.12 The unfinished story was eventually typed out, edited, and published as My ­Century, but only years ­later, in 1977, thanks to the determination of his wife. Wat’s spoken memoir, recorded only in Miłosz’s presence, was just one of the ways that Wat used his tape recorder. The poet also started to use his new device to dictate his private journal and to dictate new poems. Wat whispered his poems early in the morning when he could no longer sleep, usually around 5:00 a.m. He would try to speak the poems without moving his mouth, thereby shortening the distance between thought and voice, in order to keep his words from becoming reified or addressed to anyone specific. As Wat saw it, he was only a medium for some other, internal voice speaking through him. Similarly, as long as he tried to rec­ord his memoirs without Miłosz, Wat also whispered his text, trying to avoid its reification. On such occasions Wat saw his tape recorder as an impersonal device, a transparent, almost absent tool.13 This description of whispering texts suggests that the poet was close to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, especially in terms of the implied link between voice and pure consciousness, which was criticized by Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Speech and Phenomena. Interestingly, it was the tape recorder that allowed Wat to maintain this illusion of creating poetry that was barely materialized, that registered almost in statu nascendi. ­Here, his poetry seemed not fully externalized, neither properly voiced nor typed out. The aim of sound recording was thus paradoxical: not to save but rather to omit sounds,

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to preserve only the internal voice. However, the subsequent transcription, both by Wat and his wife, proved that the words ­were naturally articulated, and that the device registered more than just one’s presence and consciousness. In their printed form, Wat called t­ hese poems “naszepty magnetofonowe” (whispers to a tape recorder), marking their whispered origins.14 It is pos­si­ble that the state of mind in which Wat made his recordings—­ between sleep and waking, night and morning—as well as the painkillers he was taking, heightened the impression of another voice speaking through him. For Wat it was not so much his consciousness, but rather the unconscious, that was entering his dreams and whispers. In one poem the speaker hopes: “If only one could save from dream the warmth of her hand”; in another, he asks “Who am I for my poem? / Its intrusive dream,” thus reversing the usual image: the poem d ­ oesn’t come to the author’s mind, but instead the author haunts his own text as its nightmare and usurper. Subsequently, the poem wakes up and sees the author threatening it with a knife. The “slowly / ­solidified blood of ink” that flows from the knife prob­ably refers to the killing of the poem, its transition from the sphere of sleep to the sphere of words fixed on paper and authorized as Wat’s.15 In the moment of dictation, the poem is still on the verge of being killed. Wat knew that the poem was fated to be fixed, but for the moment the poem has only just woken up to be threatened by Wat’s ghostly presence. Not only from his poems, but also from his letters we know that Wat was aware that the objectifying threat preceded the act of writing, that it was in fact already pre­sent in the act of recording. In some cases Wat even saw t­ hese reifying features of recording as potentially helpful. Commenting on Miłosz’s new poems, Wat recommended that he try recording and playing back each text several times, in order to discover all of its redundant and false moments. Apparently, recording could help change one’s perception, allowing the poet to hear his own text as if from the outside. Wat admitted that testing poems through recording could lead to unduly dry and abstract texts, and that the method was prob­ably better suited to authors like him, who did not like their own voices. With t­ hese statements he revealed the extent to which tapes had influenced his own creative pro­cess. He also showed that he was well aware of the illusory transparency of recording, of the way it did in fact break the link between voice and mind, and of the objecthood of preserved speech. Seen in this light, his whispered poems reflect the purposely cherished illusion of

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a transparent flow of thoughts, an impossible rivalry with the inevitable outwardness of each poem.16 Testing poems by voicing them was one of many practices Wat had in common with Miron Białoszewski, a poet who stayed in Warsaw but bought his tape recorder the same year as Wat, in 1965. Białoszewski, who is studied in detail in Chapter 3, also became interested in using a recording device while working on a “spoken” memoir of the war; he l­ater used it to rec­ord a secret diary as well. Critics have noted the significance of interlocutors and listeners for both authors: Miłosz for Wat, and Jadwiga Stańczakowa for Białoszewski, when the latter was recording his life writing in the 1970s.17 However, Białoszewski’s views on recording ­were strikingly dif­fer­ent from Wat’s. Unlike Wat, Białoszewski thought of his tape recorder as an additional ear, a pretext for speaking, a device that intensified his plays and per­for­ mances, rather than an impersonal tool that could never substitute for an ­actual h ­ uman presence. Moreover, even when testing his works, Białoszewski used the device in a way that allowed the texts to go “through his ear,” a pro­ cess that the device only facilitated. Wat, on the other hand, referred to his own pro­cess as ­going “through the tape recorder,” accentuating the objective, but also objectifying, quality of recording (a quality he tried to evade with his whisperings).18 Despite ­these differences, both authors clearly show that in the 1960s, poets’ interest in tape-­recording was not ­limited to one side of the Iron Curtain. It was an international trend, widespread among French and American authors of the time as well.19 Similarly, the mid-1960s marked a peak of this fascination with recording both among Polish intellectuals in the Polish ­People’s ­Republic and among Polish emigrants living in Western Eu­rope, and it was clearly Wat who spread this fascination. Wat used his correspondence not just to describe his experiences with recording, but also to send and receive tapes. Mostly his letters show him waiting for the tapes with his memoir to reach France from Berkeley, but he also participated in the creation of new tapes with his friends. In December  1965, Józef Czapski and his ­sister Maria thanked Wat for introducing Czapski to the tape recorder.20 In a dif­fer­ent letter from the same month, Wat noted that he had spent Christmas Eve with the painter Jan Le­ benstein, who switched on the tape recorder ­after getting drunk and started to sing. E ­ arlier in the same month, Wat revealed that he was planning to meet

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with other Paris-­based friends—­L ebenstein, Olga Scherer, and Katarzyna Dzieduszycka—to rec­ord some texts by a younger poet, Zbigniew Herbert, who had debuted during the Thaw and was currently staying in Austria for several months. The plan was to surprise Herbert by sending ­t hese tapes to his Austrian address.21 Wat was quite effective at spreading his fascination with recording. In December 1965 Herbert wrote to Scherer that unfortunately he could not listen to the tape ­because the technician from the local literary society was sick, but he was very curious.22 A mere two months l­ater, in February 1966, Herbert wrote directly to Wat and asked if he would admit him to the “club of tape enthusiasts” (the Polish phrase he used was “klub magnetofończyków”), treating Wat as a tape-­recording guru among émigré poets. To bolster his claim, Herbert emphatically wrote that tape recorders must have been in­ ven­ted for poets. Poetry is voice, he added, voice only, that flickers and then dis­appears.23 In August 1966 Herbert was already working with his own tape recorder. He had received it from his German translator, Karl Dedecius. Herbert had recently moved from Austria to France following a series of poetry readings in West Germany, settling in the town of Antony, a suburb of Paris that was popu­lar among poor immigrants such as Wat, who had moved t­ here ­after his stay in the United States. Consequently, in the summer of 1966 Herbert not only worked like Wat, recording his new drama on tape, but also became Wat’s neighbor and friend.24 The drama Herbert recorded that summer, titled Alibi, was never finished, but Herbert’s Pa­ri­sian friends listened to the tape a year l­ater, in 1967, when Herbert was in E ­ ngland. As we learn from Herbert’s biographer, Andrzej Franaszek, a prologue written for this unfinished drama tested on tape was eventually published as a standalone poem, “Prologue,” in Herbert’s next book.25 The tapes made by Wat, Herbert, and their friends in the 1960s contained memoirs, whispers, jokes, and dramas; they can be described as a kind of manuscript or work in pro­g ress. They ­were not meant to circulate beyond friendly circles and ­were stored in private archives or lost.26 Yet both Wat and Herbert w ­ ere increasingly aware of the role of sound in their work, and they ­were also interested in speaking to wider audiences. However, due to differences in their po­liti­cal status in the 1960s, the two poets worked with radio stations that w ­ ere strikingly dif­fer­ent. Even though he had spent a long time

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abroad, Herbert managed to have his passport extended and even traveled to the United States in 1968 and 1970; prior to this he had been interrogated by secret police about his contacts in the West and encouraged to become a secret collaborator. Yet Herbert managed to get a passport without signing any declarations ­because by then he was a recognized author, not only in Poland but also in Germany and Anglophone countries. By contrast, Wat was entirely unknown in the West in 1963, when he had to make the difficult decision to emigrate. Subsequently, as a banned exile, he could not appear on Polish Radio or other state media.27

On Radio and Tape In the 1960s Aleksander Wat’s only option to have his voice broadcast to Poland was to cooperate with the Polish Section of Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope, which was headquartered in Munich. Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope was in­de­pen­dent from communist propaganda, financed by the US government, and broadcast to the Eastern Bloc, but it usually served Cold War politics. Its po­liti­cal profile made its cultural and literary broadcasts less convincing than its news program, which had many regular listeners in Poland. Some exiles, like Czesław Miłosz, felt that their position was prominent enough that they could criticize the Radio’s profile (Miłosz especially did not like the emigrants who dominated the Polish Section, whose views he considered to be more nationalist than his). But Wat did not have that kind of standing when the Polish Section reached out to him in 1963, just ­a fter his split with Poland, and then approached him in 1965, immediately ­after his move from the United States to France. Though Radio ­Free Eu­rope was interested in broadcasting Wat’s taped memoirs, the poet explained that the tapes belonged to the Berkeley Center, and instead agreed to send them reviews, poems, and commentaries.28 In 1966 Wat recorded a commentary on the Congress of Polish Culture that was to take place in ­People’s Poland in the fall. Although this commentary is not a literary text, it can be seen as an introduction to Wat’s ­later poetry recordings. H ­ ere, Wat—­who by this time was quite weak and sick—­ directly links his physical condition to the state of Polish culture and to his conflicts with the Party. He contrasts the Party’s utopian claims of being the best of all pos­si­ble worlds with his own ghostly presence. He even called

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himself an “upiór”—an undead spirit. His voice, transmitted to Poland through Radio ­Free Eu­rope’s jammed signal, was intended as a reminder of ­those who had been destroyed by the system. Speaking from the far side of the Iron Curtain, Wat sounded like a reproachful ghost from the other world, an uncanny reminder that the real­ity of compromise had its heavi­ly guarded limits.29 ­After the program the Polish Section asked for Wat’s poems, in order to devote a segment of its Literary Corner to the émigré poet’s work. Though Radio ­Free Eu­rope requested that the poems be read by actors, the poet insisted on recording his own voice and sending the tape to Munich. This was not an unusual practice at the time; in fact, in its journal Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope encouraged tape-­recording enthusiasts to send in their sound reportage. Yet the editors of the Polish Section, Jan Nowak-­Jeziorański and Tadeusz Zawadzki-­Ż enczykowski, w ­ ere worried about the consequences this effort might have on the poet’s poor health. In a letter to Nowak from February 1967, Wat declared that he had rehearsed his recitation with his wife, Ola, in Paris and was satisfied with the results. However, during his stay in Majorca that winter, Wat ran into some prob­lems with his Grundig and was not able to rec­ord his poems u ­ ntil he returned to Antony in the spring.30 Though he initially planned to send one twenty-­minute broadcast, in a letter from June 1, 1967, Wat admits that he had recently recorded four twenty-­ minute pieces (the date on the tapes is May 30, 1967). Zawadzki ­didn’t thank Wat for the tape ­until July 18, 1967, explaining that he was on vacation when the tape arrived; moreover, the poor quality of the recordings made it impossible to broadcast all of the poems in Wat’s rendition; technicians had been able to prepare only a few select poems. Thus, when the Literary Corner segment featuring Wat’s poetry was broadcast, on July 15, 1967, only three poems ­were read by Wat; the rest ­were recited by actors.31 The tape that the poet sent to Munich is hardly represented by the brief se­lection of poems broadcast in Wat’s voice on July 15. In preparing for the program, Wat was inspired to create a far more comprehensive recording than the planned twenty minutes; it also resulted in an ­earlier recording of rehearsals with his wife, which Wat mentioned in a letter to Nowak. We can infer that the rehearsals must have taken place by December 1966, when the Wats traveled to Majorca for the winter. Interestingly, among the vari­ous recordings of My ­Century in Wat’s archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, t­ here

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is a tape where the c­ ouple takes turns reading several poems, starting with Wat’s “Odes” I and II. The recording does indeed sound like a rehearsal. Aleksander’s voice is still relatively strong and expressive, and at times goes up almost to a shout; Ola, who had studied acting, can be heard professionally modulating the tone and speed of her delivery. Both readers signal rising tones and lengthen line endings, especially in the more metrically regular texts, intensifying the melodic features of ­these poems. ­Here, as on other occasions, Ola’s voice is treated as a true and convincing embodiment of Aleksander’s texts. At one point, however, he corrects a slip of the tongue on her part, ­after which the recorder is abruptly switched off; at another point, Ola herself stops reading and goes away. Though Ola reads very well, Wat seems more comfortable in the role of the reciter, and eventually, in the final poetry recording from May 30, 1967, we hear only his voice.32 ­There w ­ ere also other reasons that the recording from May 30, which contains four sections rather than the single broadcast that was initially planned, was a solo per­for­mance. Around this time Wat started to feel physically even worse than before. In the last days of May, Wat wrote suicide notes to his ­family, as well as drafts of his poem “Schodzenie . . .” (Stepping Down . . .), which he eventually titled “The Last Poem” and whose intermediate version he reads on the tape. On May 30, Wat wrote also a commentary on the po­liti­cal situation in the ­Middle East, to be published in the London émigré weekly Wiadomości (News). Due to his Jewish background, the poet was especially worried about Arab-­Israeli po­liti­cal tensions, which ­were to lead to the Six-­Day War. Knowing that the Soviet Union and its allies officially supported Arab states, Wat made a plea to his compatriots in emigration to unanimously support Israel. He saw such support as a Polish obligation in light of the fraught history of Polish-­Jewish relations in the first half of the twentieth c­ entury; in par­t ic­u ­lar, he believed this obligation fell to nationalists and former anti-­ Semites, whose slogan in interwar Poland was “Jews to Palestine.” With this last contribution to the press, Wat confirmed his increasingly complex identity, which he had expressed as early as the 1950s: “I never felt myself to be ­either a Polish Jew or a Jewish Pole. . . . ​I always felt myself to be a Jew-­Jew and a Pole-­Pole.”33 Thus, in a single day, May 30, Wat prepared his suicide notes, his “Last Poem,” his po­liti­cal plea, and his final poetry recording. Wat’s son, Andrzej, considered this tape a testament consciously left ­behind in the medium of

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voice. The tape was supposed to pre­sent Wat’s forthcoming poetry book, and the book itself has a testament-­like construction, combining Wat’s earliest, prewar futurist texts, his postwar poems from the 1957 and 1963 books, which had been published in Poland, as well as his newest poems, which w ­ ere to be published in emigration.34 The title of the new book, which appeared in Polish with the Pa­ri­sian émigré publisher Libella, has been variously rendered into En­glish, as Dark Light, Dark Trinket, Dark Tinsel, The Dark Source of Light, Black Sun, The ­Obscure Light, and Lumen Obscurum, proving how dense, elliptical, and at times hermetic Wat’s language could be. Ciemne świecidło refers not only to a paradoxical, if not baroque and surreal, type of communication, cognition, and illumination, but also to the historical meaning of the word “wyświecać,” meaning to expel a criminal from a city by candlelight. For his dark wisdom and dark experiences, which brought with them painful illumination, Wat felt that he had been expelled from the Polish ­People’s Republic, supposedly a place of enlightened, utopian pro­gress. Both the book Dark Light and the tape presenting it ­were thus transmitters of his dark legacy, summaries of the author’s poetic oeuvre as much as the biography of an exile. ­Because of the comprehensiveness and length of this testament, Wat’s tape was not suited to any plausible format for a poetry program on Radio ­Free Eu­rope.35 Wat committed suicide two months l­ater, on July 29, 1967, a­ fter fourteen years of living in pain. Given that Dark Light appeared only in 1968, the poet’s tape became even more charged with significance. Though it consisted of poems that w ­ ere recited rather than dictated, for some texts, including “The Last Poem,” the recording contains the only fully authorized versions, preceding their posthumous publication. On the other hand, older texts could take on new meanings ­under ­these changed circumstances. For instance, the section consisting of Wat’s most recent texts does not end with his “Last Poem” but is followed by the text “Ewokacja” (Evocation), written in 1963. Though it was written about Wat’s Soviet experiences, it would be hard not to read new meanings into the lines that declare “The show is over, the viewers are dispersed. / You can lock me, headsmen, in a dark cell,” when they are heard at the end of a final, farewell recording.36 In this light it is not surprising that Wat’s tape took on a life of its own beyond the copy sent to Radio ­Free Eu­rope, which ultimately resulted in more than three of Wat’s poems being broadcast (and available online t­ oday). We

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know that Wat’s wife listened to the tape a­ fter his death, filling her home with his voice. In 1969 a copy of the tape was sent to Miłosz, who found it touching but pessimistic. He observed that “­t here is more in Aleksander’s poems than his very tired and very pessimistic voice can bring out.” The poet’s ­widow attended a poetry reading in Switzerland in the 1980s, where the tape was played. A copy of the tape was given to the National Library in Warsaw. In ­these and other ways, Wat’s audio testament circulated informally, by mail, between friends and institutions, retaining something of its homemade quality and reflecting the milieu of tape enthusiasts within which Wat began his own experiments with tape recorders.37 In its length, complexity, and informal circulation, Wat’s tape did not conform to ­simple po­liti­cal aims or to the agenda of Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope. Even though Wat presented his weak voice as an effect of the communist evil he had experienced between his early fascination and disillusionment, including stints in prisons and hospitals, his recorded poems offer a more complex picture. The somatic quality of his readings, as preserved in recordings and in the poems themselves, problematizes and emphasizes the theological and personal rather than the po­liti­cal, of which the main purpose seemed to be to provide new forms that evil could take in the twentieth ­century. Looking back on his life, Wat saw all of his fluctuating beliefs, starting with ­those instilled during his upbringing in a cultured Warsaw Jewish ­family, in which his ­father was the only religious person, his siblings ­were secularized, and his nanny was a Catholic peasant. The atheist views Wat held in his youth, in interwar Poland, w ­ ere followed by a longing for the brotherhood of communism, and by a subsequent turn to Catholicism during his time in Soviet prisons. Though this turn led to his baptism in Warsaw in 1953, the doubts he felt immediately a­ fter the rite never dis­appeared, and Wat’s views remained suspended, vacillating between belief and disbelief, between Jewish and Catholic thought. For Wat, suffering was the crucial question and the ultimate test of faith; his poetry remained a space where paradoxical language could help him find a fitting form for his questions and doubts.38 Both Wat and his critics frequently emphasized that his texts should be read biographically.39 For many commentators, Wat’s somatic themes and the experience of pain are the most significant constants throughout the poet’s output.40 His 1957 volume includes a cycle titled “Somatic Poems”; the posthumous volume contains poems where the poet addresses his body

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(“Inwokacja” [Invocation]), or uses a dramatic monologue in which a dead body is speaking (“Skin and Death”).41 Many readers have noticed links between Wat’s physicality and the forms of his writing. Th ­ ese links are obvious in the case of his handwritten texts, where Wat’s illegible script, seemingly written in a race against time, tends to cover all the blank space on the page.42 But we also know that the physical experience of writing in pain influenced Wat’s intellectual attitude t­oward lit­er­a­ture and s­haped his preference for sentences that w ­ ere crude, clumsy, and imperfect.43 It is thus impossible to treat Wat’s farewell tape solely as a retrospective of his literary achievements. It is also an autobiographical document, which seems to depend on the harsh, exhausted voice of the poet himself. One poem in par­tic­u­lar offers a condensed view of the speaker’s life, work, and relationship to his body, and uses somatic qualities in a highly performative way; this is Wat’s “Ode III,” the recording of which can be seen as the poet’s audio testament in a nutshell. “Ode III,” the last of Wat’s three odes, written in the spring of 1967, was unpublished at the time of Wat’s death; on the tape, the poet reads it separately from the other two odes, using the formal aspects of recording and the sounds of his body to raise provocative theological questions.44

In the Skin In the recording, when Wat introduces his ode as “Ode three, in abridgment” (“Oda trzecia, w skróceniu”), one might won­der which version of the text he is shortening, given that the poem was still unpublished at the time (May 30, 1967). The text was only printed posthumously, on September 3, 1967, in the London-­based Polish émigré journal News. The following year it appeared in the book Dark Light, with the date “April 1967” printed below the text. All three versions of the poem are dif­fer­ent, and indeed, the spoken per­for­mance is missing three parts that appear in the book version, though it is still a long, and curiously constructed, text.45 Stanisław Barańczak aptly characterized Wat’s “Ode” as a poem that shows life “as a series of encounters with the world experienced through the skin. The skin is presented as a boundary and, at the same time, a contact surface between the self and the outer world in its sensuous, erotic, intellectual, social, and even super­natural dimension.” He also pointed out that t­ hese ex-

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periences belong entirely to the past. At the moment of writing, the skin is less an “open gate to the world” than a “prison cell closed around the body’s pain.” 46 In the printed poem, t­ hese two roles played by the skin—­first as a source of joy, and then of entrapment—­a re presented chronologically, whereas in Wat’s recitation, a piercing tone of lament can be heard from the very first lines. The following passage comes from the beginning of the text, where the skin is praised: Skórą doświadczałem Stworzenia, darów pełnego, życzliwych po­wierzch­ ni, uśmiechów światła, woni i zgiełków, zmysłom miłych. Skórą do­ świadczałem Stworzenia od pierwszego zaranku do późnego wie­czo­ru, nim noc zapadnie, kiedy ono przyświadczało sobie: “jest dobrze.” With my skin I experienced a Creation full of gifts, of friendly surfaces, of light’s smiles, of smells and sounds, all that was pleasing to the senses. With my skin I experienced Creation from the first morning till late eve­ ning, till the nightfall, while it was bringing testimony to itself: “It is good.” 47 In the m ­ iddle of the text, the role of the skin starts to differ: Teraz, kiedym w skórę szczelnie zaszyty, w skórze więziony, w skórze mojej jest bieda moja, wielka, bardzo wielka bieda, choć mózg w starociach ogłupiały dopieroż hej intonuje hosannę współbytowania w Panu, alleluja. Now, when I am tightly sewn in my skin, imprisoned in my skin, it, the skin, is a ­great misfortune to me, a ­great, g­ reat misfortune, even though my brain, stultified by old age, intones, and how, hey! a hosanna of coexisting in the Lord, alleluia! The first ­t hing that might surprise us is the structure of the printed poem. The basic units of the text resemble Bible verses; they are longer than typical verse lines, shorter than typical paragraphs, and consist of sentences or clauses. The poem is halfway between prose and verse—to the point where its basic divisions might be better rendered by “paragraph” than by “stanza” or “strophe.” Wat explic­itly names the exploration of this boundary (between prose-­prose and poetry-­poetry, as he called it) as a formal ele­ment with which

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he was consciously experimenting.48 The poem’s biblical associations are further emphasized by the parallel sentence structure and by paraphrases of biblical formulations. In the poem, Genesis and Creation are “good,” and man is “that image and likeness of God.” Elsewhere ­there are even more direct references to acts of praying (and singing) that come from the Bible: the phrases “hosanna” and “alleluia.” The passages quoted above reveal how problematic the discussion of prosody can be when referring to a poem in print, especially with a text like this, which is both devoid of metrical patterns and syntactically complicated. And indeed, in Polish verse theory, recitation (even more so than print culture) is considered an impor­tant ­factor in the development of modern accentual and f­ ree verse. Thus, the ambiguous status of Wat’s text, its oscillation between poetry and prose, seems to dis­appear in the author’s per­for­mance. Wat’s recitation clearly signals additional poetic divisions that are superimposed on the sentences, while his slow tempo underscores the special status of his speech—­despite the markers of exhaustion and old age, such as consonant reduction and less clear articulation. Wat’s long sentences and verse lines are supplemented by very long pauses, and verses frequently start with a strong falling pitch on the word “skin.” 49 This impressively falling pitch can be heard in the first word of the ­whole poem, which in Polish is “skórą”—­“skin” in the instrumental case—­whereas the En­glish translation quoted above begins with a preposition, article, and noun: “with the skin.” The Polish text opens with the keyword of the ­whole poem, “skin,” and in Wat’s delivery this first word is already piercing and emotional, standing out from the rest of the sentence. The unique characteristics of the word “skórą” depend on a combination of all three acoustic par­ ameters that influence our perception of speech: fundamental frequency, intensity, and time. The word “skórą” is exceptionally long for its size (the two syllables take more than one second to pronounce), its amplitude is relatively high, and its resultant volume is greater than that of the rest of the phrase. Most importantly, the word is pronounced with a changing pitch, and such fluctuations in frequency (and pitch height) exert the greatest influence on auditory impressions. As we can see in Figure 4.1, with “skórą” ­there is a rapid fall in fundamental frequency (from around 230 Hz to 130 Hz), followed by the quieter and lower pronunciation of the next few words.

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4.1 Wat reads the words “Skórą doświadczałem Stworzenia, darów . . .” from “Ode III.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from 1967 from a copy archived in the National Digital Archives in Warsaw.

4.2 Wat reads the words “Skórą doświadczałem Stworzenia od pierwszego zaranku do późnego wieczoru” from “Ode III.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from 1967 from a copy archived in the National Digital Archives in Warsaw.

This intonational fall is not an isolated case. When we examine the pitch contour of the next sentence starting with “skórą” (and a few subsequent passages as well), the situation looks similar, as we can see in Figure 4.2. Comparing ­every instance of the lexeme “skóra” (skin) in “Ode III” shows that, on average, “skóra” is delivered at a higher pitch than e­ very other word. Moreover, t­ here is a significantly greater difference between the average maximum and minimum fundamental frequencies of the word “skóra” in comparison with ­every other lexeme. This expressive change of tone and pitch

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height marks most instances of “skóra,” while the rest of the poem’s intonational contours remain relatively flat, invariable, and occasionally floating. In the rare cases when “skóra” is not emphasized, the range of fundamental frequencies is significantly lower, as is the duration of the word. Such cases prove that the dominant, aty­pi­cal pronunciation of “skóra” in this poem is not the default for Wat, but is instead deliberately chosen for this per­for­mance.50 As we can see, the strange, lamenting tone used for “skórą” is bound up in a word whose meaning encapsulates Wat’s painful somatic experiences. Moreover, the repetition of prosodic features associated with “skórą” highlights the enumerative structure of the poem. The falling tone thus emphasizes both the poem’s verse construction and its semantics. At the same time, it influences our perception of the poem’s syntax b ­ ecause individual sentences are separated from each other by this “thorny” word. The syntactical coherence of the poem is also weakened by the slow tempo of Wat’s reading, the long pauses, and the way his voice tends to fade out. In the first line, the word “Stworzenia” (Creation) and its epithet “darów pełnego” (full of gifts) are separated by almost a full second (0.8 sec.) of silence, ­after which “darów pełnego” is spoken with decreasing intensity. In fact, Wat’s delivery is so quiet that despite the rising tone, “darów pełnego” seems to mark the end of the phrase. The pause before the next word lasts longer than a second, suggesting that the end of the sentence has been reached. Only ­later does the utterance continue, with still more dynamic and intensive pronunciation.51 ­These characteristics of Wat’s per­for­mance are pre­sent throughout the reading. The poet does not clearly mark the ends of his phrases with a falling intonation; instead, his fading voice and long pauses tend to obscure the syntactic structure. Wat’s pauses are indeed quite long, but they are not out of place. In the printed text, the corresponding moments are usually marked with commas or periods. Wat’s reading is surprising, and bears a strong individual imprint, but it does not openly contradict the rules of Polish pronunciation: Wat stresses the penultimate syllables of words and pays attention to punctuation marks. At the same time, his reading clears up certain syntactic ambiguities. The difficulties raised by Wat’s recitation require an attentive listener, just as his crude sentences depend on careful readers. Meanwhile his voice, breathy and trembling, often sounding as though it w ­ ere ­dying away, signals both his own fatigue and the ephemeral nature of speech and life in general.

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Wat’s intonation becomes more varied in the m ­ iddle of the text, when he moves on to the passage that describes how the role of his skin changes, and where he explains his e­ arlier lamenting tone: Teraz, kiedym w skórę szczelnie zaszyty, w skórze więziony, w skórze mojej jest bieda moja, wielka, bardzo wielka bieda, choć mózg w starociach ogłupiały dopieroż hej intonuje hosannę współbytowania w Panu, alleluja. Now, when I am tightly sewn in my skin, imprisoned in my skin, it, the skin, is a ­great misfortune to me, a ­great, g­ reat misfortune, even though my brain, stultified by old age, intones, and how, hey! a hosanna of coexisting in the Lord, alleluia! This passage contains four words that refer to singing: “intones,” “hey,” “hosanna” and “alleluia.” The printed text suggests that ­these old melodies are still pre­sent in the poet’s mind (although their joyful message no longer makes sense to the speaker). In Wat’s per­for­mance, the delivery of ­these words resembles lamentation rather than song, and thus the melodies of a stultified brain are contradicted by the sounds of pain in per­for­mance. The names of t­ hese ostensibly religious songs point our attention to the sounds of the ­whole passage. It summarizes the poet’s life in his skin as “a ­great misfortune to me, a g­ reat, ­great misfortune,” and, in the next passage, as “my misfortune, a ­great, ­great misfortune.” In the Polish original (“bieda moja, wielka, bardzo wielka bieda” and “biada moja, wielka, bardzo wielka biada”) the religious roots of this language are more obvious. It is a rewriting of Confiteor, the penitential Christian prayer said at the beginning of Mass.52 In the Polish text, it would almost be enough to exchange the word “biada” (misfortune) for “wina” (fault) to end up with the standard translation of the Latin phrase “mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” To preserve this allusion in En­g lish, it would be better to translate this part as “my misery, my most grievous misery” (standing in for the En­glish “through my fault, through my most grievous fault”). Confiteor is usually recited collectively, so we may won­der how Wat’s paraphrases, which occur close to the words “intoning” and “hosanna,” ­ought to be pronounced. Should readers automatically apply the prosody of Confiteor to Wat’s words (Witold Sadowski called this type of association “prosodic memory”)?53 Or is this quotation, too, undermined by the poet’s speech? In

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4.3 Wat reads the words “wielka, bardzo wielka biada” from “Ode III.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from 1967 from a copy archived in the National Digital Archives in Warsaw.

Wat’s per­for­mance, “wielka, bardzo wielka biada” (a g­ reat, g­ reat misfortune) (Figure 4.3) mimics a typical church prayer recited in unison, with its floating pitch of rise-­fall tones and its lengthened syllables. Wat’s voice is less sonorous, more quiet and acute, than a collective recitation would be, but his per­for­mance suggests that he is treating ­these words seriously, as he might treat the words of a prayer. All this may make us won­der about the genre of Wat’s poem, and of the speech act he recorded on tape. The title of the poem suggests a classical lofty lyric, especially one meant to honor an exalted personage or to commemorate an impor­tant event—­a genre that was rarely used in twentieth-­century Polish poetry on account of its rhetorical character. In “Ode III,” Wat retained vari­ous features of the classical Greek ode: the pretext of a special occasion (the end of the poet’s life); a central object (the skin); a lofty style (inversions, enumerations, and repetitions); apostrophes to the community (Wat addresses his brethren); apostrophes to deities or divine emanations; a combination of descriptive and reflective parts; and an emphasis on the social dimension of the speaking I (“To be in the skin, in every­one, in ­every skin of ­every one”).54 At the same time, Wat’s ode reinterprets and personalizes this schema. The central object of the text, the poet’s skin, indicates that the “I” is speaking about itself, and the standard apol­o­getic passages are followed by their negation. In the end the speaker laments his own—­and humanity’s—­ confinement in the envelope of skin, rather than offering praise or holding out a promise of hope.

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Moreover, the poem’s indebtedness to ancient odes is complicated by its religious and biblical language. This language directs us instead to the two religious traditions that w ­ ere impor­tant to Wat, and that are intermingled in his work: Judaism and Catholicism. In one of Wat’s late poems, Jesus recites the Kaddish on his way to the cross. Wat’s ode is a far cry from the standard form of the Kaddish, with its apotheoses of God’s name, yet t­ here are certain similarities as well, such as praise of the world created by God that opens the text, the parallel verse constructions, the need for vocal realization, and the ritual of mourning. In Wat’s poem, however, the person being mourned is the speaker himself, rather than a parent; death has not yet occurred, but it is expected. Wat’s poem, especially in its versification, seems to point to the Kaddish not as a strict model but as a lasting source of forms and cultural associations.55 The repetitive construction of “Ode III,” further accentuated by the poet’s special pronunciation of the word “skin,” also points to the genre of litany, including the melody traditionally used for its recitation in Christian churches. Of course, Wat’s poem is not a proper litany e­ ither; it lacks the standard series of apostrophes used as laudations, invocations, and supplications. Wat repeats the word “skin,” but he is not directly addressing God or the saints, or even his own skin. Still, even if “skin” is not the projected listener of the poet’s petitions, putting this word in place of the litany’s addressee imbues the object with a religious aura.56 The idea of praying to one’s body was not alien to Wat. In the poem “Invocation,” Wat repeatedly speaks to his body, describing it in successive lines as poor, suffering, weak, holy, cruel, old, and blessed.57 The skin is also of the utmost importance in the last passages of Wat’s ode, where he says: Więc skórę tylko, tylko gołą skórę, bo i co posiadam innego? zostawiam w spadku, z pokorną dla was, bracia, prośbą, byście ją wygarbowali na oprawę do tego zbioru moich strof,   które brzydkie-­piękne, dobre-­złe, są, bracia, z tamtej upojonej, i z tej oranej, przypiekanej, kaleczonej skóry ofiarnego bydlęcia, które zdycha bez żadnego pożytku, długo długo bardzo długo, nim zaświeci mu w ślepia tępy nóż rzeźnika.

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Therefore I bequeath to you, my brethren, my skin, naked skin, for what ­else do I have? with a h ­ umble prayer, to tan it for the binding of this collection of stanzas; they, ugly-­beautiful, good-­evil as they are, are from both that ecstatic skin and this ploughed, grilled lacerated skin of a sacrificial beast that is ­dying without profit for a long, long, long time, before a butcher’s dull knife glints in its eyes. As long as the skin was used to approach, accompany, and respond to o ­ thers, it was the speaker’s pride and joy; but once it has sealed him into suffering, it becomes a useless substance, changing him into “a sacrificial beast.” The skin, whose pain transformed the speaker’s biography into an absurdity, a long pro­cess of “­dying without profit,” can no longer serve as anything more than a binding.58 ­Here the speaker not only declares himself a poet and refers to his ­future book collection, but also predicts that this situation ­w ill be short-­lived: the skin is bequeathed in the pre­sent, but he has already been ­dying for years. As with embalming, the poet’s exterior, his skin, w ­ ill be preserved for posterity. Similarly, through the act of recording, the voice ­w ill be preserved but b ­ ehind it t­ here ­w ill be no mind, no presence, no living organism. The outwardness of t­hese poetic and bodily remains provide a striking contrast to the poet’s whispers, whose aim was to temporarily avoid the reification of his internal voice; however, Wat’s afterlife is wholly external, illusory, made of ink and acoustics. Even his poems arise from the skin, not from the mind or interior. Indeed, Wat’s biggest prob­lem with Chris­t ian­ity, which prevented him from converting fully and always stood in the way of belief, was the idea of resurrection. The suffering, humanity, and loneliness of Christ, whose sacrifice was considered by Wat to be the peak of all ­human achievement, seemed to resonate with his own suffering. Yet Wat never thought of resurrection or the afterlife as a possibility, e­ ither for Jesus or for himself.59 The strongest expression of this conviction can be found in Wat’s famous “Trzy sonety” (Three Sonnets), where Jesus refuses to rise from the dead. Th ­ ese poems have been called anti-­messianic, although Jesus’s refusal is not absolute. In the text he says that he ­w ill not accept resurrection “­unless man too is freed / from death and pain.” 60

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This solidarity between Jesus’s suffering and that of the p ­ eople further highlights the parallels between Wat and Jesus. In the poem “Evocation,” the speaker suggests that a crown of thorns was designed for him, while in “Ode III,” he claims to have been promised a hell of pain. The poet saw himself as someone who paid for his own (and o ­ thers’) joys and faults, who was forced to suffer as “a sacrificial beast that is d ­ ying without profit.” The speaker’s skin is not just a symbol of his pain, but also his currency in the divine economy, an economy that demands offerings and annuls profits. The designer of this cruel economy is mentioned only briefly in “Ode III,” in the God-­like figure of the Ploughman. The scholar Jarosław Borowski has identified several characters in Wat’s texts who seem to combine ideas of God, Soviet-­like state supervision, prison guards, and hunters.61 In “Ode III” the Ploughman seems to be responsible for Wat’s suffering (the poem mentions his “­labor in man”); ­earlier we are told about a skin that is “grilled, lacerated, ploughed e­ very day anew.” In the text, however, the figure of Jesus, who usually serves as a contrast with the cruel figure of God, does not appear. Only the poet is left in the form of a suffering, sacrificial beast. The scholar Piotr Bogalecki has noted that the religious references in “Ode III” could allude to dif­fer­ent moments from the Christian Mass; ­these include the Confiteor; the Gloria, when the skin is called the speaker’s glory; vari­ous phrases from the Creed, when the poet speaks of Creation; and then the singing of the hosanna, which marks the Sanctus acclamation. The moment that seems to be missing is the Consecration, when the priest is supposed to speak in the person of Christ, repeating the words “Take this, all of you, and eat of it / for this is my Body / which ­w ill be given up for you” (according to the En­glish Roman Missal), a­ fter which Christ is addressed as Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, in prayer.62 When the poem’s speaker—­and Wat in the recording—­says instead “I bequeath to you, my brethren, my skin” and calls himself a sacrificial beast, his blasphemy is multifaceted. He seems to stand in not just for a priest but for Christ himself, although his offering can bring nothing. Moreover, when he pleads with his brethren to use his skin for bookbinding, he puts his followers (who live in a post-­Holocaust world) in a dubious moral position, one in which Christian civilization found itself anyway ­after World War II. Fi­nally, the somatic aspect of his offering reverses the Catholic notions of Eucharist and

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transubstantiation: whereas Christ’s body and his presence in Communion are said to result from a substantial transformation of what looks from the outside like bread, Wat preserves an external link with the speaker (through the book cover made of his skin, the sound of his recorded voice, and the poems born from his skin), but refuses access to any sort of interior, presence, spirit, or eternal life.63 In the ­middle of “Ode III” the poet refers to his early futurist experiments, when his nonsensical speech was “consubstantial” with the skin, sharing the skin’s substance. This youthful choice of syllables without a hidden meaning, speech sharing just the physical outwardness of skin, now seems silly to the speaker, but in his current condition ­there is not much e­ lse left. The speaker almost becomes an animal. At the end of “Ode III” he not only waits for the butcher’s knife, but is also described using words that in Polish are used only for animals: his eyes are called “ślepia” rather than “oczy,” the verb for his death is “zdycha” rather than “umiera.” 64 Given that all rites and prayers have to happen in the h ­ ere and now, and must usually be voiced, Wat’s per­for­mance may be seen as necessary for his blasphemous Mass to take place. Perhaps the delayed, tape-­recorded communication with his congregation is also sufficient, given the proclaimed lack of pos­si­ble spiritual connections. Even though this late poem is definitely more radical than Wat’s e­ arlier takes on Christian topics, a full identification with the blasphemous Mass I suggested above is, nevertheless, premature. The analogies to liturgy are only hinted at, never made explicit, and the consequences are never fully spelled out. In the text the poet’s despair results mostly from the fact that his skin no longer allows him to show compassion, to be with ­others, to carry on his burden of suffering in accordance with his vision of brotherhood (even if it is not followed by otherworldly rewards). The need to restrict a more extreme interpretation also stems from the fact that in his last tape Wat does not finish his reading from Dark Light with “Ode III,” which could be an impressive statement on the evolution of his despair and nonbelief. Several other poems follow before Wat ends his taped reading with a few sections from the 1963 poem “Evocation.” In his recitation he seems to use ­these texts as a means of genuine confession and lamentation. ­These readings make us won­der how to recognize when a poetry reading has turned into a prayer, when a performer has begun to identify with the agenda

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of the textual speaker. In this case it is hard not to treat Wat’s reading as an attempt to inhabit the “I” of the older poems one more time, to return to the views he held in the past, when in his texts he openly confessed to denying God, perceived his own suffering as wearing Christ’s crown, and lamented that he could not pray. In the very last lines that Wat reads from Dark Light on his farewell tape, the poet sounds like a doubting skeptic rather than a blasphemer. He regrets that he can neither see nor hear Christ, but at the same time he addresses him in the second person. Ultimately the speaker won­ders ­whether it would not be better for him to return to the towns of his forefathers—­“maybe t­ here in Emmaus you would cross my path again, / so that I had a chance to put my fin­gers into your wounds, / ­t hese old fin­gers of mine, blind, deaf and mute.” Speaking t­hese words in May 1967, Wat seems to make one last attempt at expressing hope that through his skin he might reach anything other than inhuman, reifying pain.65

Herbert’s Testaments While Aleksander Wat, living in exile, could only rec­ord his testament for Radio ­Free Eu­rope, Zbigniew Herbert had to avoid that radio station. He was a published poet in Poland and did not want to choose exile. Thanks to his popularity in German-­speaking countries, he made several appearances on Austrian and West German media outlets, but throughout the 1960s most of his appearances ­were on Polish Radio, the national state-­run broadcaster. In a broadcast from 1961, Herbert explained that he liked to recite his poems himself, and his readings could be heard in programs from the mid-­and late 1960s and early 1970s.66 In an article from 1956, the poet remarked that authorial readings help p ­ eople who do not know much about lit­er­a­ture to perceive poetry as a special type of speech.67 Herbert’s work for Polish Radio included more than just readings of his poetry. The broadcaster also produced his radio dramas, which w ­ ere aired between the late 1950s and early 1970s. At that time, many authors ­were writing for Polish Radio Theater, which contributed to the flowering of this special genre built almost entirely of spoken word mediated via recording. As the scholar Jacek Kopciński has shown, Herbert skillfully used the ­possibilities available in the era of secondary orality. Before the growth of

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popu­lar culture and tele­v i­sion in Poland, when the cultural landscape was still based on writing and the voice, the poet aptly exploited the possibilities of state-­controlled mass culture. Herbert’s broadcast plays included his poems, which appeared in both his dramas and his poetry books.68 Yet in dramas, poems w ­ ere surrounded by a more accessible plot and commentary, and they w ­ ere meant to be experienced in the intimate space of one’s home. Compared to poetry books, radio dramas could reach a far greater audience— at the time Polish Radio attracted millions of listeners.69 In ­t hese years Herbert was perceived as a classicist and his plays functioned as a kind of cultural therapy, working ­toward an internal transformation and the rebuilding of a harmonious and humanist society ­after the deadly catastrophes.70 Given the universal implications of t­ hese works, Herbert’s plays w ­ ere also produced in the United Kingdom by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in the 1960s.71 Yet in the 1970s, when more than half of Polish ­house­holds had tele­v i­sion sets that broadcast foreign TV series, spoken word was no longer an obvious form of entertainment and cultural influence. At the same time, Herbert’s lyric poetry started to change in tone.72 His poem “Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” which closed his 1974 volume of poetry, became a kind of lay decalogue for some circles of the intelligent­sia. By the 1980s, when poetry regained social importance due to Solidarity and the subsequent martial law, Herbert had acquired the status of national bard. During martial law his fans would copy his poems by hand and read them out loud; his poems w ­ ere also sung by 73 guitar poets and recited by actors. In this de­cade one of his poetry readings was broadcast by Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope.74 While Herbert’s position as national poet was becoming cemented, his health was steadily deteriorating, and by the time of Poland’s po­liti­cal transition Herbert was already seriously ill. His health prob­lems began in the late 1960s, when he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which haunted him till the end of his life. In late 1980 ­t hese issues w ­ ere compounded by lung disease related to the fact that the poet never quit smoking.75 When in late April 1998 Herbert unexpectedly regained his lost voice, he considered it a miracle. The team from Polish Radio Kraków, headed by the editor Romana Bobrowska, immediately de­cided to visit the ill poet in his Warsaw apartment to rec­ord his poetry reading. This was part of a larger series of cassettes and CDs that Radio Kraków was working on, in which Her-

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bert very much wanted to participate. His willingness to be recorded one more time, despite his weak and creaky voice, signaled a return of his old interest in working with radio and reciting poems as a means of communicating with wider audiences. Due to the poet’s grave health, the recording from May 8, 1998, became a special kind of farewell reading: Herbert died on July 28, 1998. Before his death, Herbert got to hear the five (out of twenty) recorded poems that had already been edited by radio technicians, and he was happy that the CD was g­ oing to be published soon.76 Herbert’s reading is aptly described by Kopciński, who notes the thoughtful recitation, the slightly lengthened vowels, and the poet’s hoarse and rustling but still deep voice. All Latin quotes ­were properly accented, including the name of Herbert’s poetic alter ego and main character, Mr. Cogito, with the stress falling on the first “o,” and not on the “i,” as the usual Polish accentuation on penultimate syllables would suggest.77 The recording showcases the elegant tone of a professional and educated reciter from the prewar intelligent­sia, now recorded at home, in his bed, fighting shortness of breath and involuntary deformations of pitch, his tired voice turning to a whisper. The ironic wit of the poet’s banter between poems, and the sounds of him striking a lighter and breathing in smoke, seem to desperately ­counter the gravity of his health condition. For his farewell reading Herbert chose poems that are serious in tone. The situations they describe matched Herbert’s own position from that time: the heroism of the defeated, the glory of the vanquished. The reading included poems about lovers d ­ ying in the flames of war (“Two Drops”), about the war­ time fear of hiding and escaping (“Our Fear”), about Rabbi Nachman and the destroyed Hasidic community of Breslov in Ukraine (“Mr. Cogito Seeks Advice”), about the Soviet invasion of “my defenseless country” (“September  17”), about Lviv, the lost city of Herbert’s childhood (“Mr.  Cogito Considers a Return to His Native Town”), about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against Soviet-­imposed policies (“To the Hungarians”), about a besieged city ­under martial law (“Report from a Besieged City”), about poverty in the outskirts (“Houses on the Outskirts”), about ­peoples defeated by the Roman Empire (“Livy’s Metamorphoses”), and about the biblical Isaac who in the poem had to be killed to remain innocent (“Photo­graph”). ­There are no po­liti­cal victories in ­these reflections, only losses. This state of affairs is openly embraced in Herbert’s most famous poem, “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,”

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which declares that “you w ­ ere saved not in order to live.” Th ­ ose who “go upright” and give testimony, as the poem demands, are to be rewarded “with what they have at hand / with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap.”78 The poems chosen for Herbert’s farewell reading feature a peculiar reverse triumphalism, close to the Polish national my­t hol­ogy established during the time of partitions in the nineteenth c­ entury, ­after the unsuccessful uprisings against the Rus­sian Empire. This glorification of sacrifice in the name of freedom, honor, or the fatherland, especially when that sacrifice fails or is po­ liti­cally unsuccessful, continued during World War II, when young partisans, including a number of young poets, ­were raised on Romantic lit­er­a­ture. It seems that the fact that Herbert himself was not a member of any Polish re­sis­tance forces only increased his admiration for ­t hose who did fight. He was also uncompromising in his anticommunist views a­ fter the war, which ­were especially clear during the time of socialist realism and in the 1980s. Herbert expressed his po­liti­cal views in interviews and comments, and they w ­ ere also reflected in Polish interpretations of his poetry in its local context. However, the poems themselves, as we can see above, w ­ ere by no means ­limited to the subject of national history. Instead, they used this history as a model for a more universal discussion of the fate of all t­ hose who have been attacked and defeated. Once, in the 1980s, the poet even admitted that he was sympathetic to any cause that was opposed by the many—­for the mere fact that its supporters w ­ ere being oppressed.79 The Polish Romantic idea of po­liti­cal sacrifice and loss, which was modeled on the Christian ideas of resurrection and redemption, was supposed to offer hope that any failures and deaths w ­ ill ultimately lead to the rebirth of the country and to a better ­f uture. Yet Herbert’s po­liti­cal views and personal beliefs did not allow for any promise of reward. In his final recording, Herbert pre­sents himself as Roman Catholic, but “more Roman than Catholic,” and appropriately, in his secular “Envoy” the only b ­ itter prize offered is “the golden fleece of nothingness” and admission “to the com­pany of cold skulls / to the com­pany of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland.” The poem echoes and modifies the ethos of self-­sacrifice that became prominent during World War II. Rather than fully subscribing to the Romantic myth of resurrection, some war­time partisans embraced the idea of honor and fidelity for their own

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sake, without hope of f­ uture victory. This ­bitter secular ethics was often attributed to the influence of Joseph Conrad, and we can find it in Herbert’s stance as well. Fighting and resisting with no hope for reward was a form of faithfulness to older, traditional princi­ples, honoring the sacrifices made by the dead.80 Herbert’s farewell reading combines his idealistic attachment to lost c­ auses with this other prominent aspect of Polish culture: looking ­toward the past rather than the ­future, considering one’s obligations ­toward the dead rather than one’s c­ hildren. Though for many de­cades Herbert did not believe in resurrection, the Catholic ideas of a spiritual bond with the dead and of communion with the saints remained part of his thinking, often in the more secular guise of cultural memory. Accordingly, in the 1998 recording Herbert dedicated his poems to the dead: to his ­mother and ­father, to the exile writer Józef Czapski, and to the poet’s mentor, philosophy professor Izydora Dąmbska, a scholar whose prewar “idealist” orientation made it difficult for her to find teaching positions a­ fter the war.81 Herbert finished his reading with a reference to other patrons from the past, to his poetic heroes, and read one poem by each of his masters: Tadeusz Gajcy, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, and Juliusz Słowacki. Gajcy, as Herbert notes in the recording, died young in the Warsaw Uprising, and the poem chosen by Herbert includes the violent imagery of a bloody glow and burnt h ­ ouses. Norwid, a late Romantic poet, died poor and unknown in a shelter in France; Herbert read his threnody to the memory of Józef Bem, a general who fought for Poland in the November Uprising of 1830 and for Hungary in the Spring of Nations of 1848. Fi­nally, the choice of the poet-­prophet Słowacki clearly signaled Herbert’s preference for his mystical poetics, baroque imagery, and Romantic irony over the work of Adam Mickiewicz, Słowacki’s rival. Herbert chose Słowacki’s poem mythologizing the figure of General Sowiński, which describes him defending himself alone in a church and ultimately getting killed during the November Uprising. This poem is the last text in Herbert’s reading, and the poet tries to recite it from memory. However, a­ fter three lines, having barely recalled the words “he is defending himself,” Herbert goes ­silent, unable to remember the rest of the poem. This dramatic moment, which closes Herbert’s recording, makes Herbert resemble General Sowiński: the ill poet desperately defending

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himself against forgetting, fighting his illness for the sake of his ideas, and ultimately failing. In this recorded moment, Herbert seems closer than ever to the defenseless and defeated whom he so often praised.82 The poet’s identification with t­ hose who have suffered defeat had to do with more than just his illness. One might won­der why a poet of such strong anticommunist views would feel defeated rather than victorious in the in­de­ pen­dent Poland of the 1990s. Yet ­there w ­ ere numerous reasons Herbert would feel this way. For instance, in the 1980s Herbert became very critical of writers who had been involved in communism at any point in their lives, even ­t hose who ­later joined the opposition and became his friends. His illness worsened his outbursts of rage and his personal conflicts, leading to his increasing isolation.83 When Herbert came back to Poland in 1992, a­ fter spending a few years in France, the country was an altogether dif­fer­ent place, in which politics, alliances, and parties ­were quickly changing in the wake of 1989, causing rapid shifts in po­liti­cal preferences, confusing ­t hose who ­were less po­liti­cally oriented, and leaving Herbert on the opposite side from his old friends. ­After many years of subjugation and loss, the new Poland was not an innocent country of repressed ideals which became ­free, but a country of new businesses, new c­ areers, and new strug­gles for power. His disappointment with the state of in­de­pen­dent Poland and his increasingly anticommunist stance made Herbert even more confident in his black-­a nd-­white choices and beliefs. Herbert’s loneliness was rooted not only in his po­liti­cal choices, which made his circle of friends narrower and his influences l­ imited to right-­w ing sources, but also in the very style of the choices he made.84 The source of this trou­ble was captured by Stanisław Barańczak in an essay from 1990, aptly titled “Heroes to ­Humans.” Though Barańczak was mostly concerned with the Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa, and his switch from antitotalitarian opposition to participation in the demo­cratic pro­cess, many observations seem to fit Herbert equally well. Barańczak noted: You become a hero on the strength of your exceptional bravery, fortitude, and charisma. Once proven, ­these qualities may still influence the hero’s public ­career a­ fter the victory, but now it is not only that which counts. What is obligatory for a hero to maintain his leadership in a ­democracy is also a set of qualities and abilities, some of which—an

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ability to strike a compromise, for instance, or to withdraw into the background when necessary—­may even seem contradictory to his previous heroic self.85 And indeed, Herbert did not want to, or could not, make t­ hese contradictory gestures, and in his farewell recording he defends his old heroic self, knowing this was a lost cause, and perhaps even celebrating that fact. The choice to pre­sent this self-­image is clear from Herbert’s decision to include Romantic texts, but also from the se­lection of his own poems, which is by no means comprehensive. In contrast to Aleksander Wat, who in his farewell recording included samples of poems from vari­ous periods in his c­ areer, Herbert read mostly from his books from the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Cogito and Report from the Besieged City. The few poems from his e­ arlier volumes do not fully represent his classicist phase and his interests in reclaiming harmony and humanism. His poetry from the 1950s and 1960s, which used his typical masks and allegories taken from Greek my­thol­ogy, ancient Rome, biblical images, and Hamlet, and showed his interest in inanimate objects, was not included on the CD. Herbert also omitted his last books, including the book he was preparing for publication in 1998, which often had a more compassionate and lyrical tone. Unlike Wat, he did not read his unpublished poems, but instead focused on a noticeable set of themes that would be remembered as his legacy.86 Speaking to a possibly wider public than usual, he presented the public face of a national poet, of a d ­ ying, partly dethroned bard. Nowadays the omitted poems from the 1960s and 1990s, which are more ambiguous expressions of fragility and weakness of thought, are popu­lar with poets and critics. For years before that, writers had collectively turned away from Herbert, whose popularity in the 1980s made him seem like a cliché of anticommunist moralistic diction.87 His categorical proposals from that time have now been scrutinized more closely: Should one r­ eally feel scorn “for the informers executioners cowards”? Is the power of taste and beauty never a misleading criterion in discerning good from evil?88 When the poem “Envoy” was written, the poet’s wife, Katarzyna, worried that it would be trivialized in the ­future, and indeed, a de­cade a­ fter Herbert’s death, she had to speak out against politicized uses of selectively chosen quotes from the poem.89 In 1998 the new Poland was not listening to Herbert the spiritual leader, and younger authors found Herbert the poet unconvincing. In a more global arena, Herbert suffered a blow when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Wisława

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Szymborska in 1996. As Czesław Miłosz, the other Polish Nobel laureate, speculated in one of his letters to the editor Jerzy Giedroyc: “Objectively speaking, Herbert deserved the Nobel, but I think he was not on the list of candidates b ­ ecause of his stays in psychiatric clinics, which Swedes are very afraid of.” Miłosz prob­ably did not know that Giedroyc himself had ­stopped lobbying for Herbert in 1991, not due to the poet’s illness itself as much as the conflicts and rages it aroused, as well as his difficult relations with the literary community, including his German, Italian, and En­glish translators.90 ­These circumstances explain why Herbert felt lonely and chose to pre­sent himself in his final recording as the last defender of the Romantic legacy and its lost virtues. This mission was also on display in the introduction he wrote for a poetry eve­ning or­ga­nized at the Warsaw G ­ rand Theater three weeks a­ fter the sound recording was made, on May 25, 1998. Herbert was too ill to come to the event, but actors visited him at home beforehand and discussed their preparations. In the introduction that was read at the event, Herbert again quoted Słowacki, Norwid, Gajcy, as well as other poets, and called the event a Kaddish, as if he w ­ ere already dead. The closing quote of his introduction, which served as the poet’s legacy, was Słowacki’s poem “My Testament,” whose last strophe declares that when a poet dies, his fateful power “­will, unseen, press you ever, / Till it remakes you, bread eaters—­into angels.”91 Słowacki’s presence at the theater eve­ning and in the farewell recording sheds light on Herbert’s complexities. The lines quoted above show both a sober evaluation of his compatriots as bread eaters and an idealized Polishness seen in the fateful power of its poets. In another text, Słowacki speaks satirically of Poland’s angelic soul as imprisoned in a boorish skull.92 A similar duality, of concrete real­ity and idealized values, is pre­sent in Herbert’s work. ­There is, on the one hand, a poem such as his “Prologue,” with an ironic recognition of Poland’s main river as “the ditch where a muddy river flows,” and on the other hand, an idealized attachment to the past values of this “defenseless country.” This identification of one’s inner sense of Polishness with the legacy of the virtuous dead makes it also more difficult to discuss Poland’s vices (like its own discrimination of minorities or anti-­Semitism). For Herbert, this deep-­seated Polish legacy is seen as oppressed, and therefore innocent. Such dualities apply not only to Herbert’s views of Polish society, but also to his poetic personas, alter egos, and himself as a person. In his “Envoy,”

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Mr. Cogito asks the “upright” and “faithful” to “keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror.” In the introduction to the theater event, before quoting Słowacki’s “Testament,” Herbert admits to oscillating between the ridicu­ lous and the sublime. The poet was well aware of how easily elevated speech can turn into pretense in Polish, and knew the shortcomings and internal conflicts of modern men like Mr. Cogito and himself. Barańczak noted the importance of self-­d isparaging irony in Herbert’s poetry, an irony that reveals the contradiction between the old ideals and the diminished condition of Mr. Cogito, between the heritage of ideals and the real disinherited world.93 This sense of irony is also on display in his final recording, in which Herbert jokes that he is a boaster who predicted the end of the Soviet Union. When dedicating a poem to his wife, he says that he wants to be seen as a good husband, become recognized by the faithful, and put on a pedestal. In a similar way, Herbert jokes about Słowacki, who, as Herbert admits when introducing his poem, lived a comfortable life as an exile in France thanks to savvy stock speculation. But “though he was permeated by the spirit of capitalism, his heart remained close to Poland and his ­mother.”94 Herbert’s purposely exaggerated phrase “the spirit of capitalism” is matched by a hyperbolic intonation, making this expression sound both serious and ironic, which the spoken Polish allows. Herbert is aware of the many po­liti­cal implications of this phrase both in the old socialist economy and in the newly cap­i­tal­ist country. He plays with ­these associations, using slight irony to admit the comic effect that Słowacki brings to the recording a­ fter Herbert has recounted the tragic deaths of Gajcy and Norwid, the other poetic masters he recites. At the same time, this phrase lays the foundation for the lofty, but now fully serious, statement on Słowacki’s heart remaining close to Poland and his ­mother. In fact, Herbert could have chosen to pre­sent Słowacki as an émigré author who died at forty of tuberculosis, but instead of increasing the dramatism and solemnity of the reading, he spontaneously admits the comic contrast between external facts and idealistic inner attachments, between Słowacki’s down-­to-­earth life and his poetry. Apparently, for Herbert, Słowacki’s discursive and spiritual leadership—­t he fact that his texts influenced young p ­ eople who followed his plea to “go to their death one a­ fter ­another, / Like the stones tossed by the Lord onto the ramparts”—is more

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impor­tant in the evaluation of his oeuvre.95 Perhaps, in this brief, revealing moment, Herbert alludes to the way in which his own works should be read, to the contradictions of his own private life: his unwanted rages and his clear preference for calm reflection in his poetry, his long years spent abroad and his declared attachment to Poland, as well as other details of his complicated private life, known t­ oday thanks to Andrzej Franaszek’s biography of the poet.96 Herbert’s jokes and irony in the farewell reading did not make his poetic legacy less serious, but rather more elegant, reminding us of his aversion to expressionism in poetry, his skepticism, and restraint of feelings. They served as an admission of the ridiculousness of vari­ous external circumstances, while preserving the essence of his message; they revealed Herbert’s awareness that certain claims that sound dated or exaggerated could still be made with a delicate self-­irony. One of his older poems states that a scream rejects “the grace of humor / ­because it knows no half-­tones,” and indeed his recitations w ­ ere usually subtle, exploiting the possibility held out by spoken Polish of simultaneous seriousness and irony.97 In the final recording, Herbert’s coarse voice is no longer fully capable of ­every spoken nuance, and his jokes are thus used to balance out the loftiness, which makes them sound like a heroic attempt to ignore the finality of this reading. With ­t hese gestures, Herbert did not contest his old self. In a recording from a meeting with students in 1984, we can hear them waiting for the poet’s declarations on the subject of politics, and Herbert responding in an equally witty, conversational, self-­ironizing tone, defending the universal aspects of his poems, his interest in history, and his avoidance of strong feelings and hatred in his poetry.98 Solemnity and expressionism ­were a common feature of non-­authorial per­for­mances from the 1980s.99 But Herbert himself, even when he supported lost ­causes and participated in the making of history, remained a modern, skeptical poet aware of the necessity of a self-­ conscious layer of irony.

Too Many Deaths When the poet Anna Kamieńska was recorded by the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in 1981, she was sixty-­one and would live for another five years.100 The poet, nevertheless, treated the recording very seriously ­because she thought of it

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as something final. She envisioned it as a means to communicate with the ­future by means of tape-­recording. She compared the way the recording captures and saves time to similar pro­cesses happening in poetry, but she was also aware of the special qualities of this technology. On the tape, she spoke briefly about her views of poetry, and then carefully read her poems, accentuating each word, modulating her tempo, pauses, and intonations. Her reading was expressive but not dramatic, lively but disciplined. In contrast with the big changes of pitch from the first seconds of recording, l­ater her voice became more moderate, and fell lower, especially when she started to read rather than speak, with many parts sounding peaceful and rhythmical. In one of the most striking moments of the tape, Kamieńska compared ­future instances of playing the recording and listening to her voice with summoning her ghost. In that sense, it seems, an audio recording differed for her from written texts. It did not simply save a certain moment of time; it allowed the poet to be pre­sent, almost alive again in the ­f uture. A pos­si­ble source for this parallel can be found in Kamieńska’s Notatnik (Notebook). In one text from this diary, dated from 1972, Kamieńska recalls finding a new means for the “return” of her beloved husband and fellow poet, Jan Śpiewak, who had died in 1967: his vinyl rec­ord. Most likely it was the disc published in the series on con­temporary Polish poetry, in which vari­ous authors read their own texts. One of ­those rec­ords was devoted to Kamieńska herself, too.101 In postwar Poland, Śpiewak had already led a somewhat ghostly life: as a Jew, he survived the war in the Soviet Union, but his parents w ­ ere killed in the Holocaust. Still, as his son recalled, Śpiewak would always be on the lookout for his parents in Warsaw, approaching unknown p ­ eople who looked similar and looking for his parents in his own cellar.102 ­After his death in 1967, Śpiewak himself became a ghost: Kamieńska believed that he visited her in her dreams and spoke to her from the vinyl rec­ord, giving her advice through his poems. In her Notebook she describes the moment of playing back the vinyl rec­ord of his poems for the first time: “My first time listening, my face flooded with tears. The k­ ettle burned in the kitchen.”103 Unsurprisingly, in the poetic creed Kamieńska recorded for the Museum, poetry is also seen as a search for words that are in conversation with time, death, and the “I,” which is edging away. Her trust in words was decreasing and her preference for silence growing; life seemed like a more pressing m ­ atter

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than poetry (unlike for ­t hose poets who valued poetry above the practical choices of everyday life). Kamieńska liked to read poems by other authors, but she felt almost embarrassed to admit to being a poet herself. Her texts ­were related to her biography, but did not seem like accurate descriptions of her life.104 This discomfort and the duality of her roles as a person and as a poet was also vis­i­ble in her appearance, which she was self-­conscious about, well aware of the cultural expectations for what a w ­ oman poet should look like. In their recollections, two of her friends in­de­pen­dently note that she was not an ethereal lady, but rather resembled a stout school teacher, projecting kindliness and wisdom rather than poetic elegance.105 Her body, just like her stressed breath audible on the tape, is what allowed the poems to appear, but seemed opposed to the artfulness of her texts and her skillful intonations. Yet this tension was not an unavoidable fact, but a mere result of expectations as to what poetry and poets should look and sound like. As for so­cio­log­i­cal categories, in 1981 Kamieńska no longer fit in with secularized literary circles—­whether official or oppositional. In the 1970s and 1980s Kamieńska became deeply involved in Catholicism, to which she turned ­after the death of her husband amid deep grief. She wrote about the Bible, published with Catholic presses, visited the sick, gave readings at seminaries, and fi­nally, at her funeral in 1986, she was called “the prophet Anna” (“prorokini Anna”) by Poland’s Primate. This moniker suggests that a ­woman could perhaps become a respected poet-­prophet in Polish culture, challenging the conclusions I reached in Chapter 3, that inspired ­women ­were presented as ambiguous figures. Yet we need to be careful when we characterize this notion of prophecy. Kamieńska was a prophet only according to the Primate’s understanding of the word—as a strictly spiritual, faith-­related term. She was not a national poet or an improvising poet-­performer. Naturally, in the 1980s the relations between the Church and lay culture had become better than ever, but Kamieńska was too religious and was not directly po­liti­cal in ­these tumultuous years. Her attention had already turned ­toward more mystic realms (though during martial law she did publish a book of martyrological Marian poems with an under­ground press). She also maintained her contacts with the old literary establishment, to which she had belonged together with Śpiewak. She had embraced Marxism in 1944, written moralistic poems during the period of socialist realism, and for years had been especially involved in issues relating to the Polish coun-

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tryside (she edited a journal on rural issues and wrote texts on folk culture). Folk art also dominated the decor at her Warsaw apartment, where young poets ­were invited to read and discuss their work, first with Śpiewak, with Kamieńska retreating to the background, and then only with her.106 Some of Kamieńska’s friends point out the continuity between her deep involvement in all the ­causes she believed in, first in socialism and then in religion.107 Due to the latter affiliation, critical reception of her work has assigned her to the niche of Catholic lit­er­a­ture.108 The most famous poet and promoter of Polish lit­er­a­ture, Czesław Miłosz, wrote in his text on Kamieńska that “She was not an eminent poet. But that was just: / A good person w ­ ill not learn the wiles of art.”109 This declaration by Miłosz seems to contrast Kamieńska with another ­woman poet, Anna Świrszczyńska, who was one of Miłosz’s favorite authors and whose poems he translated into En­glish and included in the third edition of his Postwar Polish Poetry anthology. Nevertheless, when in 1996 Miłosz published a book in Polish about Świrszczyńska, it was b ­ ecause she had also ended up in a niche—­t hat of ­women’s poetry and engaged lit­er­a­ture, which was at the very margins of the canon. In a postscript to the En­glish edition of Świrszczyńska’s poetry, Miłosz said of Poland: “­There had been an ­earlier tendency to encapsulate her work in the category of Feminist poetry, and in that way to dismiss her fierceness.”110 Miłosz understood the workings of the Polish canon and was trying to pull Świrszczyńska out of the margins, softening her feminist stance and emphasizing the presence of history and metaphysics in her poetic works.111 The reasons for Świrszczyńska’s marginalization w ­ ere thus surprisingly close to Miłosz’s own characterization of Kamieńska: she was si­mul­ta­neously a “good person” and a poet. What irritated certain reviewers of Świrszczyńska’s controversial poetry book from 1972 was the fact that such issues as domestic vio­lence, sexual abuse, alcoholism, and the burden placed on ­women in working-­class and peasant families ­were directly raised in her poems. Critics had to admit that t­ hese w ­ ere impor­tant social prob­lems but claimed that they could not make for good poetry, or any kind of poetry.112 As in the case of Kamieńska, Świrszczyńska’s directness and ethical agenda inf luenced her other activities, too, and she was similarly criticized and ridiculed for her excessive involvement in vari­ous ­causes. Th ­ ese ­causes w ­ ere related to dif­fer­ent aspects of social life, like helping destitute w ­ omen, c­ hildren, and

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the sick, rather than fighting po­liti­cal systems directly.113 Like Kamieńska, Świrszczyńska was also interested in folklore, and as their pre­de­ces­sor among female poets they both pointed to the late nineteenth-­century poet Maria Konopnicka, who was similarly an “unfashionable” social activist, inspired by folk culture, and writing about ­women.114 Świrszczyńska was eleven years older than Kamieńska (she was born in 1909) and debuted in Warsaw before World War II. In 1944 she served as a nurse in the Warsaw Uprising, but her shocking experiences ­were described much l­ater, in her 1974 poetry book, which is often compared to Miron Białoszewski’s memoir b ­ ecause of its sensitivity to the h ­ uman costs of war.115 ­A fter the destruction of Warsaw she moved to Kraków, where she lived in the famous Writers’ House on Krupnicza Street and wrote texts for the theater and radio, as well as ­children’s lit­er­a­ture (some of it also socialist realist).116 Her worldview had already been closer to the left before the war, but her postwar involvement in social issues did not take the most typical form. For example, herself a teetotaler, she published many articles throughout her life suggesting the introduction of mea­sures and restrictions that could decrease alcohol consumption in Poland, a postulate that, as she noted, should have been common to both Marxists and Catholics. Her campaign was not successful and was not met with enthusiasm by other writers, who often maintained a more bohemian lifestyle or treated t­hese pleas as a part of communist propaganda.117 Świrszczyńska herself never ­really belonged to the literary milieu, nor did she become a “Cracovian” poet, with her preference for vegetarianism, jogging, and yoga.118 When Miłosz met with her in 1981, when she was seventy-­t wo, he praised her white hair, tanned skin, and energetic movements. Neither her lifestyle nor her appearance matched the usual expectations for w ­ omen poets.119 This mismatch is openly signaled in the title of her 1972 poetry book, Je­ ­ oman” but stem baba, in which she does not neutrally declare “I am a w chooses the noun “baba,” a colloquial and sometimes derogatory word for a mature peasant w ­ oman, a ­simple and brawny ­woman more generally, or an assertive and even impertinent w ­ oman.120 This self-­presentation was as far as pos­si­ble from the image of a gentle and well-­mannered lady. In Chapter 3 we saw Szymborska’s poem about diverging from the popu­lar “feminine” ideal of an ethereal poet. Compared with Kamieńska’s religious “prorokini”

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(prophet) and Świrszczyńska’s provocative, working-­class “baba,” Szymborska much more closely fit the image of a mild-­tempered lady, whereas the poet Julia Hartwig came closest to the image of a serious and respected ­g rande dame ­toward the end of her life. Nevertheless, when Świrszczyńska was recorded for the Museum of Lit­er­ a­ture on March 28, 1979, she did not ­really sound like a “baba.”121 In the recording, her first words are very delicate: quiet and particularly high-­pitched, just like Kamieńska’s. When she starts to read the text of her poetic credo, her pitch becomes more controlled, but beginnings of sentences are still unexpectedly higher, and some more prominent claims are almost undermined by her slightly humorous tone. The subsequent recitation of a war­time poem from 1941 is serious and expressive, as the text demands, and the fragments of greatest gravity are read in a very low register. Yet one can also hear some more colloquial aspects of pronunciation, like a flat tone merging words into one tone, rather than a careful accentuation of each lexeme, which is pre­sent in Kamieńska’s recording. In this aspect Świrszczyńska is perhaps closer to a “baba” than to a professional reciter. An in­ter­est­ing t­ hing starts to happen about two-­thirds into the recording, when Świrszczyńska reads a poem she pre­sents as pantheistic, about the feeling of completeness and nirvana. A ­ fter it ends, she starts to laugh at her own text. L ­ ater, reading poems from the book Happy as a Dog Tail, she laughs and adds even more comments about her texts: on a poem about snoring—­ that she does not snore; on a poem about fasting days—­t hat she practices them. ­After a poem about being happy as a hippo, she laughingly notes that it seems illogical: why should a hippo be happy. The Museum representative recording her kindly asks why a hippo should not be happy, to which Świrszczyńska agrees and laughs again. This is the first moment of conversation in the recording, though some of her e­ arlier comments sound as if they are half-­addressed to the other ­woman, as if looking for confirmation. Świrszczyńska transforms the situation from a recording of her for posterity using a tape recorder into a real-­time conversation with a person pre­ sent in the room. She also gradually lets herself laugh, comment, and use fast, high-­pitched tones for her poems on happiness, as well as an even higher pitch for spontaneous, joyful remarks. In t­ hese poems Świrszczyńska demonstrates how the wider pitch range that ­women use can be consciously employed to match her texts semantically, how to switch between very dif­fer­ent registers

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for seriousness and joy, while still speaking in one’s own voice. Her playfulness can be compared only to Białoszewski’s, though he often used a dif­fer­ent pitch to play roles rather than speak as himself. As with Białoszewski, Świrszczyńska’s poems also have performative power, in this case lightening the mood and making her laugh. But her timbre, higher than Kamieńska’s, does not make her sound like a typical “baba,” ­either. And her other poems, which ­were often accused of directness when read in print, are inevitably milder in her own per­for­mance. We know that some ­people who listened to her public readings in the 1970s similarly praised her modest be­hav­ior and skilled per­for­mances.122 And indeed, in all her comments during the recording, Świrszczyńska seems to be excusing or questioning her texts (she introduces “just a few words” of her poetic credo, she worries she did not bring some war-­related poems). In other words, Świrszczyńska’s naturally high pitch and modest be­hav­ior make her sound closer to the cultural cliché of femininity than her printed texts would suggest. One may won­der, however, w ­ hether it means that her voice betrays her feminist agenda. Would it be more of a victory not to be ­humble and to speak only in lower tones? According to research by Marit MacArthur and her collaborators, young female poets writing ­today in the United States use a narrower pitch range and avoid expressive and dramatic styles, possibly to make their voices more similar to the white male standards of reading and to the authority of male voices in the culture, which is partly associated with men’s lower pitch.123 Świrszczyńska’s recording provokes us to ask instead if a wide pitch range and high tone necessarily exclude seriousness and reliability. The recording highlights to what extent the poet was not r­ eally like a “baba,” whose harsh experiences would have lowered her tone, yet she chooses to speak in the name of such ­women. This very gesture is part of Świrszczyńska’s poetic credo: to give voice to as many Homo sapiens as pos­si­ble, to look for more universal aspects of private experiences. At the same time, in many poems she speaks in the first person, and reinforces the idea that the experienced and mature voice of a seventy-­year-­old w ­ oman can also be high-­pitched.124 The final poem in Świrszczyńska’s recording is presented as a curriculum vitae (“Życiorys”), though it is usually known by the title “I Knocked My Head against the Wall.” The poem recounts vari­ous experiences from the lifetime

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4.4 Świrszczyńska reads the words “Byłam głodna / sześć lat. / / Potem urodziłam dziecko, / krajali mnie / bez usypiania. / / Potem trzy razy / zabił mnie piorun” from “I Knocked My Head against the Wall.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from 1979 archived in the collections of the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw.

of a ­woman her age, which includes trying to be a saint, having had lice, waiting for an execution for sixty minutes, being hungry for six years, giving birth and being cut open without anesthesia, and then being thrice “killed” by a thunderbolt and “resurrected.”125 At first, the pitch of t­ hese and other statements grows, with each of the youthful experiences pronounced in a higher register, and then the sentences related to war are all read at a low pitch. In the following stanzas t­ here is a movement from high to low tones, from new information to a serious ending. In the last words of the poem and recording, the speaker calmly declares that she is resting ­after three resurrections. In Figure 4.4 we see an excerpt from Świrszczyńska’s reading in Polish, which begins with the sentence “Byłam głodna / sześć lat” (“I was hungry for six years”) pronounced in a steady, low voice to convey the deprivations of the war years. Then, ­after a pause, we see a high pitch that marks a new stanza and a new intonation unit, starting with the word “Potem” (Then), and followed by a gradually lowered voice, speaking quickly and in an increasingly flat tone, describing the next image offhandedly: Potem urodziłam dziecko, krajali mnie bez usypiania.

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Then I bore a child, they w ­ ere carving me without putting me to sleep. Similarly, ­after a pause, the next “then” of the next stanza is emphasized by a higher pitch, which again turns into a falling, fast-­spoken message: Potem trzy razy zabił mnie piorun Then a thunderbolt killed me three times . . . ​126 In her reading t­hese dramatic experiences are presented distinctly, but without any dramatic vocal overtones; she puts more emphasis on the high-­ pitched “then,” and on the order of her narrative, than on the events themselves. Line divisions within stanzas are not marked in her reading ­either; we mostly hear the units of her fast-­spoken sentences, which form t­ hose stanzas. The casual, colloquial style based on the poem’s syntax combines with careful intonation patterns that highlight the repetitive nature of certain events. At the end of the poem, the speaker calmly declares: “Teraz odpoczywam / po trzech zmartwychwstaniach.” (“Now I am resting / ­a fter three resurrections.”) with a rise-­and-­fall pattern typical of declarative sentences. This is the final statement of the recording for the Museum of Lit­er­ a­ture (followed only by an audible “thank you”). The life philosophy in this last poem influences how we see the Museum recording. Perhaps this kind of life, with its multiple deaths and resurrections, makes the new audial resurrections evoked by the tape unnecessary. In a sense, the h ­ ere and now of speaking for the Museum is already a posthumous gift, part of the repose that follows the resurrections. The moment of recording, the laughter and conversation with the other ­woman, belong to a kind of afterlife. This perception of h ­ uman life as consisting of many deaths and resurrections is also pre­sent in the poems read by Kamieńska. For example, in her text “Tożsamość” (Identity), Kamieńska considers her set of deathlike experiences: almost drowning near a mill, losing blood while giving birth, de-

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scending into the hell of nightmares and coming back to a world of loneliness. Both poets refer to the liminal moment of giving birth, but also to other traumatic experiences. Świrszczyńska describes life in Warsaw during the war and Kamieńska writes about living alone a­ fter the death of her husband. In a dif­fer­ent text, Kamieńska claims t­ here are too many deaths, pains, hungers, and births for just one life. Even though the metaphysical characteristics of the pre­sent moment as afterlife differ between Kamieńska and Świrszczyńska, the poems they wrote in the last phases of their lives share the idea of their earthly being as already permeated by absence, silence, and death. In Kamieńska’s poems, the bound­ ary between this world and the next is especially porous; one crosses it in nightmares and dreams, which offer lessons on death, and in musings, when the other side of loneliness is discovered.127 This crossing of bound­aries is much stronger than what the usual prayers for the dead can offer. In her Museum recording for posterity, Kamieńska does not leave her skin and voice, as Wat did, or a poetic legacy of virtues, as did Herbert, but instead gives her f­ uture listeners a chance to summon her ghost. This kind of communication between worlds is something she had been exploring in her life. Świrszczyńska, on the other hand, seems to concentrate on the moment of happiness and contentment as performatively evoked by her poems, on her ­here and now, which already has some features of the afterlife, belonging to a time a­ fter her “resurrections.” When Świrszczyńska swiftly moves between low and high tones, in the gravity and joy of her last poem, we may forget about the initial high tones of her speech, similar as in the case of Kamieńska. The beginnings of both recordings remind us about the strug­gle of female poets whose bodies denounced them regularly. We may recall h ­ ere the words of the French critic Hélène Cixous, who wrote in 1975: “The torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing,” describing a ­woman who dares to speak publicly.128 Yet Cixous’s claim about a w ­ oman’s “flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare”129 does not r­ eally match the fact that both poets quickly disciplined their voices, and Świrszczyńska’s high tones actually started to be used in the intentional, artful way. ­These two Museum recordings are unique in giving us access to unedited female voices that reveal somatic qualities so dif­fer­ent from the intimate

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reading by Halina Poświatowska, mentioned in Chapter 1, or the restrained but warm readings by Szymborska, which appeared in Chapter 3. The special, sarcophagus-­like character of the Museum series made it pos­si­ble to preserve and document the obstacles of female poets’ per­for­mances. However, the very mechanism of revealing and reworking one’s somatic condition into an artistic work was common to all authors analyzed in this chapter—­not only Kamieńska and Świrszczyńska, but also Herbert and Wat. In the recordings studied above, the poets let their bodies express joy, fear, seriousness, age, illness, and pain, but then they carefully pronounced “skin” as a lament, imposed good recitation on sick and stressed bodies, joked, commented, and played with natu­ral pitch registers. All of ­these highly somatic final recordings ­were courageous in revealing weakness, but they also aimed to overcome the body one last time in order to create variously i­ magined recorded afterlives.

Chapter 5

Unbeautiful Readings Tadeusz Różewicz against Julian Przyboś

My “poetry reading” ­will take place tomorrow at 7 p.m. It was a ­mistake to agree to this per­for­mance. Now I have to go ­t here: to read and talk. What am I supposed to talk about? I’ll read poems. I know I read badly. Monotonously. Sometimes someone says: “Louder!” and then I’m irritated and ner­vous and I read softer, I d ­ on’t enunciate words; I know t­ hose words so well, I know what’s coming. “We know you d ­ on’t like d ­ oing readings, we can have an actor do it.” How do they know I ­don’t like readings? I prefer reading myself, then I d ­ on’t have to listen to my own poems.1 The thirty-­eight-­year-­old poet Tadeusz Różewicz (1921–2014) was already a classic in the Polish ­People’s Republic when he wrote ­t hese lines, from his piece “Preparation for a Poetry Reading.”2 In 1959, poetry readings ­were for him such a routine and tedious ele­ment of Polish literary life that they needed to be analyzed and ridiculed in writing. The text, which comes from a collection of sketches, notes, commentaries, dramas, and stories, was not just a written reflection on poetry readings as a cultural phenomenon, but also a reflection of Różewicz’s own reading habits.3 On the basis of preserved recordings, interviews, and criticism we can easily imagine Różewicz behaving exactly like the narrator of his text: first questioning the very idea of coming to a reading, and then reading badly. In 1957, when an interviewer asked him when he would come give a reading in Wrocław, the poet responded: “I d ­ on’t know. I d ­ on’t like readings.” 4 In 1958, at a poetry reading in Warsaw, he was said to have delivered his poems “with perfect poise and a faint smile in a monotonous and soft voice.”5 In 1982, an analy­sis of a vinyl rec­ord Różewicz made in the mid-1960s called the poet’s

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tone ordinary and sedate, like someone reading a newspaper notice, and critiqued his disregard for line endings.6 When he was recorded for research purposes in the early 1960s, the poet declared that he could read a poem in two ways, which he then did.7 In 1986, during a recording session for the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw, Różewicz said that he had not prepared his per­for­mance in advance and was simply reading what he saw, and while he gave some emotional coloring to his poems, as actors do, he usually chose the wrong places for it.8 Fi­nally, in 1991, at the University of Ottawa, the poet apologized for reading badly, which was perceived as a kind of stumbling through. Różewicz admitted: “At times I may not be the best interpreter, the best reader of my own poems. Often the lines come together and can play tricks. . . . ​A good actor for example might read the same poem in a way that differs significantly from my own reading. Emphasizing certain ele­ments in another manner, assigning dif­fer­ent values to words.”9 Though ­later in the same apology the poet suggested what he should have emphasized in one of his poems, as if knowing what the “right” reading would sound like, both ­here and elsewhere in his comments he si­mul­ta­ neously left room for other readings as well, so that interpreters and performers could decide for themselves how to read his work. Moreover, the poet frequently compared himself to actors, the traditional poetry reciters in Poland, and actors read his poems for radio programs on numerous occasions.10 It may seem that Różewicz treated his written poems as the only stable, authorized versions, while his views on poetry readings matched t­ hose of traditional Polish scholarship, which did not single out authorial per­for­mances and considered all readings to be secondary, vocal interpretations of texts. Indeed, Różewicz’s practice appears to be the best argument in ­favor of such an approach: h ­ ere was a poet who could not read his own poetry, and who openly admitted it. It is surprising, then, how often the poet agreed to read, not just in Poland but all over the world—in Yugo­slavia, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Italy, France, West Germany, ­Great Britain, the United States, Holland, Austria, Mexico, Czecho­slo­va­k ia, and Jordan.11 He also seemed to have nothing against being recorded; in addition to the occasions mentioned above, he recorded a CD with Radio Kraków in 1998, and gave some ­earlier authorial readings for Polish Radio, which w ­ ere broadcast in the 1960s and 1970s.12 Nor

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was Różewicz’s opinion of actors’ recitations as positive as his skepticism ­toward his own readings implied. In a 1999 conversation with Czesław Miłosz, he agreed with Miłosz’s criticism of Polish actors, whom they both accused of shouting and crying rather than properly delivering texts with good diction. Interestingly, Różewicz disliked not only actors’ tendency to be overly expressive, but also the fact that they often did not know poems well enough and performed unprepared—­just as he himself used to do.13 His stated openness to a variety of vocal interpretations was in practice rather ­limited, and the poet did not hide his preferences when it came to recitation. For instance, he once begged his audiences not to sing his poems, and he criticized the Kraków Rhapsodic Theater, which frequently performed Romantic texts in a disciplined, dignified manner, for their painstaking, scrupulously correct declamations.14 Moreover, in the prose piece I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the narrator refuses to have an actor read instead of him, preferring to read himself. Though Różewicz truly disliked his readings, tried to limit the number he gave, and suffered from stage fright,15 the idea of having to “listen to [his] own poems” was for him even more painful. Różewicz’s approach to his own poetry readings—­preferring them but at the same time criticizing them—­seems self-­contradictory and inconsistent. However, if we study it in the context of Polish society and poetry culture at the time, in light of the poet’s dialogue with avant-­garde tendencies in art and of his activities as a playwright, we find that t­ here is method in this madness. Różewicz’s practices reflect Polish culture as if in a convex mirror, complicating our view of both its modernizing and traditional currents, and exploring the role of the poet’s voice, and of poetry in Poland more generally, in an aty­pi­cal, incon­ve­nient way. In order to grasp some of t­ hese complexities and make sense of Różewicz’s position in the field of poetry, I w ­ ill first consider his mentor, Julian Przyboś (1901–1970), a poet of the prewar avant-­garde who was also active ­after the war and was famous for his beautiful recitations. Comparing the student with his mentor ­will help us see how Różewicz’s poetics differed from Przyboś’s, especially in terms of the younger poet’s reading style, which I w ­ ill analyze in detail. To understand what made his reading style so puzzling, I ­w ill analyze it in the context of the first scholarly audio archive of Polish poetry, and I ­w ill compare Różewicz’s reading habits with ­those of his peer Miron Białoszewski, whose per­for­mance practices ­were discussed in detail in

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Chapter 3. I propose that Różewicz’s readings can be treated as a commentary on the very practice of poetry reading, as one more attempt to blur the bound­aries between dif­fer­ent genres, discourses, and media.

The Avant-­G arde Lesson Tadeusz Różewicz wrote his first letter to Julian Przyboś just a­ fter the end of the war.16 As an unknown, twenty-­four-­year-­old author, he was planning to move from the provinces to begin his studies in Kraków—­belatedly, owing to the recent war and his involvement in the under­ground Home Army.17 He already knew Przyboś’s poems from the prewar years—­not from the school curriculum, but from his and his ­brother’s in­de­pen­dent reading and search for new lit­er­a­ture.18 Before the war, Przyboś had been an impor­tant member of the so-­called Kraków Avant-­Garde and a high school teacher with leftist views who developed a unique style of f­ ree verse. Przyboś spent the war in the countryside, and t­ oward the end of the war, in 1944, with the installation of a Soviet-­sponsored provisional government in Lublin, he quickly became involved in rebuilding cultural life. Among other activities, he became the first president of the Writers’ Union and an editor of the cultural weekly Odrodzenie (Rebirth), which moved to Kraków in 1945.19 Przyboś replied to Różewicz’s letter, declaring that it had touched him deeply and that Różewicz was a sensitive and ardent reader of poetry. Różewicz had sent some of his poems with the letter, and Przyboś was also glad to discover that Różewicz was a poet. He wondered: “How few t­ here are from the generation that completed secondary school before the war, only to be para­ lyzed by six years of occupation, whose eyes and ears remain open to poetry.”20 He invited Różewicz to Kraków, helped find him a room at the Writers’ House, published some of his poems, and became his poetic mentor; mean­ while, Różewicz began studying art history.21 Przyboś’s remark about how unusual it was to devote oneself to poetry ­after the war turned out to be a prophetic description of Różewicz’s place on the map of postwar Polish poetry. Różewicz’s first poetry book, Anxiety (1947), came to be seen as the most significant reworking of Polish poetic diction ­after World War II. Though Różewicz’s aim was to express the sense of moral dislocation felt by survivors and his own dual role as victim and avenger, and to mourn his childhood, experience alone was not enough to find the right

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poetic language.22 He needed lessons from a master of modern f­ ree verse, and recalled how Przyboś taught him to cross out words, and identify risky or banal meta­phors.23 With Przyboś’s help, Różewicz’s new diction does come through in the crucial poems from Anxiety; however, the book also contains poems written more directly in the style of the Kraków Avant-­Garde and of Przyboś in par­tic­u­lar.24 What kind of style could Przyboś teach Różewicz? While structural clarity, conciseness, and the indirect naming of emotions ­were typical stylistic ele­ ments of the Kraków Avant-­Garde, Przyboś’s poetry also used elaborate sentences broken into elliptical lines, both long and short, whose intended intonational contours often verged on silence or exclamation. In his earliest prewar poems, Przyboś expressed his fascination with l­abor, machines, the city, energy, and workers, but he soon added a wider range of emotional and sensory experiences.25 Even a­ fter the war he remained a consummate lyrist, whose poems ­were also full of high tension, spatial imagination, and even metaphysical overtones. As Madeline Levine put it: “Born into a conservative peasant ­family, Przyboś became an ardent enthusiast of technological innovation and proletarian revolution. A firm believer in the writer’s duty to speak out on behalf of revolutionary change, he was also an aesthete whose difficult poetry was written for an audience of poets, not workers.”26 An example that combines a lyrical perspective with technological accessories can be found in Przyboś’s poem “Departure,” written in the early 1930s. It starts in the following way: Again you trusted—­and again you doubted (the startled closing of barriers croaked) when below structures of metal and glass the train appeared, a fact which transgressed despair through the beat of the wheels.27 The poem displays typical ele­ments of Przyboś’s diction: striking contrasts between very short and very long lines, a structure based on the division of a single sentence into shorter emotional units, as well as a certain loftiness. Less apparent in the En­glish version is the use of sound effects: alliteration and assonance, irregular references to the Polish eleven-­syllable line, as well

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as intriguing, unobvious word choices—­for instance, instead of the literal word for “arrived,” we read that the train “stał się,” which could also be translated as “came into being.” While the train appears as a baffling phenomenon, other mechanical ele­ments, such as the lowering barriers, are imbued with vitality, and in the Polish original they resemble birds. Meta­phor­ically described as “startled” (“spłoszone”) and “croaking” (“krakało”), they seem to be equated with crows. Przyboś’s interest in aesthetics, his view of poetry as a craft, with carefully chosen words and pleasing diction, and his desire to create poetry as a language within a language, which we can see in the example above, ­were not radically altered by the war. Nor did he change his poetics to accommodate socialist realism (by that time he was working for the Polish embassy in Switzerland); however, he would not become influential in the literary establishment again u ­ ntil a­ fter the Thaw of 1956.28 Przyboś’s case can be treated as emblematic for thinking about the avant-­ garde that dominated Polish culture for many de­cades. It was associated with innovative, difficult language rather than po­liti­cal involvement, with modern aesthetics rather than revolutionary change (the most po­liti­cally engaged poetry was the state-­supported socialist realism of the 1950s). Yet even in the prewar years, the Kraków Avant-­Garde targeted their activities only at poetry circles whereas a tiny group of Polish prewar futurists, though noisier and more provocative, did not share a common social program; its members became involved in politics only ­after the dissolution of the futurist movement.29 In the context of socialist realism, the forbidden avant-­garde tradition could function as a turn away from the imposed simplification of communist engagement, and thus as an expression of ­free choice, but ­after the Thaw it was no longer banned and the state could claim it as proof of its cultural liberalism. The art and poetry of the 1960s and 1970s that refer to the avant-­ garde and neo-­avant-­garde legacy (such as linguistic poetry, concrete poetry, abstract painting, and concept art) have elicited a variety of critical responses. Some have criticized ­t hese movements as a kind of state-­sanctioned pseudo-­ avant-­garde and semi-­a lternative, still dependent on local institutions, even when these ­were not the prestigious ones.30 ­Others have emphasized the more comprehensive and indirect social criticism pre­sent in t­ hese works, as well

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as artists’ deliberate references to Western movements; proponents of this view tend to focus on the most in­de­pen­dent, barely institutionalized galleries and groups.31 Recent work based on secret police files has revealed the scale of surveillance to which neo-­avant-­garde artists ­were subjected; they ­were frequently suspected of contacts with the West and of spying, and w ­ ere tolerated but controlled by means of administrative decisions, state influence on curators and institutions, and a general tightening up of the social atmosphere, rather than imprisonment.32 In poetry, ­there was no agreement about the role of language-­oriented aesthetics. In 1971, when the young poet Stanisław Barańczak wrote a manifesto for the Generation ’68 poetry movement, he attempted to combine linguistic and social aims by referring to Marxist dialectics and Romanticism, while also praising the attitude of distrust typical of the innovative poetics of Witold Wirpsza, Tymoteusz Karpowicz, and Miron Białoszewski in the 1960s.33 He contrasted ­t hese linguistic poets with the conventions and optimism of the older avant-­garde represented by Przyboś.34 The poets from Generation ’68, who ­were interested in revealing the manipulations of language, ­were po­liti­cal in the most literal sense and soon abandoned Marxism; but apparently they found at least some trends from innovative poetry to be a necessary step in developing their po­liti­cal distrust as well as fresh ways of thinking.35 For the older poet Czesław Miłosz, experimental poetry was mostly associated with autonomous systems of reference that could be tolerated by a totalitarian state. In his Nobel lecture from 1980, he claimed that only a poetic search for real­ity could become dangerous for the state.36 This negative characterization of the avant-­garde resembles Miłosz’s description of pure poetry, aestheticism, alienated poets, and even abstract painting, as discussed in his essays from The Witness of Poetry. Seen in this light, experimental poets look surprisingly similar to art for art’s sake and aestheticism—­t he very notions against which the avant-­garde was supposed to rebel, according to its more canonical theories.37 But at least in the case of Przyboś—­t he old avant-­ gardist who treated poetry as a language separate from the gibberish and babble of the streets—­t his association is not too far from the truth. In a recording from the 1960s, Różewicz, too, equates the Polish avant-­garde with pure art and describes avant-­garde texts as poetry in a nutshell, texts that ­will

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never stop being poetry, regardless of external circumstances (whereas his own poems are already more context-­dependent and journalistic, and therefore impure).38 This attitude to poetry is exemplified by Przyboś’s poetry readings, which reveal a consistent view of the poet’s role. In one of his texts, Przyboś called the poet an “exile of birds,” and this impression was only strengthened by the author’s physical appearance at readings, both before and a­ fter the war (in the 1960s Przyboś toured all over Poland).39 When he visited the city of Szczecin in northwest Poland at the very start of the Thaw, one young fan at his reading was the ­f uture literary scholar Edward Balcerzan. For Balcerzan, the phrase “exile of birds” took on additional meaning when Przyboś entered and declared that he had come from Warsaw by plane. His general appearance and be­hav­ior, and his lofty and tense speaking voice, made his tiny figure seem even more birdlike. The audience, however, still adhered to the socialist-­ realist patterns of criticism and accused Przyboś of writing incomprehensible riddles. The poet listened carefully but did not try to defend himself; instead, he read the criticized poem once again, but more slowly, making longer pauses, and claiming that now it should be understandable.40 ­People who attended Przyboś’s readings recall that the recitations had something special about them. One critic remembered Przyboś standing with his right hand raised, accentuating the rhythm, and speaking with “emotion or stage fright.” 41 Przyboś himself devoted several essays to the prob­lem of reading well, and he advocated speaking slowly, making pauses, changing one’s intonation, building an impression of creating the poem while reading, and paying attention to its construction. He compared the right tone to speaking like someone who is moved but restrains their affect while talking. He was also aware of a certain artificiality in poetry, which should not be lost, as ­there was aesthetic plea­sure to be found even in sad poems. Przyboś thus condemned immoderate expressiveness, superfluous emotion, excessive onomatopoeia, and losing track of a poem’s formal construction while reading, as tends to happen in theater. He also contrasted his own reading style with parodies of recitations by futurists, and with the poetry of the Rus­sian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, which was created for loudspeakers and microphones rather than the nuances of pauses and ellipsis.42 In the 1960s the poet was recorded both for Polish Radio and for a vinyl rec­ord, and his recordings are indeed marked by a very slow pace, long pauses,

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5.1 Przyboś reads the words “dźwięk był tkliwy i nikły” from “Noc majowa” (May Night).

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording for Polish Radio from the 1960s archived in the National Digital Archives in Warsaw.

5.2 Przyboś reads the words “dźwięk był tkliwy i nikły” from “Noc majowa” (May Night).

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from the vinyl rec­ord Julian Przyboś: Współczesna poezja polska: Wiersze wybrane czyta autor (Warszawa: Polskie Nagrania “Muza,” [1965?]).

changes in loudness, and strong intonational contours.43 An in­ter­est­ing example comes from the poem “Noc majowa” (May Night), which I have heard in two dif­fer­ent recordings, both of which display the same refined intonational contours. The poem, written in 1945, is devoted to the ruins of Warsaw, but even amid death and destruction the text refers to rebirth, a star, a nightingale, and the breathing greenery. The sound made by this breathing is described in one line as tender and faint—­t he line reads “dźwięk był tkliwy i nikły” (“the sound was tender and faint”). Figures  5.1 and 5.2 allow us

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to study how Przyboś read this line in Polish in two dif­fer­ent recordings. Both figures show the waveforms first, and then they display the pitch contours. As the two figures show, Przyboś carefully re-­created the meaning of this line in voice: he started on a delicately rising pitch to introduce “sound,” then said the word “tender” at a much higher pitch, thereby raising the emotional tension to talk about the affectionate character of the sound, which expresses the feeling that nature, and its greenery, has for ruined Warsaw. This high tone was then broken by a pause, adding dramatism before the final phrase, “and faint,” which was spoken on a lower, falling pitch, emphasizing the fragility and shyness of rebirth in the ruined city. Przyboś’s careful control of intonational nuance can be heard in other recordings, too, and certain basic intonational figures are repeated in this poem. For example, in “May Night,” lines that are grouped into couplets are often marked by a few rising tones in the first line, followed by one or two rising tones and a fall in the second line. The line represented in Figures 5.1 and 5.2 is an example of one of t­ hese closing lines, featuring a rising and then falling prosodic phrase. Furthermore, it is spoken at an extremely slow tempo, which is typical of Przyboś and necessary to convey the stylistic nuances of his prosody. In this case, only seven syllables are uttered over approximately seven seconds. Przyboś’s readings reveal a general tendency to treat a line, no ­matter its length, as a unit that ends with a striking fall or rise in intonation, though in some poems t­ here are exceptions when two lines are read as one phrase. Interestingly, several scholars who study Przyboś’s versification have come to similar conclusions on the basis of his printed texts (or at least without mentioning his recordings and readings). The intonational character of line endings in his free-­verse poems was emphasized by the major Polish verse theorist Maria Dłuska, who based her idea of the equivalency of lines in all poems on the presence of special intonational signals in line endings. ­These signals could depend e­ ither on syntax or, in poems like Przyboś’s, which represent the epitome of ­free verse for Dłuska, on sensations and emotions. In this way, a certain intonational repeatability was constitutive of nonmetrical verse as well.44 Other scholars who treat Przyboś’s lines as intonational—­such as Aleksandra Okopień-­Sławińska, Janusz Sławiński, and Jan Potkański—­have

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noticed that t­ hese poems require a special declamatory reading style, which is needed in order to allow emotionally motivated, unusually strong intonational contours to dominate over syntactic divisions.45 When we listen to Przyboś’s readings, his special tone confirms t­ hese intuitions. Yet even in ­these readings it is doubtful ­whether changes of pitch and pauses around line endings are always stronger than t­ hose occurring in the m ­ iddle of a line, as the theory assumes. Dłuska’s model of special intonations around line endings becomes especially problematic when applied to younger free-­verse poets such as Różewicz, whose verse she calls post-­avant-­garde. Interestingly, other theorists have noticed this prob­lem and have proposed pauses instead of intonations as a key attribute of free-­verse line endings (Adam Kulawik), or even graphic division on paper as the only sure ele­ment of postwar free-­verse construction (Witold Sadowski).46 Przyboś himself declared in one of his essays that each poet creates their own versification, and that it should never be studied separately from the poet’s w ­ hole work, in isolation from style and sound instrumentation.47 This approach seems to be especially fitting with regard to Różewicz, Przyboś’s main disciple. Indeed, what first started to differentiate Różewicz’s poetry from Przyboś’s was not just his prosody but the entirety of the younger poet’s style—­devoid of meta­phors and sound orchestration, and built on very short syntactical units.

A Defiant Disciple Already in its opening lines, Różewicz’s most famous poem, “Survivor,” from his first poetry book, clearly signals a new poetics: I’m twenty-­four Led to slaughter I survived. ­ ese words are empty and equivalent: Th man and animal love and hate foe and friend dark and light.48

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This new versification system, which soon came to be known as “Różewicz’s verse,” consists of short lines, usually comprising a brief sentence, sentence equivalent, group of semantically related words, or a single lexeme.49 Lines that in En­glish consist of two or three words (“I survived,” and l­ater in the text also “I’ve seen”) need just one word, a verb, in Polish (“ocalałem,” “widziałem”). In a sense they recall Przyboś’s preference for conciseness and rigor, clarity and seriousness. However, they pre­sent a major departure from Przyboś’s beautiful, aesthetically pleasing intonation. First, despite their apparent simplicity, the syntactical relations between dif­fer­ent lines are not as clear as in Przyboś’s sentences, and the lines are often devoid of punctuation. Second, in most poems by Różewicz ­there are no striking contrasts between line lengths, such as provide much of the emotional dynamic in Przyboś’s poetry; instead, many of Różewicz’s lines are unvaryingly short. Third, reading Różewicz’s poem with “restrained feeling,” in the style recommended by Przyboś, seems inappropriate, given the gravity of the subject ­matter, as well as its air of casual destructiveness in a time of war. Still, despite t­ hese differences from Przyboś’s diction, Różewicz’s poem retains some of the older poet’s lessons, especially in its precise construction. If we look at the ­whole text, we can discover the iron logic that governs all its parts: statements that point at the emptiness of language are justified by the sentences that follow them, which reveal what the speaker-­survivor has witnessed. This reversed functioning of the world in war­time, as witnessed by the survivor, has permanently undermined his trust in the language he uses to describe real­ity. Polish idioms and quotes to which the poem alludes are no longer valid, p ­ eople behave like animals, and antonyms can describe one and the same person or situation, losing any semantic distinction. Yet despite ­these observations, Różewicz’s speaker does not give up hope of finding the right words. “I’m searching for a teacher and a master,” he declares ­toward the end of the poem, willing to find someone who could “separate the dark from the light” for him again.50 Although Różewicz found an impor­tant teacher in Przyboś at the beginning of his c­ areer, the older poet could not remain his poetic authority for long. “Survivor” comes from Różewicz’s first book, where Przyboś’s traces are still vis­i­ble; however, the young poet was afraid of becoming a mere imitator, and strong differences between the two poets could also be seen in 1947.51 In the year when Anxiety was published, Michał Borwicz edited an anthology

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of Holocaust poems, which included three poems by Różewicz and none by Przyboś. Instead, the older poet submitted a reflection in prose, in which he admitted that he had been unable to find in himself the right words, emotions, and experiences that would allow him to approach the tragedy of the Jewish p ­ eople, though to search for such words should be his task. This task, however, called for a new poetics; and as many of the more traditional poems from the anthology made clear, the new poetics had to undermine one’s trust in poetry. It was therefore Różewicz, not Przyboś, whose few but impor­tant poems about the Holocaust w ­ ere published, especially about Jewish c­ hildren. ­These texts made an effort to work with poetry’s powerlessness.52 Starting in 1947, we can observe a growing ambivalence in Różewicz’s stance t­ oward lit­er­a­ture: the poet’s views about the dubious status of language and poetry, initially triggered by the war, w ­ ere never fully overcome, and yet he never resigned from writing. ­Later, ­after being accused of promoting nihilism, he used a similar poetics to try to build a more positive vision of the world ­under socialist realism, but ultimately he began to distrust all forms, and to open his poems to language from the everyday and mass media, and to merge it with anonymous voices.53 He became increasingly interested in commonplaces and banal phrases, “cemeteries” of words and “garbage” of words, such as what he might find in newspapers.54 In fact, he shared this interest in the mundane, ugly, degraded real­ity of the postwar era, not just with poets like Miron Białoszewski and Stanisław Grochowiak, who debuted a­ fter the Thaw, but also with visual artists such as Tadeusz Kantor. Paint­ers and art critics (especially Jerzy Nowosielski and Mieczysław Porębski) rather than poets made up his closest creative milieu, having been his friends since his art history studies.55 As the scholar Agnie­ szka Karpowicz has noted, the use of everyday objects and quotes by Bia­ło­ szewski, Kantor, and Różewicz was not identical with ironic Western pop art, as the Polish authors used them to express trauma, loss, and degradation.56 This intuition can also be found in Różewicz’s 1963 poem “Notes ­toward a Con­temporary Love Poem” where he writes that “white / is best described by gray” and that “the most palpable / description of bread / is the description of hunger.”57 Such poems went a step further than Różewicz’s earliest poems on war, and this new gesture of opening his poetry to the babble and ugliness of the everyday was perceived as a challenge to Przyboś, showing a growing rift

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between the two poets. Fi­nally, in 1962, Różewicz’s disappointed master and longtime supporter turned against him, initiating a heated discussion of, and series of attacks on, the tendency he called “turpizm” (from the Latin word for “ugly”; unlike the En­glish “turpitude,” the term had only aesthetic, not moral implications). To make ­t hings even more emotionally difficult, Różewicz’s verse had by then become more influential than Przyboś’s, and was imitated in Poland by most beginning poets. The conflict between the two poets lasted ­until Przyboś’s death in 1970.58 De­cades ­later the unbridgeable difference between t­ hese two positions and aesthetics was aptly illustrated by Różewicz, who traced the contrast back to the daily habits and preferences of the teacher and his disciple. Różewicz recalled that Przyboś loved light and clouds and always walked “with his head turned upward, not thinking that he could stumble,” whereas Różewicz said of himself, “I usually walked with my head turned down, only sometimes raising my eyes.”59 But how should such poetry, written with the head down, be recited? Can this background information about the poet’s interests help us understand Różewicz’s poetry readings and versification? Do Różewicz’s poems determine any par­tic­u­lar reading style? Richard Sokoloski, who not only studied Różewicz’s verse but also listened to the poet read, declared that his poems required a hesitant voice, yet w ­ ere still based on lines as fundamental prosodic units, a view shared by other theorists.60 According to Sokoloski, the lack of stark intonational patterns resulted from the shortness of lines and their ambiguous construction: often, a line that could be treated as a separate semantic unit could also be seen as forming one continuous sentence with the lines around it. The reader’s voice should therefore be heard struggling with this systematic ambiguity; as Sokoloski put it, “the reader is left to grope.” To support this view of Różewicz’s poetry, Sokoloski quotes an early statement by Przyboś, where he says that “In Różewicz, t­ here are no firm prosodic supports, only the poetic effort itself.” 61 Sokoloski’s observations offer an intriguing perspective on Różewicz’s poetry. The loss of a clear language or even of a moral direction could be vocally represented as a strug­gle, an effort, an ambiguity. Yet for Sokoloski, the fact that Różewicz stumbled while reading his own poems only confirmed how subtle and difficult the construction of his verse ­really was. One might

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think that such effort should be expressed by means of a carefully devised effect, as it is in Przyboś, that the ambiguity should be preserved as such in a nuanced reading, that the ambivalence should somehow be trained. Listening to a variety of Różewicz’s recordings, however, we can hear that the reader’s m ­ istakes are not isolated or infrequent. Could this be a conscious strategy for expressing a poetics of doubt? Could reading badly be related to “turpizm”? In the next section I examine Różewicz’s recordings to see how he ­really read. Interestingly, one of the few articles in Polish scholarship that describe Polish poets’ recitations finds in Różewicz’s recording, not any ambiguous diction or stumbling, as Sokoloski suggested, but instead a reading style that sounds like a newspaper notice. It seems that e­ ither the critics’ impressionistic perceptions differ more than expected, or that the poet read his texts in a variety of ways, complicating our task of synthesizing and grasping his attitude to voice and poetry. For the moment, let us set ­t hese vari­ous hypotheses aside and simply describe vari­ous aspects of Różewicz’s readings: his tempo, pauses, intonation, line endings, and consistency.

Inconsistent Readings The scholars Teresa Dobrzyńska and Lucylla Pszczołowska, who compared Tadeusz Różewicz’s vinyl rec­ord from the 1960s with recitations by other Polish poets, observed that only his slower pace distinguished Różewicz’s poetry readings from readings of nonliterary texts.62 While other authors used a special tone or timbre, more sonorous articulation, or a much slower tempo, Różewicz marked his poems only by speaking at a slightly slower speed; moreover, he made pauses in places other than line endings. Some sort of contrast between Różewicz and the other poets studied by Dobrzyńska and Pszczołowska was to be expected: compared to his colleagues who ­were at least ten years older, Różewicz’s attitude to reading ­free verse was both the most provocative and the least aesthetically minded.63 This contrast is hardly surprising when we take into account the differences between Różewicz’s poetics and the authors who came of age in the prewar poetry culture, such as Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Czesław Miłosz, or, for that m ­ atter, Julian Przyboś, who was not analyzed in Dobrzyńska and Pszczołowska’s study. As we can infer from the article, t­ here was an observable rift in reading

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styles between Różewicz and other representatives of the older poetic world.64 We know that it was Różewicz’s generation, poets born in the 1920s, that significantly altered postwar Polish poetry, so the more in­ter­est­ing question is what exactly can be said about this new style of reading, and about Różewicz’s preferences in par­tic­u­lar. Listening to vari­ous of Różewicz’s recordings made on dif­fer­ent occasions over the span of several de­cades allows us to notice more details, and a greater diversity of reading practices, than are revealed by the vinyl rec­ord alone. ­There are noticeable differences between studio recordings for discs or radio, which are usually clearer and more careful, and recordings of Różewicz’s live readings and spontaneous nonbroadcast per­for­mances, especially t­ hose made for the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Acad­emy of Sciences (IBL) in the early 1960s, and for the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw in 1986 (the first ­were made for research purposes, the second to preserve the poet’s voice for posterity).65 Differences in speed can be heard between ­earlier and l­ater recordings—­Różewicz reads much more slowly on a CD recording from 1998 than on a radio recording from 1963.66 Fi­nally, ­there are differences in reading style among dif­fer­ent poems from the same recording, or even among dif­ fer­ent parts of the same text. Let us start with the tempo of Różewicz’s readings: How do we know if it was ­really slower for poetry than for prose or banter? Could slowness imply a special status for poetic speech? What can we compare it with? Recent studies of Polish living speech, based on recordings of nineteen speakers, suggest that the average tempo of both read and spoken utterances (stories, poems, sentences, dialogue, and spontaneous speech) is around 5.5 syl. / sec., and that only p ­ eople explic­itly asked to read slowly would speak an average of 3.9 syl. / sec. At the same time, the speakers’ habits reveal significant personal differences; for one individual speaker, the average tempo was only around 4.5 syl. / sec.67 Różewicz was certainly someone who spoke and read more slowly. If we take some prosodic phrases from the drama Odejście Głodomora (Starveling’s Departure), which the poet read at a public meeting in 1976, we can mea­sure the tempo at around 4.5–4.9 syl. / sec.68 ­Things get more complicated, however, when we listen to the poet’s spontaneous speech. In the IBL recording from the 1960s, his quick responses to questions and his brief remarks, which are interspersed with his readings of poems, can be both faster (e.g., 5.8

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syl. / sec.) and slower (e.g., 4.2 syl. / sec.) than the average tempo mentioned above.69 Yet in his 1980s recording for the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture, where he devotes time to answering more complicated questions, Różewicz’s responses are very long, and he speaks some phrases slowly, at just over 3 syl. / sec.70 A variety of speaking styles has also been noticed by one of Różewicz’s interviewers, whose published conversation with the poet ends with a note about her tape recording: full of pauses, suspended utterances, diverse intonations, and dif­fer­ent motifs discussed in ­either a dynamic or a lazy and reluctant way.71 I give ­these scattered mea­sure­ments and impressions of Różewicz’s tempo, rather than a single average, in order to ask ­whether a quantitative approach to poetry readings can be fruitful. If a poet’s utterance of prose can differ so strikingly depending on the situation, should we simply associate prose with a single average, median, or standard deviation? Is it pos­si­ble to ascribe dif­ fer­ent semantic overtones to dif­fer­ent tempos? And fi­nally, what­ever the tempo of a poetry reading, ­isn’t it always pos­si­ble to match it up with one of Różewicz’s ways of speaking prose? For example, in the IBL recording we can hear phrases from poems read at a tempo of 3.9, 4.2, or 5.5. syl. / sec.72 Is this somehow significant? Do the first readings evoke a more solemn poetic delivery, when compared with Różewicz’s reading of his prose drama? Or do they instead resemble his ad hoc nonpoetic utterances, which required more thinking? And as for his faster delivery, does it resemble a spontaneous remark or, rather, a quick recitation of a written dialogue? I ­will come back to some of ­these questions ­later, but for now it seems clear that tempo per se is not sufficient to grasp the specificity of Różewicz’s readings. The more impor­tant f­ actor seems to be his intonation, as well as the number, length, and placement of pauses. In fact, in e­ very example of prose and poetry I discuss above, pauses determined the (far lower) tempo of w ­ hole utterances to a greater extent than the phrases alone may suggest (for example, in the poems, each pause lasted around 0.3 to 0.6 sec.). In Różewicz’s 1998 poetry recording, the impression of solemnity was especially strong ­because of the long, regularly repeated pauses, which lasted around 0.5 second, and sometimes even around 1 second. ­These regular pauses clearly distinguish Różewicz’s poems from his drama and banter, though in his slow answers to questions the pauses are even more prominent, sometimes longer than 3 seconds, but less regular. The monotony or even dullness that Różewicz

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mentions in his criticism of his own poetry readings seems to be related to this recurrence of pauses, which creates a certain rhythmical effect but si­ mul­ta­neously breaks the poem’s flow, making it less melodic, as if cutting it into pieces. However, prominent pauses are not the only disruptive f­ actor affecting the melody of Różewicz’s readings. In both his poetry readings and his spontaneous speech, we can note two contrasting tendencies: one favoring clearer, louder articulation and stronger pitch contours, the other favoring a flat, disinterested, and continuous way of talking. Even though frequent pauses can break the flow and create a certain monotony, their presence usually coincides with more precise and rhetorical intonational phrases. We can hear this in Różewicz’s 1998 recording, where dif­fer­ent words are enunciated almost separately from each other, yet have clear, careful pitch contours. On the other hand, in the absence of pauses a dif­fer­ent monotony can be heard, one that is not related to pauses but instead based on a colloquial, less careful kind of chatter that flattens all pitch contours. This becomes even more pronounced when several lines are grouped and read together in this manner, giving us the impression that Różewicz is reading quickly, almost mechanically. ­These two pro­cesses can be illustrated by an excerpt from the poem “Letter to the Cannibals,” written in the 1950s and read by Różewicz for both the 1960s IBL recording and the 1998 CD made by Radio Kraków. “Cannibals” ­here is a meta­phor for ­people who treat o ­ thers unkindly and egoistically. Różewicz constructs a deliberately naive and innocent persona, sounding like a child or someone trying to teach c­ hildren a moral lesson. At one point the speaker critically and ironically repeats the cannibals’ vocabulary back to them, while asking them to stop saying t­ hese words with their backs turned: ja mnie mój moje mój żołądek mój włos mój odcisk moje spodnie moja żona moje dzieci moje zdanie I me my mine my stomach my hair

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5.3 Różewicz reads the words “ja mnie mój moje / mój żołądek mój włos / mój odcisk moje spodnie / moja żona moje dzieci / moje zd . . .” from “Letter to the Cannibals.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from the 1960s made for the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Acad­emy of Sciences, archived in the National Digital Archives in Warsaw.

5.4 Różewicz reads the words “ja mnie mój moje / mój żołądek mój włos / mój od . . .” from “Letter to the Cannibals.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording made for the CD Tadeusz Różewicz czyta swoje wiersze (Kraków: Radio Kraków, 1998), republished on the CD included in Tadeusz Różewicz, Wiersze przeczytane (Wrocław: Warstwy, 2014).

my bunions my pants my wife my ­children my opinion73 Figures 5.3 and 5.4 represent two readings of the above-­quoted lines in Polish. Figure 5.3 comes from the IBL recording and Figure 5.4 from the CD. What jumps out immediately is the difference in the quantity of text that gets

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spoken in the roughly 7.5-­second period vis­i­ble in each figure. In Figure 5.3, taken from the 1960s reading, we get 28 of the 30 syllables of the Polish excerpt whose translation I quoted above (only the last word is cut). In Figure 5.4, from the 1998 reading, we get only 13 syllables within the same time span. The tempo is thus 3.8 syl. / sec. in the 1960s recording and 1.7 syl. / sec. in 1998. This difference is related not just to the poet’s age, but also to his very dif­ fer­ent use of pauses: almost none (Figure 5.3) versus one ­after almost ­every word (Figure 5.4). In the latter case, e­ very unit consisting of one or two words becomes a separate prosodic phrase, each with a rising pitch contour. Yet instead of an impression of continuous flow, which the intonation alone could have provided ­here, the numerous long pauses make us wait for each word and heighten the sense of the fragility of speech, which is further emphasized by the creakiness and shakiness of the seventy-­seven-­year-­old Różewicz’s voice in this recording. Each of the cannibals’ “me-­oriented” phrases is uttered ­here with something like resignation and pain. Meanwhile, in Figure 5.3 the extremely flattened pitch contour suggests that the speaker is criticizing the ­people’s chatter rather than expressing pain. We might won­der why the contour in Figure 5.3 is broken in the m ­ iddle. The break occurs between “my bunions” and “my pants,” in the ­middle of the line, and it results from Różewicz’s need to take a breath, which can be heard in the recording. This break in pitch has nothing to do with the poem’s semantics, it is purely accidental. Such accidental divisions do not occur in the 1998 CD recording b ­ ecause the pitch is already divided at a level below that of the short lines: each ele­ment of enumeration is separated by pauses. The accidental break in the IBL recording does not make it sound slower. It only strengthens the impression that Różewicz is speaking so fast he needs to take an audible breath. In real­ity, the 3.8 syl. / sec. tempo of this excerpt is not particularly fast, even for Różewicz. It is therefore the flat intonation, lack of pauses, and reading in a single breath that give the impression of rapid colloquial speech. Różewicz’s spontaneous speech in the 1986 Museum recording is often made up of sentences similarly glued into long, continuous, flat prosodic phrases, though ­t hese are surrounded by pauses and more emphatic utterances. In the IBL recording, the feeling of imperfection or inconsistency, evoked by the need to take a breath in the ­middle of a line, appears in other places as

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5.5 Różewicz reads the words “nie patrzcie wilkiem / na człowieka / który pyta o wol . . .” from “Letter to the Cannibals.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from the 1960s made for the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Acad­emy of Sciences, archived in the National Digital Archives in Warsaw.

well, including ­earlier in the same poem. In the opening lines of his “Letter to the Cannibals,” the poet says: Kochani ludożercy nie patrzcie wilkiem na człowieka który pyta o wolne miejsce w przedziale kolejowym Dear Cannibals do not look askance at a man asking on the train if a seat is taken74 In Figure 5.5 we see lines 2, 3, and the beginning of line 4 of the poem as read by Różewicz in Polish. Line 2, “do not look askance,” is spoken on a falling pitch and falling intensity, followed by a brief pause, suggesting that it closes the sentence “Dear Cannibals, do not look askance.” However, line 3 starts again on a higher level of pitch and loudness, giving the impression of a swinging tone, or of the speaker correcting himself; in fact the sentence continues, and “at a man” should not be treated as a separate phrase.

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Naturally, when reading the printed poem to oneself ­t here is a certain ­ambiguity: one can treat “do not look askance” as both a separate statement and as a phrase that flows into the rest of the text. If Różewicz read this line simply, on a rising pitch and without a pause, thereby implying continuity, the ambiguity of ­t hese verses would be lost. This ambivalence is not very dif­ fer­ent from traditional enjambment, which, as I showed in Chapter 2 with regard to Czesław Miłosz, could be vocally realized in a nuanced way by competent reciters. Richard Sokoloski, who discussed the ambiguities of Różewicz’s lines, expected similar nuances from him as well. However, Różewicz’s reading sounds dif­fer­ent, more incoherent than ambivalent, like someone choosing the wrong intonation and subsequently changing his mind. We may won­der, in fact, if a dif­fer­ent solution would be a better fit for the poem’s aesthetics, if a nuanced declamation could be an appropriate match for the directness and simplicity of Różewicz’s childlike request to the cannibals. ­There is a similar change of intonation in the same place in Różewicz’s CD recording, and analogous shifts or last-­minute corrections occur in other poems as well, including poems from the vinyl rec­ord.75 They are especially audible when the poet reads slowly and clearly, as if trying to be declamatory or playful, and yet makes a m ­ istake. In the 1986 recording, when Różewicz talks about his emotional coloring of poems, and how he usually colors them in the wrong places, he might have ­t hese sorts of intonational strug­gles in mind. We usually mark the crucial words in a sentence with pitch; however, if we do not foresee the direction of the syntax, our pitch accents may contradict our intonational phrases. Most of Różewicz’s readings, however, follow syntax rather than versification. This dominance of the poem’s syntax, as though it ­were a prose piece, was highlighted by Dobrzyńska and Pszczołowska, who studied the poem “Chestnut” in detail, noting all the discrepancies between the printed version and the vinyl rec­ord from the 1960s.76 In fact, the same poem was read yet differently for the 1998 CD, where some of the final pauses again do not match the line endings. This liberal attitude t­ oward line endings was not accidental. Różewicz lays bare his approach to free-­verse structure in the IBL recording, when he proposes that he could read his poem “Białe groszki” (“White Spots” or “White Polka Dots”) in two dif­fer­ent ways. The biggest difference between the two

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versions is precisely the placement of pauses (which does not match the line endings), but the poet also plays with rising and falling tones, which h ­ ere too sound unsteady rather than playful. This attitude ­toward line endings is especially intriguing if we consider what kind of text “White Spots” is. It comes from Różewicz’s 1960 poetry book, and it imitates an announcement about an el­derly ­woman who dis­appeared from her ­house. It begins in the following way: On the 20th of August an eighty-­year-­old ­woman suffering from amnesia As usual in such announcements, we get the date, age, and some characteristic of the missing person, including her blue dress with white spots. A ­ fter this description, the poem finishes, nevertheless, in an unexpected way, as if cut in the m ­ iddle of a sentence: anyone able to provide any information about the missing person is requested77 Below, we can see this excerpt in Polish, in two readings from the IBL recording. I use vertical lines to mark places where Różewicz divides his poem into prosodic phrases (using pauses or intonation): ktokolwiek | wiedziałby o losie zaginionej | proszony | jest | ktokolwiek wiedziałby o losie zaginionej | proszony jest | As we can see, in both readings the poet disregards his line endings, while introducing additional pauses in the ­middle of his lines. Różewicz’s choice of this poem to illustrate this disregard for line endings is especially striking, given that the poem itself depends on introducing arbitrary divisions into a text that other­wise looks like a newspaper or radio announcement. Różewicz’s text can be seen as the literary equivalent of a ready-­made, a standard object

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moved to the world of art, just as h ­ ere the w ­ hole text of the poem seems to be taken from everyday, nonliterary real­ity. At the same time, the gesture of bringing an everyday announcement into poetry is insufficient for Różewicz, since he de­cided to modify it by cutting it up. In one interview Różewicz himself admitted: “This is a typical text of a radio announcement, but in one place I cut it up, as if I ­were cutting its veins. . . . ​If I ­hadn’t cut them, if I had imitated the radio speaker ­until the very end, it would be a typical announcement. The moment of cutting created a dramatic situation in this poem.”78 Even though this final cut is certainly reflected in the poet’s readings and emphasized in his self-­commentary, Różewicz seems to ignore his ­earlier cuts—­the breaking of the text into lines. Moreover, Różewicz disregards this breaking into lines in his readings, by introducing additional or alternative pauses. Though they differ from the printed line breaks, ­these pauses differentiate Różewicz’s per­for­mances from what a standard prose reading might sound like—­they cut the text up into shorter segments. Apart from the pauses, Różewicz also uses intonation to signal the ends of some phrases. As a result, the w ­ hole poem (including pauses) is read slowly, first at 3.3 syl. / sec., then 3.1 syl. / sec., and Różewicz sounds nothing like a radio announcer. In fact, in his first reading of the text Różewicz starts with an elegant, melodic intonation, which shifts unexpectedly ­after the first two lines—in the ­middle of a sentence—­into his more colloquial, continuous tone. The contrast between the first two lines and the two that follow can be seen in Figure 5.6. ­Later in the poem Różewicz seems to pause unexpectedly just so that he can take a breath. In his second reading of this poem he stumbles on the word “osiemdziesięcioletnia” (“eighty-­year-­old”). Apparently the spontaneity of the IBL reading encouraged Różewicz to experiment with his texts and to highlight features more typical of live readings than of studio recordings. The effect is ambiguous, however: the combination of sonorous and flat pronunciation, together with the unsteady pitches, sounds like someone who is learning how to read well, almost like a grade school pupil or a nonprofessional reader. To a lesser extent, the same features can also be heard in Różewicz’s official recordings, where it sometimes sounds as though a careful intonation has been imposed on a voice that is heavy, tired, or disinterested. The critic Piotr Mitzner captures the erratic and uncertain nature of Różewicz’s reading style when he writes that Różewicz “speaks like a common man, not an artist. I am not sure if this is a fully

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5.6 Różewicz reads the words “. . . ​nia wyszła z domu / i nie powróciła / osiemdziesięcio­ letnia staruszka / chora na zanik pamięci / ub . . .” from “White Spots.”

Figure created using Praat from an audio recording from the 1960s made for the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Acad­emy of Sciences, archived in the National Digital Archives in Warsaw.

formed man, an adult. Perhaps this is an always-­f ussy boy, who is si­mul­ta­ neously delighted by the world.”79 With its newslike text, “White Spots” provides an impor­tant context for Dobrzyńska and Pszczołowska’s assessment of Różewicz’s vinyl rec­ord, where the poet was said to read in an ordinary tone, “as if he was reading a notice from a newspaper.”80 On the one hand, having seen some examples of the author’s poetics, which often aimed to criticize egoistic chatter or schematic media information, we should not be surprised by his choice of an ordinary tone, especially a flat tone, which can be used colloquially. On the other hand, Różewicz does not actually read “White Spots” in a prosaic manner, though the poem does come closest to a newspaper-­like poetics. The author clearly starts this reading in a declamatory style. How can we interpret t­ hese inconsistencies in both the reading style and the relation between reading and versification? Are they meaningful at all, or do they simply prove that the poet was a “bad” reader? Before jumping to conclusions, we should note that Różewicz published several experimental plays ­under the title Teatr niekonsekwencji (The Theater of Inconsistency), and that inconsistency per se was one of his artistic strategies.81 Moreover, certain characteristics of his readings can be synthetized and summarized: the disregard for certain line endings, the habit of reading the same text in

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entirely dif­fer­ent ways, the avoidance of melodic effects, the rhythms based on recurrent pauses, and the mixture of dif­fer­ent reading styles (some of which rely on carefully chosen pitch to emphasize words, some exhibit unsteady or relatively flat intonation, while ­others use syntactic units grouped into a single phrase and read in one breath). Różewicz’s poetry thus moves further away from traditional recitation and ­music. And indeed, Różewicz’s reading styles have no basis in regional declamation patterns, songs from city streets, sounds from liturgy, ancient lamentations, or even expressive oral histories, playful impersonations, or elegant anecdotes shared in living speech. Th ­ ese sources for the sound patterns used by other Polish poets discussed in this book w ­ ere related to more traditional forms of spoken word, ­either known from the past or preserved in the culture. Różewicz, though he came from the same generation, seems to have been alienated from t­ hese styles of poetry. Instead he introduced to poetry readings the flat, colloquial tone that has come to be associated with the postwar period, and did away with the learned nuances of elocution, which was no longer taught in schools. He ushered in a new postwar context for poetic culture, a new manner of speaking, and a new attitude to poems, which would now be primarily print-­rather than voice-­based. Różewicz’s inconsistency seems to correspond perfectly with the non-­ declamatory tendency discovered among some Rus­sian poets by the scholar Sergei Bernshtein, who recorded and interviewed them in the 1920s for the Institute of the Living Word. As we recall from previous chapters, Bern­ shtein identified differences between poets who heard their poems before they wrote them down (and who would then declaim them in a similar way) and t­ hose who composed only on paper.82 The recurrent patterns typical of the declamatory mode could still be heard in the poetry of Miłosz or Przyboś, but Różewicz’s readings signal a clear change: his versification does not imply any special prosody oriented t­ oward line breaks, or any special reading style. Różewicz’s attitude suggests that his poems are graphic texts, and the poet himself admitted that the shape of his texts on the page was of g­ reat importance when he was dividing his poems into lines.83 This last ele­ment is perhaps the most impor­tant innovation that needs to be addressed: Różewicz’s attitude to his poems was not as traditional as it might have appeared when he downplayed his own readings and agreed for actors’ recitations. It seems that for Różewicz, his poems did not have any

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stable intonational contours; his lines ­were not prosodic phrases, and they did not encourage a variety of appropriate vocal realizations of the same schema, as the old theories assumed. This does not mean that Różewicz’s readings can be totally disregarded, given the sheer number of events and recordings in which he ultimately participated. Instead of providing the correct vocal realization, t­ hese readings became spaces of experiment, criticism, and explanation. This is clearly demonstrated by the per­for­mance of “White Spots,” where Różewicz turned a scholarly recording into his own ad hoc experiment, proposing two dif­fer­ent readings as well as a lesson about the dubious role of his own vocalization and the voicing of his poetry more generally. In the following sections, I further explore the ways in which Różewicz’s readings became a space of criticism and experiment. In order to understand his approach, I juxtapose the influences on Różewicz’s innovative thinking about poetry recitation with con­temporary scholarship on that same subject.

Poets and Scholars The scholarly recording of Tadeusz Różewicz, which offers some of the poet’s most in­ter­est­ing readings—­his “White Spots” and his own commentaries and experiments—­was produced as part of a pioneering proj­ect aimed to rec­ord Polish authors in the early 1960s. It was or­ga­nized by the IBL scholar Maria Renata Mayenowa, who was interested in the study of poetic language in general, and in the legacy of Sergei Bernshtein in par­tic­u­lar.84 This audio archive precedes the series of Polish poetry vinyl rec­ords issued from the mid1960s onward by Polskie Nagrania. Though the IBL recordings are poorly documented ­today, we know that in addition to Różewicz, poets such as Stanisław Grochowiak, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna, and Mieczysław Jastrun w ­ ere recorded, and some copied tapes from the series are now available in Poland’s National Digital Archives.85 Given the framework of this proj­ect, it is not surprising that the only article that discusses recitations by Polish poets in a more comprehensive way was also written by scholars from the same Institute. Lucylla Pszczołowska and Teresa Dobrzyńska, whose work I quoted ­earlier, worked for de­cades at the IBL Department of Theoretical Poetics, which was headed by Mayenowa.86

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The work done in the 1960s in Poland, and the scope of the IBL recordings, seem belated and l­ imited when compared to Bernshtein’s archive from the 1920s, or to the recordings of poets done in Amer­i­ca, which started in the 1930s at Columbia and Harvard as part of broader ethnographic collections of voices, proj­ects to teach public speaking, speech labs, and speech clinics.87 ­There ­were several reasons for this delay, starting with, but not ­limited to, the material conditions of the empirical study of speech in Poland. In the early 1930s, when the scholar Maria Dłuska was working on her postdoctoral habilitation in phonetics, she traveled to Paris and Hamburg to use a kymograph,88 a device that registers on paper certain physiological pro­cesses that accompany speech production. In France the kymograph had already been used in experimental phonetics in the late nineteenth ­century, but in the early 1930s it was not yet available anywhere in Poland (Dłuska’s laboratory in Lviv came into possession of this device in the late 1930s, when she had already finished her degree).89 For young verse theorists (and Dłuska would soon switch her focus to verse studies, which ­were understood as part of linguistics), the lack of equipment could also be a fortunate circumstance. That was especially true for the scholar Franciszek Siedlecki, who was influenced by Rus­sian formalists’ distinction between verse and recitation and by the structuralism of the Prague Linguistic Circle.90 In his articles from the 1930s he condemned the use of all positivist methods in the humanities: acoustic devices, experimental phonetics, and the entire “philology of the ear,” in which he also included the German Ohrenphilologie of Eduard Sievers.91 He was against the use of the natu­ral sciences in the study of the humanities, and against eclectic, undisciplined interdisciplinarity, proposing instead that humanists search for their own methods and concentrate on verifiable segments of real­ity.92 His claims ­were not surprising, given that the interwar period in Central and Eastern Eu­rope witnessed the birth of literary theory as a modern and autonomous discipline.93 More surprising was the enduring postwar legacy of Siedlecki, who died of tuberculosis in occupied Warsaw in 1942.94 Both Mayenowa and Dłuska wrote their postwar studies of verse in conversation with Siedlecki’s ideas, making the systematic orientation of his verse theory and its separation from sensory material a lasting feature of Polish scholarship. They did not abandon this approach even during the Stalinist period, when Mayenowa was able to convince Marxists, including her prewar friends,

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that her allegedly “formalist” research proj­ects ­were consistent with their po­ liti­cal doctrine.95 In this context it is unsurprising that empirical studies of recitation and Mayenowa’s poetry audio archive only appeared late and in a ­limited form—it is surprising that they appeared at all. In his studies from the 1920s, Bernshtein himself relied mostly on his ear and his own notation, and regardless of his research on declamatory and non-­declamatory poets he was convinced that their poems ­were of the same abstract nature, always differentiated from recitation. With this approach, it is unclear how Mayenowa could use the recordings of Różewicz and other Polish poets for her studies of literary language, especially given her own traditional upbringing. The archive simply reflected Mayenowa’s genuine fascination with the “philology of the ear” and the sounds of poetry. Mayenowa, who was born in 1908, was convinced of poetry’s grounding in the orality of traditional poetic culture, in recitations and elocution rather than in print, a belief shared by many poets from her generation. She was also influenced by her structuralist interests in systematic, repeatable prosodic patterns rather than concrete, singular per­for­mances.96 She was raised in a Yiddish-­and Russian-­speaking f­ amily in the city Białystok (which at the time was still part of the Rus­sian Empire), and was educated in interwar Poland, in a private Polish-­speaking Jewish high school, ­after which she de­ cided to study Polish lit­er­a­ture at Stefan Batory University in Vilnius, where she received her doctorate in 1939 (­under her original first name Rachela and her first husband’s last name Kapłanowa).97 Like Czesław Miłosz, she considered Vilnius her spiritual homeland, and her lifelong views on poetry and theory w ­ ere ­shaped by the milieu of her youth, which was also reflected in her slight eastern accent, her elegance of a then-­rich ­woman, and her love of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture.98 She was the only member of her ­family to survive the war, having procured false documents (­under the name Maria Renata). She dyed her hair and hid out in the countryside with the help of one of her university professors from Vilnius.99 The Holocaust left deep traces on her postwar life, and the new regime was also a source of fear for her (­after the anti-­Semitic campaign of 1968 she could no longer lecture at the University of Warsaw), but her academic approaches remained rooted in prewar lit­er­a­ture and theory, in Rus­ sian formalism supplemented by a fascination with structuralism. The scholar Michał Głowiński once compared the constancy of her intellectual interests

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to Julian Przyboś’s unbroken faithfulness to the poetics of the prewar avant-­garde.100 It is thus not surprising that Różewicz’s approach to recitation was puzzling to a scholar raised in a very dif­fer­ent milieu. In the field of poetry, the Polish culture did not prepare literary scholars for a proper rethinking of recitation and relations between poetry and voice. As we could see, even Przy­ boś’s recitation of his avant-­garde poems retained many traditional features. Other postwar recordings of the prewar poets of the Kraków Avant-­Garde (Jalu Kurek) and of the Polish futurists (Anatol Stern and Aleksander Wat) do not suggest that the Polish prewar innovative movements implemented a radically new approach to diction, and neither does our knowledge of futurists’ frequent cooperation with professional actors.101 Similarly, postwar experiments with sound poems, especially ­t hose that existed only in live per­for­mances or ­were recorded on tapes, with unusual sounding of phonemes and syllables, w ­ ere very l­ imited in Poland. Eugeniusz Rudnik of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, who participated in the international Fylkingen Festival in Sweden, has been rediscovered only recently and is still mostly known for his electronic and concrete ­music rather than his sound poetry.102 The only Polish poem quoted in the famous French anthology of sound poetry, Poésie sonore internationale, is an experimental prewar text by Stern (a recording of which is not included).103 Różewicz’s new reading style in the 1960s was not, therefore, an update of innovative prewar practices, a kind of repetition of the first avant-­garde, but instead its delayed and overhauled introduction into Polish literary culture. In Różewicz’s IBL recording, the poet makes comments that sound like responses to questions and parts of a broader conversation, but we rarely hear his interlocutors, one of whom was Mayenowa herself.104 The scholars in the recording appear surprised by Różewicz’s understanding of poetry and verse, by his rationale for dividing his texts into lines, or by his discussion of the effects of such external divisions. Różewicz does not make their task any easier when he states that some of his poems are basically prose, and that they could be developed into essays on poetics, while his other poems are context-­ based and journalistic, versified but far from pure poetry. This confusion about the role of poetry and poetry readings results above all from Różewicz’s novelty, and his radical rethinking of what constitutes a work of lit­er­a­ture. Nevertheless, this miscommunication also has to do with

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the poet’s and scholars’ grounding in Polish culture: it is informed by their age, background, class, education, and choices. I have briefly outlined Mayenowa’s stance and upbringing, which s­ haped her views of poetry recitation. Given the ongoing changes in Polish society a­ fter the war, it may also be helpful to briefly summarize Różewicz’s cultural environment in order to fully contextualize his radical attitude ­toward poetic per­for­mance. Of course, ­these contexts would not be openly discussed in the Polish P ­ eople’s Republic, as one’s ­family history could too often include ele­ments that ­were po­liti­cally suspicious or officially suppressed, and any mention of them would be interpreted according to official ideology—­which did in fact happen to readings of Różewicz.105

“They Came to See a Poet” Tadeusz Różewicz, born in 1921 in Radomsko, did not have a firm grounding in prewar Polish culture. As the scholar Wojciech Browarny has noted about the poet’s youth, “his social background placed him between dif­fer­ent ‘spheres,’ between the stratum of townspeople and clerks in the small city of Radomsko and the countryside roots of the ­family as well as their modest life in the province during the interwar period.”106 The Różewiczs belonged neither to the intelligent­sia, nor to a solid ­middle class, nor to the peasantry. Both of Różewicz’s parents ­were raised in the countryside, but the biography of his ­mother was more complicated and remained a mystery: she was born into a Jewish ­family, but was raised at a Catholic vicarage in a nearby village, where she was baptized and became a devout Catholic. Różewicz never spoke about her abandoned roots. He wrote an entire book about his ­mother without ever mentioning her Jewish background. Her roots must have made their war­time experiences even more difficult: according to Nazi laws, she was considered Jewish and should have been in a ghetto (together with her ­children). In the fall of 1942, a few days a­ fter Różewicz’s f­ amily moved from Radomsko to Częstochowa, the Gestapo entered their old place, which could have been ­because someone revealed his ­mother’s background or ­because of the involvement of two of her three sons in the under­ground Home Army.107 Różewicz was one of the few Polish poets who was an a­ ctual member of the Home Army, but that did not make it easy for him to identify with the re­sis­tance. ­There ­were many complicating f­ actors: his beloved older ­brother

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was killed by Germans in 1944, part of his partisan unit remained under­ ground a­ fter 1945, and during the Stalinist period ­those who had belonged to the Home Army could end up in prison, as the army had been supported by the Polish government in exile rather than the Soviets (Różewicz avoided this fate, perhaps thanks to his widely acclaimed poetry debut and Przyboś’s protection). Yet Różewicz’s memories of the under­ground re­sis­tance remained complicated even ­after the Thaw and the rehabilitation of the Home Army soldiers. The poet remembered, for instance, the Home Army’s nonsense marches and maneuvers, and his unit’s lack of equipment. Moreover, while the war was still g­ oing on, at a time when the Soviet Army and Soviet-­ sponsored government ­were establishing themselves in the eastern parts of Poland, Różewicz was accused of supporting communism ­because he had written an article in a soldiers’ bulletin that alluded to the wealthy sharing their property with ­others. Someone alerted him that he was in danger, and the poet escaped his unit before a verdict was made.108 The poet’s life in postwar communist Poland was also not easy: ­after he finished his studies in Kraków, he could not find an apartment, and with the growth of Stalinism, his poetry was increasingly condemned for being too nihilist. Fi­nally, in 1950, he moved to Gliwice, a provincial city in the formerly German industrial region of Silesia. His wife got an office job ­t here, which supported the ­family. He was now further from the pressures of the Writers’ Union, though still encouraged to join the Party (which he never did). Paradoxically, in this self-­i mposed isolation and poverty, he actually worked on socialist realist poetry, not sure if he should abandon the ideas of a social revolution. He wrote and published po­liti­cally correct poems on topics such as peace, fears of nuclear conflict, miners, and new housing districts; this work did not provide him with enough income, but was awarded a State Prize in 1955. ­After the Thaw of 1956, he could not easily trust the poets who had attacked him ­earlier and had easily switched from practicing socialist realism to condemning it, following this new trend now that it was allowed. Disillusioned by another po­liti­cal change, he ceased to be involved in any kind of po­liti­cal activity—­letter signing, dissidence, or the Solidarity movement.109 He was also critical of the younger poets from Generation ’68 (as they w ­ ere of him),

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questioning the novelty of their claims. Initially, other older poets also criticized Generation ’68, seeing too many similarities to socialist realism in the young authors’ postulates to describe and change real­ity.110 Różewicz stuck to his apo­liti­cal (in the narrow sense) stance, and in the 1970s and 1980s his plays, which depicted an antiheroic vision of under­ground movements or discussed gender and sexuality in the patriarchal f­amily, w ­ ere condemned by critics related to both the Party and the Catholic Church. However, his reputation was established enough to allow his work to be officially published and staged in major theaters, as well as abroad.111 One of the most controversial texts by Różewicz was not a play but a poem commenting on the clichéd role of poetry in the Polish po­liti­cal sphere, and on audiences’ expectations regarding the poet’s role at public readings. The text was published officially in 1983 and was treated as an attack on the opposition.112 It begins with the famous words: “they came to see a poet / and what did they see?,” ­after which it describes a poet hiding his face and declaring that he is “up to nothing.” He chooses d ­ oing nothing in contrast to ­those “who have chosen action.” The text is quite provocative given that, at the time of its publication, martial law had sent many of t­ hose who chose action to prison. And yet the poem continues: I see run-­of-­t he-­mill action coming before run-­of-­t he-­mill thought run-­of-­the-­mill Gustaw turning into run-­of-­t he-­mill Konrad113 In this way the text directly opposes the Romantic paradigm in Polish thought. The transformation of Gustaw into Konrad in Part III of Adam Mickiewicz’s drama Forefathers’ Eve served as a symbolic moment for Polish Romanticism itself, marking the characters’ shift of gravity from unhappy lovers to freedom fighters. ­Here, the poet not only refuses to be like the inspired Konrad or to write martyrological poetry about martial law, he also accuses all con­temporary Gustaws and Konrads of being mediocre and ­reckless: the Polish phrase “byle jaki” implies not just something ordinary or “run-­of-­t he-­mill” but also something cheap, half-­baked,

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and rash. In the poem, then, Różewicz is making a ­bitter statement about the theatricality of Polish culture, whose gestures cover up more realistic picture of society. Looking carefully at other authors I have discussed in this book, we can see that they often expressed similar concerns about the Romantic notions that constitute the idea of Polishness, and a similar discomfort with the pressure of public expectations for poet-­preachers. However, the early 1980s, the years ­after Solidarity had been crushed and oppressions grew, made the interpretation of Różewicz’s poem unambiguous, just as they made other texts seem patriotic if they ­were written or performed in the context of po­liti­cal opposition. Różewicz had remained uninvolved in po­liti­cal ­matters, and in oppositional circles he was increasingly treated as an antirevolutionary conformist and persona non grata.114 In this context, his poem “They Came to See a Poet” can be seen as a grotesque view of po­liti­cally engaged poetry and dissidents of the time, but also as a repre­sen­ta­tion of a poet who seems lost and hopeless. It gives voice to the huge numbers of Polish ­people who had never been directly involved in politics or preferred quiet obedience—­because they feared a Soviet invasion, b ­ ecause they remembered the war and Stalinist­era prisons, ­because they did not believe that a new change could help them, or b ­ ecause they benefited from the system. Różewicz’s complicated relationship to Polish cultural memory, identity, and politics contributed to his critical views of vari­ous popu­lar kinds of poetry per­for­mances. In his play The Witnesses, he mocks the solemn declamations that accompanied cele­brations of state holidays at schools.115 In his notes to another play, he ridicules the idea of “poetry reading by candlelight,” and its preferred topics, describing a female poet reading a metaphysical love poem and a male poet reading a text about baked beans.116 His experiences during and ­after the war seem to have strengthened his resolve to keep his distance from vari­ous popu­lar patterns of literary life. When it comes to introducing radically innovative ways of approaching poetry readings, Różewicz can only be compared to Miron Białoszewski. Both poets have been studied in the context of neo-­avant-­garde experiments, and both undermined the conventions of poetry recitation more than any of their peers; they both also refrained from any po­liti­cal involvement a­ fter the war. They w ­ ere both late innovators in the field of poetry recitation, facing the lack of ­earlier radical experiments in this field in Polish literary culture.

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It is thus intriguing to consider to what extent their novel views resulted from similar generational experiences, from similarly unassuming backgrounds outside of the Polish intelligent­sia. However, as soon as we start our comparison, we see that their experiments with poetic sound developed in two opposing directions. Comparing Białoszewski and Różewicz allows us to see how dif­fer­ent t­ hese poets’ approaches to voice w ­ ere. This confirms my argument from Chapter 3, where I challenged the scholarly view of Biało­ szewski as a neo-­avant-­garde author and traced the continuity of his interest in traditional home poetry per­for­mances. In this light, we can better grasp how modern Różewicz’s artistic choices ­were.

Różewicz and Białoszewski Tadeusz Różewicz and Miron Białoszewski ­were two poets who belonged to the same generation (born only a year apart), who both went through war­time trauma (Różewicz as a Home Army partisan and Białoszewski as a civilian during the Warsaw Uprising) and who similarly came from prewar families of unclear social status, with their f­ athers being the first generation to hold an office job in interwar Poland. Like Różewicz, Białoszewski was an outsider who lived in poverty, and an apo­liti­cal poet who could not talk openly about his identity.117 And while they both developed new approaches to poetic per­for­mance, ­these ­were rooted in strikingly dif­fer­ent beliefs and sources. To put it boldly, Białoszewski seemed to live in a partly unmodern Poland, while Różewicz lived in a modern, or even postmodern Poland, which led to their differing attitudes ­toward institutions and to seeing poetry as part of their life praxis, especially in the form of vocal per­for­mance. In the poem “They Came to See a Poet,” whose po­liti­cal uses I discussed ­earlier, Różewicz aptly names a frequent feature of Polish poetry as presented in this book: poetry can do ­t hings, it can leave the sphere of lit­er­a­ture and become a real, effective speech act. However, Różewicz’s poem shows him refusing to do any such t­ hing with his poems. His declaration that he is ­doing nothing can be applied not just to politics, but also to the place of poetry in his daily life and personal endeavors. This statement is an extension of his print-­based poetics and his general belief in the hopelessness and powerlessness of poetry, which was related not only to specific po­liti­cal disappointments but also to the general experience of modernity.

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How is it pos­si­ble that modernity did not affect Białoszewski in the way it did Różewicz? As we saw in Chapter 3, Białoszewski spent his entire life in Warsaw, traveled by bus and by plane, used a tape recorder, and lived in a modern apartment building. He published his poems with big state publishers and had readings at vari­ous institutions. Nevertheless, in his attitude to poetry and orality, in the types of spoken and sung genres to which he paid attention, and in his domestic habits, he maintained the traditional grassroots presence of the spoken word in his daily life. Though he (like Różewicz) was a nonbeliever, Białoszewski was fascinated by liturgical songs, religious cults, and folk piety, and he also appreciated the genres of gossip, anecdote, conversation, and oral history, as well as songs from urban and countryside folklore.118 His work was often a real cele­bration of friendship and community: his home salon, his partner reading out loud for him, or him reading for his blind friend. Białoszewski l­ imited his interactions with other media: he did not read newspapers, did not own a TV or a telephone, and always preferred direct contact with ­people.119 The main inspiration for his poetry came from the peripheries of highbrow or official culture, and it foregrounded voice-­based, nonprofessional thinking about poetry as part of the praxis of everyday life. Białoszewski’s work directs our attention to areas that belong neither to industrialized mass culture nor to the culture of the bourgeois elite, in contrast to how some theorists describe modern twentieth-­century socie­ties.120 The deliberate new choice made by Białoszewski was to include t­ hese spheres of culture in his poetry, to distrust other forms of speech, and to seek poetic support in the most elementary, even incorrect, uses of language.121 In that sense he was very modern, and we know that he also appreciated his own readings, which he preserved on tapes. But at the same time, in many other aspects his poetry and orality ­were a remnant, and a part, of ­these other worlds of spoken word on the periphery of culture, which still existed in his time but have since mostly dis­appeared in Poland. For Różewicz, on the other hand, poetry was always separate from everyday habits; it was professionalized, and its foundation was writing. As a child Różewicz edited a “home newspaper” with his older ­brother, and when he was at school he started publishing in a student bulletin and in magazines for young adult readers.122 This is a dif­fer­ent kind of memory from Białoszewski’s grand­father reading poetry out loud at home or the ­whole

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f­ amily having fun with role-­playing games.123 During the war Różewicz’s main task as a member of the Home Army was to follow the news in the German newspapers, but he also wrote literary pieces for a soldiers’ magazine and was commissioned to write a book of poetry and prose on parti­ san-­related topics, which was published under­ground ­under the pen name “Satyr.”124 ­These works w ­ ere very dif­fer­ent from the amateurish patriotic poetry readings or­ga­nized by Białoszewski and his fellow students in occupied Warsaw.125 Fi­nally, ­after the war Białoszewski maintained a network of friends in Warsaw, with whom he met to read poetry and or­ga­nize a home theater, while Różewicz lived a life of self-­imposed isolation in Gliwice. Różewicz had three telling recollections about his life in the late 1950s: locking himself in a room to write but reading old newspapers instead; trying to read his poetry aloud to his ­dying ­mother but finding that his texts sounded alien to him; and noting that it was a m ­ istake to look for the sources of verse in folk poetry.126 Różewicz seems to have lived in an alienated, modern world. In his “Letter to Cannibals” the speaker, traveling on a train, sees only anonymous, egoistic masses saying “I me my”; compare that to one of Białoszewski’s poems in which the speaker, traveling by bus, notices individual ­people, overhears their conversations and linguistic idiosyncrasies with curiosity, and also replays in his mind the religious melodies he was listening to at home.127 In Warsaw, Białoszewski was interested in uncultivated places overgrown with shrubs and weeds—­Warsaw was full of such wild, depopulated areas and ruins ­after the war.128 Różewicz, on the other hand, would often complain about the noisiness of cities and the presence of garbage bins, especially ­after he moved to the bigger city of Wrocław in 1968; his plays also address issues such as garbage and pollution, consumption, w ­ ater access, and population growth, revealing an almost postmodern and deeply critical awareness of the urban environment. He read current and prewar newspapers in order to write; ­later on he watched TV e­ very day.129 ­These differences between Białoszewski and Różewicz explain their dif­ fer­ent approaches to poetry and orality. They suggest that even in centralized, nationalized postwar Poland, two officially published authors could be surrounded by very dif­fer­ent poetic and linguistic cultures in their immediate environment. It was not just a difference in age or one’s roots in prewar Poland that made it hard to study and summarize the new tendencies in ­free

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verse. Poets that ­were the same age could have vastly dif­fer­ent, often only implicitly stated attitudes t­oward materials, contexts and forms of poetry—­a fact that has complicated the work of scholars. Moreover, ­these attitudes could not be attributed to one’s social class or background, which, for instance, led the scholar Henryk Vogler to see in Różewicz the loss of the small-­town environment and a resultant provincial insecurity, or led other critics to emphasize the shared generational experience of the war. As Różewicz and Białoszewski show, many other memories, predilections, accidents, and choices could determine the poetic culture one lived in a­ fter the war.130 This difference was expressed not just in the choice of voice-­or print-­based poetry, but also in the use of nonliterary sources in poetry as well as how poems w ­ ere included in the praxis of daily life. In the case of Białoszewski, ­t hese attitudes ­were mostly positive—in one of his essays, he dreams of poetry being shared anonymously in the manner of religious songs, thus merging with nonliterary contexts while still retaining something of its special poetic character.131 It is hard to imagine Różewicz’s poetry merging with his sources from the world of modern media. First, ­because it is the poetic context, and fact of poetry as a separate institution, that distinguishes a­ ctual newspapers from some of his newspaper-­based texts, which add critical overtones to the slogans they quote. Second, the criticism expressed in his use of ­t hese quotes makes it obvious that Różewicz would not want to be part of ­these discourses. In an interview he complains that posters advertising his play w ­ ere displayed right next to announcements about dog vaccinations and upcoming elec­ tions—­t hough we can easily imagine him using ­t hese same announcements in his poems.132 His poetry and poetry readings went very far in incorporating nonliterary discourses, but they could not r­ eally leave b ­ ehind the space of literary institutions. He used colloquial diction in his per­for­mances, but he also returned to more appropriate reading styles. He undermined and l­ imited his poetry readings, but he did agree to have them. The self-­contradictory ambivalence in Różewicz’s stance has been noted by Madeline Levine with reference to his 1960 poetry book, which implies the “belief in the poet’s superiority to the masses, which makes a strange accompaniment to Różewicz’s repeated insistence on the poet’s closeness to mass man.”133 ­These aporias seem to have been inevitable for a modern poet like him, and this position is well known to scholars of avant-­garde and neo-­

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avant-­garde art. Różewicz’s experiments with form and reading style stem from this recognition of the condition of the author in modernity. He was not only critical of overused school recitations, pretentious poetry readings, and po­liti­cal uses of poetry, but also raised in the culture of print rather than sonorous elocution, and skeptical of the role of poetry in the modern world. What he could do was turn to neo-­avant-­garde gestures in order to comment on t­ hese aporias. This work on broadening the possibilities of institutionalized expression, and self-­critically revealing the situation of art, cannot be viewed only negatively, even if neo-­avant-­garde art ultimately remained confined to art institutions. It is in this field, whose tasks have been aptly described by Hal Foster, that we find Różewicz: not immersing his poems in the praxis of life but turning his poetry and poetry readings into meta-­discourse, blurring the bound­aries between poetry and criticism, theory, essays, and newspaper columns.134 His experiments with poems and poetry per­for­mances thus become a critical lens through which we can view the institution of poetry.

Meta-­Performances In a conversation from the late 1990s, Tadeusz Różewicz and Czesław Miłosz talk about their shared pursuit of poetic forms through which they could discuss the topic of consciousness.135 For Miłosz, the philosophical orientation of poetry was expressed as an interest in the genres of treatise and essay, and in fact critics would accuse him of putting more emphasis on thoughts and ideas in his poetry than on the development of poetic language.136 Wisława Szymborska admitted that her Nobel speech cost her a poem, as if her ideas could serve f­ uture poems or essays equally well.137 Różewicz was even more direct when discussing the relationship between his poetry and essays. In the IBL recording, he read the poem “Proposition the Second,” which begins in the following way: The poem is finished now break it and when it grows together again break it once more138

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When reading the text for IBL, the author observed that the text was in fact written in prose, and that it could be treated as a r­ ecipe, as the introduction to a new poetics. And yet critics, as he complained, did not want to treat this work as a programmatic text b ­ ecause it had not been developed into a twenty-­ five-­page article. Which means that as long as it was in this form, they would treat it as a boring, unsuccessful poem, as if the only model for poetry, as Różewicz suggested ­earlier in the conversation, ­were the condensed, meta­ phorical poems of the Polish avant-­garde. To understand t­ hese observations from the 1960s—­which, as we have seen, ­were so puzzling to IBL researchers—­let us use h ­ ere one of the insights coming from Różewicz’s conversation with Miłosz in the late 1990s. In this conversation, Różewicz clarifies his use of t­ hese terms by emphasizing that verse and poetry are not the same ­t hing for him.139 This distinction started to be meaningful (rather than obvious) in Poland in the twentieth c­ entury, when narrative works and dramas ­were no longer written in verse, which was now used almost exclusively for lyric poetry and its ­later transformations. This recent convergence of the meanings of lyric poetry, poetry, and verse is especially palpable in the Polish classification of genres. Traditionally, instead of having poetry, prose, and drama, the Polish classification would distinguish between the epic, lyric, and dramatic genres, and each of t­ hese categories could include texts written in ­either verse or prose. For instance, in the epic genre, the most impor­tant feature is the narrative structure of heroic poems, short stories, and novels rather than their versification or lack thereof, and nowadays none of them would be automatically associated with the Polish word for “poetry,” “poezja.” The second category, the lyric, began to sound dated in the twentieth c­ entury, when it did not match the more impersonal, experimental texts being written, and it was eventually replaced by the label “poetry” (no longer applicable to the epic and drama).140 In practice, with reference to modern lit­er­a­ture, the usage of the Polish word “poezja” is analogous to the En­glish use of the word “poetry.” Nevertheless, the Polish “poezja” is not the same t­ hing as lit­er­a­ture in verse, ­because it often implies the successors of the “lyric” genres and more condensed, shorter, more “poetic” texts, including prose poems. As a result, the use of the word “prose” can be even more confusing, as it may refer to e­ ither nonpoetic, nonmeta­phorical (or even nonliterary) texts that do not fall within

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the category of the “lyric” and its successors, or to any texts not divided into verse lines and thus excluded from the category of “verse.” When Różewicz calls his “Proposition the Second” an example of prose, though it is clearly divided into lines, he has the former meaning—­“not lyric”—in mind. He thus invites us to conduct a m ­ ental experiment and think of this short free-­verse text as a piece of criticism in verse, a treatise in verse, an essay in verse rather than lyric poetry. (We should note that although ­there have been treatises written in verse throughout the centuries, they did not automatically become verbal art, and ­today they are not considered works of lit­er­a­ture or fiction.) Różewicz, in a sense, encourages us to ask: What if his texts in verse are not lit­er­a­ture at all, but just works of criticism of language and media? What if we have been applying the wrong criteria when assessing ­these texts? At the same time, we know that he does not plan to fully reject the label “poetry,” to leave it ­behind altogether; instead he seems to be testing how far the notions of poetry and texts in verse can be expanded. Analogous experiments took place at Różewicz’s poetry per­for­mances. In fact, the entire discussion of “Proposition the Second” was a result of Różewicz’s IBL recording, in which his reading of the text unexpectedly turns into self-­exploration and self-­commentary. In light of this, the poem itself can be treated as a ­recipe for his per­for­mances, in which he was following closely the instruction of breaking the lines again and again in new places. As we saw, this was also the case with his poem “White Spots,” which shows not only Różewicz’s neglect for line endings but also his willingness to use the recording to try out dif­fer­ent versions of the text and as an occasion to demonstrate his neglect, to flaunt his attitude to verse. What was supposed to be scholars d ­ oing their research—­recording poets and asking them questions—­turned into Różewicz conducting research of his own with his ad hoc discoveries and comments. We also have other examples of how Różewicz’s readings became a kind of experiment, first testing the organizers’ patience, as he was not an easy poet to invite, and then testing his readers’ patience with his monotonous readings. Does it ­really make sense to have a poet read? Is the poet’s voice impor­ tant anyhow? He seemed to be exploring t­ hese questions at his readings. Yet his experiments concerned more than just his audience. In the 1986 Museum recording, he pre­sents his unrehearsed reading as merely reading

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the texts placed in front of him, as if he wanted to see what it was like to read his own poems from a distance, from the perspective of an alienated reader who has almost forgotten what he has written. In a commentary to his 1998 recording, the poet elaborates on this approach, admitting that at his poetry readings “I often shorten my poems, at the reading I skip some words which annoy me, I skip entire stanzas. . . . ​‘A long poem’ often seems too long to me . . . ​and I am struck by a strange feeling that poetry has finished ‘at this point,’ but the poem has not. So I lapse into silence.”141 Apparently the changes and corrections Różewicz implemented during his readings ­were not planned; but neither w ­ ere they accidental, as they resulted from the poet’s ad hoc rethinking of the bound­aries of poetry. At his reading, a poem could be redone and transformed into an event, rather than simply vocalized. And ­because this kind of creative reworking has an authorial signature only when carried out by the poet, this may explain Różewicz’s interest in his own per­for­mances. The idea that a work of art may be something pro­cessual, ephemeral, event-­ based, was typical of neo-­avant-­garde experiments with happenings and per­for­mance art, similar to other attempts at changing an existing concept of the finished masterpiece and replacing it with a found object, an idea described on paper, or a collage of dif­fer­ent materials. In analogous ways, Różewicz broadened the concepts of his poetry and poetry readings—­for example, by constantly rewriting and modifying his poems in print.142 For this reason his monographer, Tadeusz Drewnowski, has compared him to the neo-­avant-­garde.143 Some critics have noted that the term “neo-­avant-­garde” has not been used frequently by literary scholars, and that many similar literary phenomena are instead associated with postmodernism.144 In the many discussions regarding the extent to which Różewicz can be called a postmodernist, the main prob­lem has to do with how postmodernism is defined. Różewicz belongs to postmodernism if it is defined as a broad concept denoting disillusioned modernity, already pre­sent in Poland ­after the war, or an umbrella term for certain avant-­ garde-­like techniques, and for lit­er­a­ture that becomes a discourse about itself. Różewicz’s relationship to postmodernism looks far more complicated if the term is used to mean a ludic approach, playfulness, and a readiness to merge with imitated discourses rather than their critical observation.145

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Różewicz himself did not like to be associated with the avant-­garde, which he understood in a narrow way, and critics have also objected that naming any kind of lit­er­a­ture neo-­avant-­garde is a risky borrowing of terms from the field of art history. However, the notion of neo-­avant-­garde (rather than postmodernism) can be helpful in grasping Różewicz’s transfers between media, between printed and spoken word, and between his dramas and per­for­mances. Theater is ­here an especially impor­tant context, as the author’s plays and their subsequent stagings w ­ ere recognized by critics as an impor­tant space for testing new ave­nues, starting with the drama The Card Index from 1960.146 Interestingly, in the context of theater Różewicz admitted that he perceived his staged plays as separate works. Per­for­mances belonged to actors and directors; they ­were by no means “his,” and they made him feel awkward and embarrassed.147 This division between an authored dramatic text and its per­ for­mance was fully broken only in 1992, when Różewicz himself directed a series of open rehearsals of his Kartoteka rozrzucona (Card Index Scattered). He updated and recomposed The Card Index—­cutting it, making characters older, and adding new scenes—­and he did it all onstage, improvising, reading aloud from current newspapers to illustrate the new Poland that his new play was supposed to reflect. The new text of the drama, when it was ultimately published, was merely a pale reflection of this series of open rehearsals.148 He not only included collage-­like quotations in his drama and made his play reliant on the historical context of po­liti­cal transition in Poland, but he also replaced the drama with a series of live events. A much ­earlier attempt at a dif­fer­ent substitution happened in his Birth Rate: The Biography of a Stage Play, which he wrote between 1958 and 1967. ­Here, instead of a play, Różewicz wrote a play’s “biography”—an essay resembling a diary entry, describing the author’s difficulties with writing, the sources for his ideas, his contexts of writing, a pos­si­ble plot, chosen images, as well as a more general reflection. As Różewicz says in his Birth Rate: “­Today I’m on the verge of surrender. I’ve lost the w ­ ill and the necessary energy; I ­don’t believe in the need to bring this play to life.”149 While explaining his difficulty with writing, he mentions an ­earlier thought that “it would be better to improvise the ­whole t­ hing with a com­pany,” but then realizes that his task is to write the drama down. Subsequently he ­faces another dilemma: “Should I limit myself to the play text, or describe the ‘history’ of this piece, its biography?,” he asks.150

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In ­these reflections Różewicz considers both exchanging his drama for a live improvisation and filling his drama with pieces of a nondramatic nature: not only stage directions, but also meditations, digressions, and memories, all of which ultimately constitute the Birth Rate. However, t­ hese features have not changed the classification of the piece: it has been published alongside his plays as a play, and it has even been staged. Różewicz’s drama became meta-­drama, just as his poetry became meta-­poetry, broadening t­ hese categories from within, breaking the bound­aries between fiction and criticism. Similarly, the author’s diction was used as a critical tool undermining the link between voice and poetry. Given all this, we can see how the 1959 prose piece “Preparation for a Poetry Reading,” with which I began this chapter, is not simply a confession, an essay, or a short story about poetry readings.151 It is a poetry reading—­a reading substituted by the description of a reading, an account of the poet’s fears, answers to pos­si­ble questions, a list of poems to be read. It is another self-­critical experiment with the form of the poetry reading. If Różewicz could substitute drama with an improvisation on stage, why not substitute a live poetry reading with a description on the page? When the link between the poet’s voice and his poems has been undermined, this kind of ­silent, experimental reading seems justified.

Beyond Różewicz If Tadeusz Różewicz’s poems, readings, and dramas—or rather meta-­poems, meta-­readings, and meta-­dramas—­look just like their own deconstruction, or even destruction, it is ­because of the author’s views as expressed in “Preparation for a Poetry Reading”: “Poets feel better than ­others the powerlessness and feebleness of man in the modern world. They play the fool out of despair.”152 Różewicz’s recordings, compared to other readings studied in this book, seem to confirm Czesław Miłosz’s observation from The Witness of ­Poetry, in which he juxtaposes Różewicz with other postwar Polish poets: Miron Białoszewski, Zbigniew Herbert, Aleksander Wat (and himself). Though Miłosz’s claim of Różewicz’s links to Eu­ro­pean nihilism may need more qualifications, in general Różewicz’s poetic per­for­mances confirm Miłosz’s statement about the close affinity between Różewicz and the ideas of Western modernity and alienation.153 The other poets mentioned by Miłosz,

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who he says tried to restore order a­ fter the war, also seemed to believe that their readings could be used to connect with ­people, to spend time with friends, or to leave a last message for their readers. It is symptomatic that Różewicz’s Museum recording, produced as part of the same series as the ­recordings “for posterity” of Anna Kamieńska and Anna Świrszczyńska (Chapter 4), did not inspire Różewicz to leave any par­tic­u­lar message or poetic credo, or even to get ready for his reading: just as he said, he was unprepared, and then he talked about con­temporary affairs, glad that he could speak openly as his words would not be broadcast anytime soon. What is most intriguing is that according to both Miłosz and Różewicz ­t hese dif­fer­ent poetic strategies resulted from objective external circumstances, which the two poets apparently saw in radically dif­fer­ent ways. For Miłosz, during and ­after the war, Polish poets discovered that “the established order, which provides the framework for the quarrel between the poet and the crowd, can cease to exist from one day to the next”; consequently they once again became part of “the g­ reat h ­ uman ­family” rather than isolated bohemians.154 Różewicz, in 1959, seemed to observe something e­ lse: poetry’s dissolution, and the isolation of poetry readers—­city dwellers who “are moving apart, are so remote from each other that between one hand and another, one heart and another, an infinite void gapes.” Moreover, ­these relations are the fabric “on which we stitch the green ­rose of con­temporary poetry. The fabric so fragile that it falls apart in our hands. The threads d ­ on’t touch, d ­ on’t intertwine, ­don’t mesh, d ­ on’t cross.” Poetry thus falls into a void.155 Miłosz’s and Różewicz’s observations are applicable to dif­fer­ent periods and aspects of postwar culture. Miłosz’s view of a traditional Poland and of poets’ closeness to their readers seems to fit times of po­liti­cal upheaval, like the times I described in Chapter 1. On the other hand, Miłosz himself must have known the limitations of being close to the crowds a­ fter his 1981 visit to Poland, as well as the truth of ­every poet’s ultimate loneliness. Most authors I study in this book ­were actually working at the intersection of ­t hese two tendencies, preserving an inherited conviction about the importance of orality and occasionally using their poems for nonliterary aims, but at the same time selecting their audiences and venues, and the circumstances of their per­for­mances, questioning their abilities and the possibilities of reading out loud, and revealing the imperfections and limitations of their voice.

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Różewicz, however, went even further. He could anticipate the more global, long-­term changes, which even the Polish ­People’s Republic could not prevent, and which made Poland more similar to the United States than Miłosz could have expected. This encouraged Różewicz to or­ga­nize his poems and readings as a kind of caricature, a critical mirror for the role of the poet in Polish culture, but also more broadly as a space to challenge the nature of poetry. Różewicz’s poetry became more appreciated a­ fter the po­liti­cal transition of 1989, when, at a time of rapidly modernizing real­ity, younger poets linked their poetic ancestry to Różewicz rather than Miłosz or Herbert, and ­were increasingly interested in reading their poems in a flat, less careful way, undermining the poet’s voice and presence.156

 Epilogue

Dwutygodnik (Bi­ weekly) published an anniversary issue online, which featured new audio recordings of the poet Krystyna Miłobędzka (b. 1932) that had been made at her home just a few days e­ arlier. The editor in chief, Zofia Król, remarked that she could hear the passing of time in the poet’s voice. In her readings, Miłobędzka is known to enunciate with audible effort and introduce silences into the ­middle of her texts; ­these features w ­ ere even more pronounced in 1 the Biweekly recordings. ­These aesthetic effects, while amplified by old age, ­were not new. They are also pre­sent in Miłobędzka’s poetry, which is full of pauses and silences, as well as repeated phrases that are modified, corrected, or remade into new words. An untitled poem published fifteen years before the Biweekly recording begins the following way: “maybe ­t here is just no one to whom she could say herself out loud with ­t hose stammers since she can remember in the most unexpected places at the same always expected moment?”2 In her interviews Miłobędzka emphasizes that she cannot speak well, that her speech is far from smooth. The reason for that is not just a lack of practice speaking in public, to which the poet also admits, given how long she had been on the margins of literary life. The biggest ­factor is her hesitance, her search for the right words, her awareness that what is said cannot be unsaid.3 Her readings, while broken up by pauses, have always been very attentive and focused, each word in her spare poems is pronounced distinctly, and one can feel how the words come into being. Miłobędzka’s way of speaking matches her style of thinking and writing: her poetry is linguistically innovative, but also increasingly minimalistic. The ever-­changing world is experienced in her poetry through language, through the movement of phrases, but words never suffice to IN APRIL  2019 THE ARTS-­A ND-­C ULTURE MAGA ZINE

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capture all that is visual, material, prelinguistic. This belief in the insufficiency of language leads Miłobędzka to foreground imperfection and humility in her poetic practice, which are accompanied by further cutting and editing.4 The pro­cesses of losing, disappearing, hesitating, and stumbling are addressed in her poems and evoked by the short lines and white spaces of her texts. Miłobędzka never belonged to any movements or groups, and became well known only in the 2000s when she published several new volumes of poetry and received a number of national literary awards. In her seventies and eighties, she has been treated as a guest of honor at vari­ous poetry readings, during which the audience focused all their attention on catching her faltering but precise voice and celebrating the frail, white-­haired ­woman.5 She was ­especially well received by younger poets and critics, who had started to ­explore the neglected legacy of Polish neo-­avant-­garde art and writing (Miłobędzka’s first book was published in 1970, but her poems first appeared in journals in 1960). While the poet Julia Hartwig, discussed in Chapter 2, was embraced as a grande dame by readers of more classical Polish authors, Miłobędzka became a figure of authority for ­those closer to the avant-­garde current. The poet herself often referred to Bolesław Leśmian, Tymoteusz Karpowicz, and Miron Białoszewski, as well as Emily Dickinson, as her poetic models, while distancing herself from the legacy of Czesław Miłosz and Zbi­ gniew Herbert.6 Miłobędzka’s poetry readings from recent de­cades are an apt example with which to conclude this book, for a variety of reasons. They show how much the Polish literary scene and reading styles have changed in the postwar era. In the preceding chapters we studied the evolution of Polish poetic culture between World War II and the 2000s, and we saw that gradually, modern poetic culture—­focused on publicly accessible, authors’ own, untrained voices—­came to the fore. Miłobędzka’s recognition came at a time when readings by poets (as opposed to actors or professional reciters) ­were treated as the default by younger authors, and w ­ ere frequently recorded and published. The style of the readings has also changed to include a greater willingness to foreground the fragile and accidental nature of per­for­mance, to limit its melodicity, and to incorporate the poet’s physical state into the poetry, creatively rethinking and reworking the poet’s conditions. It is unlikely that

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p ­ er­for­mances similar to Miłobędzka’s Biweekly reading would have been broadcast and embraced in the past, during the interwar period, or even in early postwar radio programs and rec­ords, when good recitation skills w ­ ere still expected and valued. Miłobędzka’s recordings could only have been appreciated as an appropriate format for her texts a­ fter the provocatively bad readings by Tadeusz Różewicz (Chapter 5) and the dramatic final recording of the ailing Herbert (Chapter 4). Moreover, Miłobędzka’s poetic practices, though contrasted with Miłosz’s and Herbert’s legacy, complicate the divisions between vari­ous poetic currents, like so many other per­for­mances discussed in this book. Miłobędzka herself has hesitated to label her work as “avant-­garde” or “linguistic” (“lingwistyczny”), the usual appellations in Polish for the type of poetry represented by Karpowicz and Białoszewski.7 She claimed that she simply could not write in any other way, just as she could not speak more smoothly. Furthermore, much of her interest in word formation came from her reflections on childhood and listening to c­ hildren’s creative uses of language. Thanks to her avant-­garde poetics and the late recognition of her work, Miłobędzka has not been read as a “feminine” poet, even when she wrote about c­ hildren and motherhood. Miłobędzka used to read linguistically innovative poetry during her workshops with c­ hildren, and her pupils understood t­ hese texts better than their schoolteachers did.8 She also wrote plays for ­children, which ­were staged in a few cities, and w ­ ere similarly full of wordplay. As she herself admitted, parts of ­t hese plays w ­ ere also published as poems, and for her the boundary between the two genres was blurred.9 Miłobędzka is, of course, not the first Polish author to blur the bound­aries between genres, making some poems part of the staged per­for­mances. This had also been done by Białoszewski and Herbert. It is striking, however, that her plays for ­children could function as poems for adults, and vice versa. Moreover, t­ hese plays for c­ hildren w ­ ere not the only scripts she wrote: her experiments with dif­fer­ent genres and media applied also to her poetry readings, making her practices interestingly close to Różewicz’s. ­Because Miłobędzka usually felt at a loss when asked to talk about poetry, and was generally insecure about public speaking, the author carefully prepared for her poetry readings, especially as her popularity started to grow and she was invited by her publisher to read at major literary festivals. Miłobędzka wrote scripts for her poetry readings; she prepared commentaries on her own

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poetry that were intertwined with the poems themselves, and she simply read the w ­ hole ­thing. The script that she read at the first of t­ hese readings, in the year 2000, started with the words: “Good eve­ning! I ­will be talking about poetry. Poetry. When my ­mother made a good cake, she would say, ‘This ­isn’t a cake, this is poetry.’ And then she would add, ‘Tastes heavenly.’ What can you talk about during a poetry reading? You have no choice. You have to talk about life and about writing.”10 As critics have noted, Miłobędzka’s scripts for t­ hese events w ­ ere often as carefully thought out and precisely formulated as her poems, becoming useful poetry lessons and self-­commentaries. At a reading in 2004 the poet declared that her texts needed no commentary, but she still went on to explain why comments w ­ ere not needed, and thus ended up commenting on the nature of her texts.11 A common thread in her commentary, which also appeared in her interviews, was the question of what poetry is and what makes a poem a poem. Miłobędzka took a par­tic­u­lar interest in this question when she turned to visual and concrete poetry. She would call her brief statements and experiments “poems,” and provocatively say that every­t hing is a poem (“wszystko wiersze”). At the same time, the poet would often refer to a typical text of hers as a “zapis”—­just a rec­ord or notation, something jotted down, rather than “poetry.”12 This approach to genre—­questioning our conventional ways of looking at dif­fer­ent genres, relocating the labels of certain texts, making commentary poetic, saying that a poem is not poetry, that a poem may turn into a play and await its staging—­recalls the experiments of Różewicz, as discussed in Chapter 5. Miłobędzka did not feel an affinity with his poems, perceiving them as more static than hers.13 Nevertheless, both authors emphasized the importance of print for their work, and both gave readings in a style broken up by pauses. Miłobędzka admitted how difficult poetry readings ­were for her.14 This discomfort, together with her interest in the visual side of her books, shows that voice is not the only point of entry into Miłobędzka’s poetry, just as it was not for Różewicz. Then again, we know about this preference from her poetry readings, which are deliberately structured and recognized as a form of commentary on her texts, just as it was with Różewicz. As we may remember, Różewicz published an essay titled “Preparation for a Poetry Reading”; in Miłobędzka’s case, the critic Jarosław Borowiec edited the

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texts—­the scripts—of her four poetry readings from 2000, 2001, 2008, and 2010 and published them in the book znikam jestem: cztery wieczory autor­ skie (I dis­appear I am: Four poetry readings).15 An audio recording of the first reading was also included in the book. A video recording of Miłobędzka’s reading for her eightieth birthday, or­ga­nized in Wrocław in 2012, was published with a book of essays on her work, and an audio recording of the 2004 event was posted on her publisher’s website.16 Poetry reading thus became a format distinctly associated with Miłobędzka’s work. Her work also showed that poetry readings can be studied in print, further complicating the distinctions and transitions between dif­fer­ent media. With Miłobędzka, we thus see the first instance of a female poet who not only reveals and problematizes her vulnerable, quiet voice, but also consciously experiments with the format of poetry readings, challenges our ideas of print and voice. Miłobędzka does not simply illustrate the evolution of poetic culture that we have observed ­earlier in the book; she also allows us to see a moment when ­women become similarly involved in rethinking the par­ameters of readings and recordings, as men used to be. And indeed, in recent years other w ­ omen poets have gradually gained more recognition while displaying more diverse reading styles on stage: ironic, blasé, or daring.17 Yet it would be a m ­ istake to see Miłobędzka’s attitude to voice only in the light of Różewicz’s experiments. Her readings are more consistent in style and more focused than his, just like her poetry is closer to the way she speaks and perceives the world, drawing on her experiences of motherhood and giving birth.18 To some extent this biographical, bodily view of her poetics and reading recalls Aleksander Wat, discussed in Chapter 4, whose crude, complicated sentences, handwriting, and the lamenting tone heard in his recording w ­ ere also all connected. Miłobędzka’s readings are not explic­itly elegiac in nature, though they do reveal her age in her faltering voice. Miłobędzka has said that for her, e­ very poem feels like the first and the last. Such biographical, maternal perspective was also recently explored by a much younger poet, Julia Fiedorczuk, who recorded her readings (set to ambient ­music by Alan Holmes) to accompany her poetry book Psalmy (Psalms) in 2017—­t he first ­woman poet in Poland to do so by her own initiative.19 Given the reception of ­t hese works, one could say that another change illustrated by t­ hese poets is the dismantling of the niche of “feminine” poetry,

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of the category that was continually evoked in the context of ­women poets discussed e­ arlier in the book, but is no longer imposed t­ oday. Interestingly, this change coincides with women poets’ readiness to work and experiment with their body, voice, and biography in reading and recording. Miłobędzka’s work additionally reminds us to what extent the divisions of poets into generations and movements are arbitrary. We have seen this arbitrariness exemplified by Wat, who was born in 1900 but worked with younger poets. In the case of Miłobędzka, though her date of birth is close to that of other authors discussed in this book (who w ­ ere mostly born in the 1910s and 1920s), as a poet—­and especially as a recorded poet—­she should be treated as a con­temporary author. When the poet and critic Agnieszka Wolny-­Hamkało noted in 2010 that the readings of several Polish poets ­were “charged with emotions and invariably attract[ed] crowds of faithful followers,” she listed Miłobędzka alongside Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-­Dycki and Andrzej Sosnowski, poets whose first books ­were published in the early 1990s.20 The late discovery of Miłobędzka, her long marginalization in literary life, reminds us, nevertheless, of all the other voices that never got such a chance to be heard and recognized. Fi­nally, Miłobędzka’s poems vividly point at the connection between one’s reading style and the poetic self, a connection that often relies on silence, hesitation, stumbling. The recordings studied in this book demonstrate that ­t here is no contradiction between questioning and undermining oneself as a speaker, and showing a willingness to communicate with listeners from this weaker position. Th ­ ese poetry readings therefore leave us with a plea for attentive and unprejudiced listening, a plea applicable far beyond Polish poetry.

Notes Acknowl­edgments Index

Notes

Introduction 1. See the CD Czesław Miłosz czyta Mickiewicza: Czesław Miłosz czyta Miłosza (Warszawa: CD Accord, 1996). On returning from exile, see Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: A Biography, ed. and trans. Aleksandra and Michael Parker (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), 451. 2. A recent example of an impor­tant article interested in readings and recordings, yet without any prominence given to authors’ own readings, is Andrzej ­Hejmej, “Literatura w kulturze akuzmatycznej,” Ethos 32, no. 1 (2019): 71–74. Recordings of Miłosz and Szymborska are sometimes presented as artifacts of the literary marketplace, as public images of both authors: Dominik Antonik, “Dźwięki: Pisarz mówi,” Dwutygodnik, no. 10 (2015), http://­w ww​.­dwutygodnik​ .­com​/­a rtykul​/­6171​-­d zwieki​-­pisarz​-­mowi​.­html. According to Antonik, however, ­t hese recordings do not change the understanding of the poem per se, and instead can actually be an obstacle: Dominik Antonik, “Audiobook: Od brzmienia słów do głosu autora,” Teksty Drugie, no. 5 (2015): 126–147. Some e­ arlier analyses of the poet’s voice include two essays by Jacek Kopciński, “Człowiek transu: Magnetofonowe sesje Mirona Białoszewskiego,” Teksty Drugie, no. 4 (2011): 206–219; and “Głos poety,” in Kopciński, Nasłuchiwanie: Sztuki na głosy Zbigniewa Herberta (Warszawa: Biblioteka Więzi, 2008), 7–20; and an article by Teresa Dobrzyńska and Lucylla Pszczołowska, “Wiersz a recytacja,” Pamiętnik Literacki 73, no. 3–4 (1982): 261–284. Recent interest in Miron Białoszewski’s recordings is the most prominent signal of change in scholarly approach. 3. Charles Bern­stein, “Introduction,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bern­stein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6, 8, 9, 11. 4. Charles Bern­stein, “Hearing Voices,” in The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 142. 5. Peter Middleton, “The Con­temporary Poetry Reading,” in Bern­stein, Close Listening, 268.

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6. See Lesley Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Per­for­mance from the 1920s to the Pre­sent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Derek Furr, Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Peter Middleton, Distant Reading: Per­for­mance, Readership, and Consumption in Con­temporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); Raphael Allison, Bodies on the Line: Per­for­mance and the Sixties Poetry Reading (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014); and Juha Virtanen, Poetry and Per­for­mance during the British Poetry ­Revival, 1960–1980: Event and Effect (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 7. See Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry, 4–13; Furr, Recorded Poetry, 5, 19, 28, 40, 113, 170. 8. On radio: Paweł Mathia, “Kroki milowe techniki Polskiego Radia w latach 1925–2015,” in Polskie Radio—­ historia, program, technika: 90 lat Polskiego Radia, ed. Andrzej Ossibach-­Budzyński (Warszawa: Polskie Radio and Oficyna Wydawnicza Aspra-­JR, 2015), 89–90; see also Jacek Kopciński, “Radio, maska i oko wewnętrzne: ‘Rekonstrukcja poety’ Zbigniewa Herberta,” Pamiętnik Lite­ racki 96, no. 1 (2005): 55. 9. Rec­ords: series Współczesna poezja polska: Wiersze wybrane czytają autorzy (Warszawa: Polskie Nagrania “Muza,” 1965, 1968, 1972) (some sources give dif­ fer­ent dates). 10. On elocution in schools: Bronisława Kulka, “Głośne czytanie i deklamacja w szkolnej oraz pozaszkolnej edukacji polonistycznej w latach 1870–1918,” and Katarzyna Lange, “Z zagadnień kształcenia recytacyjnego w szkole dwudziestolecia międzywojennego,” both in Problematyka tekstu głosowo interpretowanego, ed. Katarzyna Lange, Władysław Sawrycki, and Paweł Tański (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2004), 263–279, 281–289. 11. Texts by Wisława Szymborska and Tadeusz Różewicz are discussed in chapters devoted to t­ hese poets. 12. See the CDs Głosy poetów (Kraków: Radio Kraków, 1997); Zbigniew Herbert czyta swoje wiersze (Kraków: Radio Kraków, 1998); Tadeusz Różewicz czyta swoje wiersze (Kraków: Radio Kraków, 1998); and Nobel ’96: Wisława Szymborska czyta swoje wiersze (Kraków: Radio Kraków, 1996). All of them ­were edited by Romana Bobrowska. See also the CD Czesław Miłosz czyta Miłosza. Since 2014 the publishing ­house a5 has published a series of books of selected poems by major authors that include CDs. See also recordings and videos on the website of Biuro Literackie, accessed January 31, 2021, http://­biuroliterackie​.­pl​/­. 13. E.g., Patrice Dabrowski, Poland: The First Thousand Years (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 436. 14. See PennSound, accessed January  31, 2021, http://­writing​.­upenn​.­edu​/p ­ enn​ sound​/­about​.p ­ hp. On dif­fer­ent online archives, see Furr, Recorded Poetry, 4–5.

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15. On the importation of theories, see, e.g., Joanna Niżyńska, “Globalization and Its Discontents: Notes on Polish Studies in the Age of Globalization,” East Eu­ro­pean Politics and Socie­ties 28, no. 4 (2014): 684. For the recent reception of sound studies, see, e.g., Teksty Drugie, no. 5 (2015). My own article from this issue is an example of this transfer of Western ideas. 16. Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. George Grabowicz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 373 (quote), 9–11, 338, 372. On Ingarden, see also Łukasz Wróbel, Hylé i noesis: Trzy międzywojenne koncepcje literatury stosowanej (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2013), 123–124. 17. The crucial influence of the Romantic paradigm on Polish culture was the special focus of scholar Maria Janion. Her work in a wider context is presented, for instance, in the textbook Tadeusz Drewnowski, Literatura polska, 1944–1989: Próba scalenia, rev. ed. (Kraków: Universitas, 2004), 429–431. 18. Andrew Wachtel, Remaining Relevant ­after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Eu­rope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 14, 15. 19. On the censorship of editions of Mickiewicz exported from the Austrian to the Rus­sian partition, see Małgorzata Rowicka, “Spreparowane edycje utworów Adama Mickiewicza, czyli potyczki wydawców zakordonowych z cenzurą carską w okresie zaborów,” Sztuka Edycji 4 (2013): 47–56. 20. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage, 1990), 175. 21. For instance, Julian Tuwim shared this conviction. See Jadwiga Sawicka, Julian Tuwim (Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna, 1986), 363; and Mariusz Urbanek, Tuwim: Wylękniony bluźnierca (Warszawa: Iskry, 2013), 291. And see Miron Białoszewski, “O tym Mickiewiczu jak go mówię,” Odra 6 (1967): 33–38. 22. Lidia Burska, Awangarda i inne złudzenia: O pokoleniu ’68 w Polsce (Gdańsk: słowo / obraz terytoria, 2012), 153. 23. Adam Mickiewicz, Conrad Wallenrod: An Historical Poem, Founded on Events in the Annals of Lithuania and Prus­sia, trans. Leon Jablonski (Edinburgh: Fraser and Crawford, 1841), 37–38. Compare with the Polish: “Płomień rozgryzie malowane dzieje, / Skarby mieczowi spustoszą złodzieje, / Pieśń ujdzie cało, tłum ludzi obiega;”—­Adam Mickiewicz, Wiersze i powieści poetyckie, afterword by Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz (Warszawa: Świat Książki, 1998), 291. 24. The Polish phrase is “pieśń ujdzie cało.” 25. See Wiktor Weintraub, Poeta i prorok: Rzecz o profetyzmie Mickiewicza (Warszawa: Biblioteka Narodowa, 1998), especially the chapter “Metamorfozy improwizacji.” See also Roman Koropeckyj, Adam Mickiewicz: The Life of a Ro­ mantic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 52, 106, 109; Wiktor Weintraub, “The Prob­lem of Improvisation in Romantic Lit­er­a­ture,” Comparative Lit­er­at­ ure 16, no. 2 (Spring 1964): 124–125.

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26. ­These features of improvisation are described by Weintraub in Poeta i prorok; and Stefania Skwarczyńska, “Istota improwizacji i jej stanowisko w lite­ raturze,” Pamiętnik Literacki 28, no. 1–4 (1931): 185–212. See also Bożena Shallcross, “ ‘Wondrous Fire’: Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz and the Romantic Improvisation,” East Eu­ro­pean Politics and Socie­ties 9, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 527. On the ­limited verbal content of some con­temporary per­for­mance poetry, see Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and Its ­Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 222. 27. Weintraub, Poeta i prorok, 273–276. See also Koropeckyj, Adam Mickiewicz, 274–275. Instead of improvising poetry, Mickiewicz then started to improvise his lectures on Slavic and Polish lit­er­a­ture. For more on his lectures as prophetic per­ for­mances, see Halina Filipowicz, “Performing Mickiewicz: Drama as Prob­lem in Per­for­mance Studies,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 43, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 7–8, 13. 28. A ­ fter Mickiewicz, the only well-­known, although often criticized, improviser was Deotyma (Jadwiga Łuszczewska). The poet Maria Konopnicka improvised in the style of Mickiewicz on public occasions, but ­these cases ­were marginal. See Skwarczyńska, “Istota improwizacji.” See also Zofia Stefanowska, “Wielka—­tak, ale dlaczego improwizacja?,” in Próba zdrowego rozumu: Studia o Mickiewiczu (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1976), 71–86. 29. Skwarczyńska, “Istota improwizacji.” For more on the concept of applied lit­er­a­ture, see Wróbel, Hylé i noesis, 181–238. It included also conversations, letters, and diaries. See also Stefania Skwarczyńska, “O pojęcie literatury stosowanej,” Pamiętnik Literacki 28, no.  1–4 (1931): 1–24. For a more recent study of improvisation, see Iwona Puchalska, Improwizacja poetycka w kulturze polskiej XIX wieku na tle europejskim (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2012). In this book, improvisation is placed on the border between lit­er­a­ture and other arts. 30. Such an interpretation of the scene can be found in Stefanowska, “Wielka—­tak, ale dlaczego improwizacja?” For the scene itself, see, e.g., Adam Mickiewicz, Forefathers’ Eve, trans. Charles Kraszewski (London: Glagoslav, 2016), 206–217 (Part III, scene 2). 31. See, e.g., Kwiryna Ziemba, “Wielka improwizacja w świetle liryków Mic­ kiewicza z rękopisów III Części Dziadów,” Pamiętnik Literacki, no. 4 (2016): 7–40. 32. Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 79. Specifically, Miłosz writes h ­ ere about Polish poetry during World War II, presented as a Eu­ro­pean poet’s encounter with hell. 33. See a recorded lecture by Eugene Ostashevsky, “The Declamatory Mode,” September  13, 2011, The WPR Vocarium, Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University, https://­library​.­harvard​.­edu​/­sites​/­default​/­fi les​/­static​/­poetry​/­vocarium​ /­recordings​/­thinktank​_­declamatory​.­html. On the connection between mnemon-

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ics, memorization, and the survival of traditional metrical verse in Rus­sia, see also Mikhail Gronas, Cognitive Poetics and Cultural Memory: Rus­sian Literary Mnemon­ ics (New York: Routledge, 2011), 7–8, 71–96. 34. Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Rus­sia, Poland, and the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 124. 35. The widespread resignation from meter and rhymes, and the consequent disappearance of memorization and recitation, w ­ ere noted and criticized by the poet Antoni Słonimski in a program of the BBC Polish Section in 1970. Słonimski was surprised that this radical change in poetry’s circulation was not more broadly discussed by scholars and critics. “Antoni Słonimski o literaturze (cz. 4),” archival BBC broadcast, Radia Wolności, accessed May  5, 2021, https://­w ww​.­polskieradio​.­pl​/­68​ /­2461​/­Audio​/­287832,Antoni​-­Slonimski​-­o​-­literaturze​-­cz4. On changes in meter, see Lucylla Pszczołowska, Wiersz polski: Zarys history­czny (Wrocław: Fundacja na rzecz Nauki Polskiej and FUNNA, 2001), 355–356, 374–375. 36. Katarzyna Herbertowa, “Ze Zbigniewem Herbertem mój życiorys,” in Wierność: Wspomnienia o Zbigniewie Herbercie, ed. Anna Romaniuk (Warszawa: PWN, 2014), 135; Andrzej Franaszek, Herbert: Biografia, vol. 2: Pan Cogito (Kraków: Znak, 2018), 269. 37. Miłosz said as much at a poetry reading in Amer­i­ca, commenting on how long it took him to find poems he wanted to read, and contrasting himself with Rus­sian poets, who knew their poems by heart. See the recording from the Harvard Woodberry Poetry Room collection made on March 10, 1982, in Houghton Library, Harvard, no. PG 7158.M553 A6 1982bx, accessed May 4, 2021, The WPR Listening Booth, Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University, https://­library​ .­harvard​.­edu​/­sites​/­default​/­fi les​/­static​/­poetry​/­listeningbooth​/­poets​/­milosz​.­html. In an interview conducted in Wrocław in 1990 by the American poet and teacher Richard Chetwynd, Różewicz said he had to bring his book along ­because he did not know any of his poems by heart. On a dif­fer­ent occasion, Różewicz admitted he had learned some metrical poems by heart in the past, but had prob­lems memorizing free-­verse texts. See Wbrew sobie: Rozmowy z Tadeuszem Różewiczem, ed. Jan Stolarczyk (Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2011), 189, 333. 38. Peter Middleton’s impression inspired by W. H. Auden’s reading in 1969. See Peter Middleton, “How to Read a Reading of a Written Poem,” Oral Tradition 20, no. 1 (2005): 9. 39. Graphic construction of Polish ­free verse in the 1960s and the role of print are the main focus of Witold Sadowski, Wiersz wolny jako tekst graficzny (Kraków: Universitas, 2004). This does not mean, however, that metrical verse dis­appeared completely; it was indirectly or loosely referenced, and in recent de­ cades has been revived by some classically oriented con­temporary poets, for whom ­silent poetry on the page is not the default site of creation. For instance, Tomasz Różycki has admitted that he mutters or hums his texts while composing

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them, that he memorizes some lines in the pro­cess, that rhymes help him, and that all this is necessary in order to preserve a sense of meter. See Tomasz Różycki, “Najpierw są pomruki,” Tygodnik Powszechny, December 9, 2018, 73–74. In video recordings of the poet Anna Adamowicz, we can also see that she recites her poems from memory. 40. Ostashevsky, “The Declamatory Mode.” 41. Declamatory and theatrical recitations w ­ ere also distinguished in Rus­sian culture by Boris Eikhenbaum in the 1920s. The scholar associated actors with stage declamation and authors with less expressive, monotonous chamber declamation (though ­t hese characteristics did not apply to many Rus­sian poets of the time). For an En­glish discussion of Eikhenbaum, see Sabine Hänsgen, “Poetic Per­for­mance: Script and Voice,” in Staging the Image: Dmitry Prigov as Artist and Writer, ed. Gerald Janecek (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2018), 6–7. 42. This difference in style between Poland and Rus­sia is to some extent pre­sent in current poetry as well, though practices are gradually changing. See the readings from the Rus­sian portal OpenSpace, accessed January 31, 2021, http://­os​.­colta​ .­ru​/­literature​/­projects​/­75​/­. At the 2018 Miłosz Festival in Kraków, on June 8, the organizers, Olga Brzezińska and Krzysztof Siwczyk, who introduced the Rus­sian poet Maria Stepanova, recalled a very well received recitation by the poet Olga Sedakova from 2016, and admitted that it is a rarity for Poles to hear such melodic declamations performed from memory. 43. Bern­stein, “Introduction,” 10. 44. See Marit J. MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee M. Miller, “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Per­for­mance Styles of 100 American Poets,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (April 18, 2018): 3–7. 45. Allison, Bodies on the Line, xi–­x vii. 46. On the links between con­temporary reading styles and typical forms of  worship in Protestant churches, see Marit  J. MacArthur, “Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies,” PMLA 131, no. 1 (January 2016): 38–63. 47. E.g., Adam Zagajewski’s readings in Polish preserved some traces of the declamatory mode (I write more about him in Chapter 2). It is also impor­t ant to note that the first Polish slam was or­ga­n ized only in 2003. See “Grzegorz Bruszewski o slamie w Warszawie,” in Najlepszy poeta nigdy nie wygrywa: His­ toria slamu w Polsce, 2003–2012, ed. Agata Kołodziej (Kraków:  Hub Wydawniczy Rozdzielczość Chleba, 2013). Polish per­for­mance poets, and more generally some younger poets who are inspired by American per­for­mances, go away from the anti-­expressive mode. Their style is at the same time very dif­fer­ent from the Polish theatrical mode. 48. Brian Porter-­Szűcs, Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (Chichester: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2014), 299–300.

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49. Story told on the basis of Tara W. Merrigan’s article “Even When No One Is Looking,” The Harvard Crimson, October 2, 2012, https://­w ww​.­t hecrimson​.­com​ /­article​/­2012​/­10​/­2/​ s­ tanislaw​-­baranczak​/­​?­page​= s­ ingle 6/23/2018; and several conversations with Anna Barańczak, the latest on this topic having been on April 12, 2019. See also Anna Barańczak, Jerzy Illg, Joanna Niżyńska, and Wojciech Wołyński, “Ameryka Barańczaka widziana stamtąd,” in Ameryka Barańczaka, ed. Sylwia Karolak and Ewa Rajewska (Kraków: Universitas, 2018), 151–152. 50. See especially the essay “Zmieniony głos Settembriniego” (The Changed Voice of Settembrini) from 1975. Stanisław Barańczak, Etyka i poetyka (Kraków: Znak, 2009), 27–38. On changes in the awareness of Generation ’68 (from Marxism, avant-­garde, and utopia to self-­defense, solidarity, and citizen society), see Burska, Awangarda i inne złudzenia, 324, 288, 300–304. 51. See the CD Głosy poetów and Barańczak’s poetry reading at Harvard, tape archive of the Woodberry Poetry Room, no. PG7161.A67 A6 x, 1983. Barańczak was also recorded by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of Amer­i­ca in New York City. See their Sound Archives and Oral History Collection (nos. 246, 247). 52. Stanisław Barańczak, “Voice Coaching,” trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, Metamorphoses 7, no.  2 (1999): 112–115. For the Polish, see Stanisław Barańczak, “Ustawienie głosu,” in Stanisław Barańczak, Wiersze ze­ brane (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2014), 365–366. 53. For a further discussion of this poem, see Chapter 2. 54. On her recitations in Poland: Joanna Krakowska, Mikołajska: Teatr i PRL (Warszawa: WAB, 2011), 405. Her recitations of Barańczak’s poems appeared also on Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope in the late 1970s. “Audycja poetycka,” archival Radio ­Free Eu­rope broadcast, Radia Wolności, November 5, 1978, https://­w ww​.­polskieradio​ .­pl​/­68​/­2461​/A ­ udio​/­295611. 55. For the more usual examples of “sonic samizdat,” see J. Martin Daughtry, “ ‘Sonic Samizdat’: Situating Unofficial Recording in the Post-­Stalinist Soviet Union,” Poetics ­Today 30, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 27–65. For the Polish examples, see Andrea  F. Bohlman, Musical Solidarities: Po­ liti­ cal Action and ­ Music in Late Twentieth-­Century Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 56. In the Anglophone context, Jason Camlot discusses the evolution of T. S. Eliot’s reading style, which was modified to reflect his views of poetry and modernist verse. See chapter  4  in Jason Camlot, Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). 57. See, e.g., William Mills Todd III, Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1976), 23–25; Todd, Fic­ tion and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 58–60. On using poems in nineteenth-­ century Rus­sian social contexts, see Daria Khitrova, Lyric Complicity: Poetry and Readers in Rus­sia’s Golden Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019).

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58. For the role of urbanization and modernization in the alienation of art, and the subsequent responses of modern and avant-­garde authors, see Michał Paweł Markowski, Polska literatura nowoczesna: Leśmian, Schulz, Witkacy (Kra­ ków: Universitas, 2007), 24–26, 43–45 (for Poland); and Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-­Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, foreword by Jochen Schulte-­Sasse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 48–49 (for Eu­rope). Th ­ ese impor­tant models do apply to authors who responded to the changes in Poland, but the country’s ­limited modernization and history also left a decidedly unmodern trace on many cultural practices. 59. Piotr Rypson, “Mail Art in Poland,” in Mail Art: Osteuropa im internation­ alen Netzwerk / Eastern Eu­rope in International Network (Schwerin: Staatliches Museum Schwerin, 1996), 91; John Held, “Correspondence Art,” in The Grove En­ cyclopedia of American Art, ed. Joan Marter, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 558–559. See also Dorota Folga-­Januszewska, “Mail Time,” in Mail art czyli sztuka poczty, ed. Dorota Folga-­Januszewska and Piotr Rypson (Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, 1991), 11. 60. Jesper Olsson, “The Audiographic Impulse: ­Doing Lit­er­a­ture with the Tape Recorder,” in Audiobooks, Lit­er­a­ture, and Sound Studies, ed. Matthew Rubery (New York: Routledge, 2011), 63–68. 61. Lytle Shaw, Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 3, 7, 14. 62. Chris Mustazza, “Machine-­A ided Close Listening: Prosthetic Synaesthesia and the 3D Phonotext,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 12, no.  3 (2018); ­MacArthur et al., “Beyond Poet Voice,” 10. MacArthur et al. use dif­fer­ent software, not Praat, which I chose b ­ ecause it allowed me to si­mul­ta­neously look at pitch contours and play back selected fragments, thus confronting my impressionistic listening with computer calculations, training my ear, checking the contours, ­etc. For more on her software, see Marit MacArthur, “Introducing ­Simple Open-­Source Tools for Performative Speech Analy­sis: Gentle and Drift,” Jacket2, special issue Clipping, June 2, 2016, http://­jacket2​.­org​/­commentary​/­i n​ troducing​-­simple​-­open​-­source​-­tools​-­performative​-­speech​-­a nalysis​-­gentle​-­a nd​ -­drift. 63. On the basis of my research in the Polish Radio Archive in Warsaw, as well as comments from the CD Głosy poetów, stating that the published recordings of Bursa and Poświatowska are unique, and that no recording of Świrszczyńska reading poetry could be found. Świrszczyńska’s recording can, however, be found in the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw—­I analyze it in Chapter 4. 64. Piotr Bogalecki, “Lewą ręką: Polscy teoretycy poezji konkretnej jako kon­ kretyści (Józef Bujnowski, Tadeusz Sławek, Piotr Rypson),” Er(r)go: Teoria–­Literatura–­ Kultura 36, no. 1 (2018).

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65. See, e.g., Polish Radio Archive’s website, especially the sections on the years 1930 and 1940, and how l­ ittle was saved of prewar Lviv station’s recordings as well, accessed July  17, 2018, https://­w ww​.­polskieradio​.­pl​/­231​/­4 402​/­K siazka​ /­Rok1940. 66. See the editors’ discussion in the anthology of ­women’s poetry Solistki: An­ tologia poezji kobiet (1989–2009), ed. Maria Cyranowicz, Joanna Mueller, and Justyna Radczyńska (Warszawa: Staromiejski Dom Kultury, 2009); Julia Fiedorczuk, “Strangers in the Country of the Poet,” World Lit­er­a­ture T ­ oday 91, no.  1 (January 2017): 45–52. Compare with a controversial anthology of modern poetry, in which only one ­woman is included: Powiedzieć to inaczej: Polska liryka nowo­ czesna: Antologia, ed. Jerzy Borowczyk and Michał Larek (Poznań: WBPiCAK, 2011). 67. I discuss ­t hese issues in Chapters 1, 3, and 4. 68. The only poet I know of is the blind author Jadwiga Stańczakowa, who was encouraged to rec­ord herself by Białoszewski in the 1970s. I write more about them in Chapter 3. 69. On Szymborska and Miłosz: Bogdan Tosza, “Ślad ptaka na piasku,” in Zachwyt i rozpacz: Wspomnienia o Wisławie Szymborskiej, ed. Agnieszka Papieska (Warszawa: PWN, 2014), 433; Teresa Walas, “Stać między światem a Szymborską,” also in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 464. On Kamieńska: “Wspomnienie o Annie Kamieńskiej—­Zapiski ze współczesności,” 2001, archival Polish Radio program, http://­archiwum​.­nina​.­gov​.­pl​/­film​/­wspomnienie​-­o​-a­ nnie​-­kamienskiej​-1­ (the entire recording is available in the National Film Archive—Audiovisual Institute). On Białoszewski, see Chapter 3. 70. Ewa Lipska interviewed by Katarzyna Kubisiowska, “Daję radę,” Tygodnik Powszechny, August 4, 2019, 77–78. 71. Julie  A. Buckler, Julie  A. Cassiday, and Boris Wolfson, “Introduction: Thinking through Per­for­mance in Modern Rus­sian Culture,” in Rus­sian Per ­for­ mances: Word, Object, Action, ed. Julie A. Buckler, Julie A. Cassiday, and Boris Wolfson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), 16–19. See also Tomasz Kubikowski, “Performans według Marvina Carlsona,” in Marvin Carlson, Per­ formans, trans. Edyta Kubikowska (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2007), 5–15. 72. Richard Schechner, Per­for­mance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 29; Philip Auslander, Liveness: Per­for­mance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008). 73. Furr, Recorded Poetry, 12–13. 74. Bern­stein, “Introduction,” 8. 75. Richard Schechner and W. B. Worthen, “Foreword: Performing Rus­sia,” in Buckler, Cassiday, and Wolfson, Rus­sian Per­for­mances, xv; Schechner, Per­for­ mance Theory, 69.

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76. Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Derrida, ­Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 1–23. 77. Richard Schechner, Per­for­mance Studies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2013), 124–125. 78. Bern­stein, “Introduction,” 8. 79. Sophia Nguyen, “Poetry, Voiced,” Harvard Magazine, July–­August 2017, 35. 80. Aleksander Wat, Poezje zebrane, ed. Anna Micińska and Jan Zieliński (Kraków: Znak, 1992), 443, 547–548; Miron Białoszewski, Świat można jeść w każdym miejscu: Rozproszone i niepublikowane wiersze i kabarety, 1975–1983, ed. Maciej Byliniak and Marianna Sokołowska (Warszawa: PIW, 2017), 325, 329. 81. See, e.g., Wat, Poezje zebrane, 513–515. This is the tape I discuss in Chapter 4, also in its edited version.

1. Postwar Currents 1. On Tuwim’s emigration and his writing of Polish Flowers, see Tadeusz Januszewski, “Przedmowa,” in Julian Tuwim, Kwiaty polskie, ed. Tadeusz Januszewski (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 2005), 9. On Tuwim’s m ­ other, see Mariusz Urbanek, Tuwim: Wylękniony bluźnierca (Warszawa: Iskry, 2013), 198. For more on emigration, see Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 196, 197. On the ­family’s correspondence, see Julian Tuwim, Listy do Ireny i Juliana Sta­ wińskich, 1940–1952, mf 58205 and 58206  in the National Library in Warsaw, especially letters from May 8, 1942, and January 5, 1943. Tuwim’s ­sister, Irena Tuwim, is now mostly known for her 1938 Polish translation of Winnie the Pooh. For more information in En­glish, see the entries for “Julian Tuwim” and “­Children’s Lit­er­a­ture” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Eu­rope, accessed January 31, 2021, https://­y ivoencyclopedia​.­org​/­article​.­aspx​/­Tuwim​_­Julian. 2. Tuwim, Listy do Ireny i Juliana Stawińskich, June 11, 1942. Piotr Matywiecki also connects this feeling of guilt to the fact that before the war Tuwim, as a Polish-­ speaking assimilated Jew, had known very ­little about the Orthodox Jewish communities in Poland and had sometimes even expressed his understanding for certain forms of cultural and economic anti-­Semitism. See Piotr Matywiecki, Twarz Tuwima (Warszawa: WAB, 2007), 295–323. 3. Matywiecki, Twarz Tuwima, 259–260, 291–292; Michał Głowiński, “Wstęp,” in Julian Tuwim, Wiersze wybrane (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1964), vii–­v iii; Magnus Krynski, “Politics and Poetry: The Case of Julian Tuwim,” The Polish Review 18, no. 4 (1973): 5. 4. Matywiecki, Twarz Tuwima, 163, 164; Urbanek, Tuwim, 197; Krynski, “Politics and Poetry,” 13–14.

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5. Tuwim, Listy do Ireny i Juliana Stawińskich, December 24, 1943. In this letter, he won­ders if she has received his Christmas gift and calls it nice and original. 6. In Tuwim, Listy do Ireny i Juliana Stawińskich, December 24, 1943, we read that he spent Christmas Eve with his friends. When he was still a schoolboy, he spent his first earnings on a Christmas tree, something his f­amily had never bought. See Irena Tuwim, “Czarodziej,” in Wspomnienia o Julianie Tuwimie, ed. Wanda Jedlicka and Marian Toporowski (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1963), 12. Tuwim was brought up without religious education, but saw himself as interested in metaphysics: see Matywiecki, Twarz Tuwima, 316, 321–323; Zofia Starowieyska-­ Morstinowa, “Zjazd poetów,” in Jedlicka and Toporowski, Wspomnienia o Julianie Tuwimie, 165. 7. Information about New York City’s leading phonograph operators’ interest in new Voice-­O-­Graph machines in 1940, testing materials other than shellac to produce discs in 1941, and the continuing popularity of t­ hese machines in 1947, can be found in issues of Billboard magazine from February 24, 1940; January 8, 1941; September 20, 1947 (no authors given, articles: “Phono Ops View Voice-­O -­ Graph,” “New Pep For Rec­ords,” “Miss Voice-­O -­Graph,” respectively). On home recording and jukeboxes, see David L. Morton Jr., Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 98, 99. At that time, 78 rpm discs w ­ ere most commonly used; 45 rpm discs w ­ ere introduced ­later. 8. Krynski, “Politics and Poetry,” 20. On listening to the radio, see Tuwim, Listy do Ireny i Juliana Stawińskich, February 10, 1943. On Polish Radio, see Urbanek, Tuwim, 114. 9. A studio (or booth) is mentioned in Stefan Kruczkowski, “Sensacyjne nagrania z historii Polski w I połowie XX wieku,” Bibliotekarz, no.  7–8 (July–­ August 2020): 29. 10. A huge part of the recording is published online: “Posłuchaj! Julian Tuwim recytuje: ‘Czy pamiętasz, jak z tobą tańczyłem walca,’ ” Polskie Radio, accessed January 31, 2021, https://­www​.­polskieradio24​.­pl​/­13​/­53​/­Artykul​/­2367827,Posluchaj​-­Julian​ -­Tuwim​-­recytuje​-­Czy​-­pamietasz​-­jak​-­z​-­toba​-­tanczylem​-­walca. The Polish Radio website claims the recording was made in New York City for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and was broadcast as Christmas greetings for Poles, but no explanation for that is given. We know the BBC Polish Section was located in London rather than New York, and Tuwim’s greetings have a personal rather than public character. Moreover, it is hard to imagine that Christmas wishes would be broadcast in late November. The recording was also published on the CD Tuwimiasto (Warszawa: Czwórka Polskie Radio and Timof Comics, 2013). Copies of this recording can be found in the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ ture in Warsaw (hereafter cited as Museum of Lit­er­a­ture) (no. M.00008) and in the Polish Radio Archive (no.  8727 / 1), which received it a­ fter Tuwim’s death in 1954. The radio cata­log calls the recording “an audio postcard” sent by Tuwim to

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his s­ ister. Given the discs available at the time, it must have been a 78 rpm disc, ­either ten-­inch or twelve-­inch. The digitized archival radio copy is cleaned for broadcasting, but the museum copy preserves noises, which suggest a break (and a change of side) ­a fter around three minutes. Ten-­inch discs allowed approximately three minutes to be recorded on each side; for twelve-­inch discs it was four to five minutes. The archives of Julian Tuwim and Irena Tuwim are deposited in the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture, but no disc is preserved ­t here. On the history of discs, see Morton, Sound Recording, 41, 87, 92–93, 98. See also the Museum of Obsolete Media, accessed January  31, 2021, http://­w ww​ .­obsoletemedia​.­org​/­; and Phono-­Post (a research archive investigating the media archaeology of voicemail), accessed January 31, 2021, https://­w ww​.­phono​-p ­ ost​.­org​ /­. Some Polish sources suggest that Tuwim used a booth, but it seems hardly pos­ si­ble that it was an automatic coin-­operated booth, as they had a shorter recording time. See the brochure added to Tuwimiasto, 9. Compare vari­ous advertisements of booths at “1940–1957 Mutoscope Voice-­O-­Graph, 1960 Williams Voice-­O -­ Graph,” accessed January 31, 2021, http://­w ww​.p ­ inrepair​.c­ om​/a­ rcade​/­voice​.h ­ tm. On Chopin, see a note in Tuwim, Kwiaty polskie, 104. The quotes in Polish are “Moi Kochani” and “najserdeczniejsze.” Tuwim called his wishes “świąteczne,” a term that does not specify which holidays are meant, but “Święta” typically refers to two holidays only, Christmas and Easter, especially in more colloquial or secular contexts. 11. See a note in Tuwim, Kwiaty polskie, 104. 12. See Tuwim, Kwiaty polskie, 86, 90; translations are mine. Compare the  Polish: “Czy pamiętasz, jak z tobą tańczyłem walca, / Panno, madonno, ­legendo tych lat?” and “Czy pamiętasz, / jak z tobą / W ciemny las mego życia wkroczyłem—.” 13. See a note in Tuwim, Kwiaty polskie, 104. 14. Halina Kosskowa, “O Moim Szefie,” in Wspomnienia o Julianie Tuwimie, 254–255. 15. Kosskowa, “O Moim Szefie,” 254. 16. Januszewski, “Przedmowa,” 9–10. 17. Tuwim, Listy do Ireny i Juliana Stawińskich, December 17, 1941. 18. See Władysław Szlengel, “Dajcie mi spokój,” in Pieśń ujdzie cało . . . ​Anto­ logia wierszy o Żydach pod okupacją niemiecką, ed. Michał Borwicz (Warszawa: Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna w Polsce, 1947), 187–190; Matywiecki, Twarz Tuwima, 318–319. 19. Despite the ban, some Poles kept their radios and listened to foreign radio stations, especially the BBC Polish Section. An actress’s recitation of Antoni Słonimski’s poem “Alarm” was broadcast from France in late 1939. Paweł Mathia, “Kroki milowe techniki Polskiego Radia w latach 1925–2015,” in Polskie Radio—­ historia, program, technika (Warszawa: Polskie Radio SA and ASPRA-­JR, 2015), 91; Andrzej Siezieniewski, “Informacja i publicystyka,” in Polskie Radio—­historia,

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program, technika, 229; Kruczkowski, “Sensacyjne nagrania,” 27; Wspomnienia o Antonim Słonimskim, ed. Paweł Kądziela and Artur Międzyrzecki (Warszawa: Biblioteka Więzi, 1996), 16, 139, 345; “Głosy z roku 1939,” archival Polish Radio program, Polskie Radio, accessed July  26, 2020, https://­w ww​.­polskieradio​.­pl​/­8​ /­1594​/­Artykul​/­566730,Glosy​-z­ -​ ­roku​-­1939. 20. Jerzy Święch, Literatura polska w latach II wojny światowej (Warszawa: PWN, 1999), 33–35; Ryszard Matuszewski, “Wspomnienie o Julianie Tuwimie,” in Tuwim współczesny. Szkice o twórczości Juliana Tuwima, ed. Maria Makaruk (Warszawa: Wydział Polonistyki UW, 2015), 21; Czesław Miłosz, Conversations with Czesław Miłosz by Ewa Czarnecka and Aleksander Fiut, trans. Richard Lourie (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 85. 21. Michał Borwicz, untitled introduction, in Borwicz, Pieśń ujdzie cało, 14–38, comparison 10–11. 22. Matywiecki, Twarz Tuwima, 318–319. 23. This joy is mentioned in Tuwim, Listy do Ireny i Juliana Stawińskich, December 17, 1941; and Karolina Beylin, “Powrót do Warszawy,” in Wspomnienia o Julianie Tuwimie, 242–243. On the events, see Matuszewski, “Wspomnienie o Julianie Tuwimie,” 20–21. See also Józef Rurawski’s recollection from “Julian Tuwim—­ Anegdoty literackie,” archival Polish Radio program, Polskie Radio, accessed June 29, 2018, https://­www​.­polskieradio​.­pl​/­82​/­247​/­Artykul​/­1008130,Julian​-­Tuwim​-­Mam​-­talent​ -­jak​-­Slowacki​-­tylko​-n ­ ie​-­mam​-­nic​-d ­ o​-­powiedzenia; and Miłosz, Conversations with Czesław Miłosz by Ewa Czarnecka and Aleksander Fiut, 85. 24. Urbanek, Tuwim, 185. Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Lit­er­a­ture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 446. 25. See, e.g., Tuwim, Listy do Ireny i Juliana Stawińskich, December 17, 1941. 26. She was born Sonia Landau. While active in the Polish re­sis­tance she assumed the name Zofia Wiśniewska. ­Later, when she was arrested, she called herself Krystyna Żywulska. See Barbara Milewski, “Krystyna Żywulska,” ­Music and the Holocaust, accessed June 29, 2018, http://­holocaustmusic​.­ort​.­org. Żywulska never named the organ­ization she worked for; in her first book, the identity of her autobiographical narrator is presented as Polish and seems to be affiliated with the Polish Home Army; in her second book she mentions being accused by the Gestapo of being Jewish and a communist. She was also close to communism before the war. See Anna Zawadzka, “Świadkowanie świadkowaniu. Żydowskie narracje o polskich ‘świadkach’ Zagłady,” in Opowieść o niewinności: Kategoria świadka Zagłady w kulturze polskiej (1942–2015), ed. Maryla Hopfinger and Tomasz Żukowski (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2018), 281, 303. 27. See Krystyna Żywulska, “Modlitwa,” in Wspomnienia o Julianie Tuwimie, 231–234. In her text she calls Szlengel’s poem “Juno sind rund.” On that quote from the text, see Bożena Shallcross, The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-­ Jewish Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 144. See also Władysław Szlengel, “Kontratak,” in Borwicz, Pieśń ujdzie cało, 190–193. For the

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En­glish version, see Władysław Szlengel, “Counterattack,” trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, in Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto: Writing Our History, ed. David G. Roskies, foreword by Samuel D. Kassow (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 218–222. 28. Milewski, “Krystyna Żywulska.” See also Krystyna Żywulska, I Came Back (London: Dennis Dobson, 1951), 60; Przeżyłam Oświęcim (Warszawa: tCHu and Muzeum Auschwitz Birkenau, 2004), 62–63. 29. Żywulska, “Modlitwa,” 234–235. 30. Julian Tuwim, “The Prayer,” in Julian Tuwim, The Dancing Socrates and Other Poems, selected and trans. Adam Gillon (New York: Twayne, 1968), 52. 31. Tuwim, “The Prayer,” 53. 32. En­glish quotes from Tuwim, “The Prayer,” 54. 33. Żywulska, “Modlitwa,” 235–236. Żywulska remembered that only a few ­women had been appalled by the fragment about breaking commandments. In Miłosz’s war­t ime anthology the poem appears without t­ hese lines; Żywulska’s copy must therefore have come from a dif­fer­ent copy. See Pieśń niepodległa / The Invincible Song: A Clandestine Anthology, ed. Czesław Miłosz (Ann Arbor: Michi­ gan Slavic Publications, 1981) [reprint, originally published in Warsaw, 1942], 124. Miłosz censored ­t hese lines as he found them distasteful. See Czesław Miłosz and Aleksander Fiut, “Autoportret przekorny” (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003), 388. 34. Beylin, “Powrót do Warszawy,” 242. 35. Richard Ohmann, “Speech Acts and the Definition of Lit­er­a­ture,” Philos­ ophy and Rhe­toric 4, no. 1 (1971): 14–15. Ohmann’s definition of a work of lit­er­a­t ure is “a discourse whose sentences lack the illocutionary forces that would normally attach to them,” and an imitation of a series of speech acts. He notices that a work may change status from private non-­literature to lit­er­a­ture, and admits that the context decides about the status of lit­er­a­ture. Such cases are however called troublesome, and are the “bizarre” side effects of his definition. Ohmann also quotes J. L. Austin, who had initiated the study of speech acts and performatives, and who called lit­er­a­ture “parasitic” uses of language (page 13). An in­ter­est­ing argument in ­favor of looking at poems as both poems and acts of speech, especially when it comes to domestic verse and the Rus­sian Golden Age, can be found in Daria Khitrova’s book, Lyric Complicity: Poetry and Readers in the Golden Age of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), see especially page 25 and chapters “Lyric as Speech Act and Literary Fact” and “How to Do ­Things With Verse.” In his impor­tant study of poetry and prayer, to distinguish between the two, Jahan Ramazani focuses on the structure of written texts and their authors’ beliefs. Yet if we focus on the nature of subsequent per­for­mances and speech acts we can see that even the poems meant to be lit­er­a­ture can become prayers. Ramazani, Poetry and Its O ­ thers: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 131–136.

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36. Czesław Miłosz, “Introduction,” in Pieśń niepodległa / The Invincible Song, v–vi. 37. Borwicz, Pieśń ujdzie cało. 38. Zakazane piosenki, dir. Leonard Buczkowski, 1946 / 7. See Elżbieta Ostrowska, “Negotiating the Aesthetic: The Politics of Polish Postwar Cinema,” in Being Poland: A New History of Polish Lit­er­a­ture and Culture since 1918, ed. ­Tamara Trojanowska, Joanna Niżyńska, and Przemysław Czapliński, with the ­a ssistance of Agnieszka Polakowska (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 691. 39. Shallcross, The Holocaust Object, 7, 38–39. 40. Pod Picadorem was modeled on avant-­garde Rus­sian literary cafés, but authorial poetry per­for­mances w ­ ere also impor­tant for other Eu­ro­pean movements, such as Italian futurism or Swiss Dada. For a vivid En­glish description of Picador and their milieu, see Shore, Caviar and Ashes, 10–11, 22–23. See also Jadwiga Sawicka, Julian Tuwim (Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna, 1986), 89–94; Andrzej Makowiecki, Warszawskie kawiarnie literackie (Warszawa: Iskry 2013), 80–90, 94; and the recollections of Tadeusz Raabe in “W Ziemiańskiej i Pod Picadorem—­Finezje literackie,” archival Polish Radio program, NINATEKA, ­accessed January 31, 2021, http://­ninateka​.­pl​/­audio​/­fi nezje​-­l iterackie​-­1998​-­w​-­zie​ mianskiej​-­pod​-­picadorem​-­odc​-­1. On nineteenth-­century Warsaw salons, see Halina Goldberg, “Salons,” in ­Music in Chopin’s Warsaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). For more on the presence of literary salons in Kraków that continued to operate u ­ ntil the war­time years, see Anna Gabryś, Salony krakowskie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006). 41. Tomasz Weiss, “Wstęp,” in Tadeusz Żeleński Boy, Słówka, ed. and intro. Tomasz Weiss, notes by Ewa Miodońska-­Brookes and Jan Michalik (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1988), xl–­x lii, xlvii–­liv. 42. Alina Kowalczykowa, Programy i spory literackie w dwudziestoleciu (War­ szawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1978), 33–39, 46, 61–62, 212, 219, 226; Adela Kobelska, Miasto. Uniwersytet. Literaturoznawstwo: Poznań lat dwu­dzie­ stych i trzydziestych XX wieku jako przestrzeń działania członków Koła Polonistów (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2016), 136–137; Jagoda Hernik-­Spalińska, Wileńskie Środy Literackie (1927–1939) (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 1998), 47, 65, 77, 211. See also Czesław Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, trans. Louis Iribarne (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 15–17. 43. On Tuwim’s readings for Polish-American workers in 1942, see Urbanek, Tuwim, 193–194. On American readings by Tuwim, Kazimierz Wierzyński, and Józef Wittlin in 1941, see Beata Dorosz, Nowojorski pasjans: Polski Instytut Nau­ kowy w Ameryce, Jan Lechoń, Kazimierz Wierzyński (Warszawa: Biblioteka Więzi, 2013), 335–341. 44. “Kraków 422,” ed. Krystyna Szlaga, 1977, archival Radio Kraków program (no. T A / 1272 1272 in Radio Kraków Archive); Mathia, “Kroki milowe,” 89–90;

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Wacław Tkaczuk, “Literatura na antenie Polskiego Radia,” in Polskie Radio—­ historia, program, technika, 352–355. 45. Th ­ ese poets w ­ ere, for instance, Czesław Miłosz, Józef Czechowicz, Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, and Zuzanna Ginczanka. See Diana Poskuta-­Włodek, “Wczoraj i przedwczoraj Radia Kraków,” in Radio: Szanse i wyzwania: Materiały konferencji Kulturotwórcza rola Radia Kraków: Kraków 14–15 lutego 1997 (Kraków: Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury and Polskie Radio Kraków, 1997), 111; Tkaczuk, “Literatura na antenie Polskiego Radia,” 355; Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: A Biography, ed. and trans. Aleksandra and Michael Parker (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), 152–153, 166–167; Agata Araszkiewicz, Wypowiadam wam moje życie: Melancholia Zuzanny Ginczanki (Warszawa: Fundacja OŚKa, 2001), 15; Anna Arno, Niebezpieczny poeta: Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński (Kraków: Znak, 2013), 112–114. 46. Kruczkowski, “Sensacyjne nagrania,” 27. See also Tkaczuk, “Literatura na antenie Polskiego Radia,” 353. Radio Kraków began recording only in 1938 (information from a conversation with Jerzy Pawełczyk from the Radio Archive, December 22, 2017). 47. Makowiecki, Warszawskie kawiarnie literackie, 89–91; Hanna Faryna-­ Paszkiewicz, Opium życia: Niezwykła historia Marii Morskiej, muzy skaman­ drytów (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Jeden Świat, 2008), 22–27. 48. For news of t­ hese per­for­mances, see Kurjer Polski, February 6, 7, 9, 10, 15, 16, and 17, 1921. See also Krystyna Nowak-­Wolna, Dzieje sztuki recytatorskiej w Polsce (Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego, 1999), 96; Formiści 4 (1921): 10; Zofia Ordyńska, To już prawie sto lat. Pamiętnik aktorki (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1970), 174–180; Zbigniew Jarosiński, “Wstęp,” in Antologia polskiego futuryzmu i Nowej Sztuki, ed. Helena Zaworska, intro. Zbigniew Jarosiński (Wrocław: Ossoli­ neum, 1978), lxiii, xliv. 49. Zbigniew Osiński, Pamięć Reduty: Osterwa, Limanowski, Grotowski (Gdańsk: słowo / obraz terytoria, 2003), 564, 565. 50. E.g., Juliusz Osterwa and Stefan Jaracz, whose prewar recordings are preserved at the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture, nos. M.00088-­M.00100. See also Radjo: Ilus­ trowany tygodnik dla wszystkich (­later published ­under the title Antena: Ilustrowany tygodnik dla wszystkich), e.g., vol. 3, no. 3 (1928): 3; vol. 5, no. 26 (1930): 5; vol. 5, no. 35 (1930): 6; vol. 6, no. 5 (1931): 9; vol. 7, no. 5 (1932): 9; vol. 7, no. 17 (1932): 13. 51. Lidia Ignaczak, “Pod urokiem piosenki—­o twórczości Juliana Tuwima dla kabaretów, teatrów i filmu,” Czytanie Literatury: Łódzkie Studia Literaturoznawcze, no. 3 (2014): 84–85. 52. Sawicka, Julian Tuwim, 278, 286–289, 305, 310, 316. For more on cabarets, see Beth Holmgren, “The Polish-­Language Cabaret Song: Its Multi-­Ethnic Pedigree and Transnational Adventures, 1919–1968,” in Trojanowska et  al., Being Poland, 258–272.

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53. Such assessment of Tuwim’s recitation skills can also be found in Kazimierz Wierzyński, “Pamiętnik poety,” in Jan Lechoń and Kazimierz Wierzyński, Listy 1941–1956, ed. Beata Dorosz and Paweł Kądziela (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2016), 587. 54. I speak of a culture, as Tuwim’s friends and fellow poets seemed to share similar views even a­ fter the war. Antoni Słonimski complained that memorization and recitation of poems ­were disappearing. “Antoni Słonimski o literaturze (cz. 4),” archival BBC broadcast, Radia Wolności, accessed May 5, 2021, https://­w ww​ .­polskieradio​.­pl​/6­ 8​/­2461​/­Audio​/2­ 87832,Antoni​-­Slonimski​-­o-​ ­literaturze​-­cz4. Kazi­ mierz Wierzyński, who led his own radio program “Pamiętnik poetycki” ­after the war, frequently asked actors to read his poems on air. See, e.g., parts 32, 34, 36, Radia Wolności, archival Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope broadcast, accessed May 5, 2021, https://­w ww​ .­polskieradio​.­pl​/6­ 8​/­2461​/­Audio​/2­ 91130. 55. Anna Bikont and Joanna Szczęsna, Pamiątkowe rupiecie: Przyjaciele i sny Wisławy Szymborskiej (Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 1997), 85; Joanna Krakowska, Mikołajska: Teatr i PRL (Warszawa: WAB, 2011), 60. See also Miłosz’s recording from his visit to Kraków in 1981  in the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture, no. M.00794. 56. For more on Mickiewicz and Stalinism, see Stanley Bill, “The Splintering of a Myth: Polish Romantic Ideology in the Twentieth and Twentieth-­First Centuries,” in Trojanowska et al., Being Poland, 57–58. 57. See, for instance, Mariusz Urbanek, Broniewski: Miłość, wódka, polityka (Warszawa: Iskry, 2011), 258–260. 58. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage, 1990), 176. 59. ­There was a small radio station operating as early as 1944  in Soviet-­ liberated Lublin. Meanwhile, soldiers in the Warsaw Uprising set up a local radio station in Warsaw. Mathia, “Kroki milowe,” 91; Poskuta-­Włodek, “Wczoraj i przedwczoraj Radia Kraków,” 117. In the postwar period, tapes for radio ­were usually reused and not preserved. Recordings of Gałczyński w ­ ere saved not b ­ ecause their importance was institutionally recognized, but thanks to the efforts of one employee. I am grateful to Piotr Mitzner for this information. 60. See the article “Radiostacja w Raszynie—­sygnał od 1931 roku,” Polskie Radio, accessed July 4, 2018, https://­w ww​.­polskieradio​.­pl​/­39​/­156​/­Artykul​/­1448878,​ Radiostacja​-­w​-­Raszynie​-­sygnal​-­od​-­1931​-­roku. ­Here see archival Polish Radio program “Montaż z otwarcia radiostacji w Raszynie,” July 24, 1949. See also journal Radioamator 1, no. 7 / 8 (1951): 1; 1, no. 10 (1951): 1–2; 2, no. 1 (1952): 1–2; 10, no. 12 (1960): 353. 61. Arno, Niebezpieczny poeta, 275, 340–341, 355, 382, 392. The National Digital Archives in Warsaw has copies from Polish Radio; see recording no. 33-­T-956. The 1949 recording is also available in the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture, no. M.00003.

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62. See the cata­logs of the Polish Radio Archive. See also copies of recordings preserved at the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture, nos. 897–914. 63. See, e.g., Bohdan Zadura, “Jeden niezrozumiały wiersz,” Tygodnik Po­ wszechny, May 13, 2018, 75. The 1950s is also a de­cade from which audio recordings of Polish émigré poets have been preserved. See, e.g., the program “Głos wolnych pisarzy,” Radia Wolności, archival Radio ­Free Eu­rope program, accessed May 5, 2021, https://­w ww​.­polskieradio​.­pl​/­68​/­2461​/­Audio​/­306401; a note in Lechoń and Wierzyński, Listy 1941–1956, 191; and tapes in the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of Amer­i­ca. 64. Urbanek, Tuwim, 193–194. For the manifesto and quote, see Madeline G. Levine, “Julian Tuwim: ‘We, the Polish Jews . . . ,’ ” The Polish Review 17, no.  4 (1972): 85. 65. Urbanek, Tuwim, 235, 223, 217, 321–322. 66. Krynski, “Politics and Poetry,” 22–25; Urbanek, Tuwim, 235, 223, 217, 321– 322. For more on avoiding public events, see Matuszewski, “Wspomnienie o Julianie Tuwimie,” 23–24. See Tuwim’s recordings from 1952 and 1953, at the Museum of Lit­er­at­ ure. 67. Janusz Szpotański’s satirical “opera” Cisi i gęgacze was recited and sung at home meetings, and l­ater also recorded by the author. This work from 1964 led to Szpotański’s arrest in 1967 and three-­year imprisonment. He was especially known for imitating First Secretary Władysław Gomułka. More information, including Szpotański’s recitations and singing, can be found at the Polish Radio’s website Szpot, September  28, 2011, https://­w ww​.­polskieradio​.­pl​/­97,Szpot​/­1409, Dzwieki​-­strona​-­zbiorcza ​/­ . See also Makowiecki, Warszawskie kawiarnie literackie, 190. On liberalization of culture and new initiatives, see Brian Porter-­Szűcs, Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (Chichester: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2014), 237–239; Tkaczuk, “Literatura na antenie Polskiego Radia,” 353–354; Mathia, “Kroki milowe,” 95; Tadeusz Drewnowski, Literatura polska, 1944–1989: Próba scalenia, rev. ed. (Kraków: Universitas, 2004), 324–326. For an example of an official, politicized poetry reading from that era, see the recording of a 1965 event “Biesiada poetycka: Poeci w sali Hołdu Pruskiego,” recording no. DAT A / 588 A / 310 from the Radio Kraków archive. 68. Translation mine. Adam Zagajewski, “Kawa po turecku,” in Zachwyt i roz­ pacz: Wspomnienia o Wisławie Szymborskiej, ed. Agnieszka Papieska (Warszawa: PWN, 2014), 482. 69. Angelika Kuźniak and Ewelina Karpacz-­Oboładze, Czarny Anioł: Opo­ wieść o Ewie Demarczyk (Kraków: Znak, 2015). 70. Renata Radłowska, “  ‘Grande Valse Brillante’—­ t rochę fioletu, trochę sepii,” Gazeta Wyborcza, June 20, 2006, https://­k rakow​.­w yborcza​.­pl​/­k rakow​/­1,357​ 96,3428096​.­html. Initially, Mieczysław Święcicki sang the text at Opole Festival. See also the 1997 documentary film on Ewa Demarczyk, Panna Madonna legenda

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tych lat, dir. Janusz Filip Chodzewicz, produced by TVP SA; Kuźniak and Karpacz-­Oboładze, Czarny Anioł, 61–62. 71. Ewa Demarczyk śpiewa piosenki Zygmunta Koniecznego (Warszawa: Polskie Nagrania “Muza,” 1967). 72. The story told by Konieczny and the juxtaposition of Tuwim’s and Demar­ czyk’s per­for­mances can be found in Panna Madonna legenda tych lat, dir. Chodzewicz. 73. Monika Greenleaf presented inspiring observations on Demarczyk’s choice of texts, including Baczyński, in her talk “Voice and Voice-­Over: How Tsvetaeva’s Poems Sound and Behave in Rus­sian and Polish Song and Film,” AATSEEL Annual Conference, February 2, 2018. 74. Kuźniak and Karpacz-­Oboładze, Czarny Anioł, 95–96. 75. See the 2013 CD Tuwimiasto; see Kuźniak and Karpacz-­Oboładze, Czarny Anioł, 232. In Polish it was called “Dźwiękowa karta pocztowa.” See the rec­ord in Katalog Polskich Płyt Gramofonowych, accessed December 20, 2020, http://­w ww​ .­kppg​.­waw​.­pl​/­Strona%202019​/­etykiety​.­php​?­plyta​=­4140. 76. Kuźniak and Karpacz-­Oboładze in their Czarny Anioł mention that audio postcards from the 1970s ­were made without Demarczyk’s permission (p. 149). See also Mat Schulz, “Kultura 2.0: Pocztówki dźwiękowe,” Dwutygodnik, no. 10 (2011), https://­w ww​.­dwutygodnik ​.­com​/­a rtykul​/­2774​-­kultura​-­20​-­pocztowki​-­d zwiekowe​ .­html. The history of Soviet “sound letters” begins much e­arlier, in 1946. See J. Martin Daughtry, “Acoustic Palimpsests and the Politics of Listening,” ­Music and Politics 7, no. 1 (Winter 2013), https://­doi​.o ­ rg​/­10​.3­ 998​/­mp​.­9460447​.­0007​.1­ 01. 77. See Współczesna poezja polska: Wiersze wybrane czytają autorzy (Warszawa: Polskie Nagrania “Muza”). Th ­ ese w ­ ere relatively short 45 rpm rec­ords; some ­earlier ones w ­ ere even 33 rpm. According to the cata­logs of the National Library in Warsaw, the series ­were issued in 1965, 1968, and 1972. Each comprised six rec­ords. Jagiellonian Library in Kraków gives a more diverse range of dates between 1963 and 1970. 78. Polish Radio Archive, no.  8761 / 1 (June 8, 1961). Other broadcasts with Herbert: 1965, 1969, 1971, 1972. 79. Jacek Kopciński, “Radio, maska i oko wewnętrzne: ‘Rekonstrukcja poety’ Zbigniewa Herberta,” Pamiętnik Literacki 96, no. 1 (2005): 21–56. 80. Anna Polony, “W wawelskich klamrach,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 375–376; Andrzej Franaszek, Herbert: Biografia, vol.  2: Pan Cogito (Kraków: Znak, 2018), 375–376. 81. See Wisława Szymborska czyta wiersze z tomiku “Chwila” from the CD set Wisława Szymborska (Warszawa: Agora SA, 2010). 82. See, e.g., Franaszek, Herbert, 2:456, 473–475. 83. This description is based on a retransmission of the event “Artyści Warszawy dla Solidarności,” archival Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope broadcast, Radia Wolności, December 31,

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1982 (two parts), https://www.polskieradio.pl/68/2461/Audio/307136. See also Rafał Węgrzyniak, “Koncert Artyści Warszawy—­Solidarności,” Encyklopedia Teatru Polskiego, accessed August 24, 2017, http://­www​.­encyklopediateatru​.­pl​/­kalendarium​/­; and Krakowska, Mikołajska, 435. 84. The translations of the quotations come from Tuwim, The Dancing Socrates, trans. Adam Gillon, 52–53. 85. Porter-­Szűcs, Poland in the Modern World, 298–302. 86. Krzysztof Biedrzycki, “Przedmowa,” in Stanisław Barańczak, Etyka i po­ etyka (Kraków: Znak, 2009), 9–14; Drewnowski, Literatura polska, 1944–1989, 274–299; Siobhan Doucette, Books Are Weapons: The Polish Opposition Press and the Overthrow of Communism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). 87. Konrad Rokicki, “Salon Walendowskich,” Biuletyn IPN 4 (2004): 91–92; Jerzy S. Majewski, “40-­lecie KOR-­u. Mieszkania, w których zaczęła się rewolucja,” Gazeta Wyborcza: Magazyn Stołeczny, September  23, 2016, https://­warszawa​ .­w yborcza ​.­pl ​/­warszawa ​/­1,150427,20733575,40​-­lecie​-­kor​-­u​-­m ieszkania​-­w​-­k torych​ -­zaczela​-­sie​-­rewolucja​.­html. For more on under­ground salons, see Andrea  F. Bohlman, Musical Solidarities: Po­ liti­ cal Action and ­ Music in Late Twentieth-­ Century Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 85–86. 88. Maciej Rayzacher, “Poezje na indeksie,” Poza cenzurą: Dodatek do Rzecz­ pospolitej, May 16–17, 2009, 6–7; Krakowska, Mikołajska, 434. 89. Porter-­Szűcs, Poland in the Modern World, 306. 90. Małgorzata Stanula, “Tygodnie Kultury Chrześcijańskiej w Polsce (1975– 1993),” Fides 1–2 (1996): 99–109; Krakowska, Mikołajska, 461; Bohlman, Musical Solidarities, 43. On Herbert’s reading in Kraków: Józef Baran, “Rzeźbiarz metafor,” in Wierność: Wspomnienia o Zbigniewie Herbercie, ed. Anna Romaniuk (Warszawa: PWN, 2014), 367. On Kornel Filipowicz’s reading in Kraków: Wojciech Bonowicz, “Codziennie po trochę,” Tygodnik Powszechny, July  30, 2017, 59. 91. Justyna Błażejowska, “Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza NOWa,” Encyklopedia Solidarności, accessed July  12, 2018, http://­w ww​.e­ ncysol​.­pl​/­wiki​/­Nie​ zale%C5%BCna​_­Oficyna​_­Wydawnicza. See the lists of under­ground cassettes in “Polska Solidarna,” Sowiniec: Fundacja Centrum Dokumentacji Czynu Niepod­ ległościowego, accessed July  12, 2018, http://­w ww​.­sowiniec​.­com​.­pl; Leszek Jaranowski, “Niezależne publikacje fonograficzne podziemia solidarnościowego (1982–1989),” accessed July  12, 2018, http://­w ww​.­d arpoint​.­pl​/­pages​/­O ficyna​ %20fonograficzna​/­wojenne%20kasety%20audio​.­htm. See especially the cassettes: ­Bojkot: Aktorzy przeciwko stanowi wojennemu, ed. Jan Gall (Warszawa: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1983), ser. nk, no.  004; Przemek Gintrowski, Pamiątki (Warszawa: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1983), ser. nk, no. 008. Both (and ­others) available in the National Library in Warsaw.

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92. Natalia Popłonikowska, “Dziady w reżyserii Kazimierza Dejmka—­próba demitologizacji,” Acta Universitatis Lodziensis: Folia Litteraria Polonica 27 (2015): 111–113; Magdalena Raszewska, “Dziady,” Encyklopedia Teatru Polskiego, accessed July 7, 2018, http://­w ww​.e­ ncyklopediateatru​.­pl​/­przedstawienie​/­10935​/­dzi​ ady. 93. Krakowska, Mikołajska, 302, 405. 94. Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 191. On actors in other striking shipyards, see Krakowska, Mikołajska, 432. 95. See the cassette Bojkot: Aktorzy przeciwko stanowi wojennemu. 96. Franaszek, Herbert, 2:533, 537. 97. Franaszek, Miłosz, 416, 430–437. 98. Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Rus­sia, Poland, and the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 262; Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 198. 99. Człowiek z żelaza, dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1981. 100. Rec­ord Czesław Miłosz: Doktor honoris causa, Lublin 10–12.6.1981 (Viersen: Aulos, 1981), available in the National Library in Warsaw; recording no. M.00794 from the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture; Franaszek, Miłosz, 430–437. 101. Miłosz and Fiut, “Autoportret przekorny,” 330; Franaszek, Miłosz, 431. 102. Recording no. M.00794 from the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture. 103. Franaszek, Miłosz, 437. 104. Miłosz’s and actors’ readings: Czesław Miłosz: Doktor honoris causa. On actors’ recitals of Miłosz’s poems a­ fter the ceremony: Franaszek, Miłosz, 433. 105. Franaszek, Herbert, 2:540. 106. Franaszek, Herbert, 2:540, 561–564. 107. Gintrowski, Pamiątki. For more on the controversies surrounding a Warsaw theater’s per­for­mance of Herbert’s texts and his final consent, see Zbigniew Herbert and Jerzy Turowicz, Korespondencja (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2005), 217. 108. CD, Zbigniew Herbert w Poznaniu 11 grudnia 1984 roku, added to Zbigniew Herbert, Wiersze wybrane (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2017); Baran, “Rzeźbiarz metafor,” 368. 109. On Świetlicki, Sosnowski, and Dycki, see Wioletta Grzegorzewska and Marek Kazimierski, “A Transformation in Verse: Reconnaissance of Developments in Polish Poetry since 1989,” in Polish Lit­er­a­ture in Transformation, ed. Ursula Phillips, with the assistance of Knut Andreas Grimstad and Kris Van Heuckelom (Zürich: Lit, 2013): 251–264; Joanna Niżyńska, “The Impossibility of Shrugging One’s Shoulders: O’Harists, O’Ha­ra, and Post-1989 Polish Poetry,” Slavic Review 66, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 463; Piotr Śliwiński, “Polish Twentieth-­C entury Poetry,” in

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Trojanowska et  al., Being Poland, 464. See also Andrew Wachtel, Remaining Relevant ­after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Eu­rope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). See Świetlicki’s CD, advertised as an audiobook: Marcin Świetlicki, Drobna zmiana: Audiobook (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2017); Sosnowski’s recordings with the band the Chain Smokers; and Dycki’s CD included with the book by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-­D ycki, Oddam wiersze w dobre ręce (Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2010). See the articles: Jacek Gutorow, “Mutacja,” Adam Poprawa, “O tym Sosnowskim, jak się mówi,” Marta Koronkiewicz, “Wszystkie ciała Sosnowskiego,” and Karolina Felberg, “Andrzej Sosnowski: Pozycje,” all in Wiersze na głos: Szkice o twórczości Andrzeja Sos­ nowskiego, ed. Piotr Śliwiński (Poznań: WBPiCAK, 2010). On the Chain Smokers, see Andrzej Sosnowski, “Interpretacyjna improwizacja (wywiad Małgorzaty Iwanek),” Popmoderna, September 10, 2012, https://­popmoderna​.­pl​/­w ywiad​-­a ndrzej​ -­sosnowski​/­. 110. See “Noc poetów: Festiwal Literacki Warszawa Pisarzy—­Finezje literackie,” archival Polish Radio program, accessed January  31, 2021, http://­archiwum​.­nina​ .­gov​.­pl​/­en​/­fi lm​/­noc​-­poetow​-­festiwal​-­literacki​-­warszawa​-­pisarzy​-­1 (the ­whole recording is available in the National Film Archive—Audiovisual Institute). 111. Materials from the Radio Kraków archive show that the majority of poets who appeared on the CD Głosy poetów, ed. Romana Bobrowska (Kraków: Polskie Radio Kraków, 1997), had to be recorded for that purpose. See “Głosy poetów—­ materiały,” parts 1–4, no. A 3158 DAT 1564, 1565, 1566, 1567. See also Zbigniew Her­ bert czyta swoje wiersze (Kraków: Radio Kraków, 1998); Tadeusz Różewicz czyta swoje wiersze (Kraków: Radio Kraków, 1998); Nobel ’96: Wisława Szymborska czyta swoje wiersze (Kraków: Radio Kraków, 1996). All CDs w ­ ere edited by Romana Bobrowska. For Miłosz’s recording, see Czesław Miłosz czyta Mickiewicza: Czesław Miłosz czyta Miłosza, 2 CDs (Warszawa: CD Accord, 1996). Another impor­tant CD series, included with l­imited editions of poems by canonical authors, has been issued since 2014 by the a5 publishing ­house. 112. Cata­logs of Polish Radio Archive in Warsaw. Actors’ readings appeared, for example, during ceremonies for the Gdynia Literary Award and the Silesius Poetry Award. 113. Such views and information on recitation training and contests can be found in recent works like Krystyna Nowak-­Wolna, W kręgu edukacji, teatru i ­sztuki żywego słowa: Studia i szkice (Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego, 2005); and Problematyka tekstu głosowo interpretowanego, ed. Katarzyna Lange, Władysław Sawrycki, and Paweł Tański (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2004). 114. For example, the band Akurat and their song “Do prostego człowieka,” or the band Hańba! and their song “Żandarm.” 115. Dorota Kozińska, “Czarny Anioł, choć białoskrzydły,” Tygodnik Powszechny, August 23, 2020, 11.

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116. The print-­based functioning of Gombrowicz and Białoszewski, only recently confronted with recordings, is mentioned by Dominik Antonik, “Dźwięki: Pisarz mówi,” Dwutygodnik 10 (2015), http://­w ww​.­dwutygodnik ​.­com​ /­artykul​/­6171​-­dzwieki​-­pisarz​-­mowi​.­html. From private conversations I know of the surprise some scholars have felt a­ fter hearing the voices of Białoszewski and Wat for the first time in recent years. 117. See Anna Legeżyńska, Od kochanki do psalmistki . . . ​Sylwetki, tematy i konwencje liryki kobiecej (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2009). On changes in reception, see “Halina Poświatowska—­Życie na miarę literatury: Rozmowy po zmroku,” archival Polish Radio program, Polskie Radio, accessed July  25, 2018, https://­w ww​ .­p olskieradio​ .­pl​ /­8​ /­2 843​ /­A rtykul​ /­1 132898,Halina​ -­Poswiatowska​ -­ciekawosc​-­swiata​-­silniejsza​-­niz​-­chec​-­z ycia. The power of the ste­reo­t ype is especially vis­i­ble in numerous popu­lar editions of w ­ omen’s poetry, which focus on love lyr­ics and frequently have covers with pink or red motifs. See se­lections from Poświatowska titled Elementarz Haliny Poświatowskiej dla szczęśliwych i nieszczęśliwych kochanków; Miłość to Ty; and właśnie kocham . . . ​ / indeed I love . . . 118. Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (Or, How to Listen to the World) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 33, 35. 119. Krakowska, Mikołajska, 13, 95, 43. Miłosz famously claimed that Demar­ czyk’s LP was sentimental and kitschy. Kuźniak and Karpacz-­Oboładze, Czarny Anioł, 101. 120. See the series Współczesna poezja polska. 121. See the poems “moim głównym zajęciem jest malowanie brwi . . .” (“my main pastime is penciling my eyebrows . . .”) in Halina Poświatowska, właśnie ko­ cham . . . ​ / indeed I love . . . ​, trans. Ma­ya Peretz, afterword Anna Nasiłowska (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1997), 66–67. 122. For the recording and its date, see the CD Głosy poetów and materials from the archive of Radio Kraków. Copies of the recording appear also on YouTube. For the circumstances surrounding the recording, see Kalina Błażejowska, Uparte serce: Biografia Poświatowskiej (Kraków: Znak, 2014), 151, 340. For Poświatowska’s poems in translation and basic biography in En­ g lish, see Poświatowska, właśnie kocham . . . ​ / indeed I love . . . ​In the cata­log of the Polish Radio archive in Warsaw, a 1959 recording of the poet Mieczysława Buczkówna is registered. Th ­ ere might be also some other less-­k nown recordings of w ­ omen from that time. 123. Błażejowska, Uparte serce, 211, 258, 284–285. On her experiences as a student, see her autobiographical book Halina Poświatowska, Opowieść dla przyja­ ciela (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000). 124. See “Halina Poświatowska—­Życie na miarę literatury.” The ­u ncle’s name was Henry Fiedorowicz (his wife was a cousin of Poświatowska’s f­ather). See Błażejowska, Uparte serce, 114, 151.

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125. See the untitled poems “w jadowitym brzęku . . .” and “zgarnij mnie oczy­ma,” in Halina Poświatowska, Wszystkie wiersze (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000), 147, 254. The first poem is much shorter in print than in her recording, it also has a dif­fer­ent beginning. 126. Translation mine, quote based on audio recording. In Polish: “jakbym w dłoń zaciskała motyla / trzepiesz skrzydłami moich złotych nadziei.” 127. Translation mine. See Poświatowska, Wszystkie wiersze, 147. In Polish: “jakby motyl trzepotał w dłoni / uwięziony i ślepy.” 128. “ ja minę, ty miniesz . . . ”: in O Halinie Poświatowskiej wspomnienia, listy, wiersze, ed. Mariola Pryzwan (Warszawa: EM-­K A, 1994), 80, 83, 85, 86, 115, 127, 170, 182, 226. 129. For more on her voice, see Anna Wenglarzy, “Związki z muzyką i ‘muzycznością’ w poezji Haliny Poświatowskiej,” Pamiętnik Literacki, no. 4 (2012): 171. On the shrill and technology, see, e.g., Tina Tallon, “A ­Century of ‘Shrill’: How Bias in Technology Has Hurt ­Women’s Voices,” New Yorker, September 3, 2019, https://­w ww​.n ­ ewyorker​.­com​/­culture​/­cultural​-­comment​/­a​-c­ entury​-o ­ f​-­shrill​-h ­ ow​ -­bias​-­in​-­technology​-­has​-­hurt​-­womens​-­voices.

2. Intonation in Exile 1. Translation mine. Zygmunt Hertz, Listy do Czesława Miłosza, 1952–1979, ed. Renata Gorczyńska (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1992), 49. In this edition the letter is dated November 20, but the original text does not have any date; when I did my research in January 2018, the piece of paper in which the letter was held said: November 14. For this and other letters from Hertz, see Czesław Miłosz Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (hereafter cited as Beinecke Library), GEN MSS 661, box 26 (Zygmunt and Zofia Hertz), folders 412, 413, 417. All box numbers given on the basis of archival research in the Beinecke Library in January 2018. 2. Translation mine. See Hertz, Listy do Czesława Miłosza, 61, 66 (card, January 17, 1961; letter, March 7, 1961). 3. Translations mine. Hertz, Listy do Czesława Miłosza, 66. 4. Hertz, Listy do Czesława Miłosza, 217 (letter, June 20, 1965). 5. See Hertz, Listy do Czesława Miłosza, 61–73 (in this edition their order seems to be changed compared with Hertz’s undated letter from April 1961 and letters from April 30, May 4, and May 12, 1961, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 661, box 26, folder 413). 6. Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: A Biography, ed. and trans. Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), 428. Compare with Hertz’s letters, April  28, 1965, and June  10, 1965.

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7. Translation mine. Jerzy Giedroyc and Czesław Miłosz, Listy 1952–1963, ed. Marek Kornat (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 2008), 474 (Miłosz’s letter, December  30, 1960). 8. Giedroyc and Miłosz, Listy 1952–1963, 525 (Miłosz’s letter, October 11, 1961). On the 1970s, see Hertz’s letter to Miłosz, February  15, 1975, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 661, box 27, folder 427. 9. See recordings nos. 33-­T-7107 / 1 and 33-­T-7107 / 2 in the National Digital Archives attributed to the Institute of Literary Research (IBL) in Warsaw; and a notebook in special collections library in IBL mentioning copies made for the Institute in 1974. See Czesław Miłosz, “Poetry Reading: Se­lections from Ocalenie and Swiatlo dzienne,” Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University, PG7158. M553 A6 1950zx, and the same reading online, “Poetry Reading (Undated),” accessed January 31, 2021, https://­library​.­harvard​.­edu​/­sites​/­default​/fi ­ les​/­static​/­poetry​/­listening​ booth​/­poets​/­m ilosz​.­html. See cata­logs of recordings in the Adam Mic­k iewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw (hereafter cited as Museum of Lit­er­a­ture); a cassette from the 1980s in special collections of IBL; and a home recording from the 1970s, available online, published by the Polish Book Institute on YouTube, accessed August 14, 2018, http://­milosz​.­instytutksiazki​.­pl​/m ­ ​/­pl,multimedia​.­php. It includes a few metrical poems and “Mittelbergheim.” 10. For more on Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope, see Chapter  4. Rec­ord a­ lbum, Czesław Miłosz: Doktor honoris causa, Lublin 10–12.6.1981 (Viersen: Aulos, 1981), available in the National Library in Warsaw. See also other unpublished recordings—­e.g., nos. M.00794 and M.00759—­from the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture. 11. Czesław Miłosz czyta Mickiewicza: Czesław Miłosz czyta Miłosza, 2 CDs (Warszawa: CD Accord, 1996). See also Czesław Miłosz, Antologia osobista (Kraków: Znak, 1998), accompanied by cassettes. 12. Franaszek, Miłosz, 285. 13. Czesław Miłosz, New and Collected Poems (1931–2001) (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 336 (“A Magic Mountain”). 14. Franaszek, Miłosz, 293, 379. 15. Franaszek, Miłosz, 379. 16. Translation mine. Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz, “Korespondencja,” ed. Ryszard Nycz and Jerzy Jarzębski, Teksty Drugie, no. 1–2 (1992): 210 (letter, February 8, 1968). 17. Quote from Bartosz Małczyński, “Wstęp,” in Tymoteusz Karpowicz, Utwory poetyckie (wybór), ed. Bartosz Małczyński (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 2014), xxiv. Translation mine. 18. Franaszek, Miłosz, 301. 19. On his attitude to American Poles, see Franaszek, Miłosz, 377–378, and Beata Dorosz, “Czesław Miłosz in the Context of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in Amer­ic­ a,” The Polish Review 56, no. 4 (2011): 317–318. On his relations

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with immigrants and their characteristics when he was still an attaché, see Ewa Kołodziejczyk, Amerykańskie powojnie Czesława Miłosza (Warszawa: Wydaw­ nictwo IBL PAN, 2015), 99–107. For more on Miłosz’s prob­lems with obtaining a visa, the suspicion t­oward him as a communist, and the small attendance at his readings, see the Polish edition of Franaszek’s biography: Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: Biografia (Kraków: Znak, 2011), 483–484, 613, 666, 888. On not being the diaspora’s poet, see Czesław Miłosz and Aleksander Fiut, “Autoportret przekorny” (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003), 329. 20. Jerzy Giedroyc and Czesław Miłosz, Listy 1964–1972, ed. Marek Kornat (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 2011), 446 (Miłosz’s letter, March 13, 1971). 21. Giedroyc and Miłosz, Listy 1964–1972, 379, 400 (Giedroyc’s letters, July 29, 1970, and October 13, 1970). 22. Jerzy Giedroyc and Czesław Miłosz, Listy 1973–2000, ed. Marek Kornat (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 2012), 6 (Miłosz’s letter, January 23, 1973). 23. Giedroyc and Miłosz, Listy 1964–1972, 506–507 (Miłosz’s letter, March  25, 1972). 24. Giedroyc and Miłosz, Listy 1964–1972, 446–447, 549 (Miłosz’s letters, March 13, 1971, and October 30, 1972). On translators not including émigré authors in order to maintain contacts with Poland, see Bożena Karwowska, Miłosz i Brodski: Recepcja krytyczna twórczości w krajach anglojęzycznych (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL, 2000), 24–25. 25. Gombrowicz and Miłosz, “Korespondencja,” 217 (Miłosz’s letter to Gombrowicz, January 17, 1969). 26. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 245–246. 27. Czesław Miłosz, “Notes on Exile,” Books Abroad 50, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 284. 28. Compare Postwar Polish Poetry, expanded ed., ed. Czesław Miłosz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Zbigniew Herbert, Selected Poems, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1968). 29. Czesław Miłosz, Selected Poems, trans. several hands, intro. Kenneth Rexroth (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). See Giedroyc and Miłosz, Listy 1973– 2000, 106 (Miłosz’s letter, December 23, 1974). 30. Giedroyc and Miłosz, Listy 1973–2000, 74 (Miłosz’s letter, March 10, 1974). 31. On Herbert, see Miłosz and Fiut, “Autoportret przekorny,” 395. On his poems, hear Miłosz’s commentary from the beginning of his reading at Harvard: Czesław Miłosz, “Poetry Reading,” March 10, 1982, Houghton Library, Harvard University, no. PG7158.M553 A6 1982bx, available online as “Poetry Reading (1982),” Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University, https://­library​.­harvard​.­edu​/­sites​/­default​ /­fi les​/­static​/­poetry​/­listeningbooth​/­poets​/­milosz​.­html. 32. See Miłosz and Fiut, “Autoportret przekorny,” 391–392, 322. Compare Miłosz’s New and Collected Poems with Czesław Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie (Kraków: Znak, 2011).

NOTE S TO PAGE S 80– 82

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33. Translation mine. Giedroyc and Miłosz, Listy 1973–2000, 106 (Miłosz’s letter, December 23, 1974). 34. Giedroyc and Miłosz, Listy 1973–2000, 106 (Miłosz’s letter, December  23, 1974). 35. Czesław Miłosz, “Poetry Reading,” December 17, 1974, Guggenheim Museum, sponsored by the Acad­emy of American Poets, cassette copy no. PG7158.M553 A6 x, 1974, Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University. 36. Irena Grudzińska-­Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 249, 250. 37. Karwowska, Miłosz i Brodski, 123, 46. 38. Magda Heydel, Gorliwość tłumacza: Przekład poetycki w twórczości Czesława Miłosza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2013), 224–226. 39. ­Until he received the Nobel Prize, they ­were not well attended. Franaszek, Miłosz, 404. 40. See Andrzej Franaszek, Herbert: Biografia, vol. 2: Pan Cogito (Kraków: Znak, 2018), 234–237. For recording from Lincoln Center on June 26, 1968, see “75 at 75: Clare Cavanagh on Czesław Miłosz,” 92Y, accessed July  28, 2018, http://­ 92yondemand​.­org​/­75​-­at​-­75​-­clare​-c­ avanagh​-­on​-­czeslaw​-­milosz. Even e­ arlier, in 1964, he read his poems in Polish and En­glish at a Lithuanian émigré congress at a farm in Michigan. See Czesław Miłosz and Konstanty Jeleński, Korespondencja (Warszawa: Fundacja Zeszytów Literackich, 2011), 48–50. 41. Franaszek, Herbert, 2:233. 42. Franaszek, Herbert, 2:234. 43. The two Herbert poems read by Miłosz w ­ ere “At the Gates of the Valley” and “Inner Voice.” 44. I studied the following recordings of public readings by Miłosz from the collection of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University: December 17, 1974, Guggenheim Museum, Acad­emy of American Poets, no. PG 7158.M553 A6x 1974; October 17, 1978, Acad­emy of American Poets, no. PG 7158.M553 A6x 1978; October 19, 1981, Modern Language Center, Boylston Hall, Harvard, Norton Lecturer, no. PG 7158.M553 A6x 1981; March  10, 1982, Houghton Library, Harvard, New E ­ ngland Poetry Club, no. PG 7158.M553 A6 1982bx (and online); September 23, 1982, Donnell Library, Acad­emy of American Poets, Biddle Memorial Lecture, no. PG 7158.M553 A6x 1982; October 5, 1986, Hirschhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, cassette Czesław Miłosz, Fire (Washington, DC: Watershed Tapes, 1987), no. CASS L 891.92 M661 2#1; September 12, 1988, Los Angeles Theater Center, videocassette from Lannan Literary Videos, Czesław Miłosz (Los Angeles: Lannan Foundation, 1989), no. PG7158 .M553 A6 1989x; April 23, 1992, Emerson Hall, Harvard, no. PG 7158.M553 A6 1992x (and online); March  26, 1998, videocassette from Lannan Literary Videos, Czesław Miłosz: Reading by Czesław Miłosz: Conversation with Helen Vendler (Berkeley, CA:

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Lannan Foundation; Santa Fe, NM: Thunder Road Productions, 2001), no. PG7158.M553 A5 2001. And from the Library of Congress: December  5, 1991, Montpelier Room, Library of Congress, accessed August 2, 2018, https://­w ww​.­loc​ .­gov​/­item​/9­ 2759988​/­; April  3, 1997, Montpelier Room, Library of Congress, accessed August 2, 2018, https://­w ww​.­loc​.­gov​/i­ tem​/­97702039​/­. 45. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 182. 46. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 275, 458. 47. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 196. 48. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 249. 49. Miłosz and Fiut, “Autoportret przekorny,” 322–323. 50. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 393–394. On Miłosz’s interpretation of the text, see Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 8–10. 51. Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-­Definition, trans. Catherine S. Leach (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968). 52. Grudzińska-­Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky, 12. 53. Grudzińska-­Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky, 16. 54. Miłosz and Fiut, “Autoportret przekorny,” 169, 171, 175. 55. Grudzińska-­Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky, 16. 56. Franaszek, Miłosz, 45–47. 57. Franaszek, Miłosz, 167. 58. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 245. 59. On the weak critical interest in the book in the 1970s, see Karwowska, Miłosz i Brodski, 26. 60. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 10. 61. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 188, 207–208 (the latter is a fragment of “Throughout Our Lands”). I know only one other recorded poetry reading when Miłosz read “Cabeza” (October 17, 1978, Acad­emy of American Poets), and one when he read “I Sleep a Lot” (December 17, 1974, Guggenheim Museum, Acad­emy of American Poets). 62. “75 at 75: Clare Cavanagh on Czesław Miłosz.” 63. Karwowska shows how even the construction and se­lection of Selected Poems from 1973 contributed to such a view of the poet instead of undermining it. Karwowska, Miłosz i Brodski, 32–33. 64. Franaszek, Herbert, 2:235–236. 65. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 254. 66. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 156. 67. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 183. 68. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 524. 69. Miłosz, “Poetry Reading (1992),” Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University, https://­library​.­harvard​.e­ du​/­sites​/­default​/fi ­ les​/­static​/­poetry​/­listeningbooth​ /­poets​/m ­ ilosz​.­html.

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70. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 56. 71. See Karwowska, Miłosz i Brodski, 46. 72. Marek Klus, “Czesław Miłosz in Toronto,” in Between Anxiety and Hope: The Poetry and Writing of Czesław Miłosz, ed. Edward Możejko (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1988), 167. 73. Klus, “Czesław Miłosz in Toronto,” 166–170; Edward Możejko, “Miłosz in Edmonton,” in Możejko, Between Anxiety and Hope, 171. See also Giedroyc and Miłosz, Listy 1973–2000, 74; Giedroyc and Miłosz, Listy 1964–1972, 399, 404, 501. 74. December  17, 1974, Guggenheim Museum, Acad­emy of American Poets; October 17, 1978, Acad­emy of American Poets. On 1977, see Klus, “Czesław Miłosz in Toronto,” 167. 75. For online versions of the readings from the 1960s and 1980s, see “Poetry Reading (Undated)” and “Poetry Reading (1982),” https://­l ibrary​.­harvard​.­edu​ /­sites​/­default​/­files​/­static​/­poetry​/­listeningbooth​/­poets​/­milosz​.­html. See also the recordings nos. 33-T-7107/1 and 33-T-7107/2 in the National Digital Archives. Cassettes accompanied Antologia osobista. I use a copy from the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture. 76. An intonation unit or intonational phrase can have more changes of pitch, but the word perceived as most prominent (usually the final one) determines the direction of intonation. In some cases this crucial word might not be the last stressed word, but an ­earlier, semantically impor­tant one. In Polish, more often than in En­glish, it is just the last word that determines this. See Grażyna Demenko, Analiza cech suprasegmentalnych języka polskiego na potrzeby technologii mowy (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza, 1999), 56–58, 78–94, 117, 187–188. H ­ ere and elsewhere I try to reflect current phonological knowledge without references to specific terminology, which would require further explanations for lay readers and which often significantly differs between dif­ fer­ent models of intonation. For example, ToBI is frequently used to describe intonation in English, and intonation phrase would be described to have a sequence of basic tones: a pitch accent, phrase accent, and a boundary tone. The British school would speak, however, of more complex tunes, like a rise-­fall. Moreover, in other contexts “pitch accent” can refer to phenomena not related to intonation. See, for instance, Amalia Arvaniti, “The Repre­sen­ta­t ion of Intonation” and Harry van der Hulst, “Pitch Accent Systems,” both in The Blackwell Companion to Pho­ nology, ed. Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, and Keren Rice, vol. 2: Suprasegmental and Prosodic Phonology (Chichester, UK: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2011), 757–780; 1003–1026; Caroline Féry, Intonation and Prosodic Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 119, 125. 77. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 56. Polish: Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 206. 78. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 56. Polish: Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 206. 79. See Stanisław Balbus, “ ‘Pierwszy ruch jest śpiewanie’ (O wierszu Miłosza rozpoznanie wstępne),” in Poznawanie Miłosza: Studia i szkice o twórczości poety, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 485.

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80. Magdalena Heydel, Obecność T. S. Eliota w literaturze polskiej (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego and Monografie FNP, 2002), 53–58. 81. This is Magdalena Heydel’s reading from Obecność T. S. Eliota. 82. Marek Zaleski, “Piosenki niewinności i doświadczenia,” Teksty Drugie, no. 1–2 (1991): 93. 83. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 196. On the basis of the Harvard recording from March 10, 1982, Houghton Library Harvard, New ­England Poetry Club. 84. The program can be downloaded from the website http://­w ww​.­fon​.­hum​ .­uva​.­n l​/­praat​/­. In the figures the exact settings and mea­sure­ments are not vis­i­ble for cleaner pre­sen­ta­tion. It should be noted that the settings w ­ ere chosen for each recording, so the figures should not be directly compared. For instance, for Miłosz’s recording from the 1960s, the pitch range I used in Praat began at 30 Hz rather than the more common 75  Hz ­because the pitch was so low. The main features of the contour and the relations between parts of the same figure are nevertheless vis­i­ble and remain crucial for my discussion. In literary studies, Praat was first used by Reuven Tsur in his analyses of ambivalent points in En­ glish metrical verse performed by actors. See, e.g., Reuven Tsur, Poetic Rhythm: Structure and Per­for­mance: An Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics, 2nd  ed. (Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2012). In his 2015 book, Witalij Schmidt compared Praat mea­sure­ments with Sergei Bernshtein’s descriptions of Rus­sian poets’ recitations. Witalij Schmidt, Deklamation in Theorie und Praxis: Sergej Ignat’evic Bernstejn (Herne: Gabriele Schäfer Verlag, 2015). Praat was also used by the linguist Agnieszka Wagner, my collaborator for the proj­ect “Voices of Polish Poetry” (2015–2016), in a technical acoustic description of two poets’ intonation (Agnieszka Wagner, “Współczesne metody badań nad intonacją wypowiedzi słownych: Przykład zastosowania wybranych metod do analizy melodii wiersza,” Poradnik Językowy 7 [2016]: 54–67) and in my article “Testament and Testimony: Listening to ‘Ode  III’ by Aleksander Wat,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 61, no. 1 (2017): 92–110. American scholars worked on developing new software to study verse; see, e.g., the proj­ect HiPSTAS, directed by Tanya Clement, which led to the publication of the issue Clipping in Jacket2, 2015; and Marit  J. MacArthur, “Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies,” PMLA 131, no. 1 (January 2016): 38–63; Marit J. MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee M. Miller, “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Per­for­mance Styles of 100 American Poets,” Journal of Cultural Analytics, April 18, 2018, https://­c ulturalanalytics​.­org ​/­a rticle​/­1 1039​-­b eyond​-­p oet​-­voice​-­s ampling​ -­t he​-­non​-­performance​-­styles​-­of​-­100​-­a merican​-­poets. But Praat was still used in a recent book by Jason Camlot, Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Lit­ erary Recordings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). Much ­earlier, another program was also used to compare the pronunciation of Joseph Brodsky and other speakers, in Ni­la Friedberg, En­g lish Rhythms in Rus­s ian

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Verse: On the Experiment of Joseph Brodsky (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 68–74. 85. See, e.g., Anthony Fox, Prosodic Features and Prosodic Structure: The Pho­ nology of Suprasegmentals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 270, 288–289, 302–303. On intermediate phrases in the context of Polish, see Agnieszka Wagner, “A Comprehensive Model of Intonation for Application in Speech Synthesis” (doctoral diss., Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, 2006), 28–30, 100–105. Wagner treats phrases based on clauses as intermediate, and for her only a full sentence is an equivalent of a major intonation unit. In Miłosz’s readings, however, phrases based on clauses and lines are often so prominent that it is more functional to treat them as full units if acoustic cues so suggest. Phrases with weaker bound­ aries are also discussed by Grażyna Demenko. Her framework is slightly dif­fer­ent and shows that ele­ments of enumeration or single words can be separate phrases. See examples in Demenko, Analiza cech suprasegmentalnych języka polskiego, 117, 187–188. Similarly, Caroline Féry, who calls the intermediate level “prosodic phrases,” ascribes it to smaller parts of the sentence, and the full phrases to clauses. She also notices the difficulty of distinguishing the types of phrases on the basis of intonational features. Her approach, however, is based on syntax rather than phonetics, and assumes that prosodic phrases are isomorphic to syntactic phrases. This approach cannot be applied to the study of Polish poets, whose intonation was often idiosyncratic. See Féry, Intonation and Prosodic Structure, 59–62, 323. 86. Fox, Prosodic Features and Prosodic Structure, 269; Féry, Intonation and Prosodic Structure, 31–32; Agnieszka Wagner, “Analy­sis and Recognition of Accentual Patterns,” Proceedings of Interspeech, September 6–10, 2009 (Brighton, UK), 2427. Automatic detection of prominence and classification of pitch accent types have levels of accuracy of 70–87 ­percent and 80 ­percent, while manual annotation of prominence position and h ­ uman classification of pitch accent types have inter-­transcriber agreement of 80–90  ­percent and 64–90 ­percent. See also Praat website. That is the reason I compare my listening practice to Praat mea­ sure­ments and the mea­sure­ments with my listening. The figures cannot be easily compared; for example, the pitch range settings I use in this and other chapters are modified depending on the poet’s voice and recording to avoid some obviously wrong contours. Some ­mistakes are, however, still vis­i­ble in the charts I show (random points of pitch contour far above / below the rest of the contour), which is an error typical of Praat. Instead of working on stylizing and correcting ­t hese contours, in my analyses I simply focus on the reliable parts of the figure that are confirmed by my own listening. 87. Word stress, especially in Polish, is a good example of such a confusion, and I discuss it l­ater in the chapter. More generally on prob­lems with accent, see Fox, Prosodic Features and Prosodic Structure, 114–115. In this chapter, by “prosody” I usually mean intonation.

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88. See “Ars Poetica?,” and “From the Rising of the Sun,” in Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 240, 278. 89. Balbus, “ ‘Pierwszy ruch jest śpiewanie,’ ” 473–479, 500–503, 516. 90. See, e.g., Stanisław Barańczak, “Milosz’s Poetic Language: A Reconnaissance,” Language and Style 18, no. 5 (October 1985): 329. 91. Franaszek, Miłosz, 311. 92. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 104. 93. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 104. 94. See, along with its bibliography, Agata Stankowska, “Litwa i tożsamość: Miłosz i Miłosz o potrzebie ‘określonego miejsca na ziemi,’ ” Porównania 12 (2013): 43–53. 95. See Guggenheim reading from 1974. Such is also the idea b ­ ehind Czesław Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, trans. Louis Iribarne (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). 96. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 104. 97. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 351. 98. Lucylla Pszczołowska, Wiersz polski: Zarys historyczny (Wrocław: Fundacja na rzecz Nauki Polskiej and FUNNA, 2001), 360. 99. See Karwowska, Miłosz i Brodski, 120–121; Heydel, Gorliwość tłumacza, 221–222. 100. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 196. 101. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 524. The comma is missing in this edition. 102. Gathering Time: Five Modern Polish Elegies, trans. and intro. Andrzej Busza and Bogdan Czaykowski (Mission, BC: Barbarian Press, 1983), 47. 103. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 193. 104. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 521. 105. Gathering Time, 43. 106. E.g., the 1998 recording from Antologia osobista. 107. Heydel, Gorliwość tłumacza, 224–226. For more on the naiveté of the text, see Benjamin Paloff, Lost in the Shadow of the Word: Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Eu­rope (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 138–140. 108. Czesław Miłosz: Conversations, ed. Cynthia L. Haven (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 95 (a conversation with Paul W. Rea from 1987). 109. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 38. 110. The Polish and En­g lish versions are both in Czesław Miłosz, Separate Notebooks (New York: Ecco, 1984), 132, 133. See the note on p. 211 regarding who translated which part. 111. I do not know of any readings of this poem in En­glish by Miłosz. The Polish reading from 1998 confirms my interpretation of the poem’s phrasal structure. 112. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 36.

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113. Miłosz, Separate Notebooks, 130, 131. 114. When one compares Miłosz’s Polish texts to translations made with and without Miłosz’s participation, it becomes clear that his participation led to translations following the phrasing of the original much more closely. This fidelity is not always as close as in the examples I analyzed above, but it is still striking when we can compare it to translations (both early and recent) made without Miłosz’s involvement, in which the structure of sentences and lines is changed. “A Song on the End of the World,” translated solely by Miłosz’s son Anthony, is an exception, but it would be hard not to follow the syntax of the original in this poem. 115. Grudzińska-­Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky, 249. 116. Quotes from Charles Bern­stein, “Introduction,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bern­stein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9; Bern­stein, “Hearing Voices,” in The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 142. 117. Czesław Miłosz, “Mickiewicz,” Kultura 351, no. 12 (1976): 49–50, ­later republished in Czesław Miłosz, Ogród nauk (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1979). On the number of per­for­mances, recording, and popularity, see Roman Pawłowski, “Nasze Dziady,” Gazeta Wyborcza, February 17, 2003, http://­w yborcza​.­pl​/­1,75410​ ,​1330797​.h ­ tml. 118. Aleksander Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czesław Miłosz, trans. Theodosia S. Robertson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 158. Mickiewicz lectured at the Collège de France. Compare Lidia Banowska, Miłosz i Mickiewicz: Poezja wobec tradycji (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2005). 119. Miłosz and Fiut, “Autoportret przekorny,” 169–171. 120. Dif­fer­ent translations of the first line of Pan Tadeusz (“homeland,” “country,” “fatherland,” “motherland”) are discussed in Jadwiga Warchoł, “ ‘Litwo! Ojczyzno moja’—­k ategoria ‘ojczyzny’ w angielskich i francuskich przekładach Inwokacji Pana Tadeusza,” Rocznik Towarzystwa Literackiego imienia Adama Mickiewicza 33 (1998): 129–145; and Anna Filipek, “Przekład z duszy leci bystro, nim się w metrum złamie, czyli o formie angielskich tłumaczeń Pana Tadeusza,” Przekładaniec 32 (2016): 80–81. 121. On Miłosz’s use of ste­reo­t ypes about Lithuania and his view of the Polish nobility, see Marta Kowerko-­Urbańczyk, “Szukanie ojczyzny, czyli niemożliwe powroty Czesława Miłosza na Litwę,” in Miłosz i Miłosz, ed. Aleksander Fiut, Artur Grabowski, and Łukasz Tischner (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka and Gould Center / Miłosz Institute, 2013), 355–356, 368. 122. On his interests in “Lithuanian” rather than “Polish” aspects of Mickiewicz, see chaps. 22–27 in The Land of Ulro, originally published as “Romantyczność,” Kul­ tura 343, no. 4 (1976): 9–34. On style, see Miłosz, “Mickiewicz,” 47–50. On humor in

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Mickiewicz’s ballads, see Czesław Miłosz, “W dworach i zaściankach,” in Adam Mickiewicz, Ballady i romanse (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004), 8. 123. See Miłosz, “W dworach i zaściankach,” 5. The CD Adam Mickiewicz: Bal­ lady i romanse: czyta Czesław Miłosz (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004) accompanied this edition of Mickiewicz’s ballads and was a copy of the Berkeley recording. See also pp.  13–14  in the booklet accompanying the CDs Czesław Miłosz czyta Mickiewicza: Czesław Miłosz czyta Miłosza (Warszawa: CD Accord and Polskie Radio SA, 1996). 124. Adam Mickiewicz, Ballady i romanse (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004), is part of a series of lit­er­a­t ure lessons with Miłosz and other writers. The Polish title is “Lekcja literatury z Czesławem Miłoszem.” 125. Miłosz, “W dworach i zaściankach,” 8. 126. Miłosz, “W dworach i zaściankach,” 8. See also Agnieszka Kosińska, Miłosz w Krakowie (Kraków: Znak, 2015), 466. 127. Swinarski’s per­for­mance was also filmed in 1983 by Polish TV, and clips are available on YouTube, e.g. “Dziady A. Mickiewicz: Trailer,” accessed May 9, 2021, https://­w ww​.­youtube​.c­ om​/­watch​?­v​=­xuwS17Ym​_­H4. 128. Kosińska, Miłosz w Krakowie, 390. 129. Miłosz, “Mickiewicz,” 50. 130. A similar observation about the changes in Polish can be found in Adam Zagajewski, “I C ­ an’t Write a Memoir of Czesław Miłosz,” in An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz, ed. Cynthia L. Haven (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 122. 131. Teresa Dobrzyńska and Lucylla Pszczołowska, “Wiersz a recytacja,” Pamięt­ nik Literacki 73, no. 3–4 (1982): 267, 277–278. 132. Miłosz and Fiut, “Autoportret przekorny,” 38–39, 42–43. 133. See Maria Dłuska, Próba teorii wiersza polskiego, 2nd ed. (Kraków: Wy­ daw­nictwo Literackie, 1980). 134. Miłosz and Fiut, “Autoportret przekorny,” 43. 135. For instance, Adam Zagajewski emphasized the contours of his phrases with a falling pitch on the penultimate (accented) syllable of the last word in the phrase, followed by a low and quiet, and si­mul­ta­neously lengthened and flat (or slightly rising) pronunciation of the last syllable. This manner of phrasing can be heard in many recordings in Polish (and in his speech more generally). The ­earlier parts of the phrases often sound very modern and flat, only the endings are prominent, and the syntax-­based phrasing does not always match the division to lines (enjambments are not signaled). Zagajewski’s readings in En­glish w ­ ere not so consistent; some poems w ­ ere even read with repetitive rising tones. My observations are based on the following CDs: Adam Zagajewski, Wiersze wybrane czyta Autor (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2014); XX lat “Zeszytów Literackich” (Warszawa: Fundacja Zeszytów Literackich, 2002); and two recorded readings by Zagajewski

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archived in the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University: February 14, 1989, Guggenheim Museum, Acad­emy of American Poets, Katherine Garrison Chapin Biddle Memorial Lecture, no PG 7070 .Z34x 1989; and March 20, 2007, Thompson Room, Harvard, Morris Gray Reading, no. PG 7185.A32 R43 2007. 136. I used the Polish translation of his article “Verse and Declamation.” See S. I. Bernsztejn, “Wiersz a recytacja,” trans. Zygmunt Saloni, in Rosyjska szkoła stylistyki, ed. Maria Renata Mayenowa and Zygmunt Saloni (Warszawa: PIW, 1970), 180–219. For the Rus­sian text, see Sergei I. Bernshtein, “Stikh i deklama­ tsiia,” in Russkaia rech: Novaia seriia, vol. 1, ed. Lev V. Shcherba (Leningrad: Academia, 1927), 7–41. Compare Timothy D. Sergay, “ ‘A ­Music of Letters’: Reconsidering Eikhenbaum’s Melodics of Verse,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 59, no. 2 (2015): 208. For more on Bernshtein, see Schmidt, Deklamation in Theorie und Praxis; and the chapter “Motor Impulses of Verse: Rus­sian Formalists on Poetry Recitation,” in Ana Hedberg Olenina, Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Lit­er­a­ture and Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 43–102. 137. Miłosz and Fiut, “Autoportret przekorny,” 45. 138. Ewa Czarnecka and Aleksander Fiut, Conversations with Czesław Miłosz, trans. Richard Lourie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 315. 139. Agnieszka Wagner, “Akustyczne wyznaczniki rytmu w wypowiedziach mówców natywnych i nienatywnych języka polskiego,” Prace Filologiczne / Philo­ logical Studies 66 (2016): 250; Agnieszka Wagner, “Czy języki posiadają stabilne, kontrastywne własności rytmiczne? Dowody eksperymentalne z języka polskie­ go,” Prace Filologiczne / Philological Studies 69 (2015): 516–518, 530–531; Marina Nespor, Mohinish Shukla, and Jacques Mehler, “Stress-­Timed vs. Syllable-­Timed Languages,” in van Oostendorp et al., The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, 2:1150. 140. On word stress, see Wagner, “Akustyczne wyznaczniki rytmu,” 250; Demenko, Analiza cech suprasegmentalnych języka polskiego, 18; Agnieszka Wagner, Rytm w mowie i języku w ujęciu wielowymiarowym (Warszawa: Elipsa, 2017), 193, 211–212. On secondary stresses, see Luiza Newlin-­ Łukowicz, “Polish Stress: Looking for Phonetic Evidence of a Bidirectional System,” Phonology 29, no. 2 (2012): 271–329. On one-­syllable words in the context of verse, see, e.g., Witold Sadowski, “Żywa mowa wiersza (Mickiewicz—­Słowacki),” in Potencjał wiersza, ed. Witold Sadowski (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2013), 87–88. Caroline Féry suggests more generally that stress might be an abstract property identifying a syllable in a word. Its phonetic realization would, however, depend on sentence intonation and sometimes could remain unrealized. Féry, Intonation and Prosodic Structure, 222. 141. See Dobrzyńska and Pszczołowska, “Wiersz a recytacja,” 276–277. 142. Wagner, “Akustyczne wyznaczniki rytmu,” 251.

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143. See Miłosz, “Mickiewicz”; Czesław Miłosz, “Język, narody,” Kultura 312, no.  9 (1973): 3–12 (republished l­ater in Ogród nauk); Andrzej Vincenz, “Ogród nauk czy wirydarz poetycki?,” Kultura 354, no. 3 (1977): 121–129; Czesław Miłosz, “Uzupełnienia,” Kultura 354, no. 3 (1977): 129–134. 144. In Polish, “ustawiony głos.” This translation of the term as “stabilized tone” is used by Christopher Adam, “The ‘Crimean Sonnets’ of Adam Mickiewicz—­A New Translation,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 40, no. 3–4 (September–­December 1998): 405. 145. See especially Miłosz, “Język, narody,” 8, 10, 11; Miłosz, “Uzupełnienia,” 130–131. 146. See Barańczak, “Milosz’s Poetic Language,” 319–333. 147. Miłosz, “Język, narody,” 5, 8. 148. Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 7. 149. Vincenz, “Ogród nauk czy wirydarz poetycki?,” 129. 150. Miłosz’s “Incantation,” in New and Collected Poems, 239. 151. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 834. A prose fragment from the Unattainable Earth says h ­ ere: “can the lack of a sense of form, perceivable in language, in lit­er­a­ ture, be the reason for a fall of a country?” and e­ arlier: “prob­lems with drawing the bound­aries of a sentence, which in Polish tends to flow capriciously in dif­ fer­ent directions, up to verbosity. The often-­worrying lack of a sense of form in Old Polish authors, even t­hose from the Golden Age” (translation mine, Old Polish lit­er­a­ture refers in Polish to both medieval and early modern writers, and Golden Age to Re­nais­sance). 152. In the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture ­there is a tape no.  371, copied from Artur Międzyrzecki in 1979, in which Miłosz reads from Puławy Psalter in Polish. 153. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 452. 154. Piotr Bogalecki, “Niepodjęta terapia Stanisława Barańczaka: Próba diagnozy postsekularnej,” Teksty Drugie, no. 2 (2014): 341. Bogalecki’s claim is further supported by Barańczak’s article on Miłosz’s poetic language. In the Polish version from 1981, Barańczak quotes not only Miłosz’s idea of stabilized tone, but also the poet’s criticism of other styles, such as linguistic poetry (the category in which Barańczak’s poems w ­ ere often included). See Stanisław Barańczak, “Język poetycki Czesława Miłosza: Wstępne rozpoznanie,” Teksty: Teoria literatury, kry­ tyka, interpretacja, no. 4–5 (1981): 157. It should be emphasized, however, that ­these ­were friendly polemics, and Miłosz had a very high opinion of both Andrzej Vincenz (Stanisław Vincenz’s son) and Barańczak. See also Stanisław Barańczak, “Voice Coaching,” trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, Metamorphoses 7, no. 2 (1999): 112–115. 155. See Miłosz’s “Ars Poetica?,” in his New and Collected Poems, 240. 156. Barańczak’s poetry reading at Harvard, Woodberry Poetry Room, 1983, no. PG7161.A67 A6 x, 1983, from the tape archive of the Woodberry Poetry Room.

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157. Józef Olejniczak on his conversations with Jan Peszek. See Piotr Bogalecki, Anna Kałuża, Tadeusz Sławek, and Józef Olejniczak, “Nie ma Miłosza?,” artPA­ PIER 180, no. 12 (2011), http://­a rtpapier​.­com​/­i ndex​.­php​?­page​= a­ rtykul&wydanie​ =­132&artykul​=2­ 947. 158. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 69. Linguistics also refers to the reader’s implicit prosody or inner voice and notices that it may influence their syntactic pro­cessing. See Féry, Intonation and Prosodic Structure, 305. 159. Event from June  29, 1996, or­ga­nized by Polish Radio Bis ­under the patronage of the PEN Club, recorded on the first CD from Czesław Miłosz czyta Mic­ kiewicza: Czesław Miłosz czyta Miłosza. 160. Bogdana Carpenter, “The Gift Returned,” World Lit­er­a­ture ­Today 73, no.  4 (Autumn 1999): 631–636. See also Kołodziejczyk, Amerykańskie powojnie Czesława Miłosza. Similar exchanges between Anglo-­A merican and Czech poetry ­were described by Justin Quinn, Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 161. Mary Besemeres, “Rewriting One’s Self in En­g lish: Miłosz Translated by Miłosz,” The Polish Review 40, no. 4 (1995): 415–432. 162. W. Martin, “An Interview with Piotr Sommer,” Chicago Review 46, no. 3–4 (2000): 207. 163. Anna Legeżyńska, Hartwig: Wdzięczność (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2017), 222–231. 164. Julia Hartwig, In Praise of the Unfinished: Selected Poems, trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter (New York: Alfred  A. Knopf, 2008), 32. In Polish: “Wierzę w zdanie” and “Ale zdanie zdanie wiarygodne / sprawia ża znowu czuję pod stopami ziemię,” in Julia Hartwig, Wiersze wybrane (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2014), 184. 165. Quoted in Joanna Grądziel-­Wójcik, “Opis autotematyczny na przykładzie poezji kobiet: Przypadek Joanny Pollakówny,” Forum Poetyki, no.  20 (Spring 2020): 38. See also Legeżyńska, Hartwig, 264. 166. Legeżyńska, Hartwig, 146–147; Ewa Rajewska, “Przekłady amerykańskie Julii Hartwig: Peryferie i parafernalia,” Przekłady literatur słowiańskich 10, pt. 1 (2019): 48, 51; Julia Hartwig, Dziennik amerykański (Warszawa: PIW, 1980). 167. Magdalena Kay, Knowing One’s Place in Con­temporary Irish and Polish Po­ etry: Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, Hartwig (London: Continuum, 2012), 204–205; Legeżyńska, Hartwig, 227; Elżbieta Winiecka, “Zapis amerykański Julii Hartwig,” in Pochwała istnienia: Studia o twórczości Julii Hartwig, ed. Barbara Kulesza-­ Gulczyńska (Poznań: Bogucki Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2015), 102, 108; Rajewska, “Przekłady amerykańskie Julii Hartwig,” 58. 168. Legeżyńska, Hartwig, 224; Julia Hartwig and Jarosław Mikołajewski, Największe szczęście, największy ból (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2014), 45.

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169. See “Julia Hartwig—­Finezje literackie,” pt. 4, archival Polish Radio program, NINATEKA, accessed January  1, 2021, http://­ninateka​.­pl​/­audio​/­finezje​ -­literackie​-1­ 996​-­julia​-h ­ artwig​-­odc​-4­ . 170. Legeżyńska, Hartwig, 120, 121, 184; Winiecka, “Zapis amerykański,” 102; Anna Legeżyńska, “Gdyby Czesław Miłosz był kobietą . . . ,” in Pochwała ist­ nienia; Rajewska, “Przekłady amerykańskie Julii Hartwig,” 50. On childhood, see Hartwig’s response to questions at the 1996 meeting in Lublin at Brama Grodzka—­Teatr NN, accessed January  1, 2021, http://­teatrnn​.­pl​/­kalendarium​ /­w ydarzenia​/­czy​-­warto​-­byc​-­poeta​-­spotkanie​-­z​-­julia​-­hartwig​/­. 171. In her recording for the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in 1989 she mentions that she is not included in anthologies in Poland ­because she followed her own path. In her diary she notes she was afraid of a reading with Allen Ginsberg, whom she knew to be misogynistic, so she said as ­little as pos­si­ble, but it turned out he was very kind. She also makes a remark on Miłosz, for whom it was so difficult to praise her in Polish that he used other languages. See Hartwig’s 1989 recording in the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture, no. 2171; Julia Hartwig, Zawsze powroty: Dzienniki podróży (Warszawa: Sic!, 2001), 220; Hartwig and Mikołajewski, Największe szczęście, największy ból, 61. 172. This view is shared in “Julia Hartwig—­Finezje literackie,” pt. 4. 173. Recording from the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture, no. 2171 from 1989. 174. See recordings at the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture, nos. 1802 and 2691; the 2014 CD added to Hartwig, Wiersze wybrane; and vari­ous videos on the website “Julia Hartwig,” Polska poezja współczesna: Przewodnik encyklopedyczny, accessed May 9, 2021, http://­przewodnikpoetycki​.­amu​.­edu​.­pl​/­encyklopedia​/­julia​-­hartwig​/­. 175. Hartwig, In Praise of the Unfinished. 176. Julia Hartwig and Artur Międzyrzecki, “A Poetry Reading,” Lamont Forum Room, Harvard, November 12, 1986, on deposit at the Woodberry Poetry Room PG7167.A75 A6x, 1986; Artur Międzyrzecki and Julia Hartwig, “A Bilingual Reading and Discussion with Polish Poets,” PEN American Center in New York, November  25, 1986, archive​.­pen​.­org​/­asset​?i­ d​=2­ 13; Julia Hartwig, “Pre­sen­ta­t ion,” University of Iowa, October 28, 1986, https://­digital​.­lib​.­uiowa​.­edu​/­islandora​/­object​ /­ui%3Avwu​_2­ 841. 177. “In Your Eyes” and “But of Course,” in Polish Poetry of the Last Two De­ cades of Communist Rule: Spoiling the Cannibals’ Fun, ed. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 48. 178. Julia Hartwig and Rosanna Warren, “Poetry and Nations,” Boston University, October 2006, https://­soundcloud​.c­ om​/e­ uforyou​/­episode19. 179. Julia Fiedorczuk, “Strangers in the Country of the Poet,” World Lit­er­a­ture ­Today 91, no. 1 (January 2017): 45–52. 180. Compare the Meeting of the Poets of the East and the West in Kraków in 1997 (with Julia Hartwig, Urszula Kozioł, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, and Judita Vaičiūnaitė), or the second Meeting of the Poets in 2000 (featuring Ewa Lipska,

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Marzanna Bogumiła Kielar, Jane Hirshfield, Joy Harjo, and Elena Shvarts) with the younger poets at the Night of Poets at the festival Writers’ Warsaw in 1997, or a year before: male only. At another festival, or­ga­nized by the new poetry publisher Biuro Literackie, Marta Podgórnik was the first and only young w ­ oman invited to read in 1999. See Teresa Walas, “Spotkanie Poetów Wschodu i Zachodu,” Dekada Literacka 7, no. 10–11 (1997): 4–5; “Krakowskie spotkania poetów świata—­Finezje literackie,” archival Polish Radio program, NINATEKA, accessed July  13, 2018, http://­n inateka​.­pl​/­audio​/­f inezje​-­l iterackie​-­1997​-­k rakowskie​-­spotkania​-­poetow​ -­swiata​-­odc​-­1; “II Krakowskie Spotkania Poetów. Poezja—­M iędzy piosenką a modlitwą,” Krakowskie Biuro Festiwalowe, November 10–13, 2000, http://­biu​ro​ festiwalowe​.­pl​/­k alendarium​/­i i​-­k rakowskie​-­spotkania​-­poetow​-­poezja​-­m iedzy​ -­piosenka​-­a​-­modlitwa​.­html; “Noc poetów: Festiwal Literacki Warszawa Pisarzy—­ Finezje literackie,” archival Polish Radio program, accessed January 31, 2021, http://­ archiwum​.­nina​.­gov​.­pl​/­en​/­fi lm​/­noc​-­poetow​-­festiwal​-­literacki​-­warszawa​-­pisarzy​-­1 (the ­whole recording available in the National Film Archive—Audiovisual Institute); Bohdan Zadura, “Noc poetów (Warszawa pisarzy),” Akcent 67, no. 1 (1997): 7–23; Marta Podgórnik, “As Time Goes By,” in Katalog wspomnień z Fortu i Portu, 1996–2015 (Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2015), 40; “Odsiecz,” Biblioteka. Nagrania. Z Fortu do Portu, recording of the 2015 meeting commemorating the 1999 meeting, http://­w ww​.b ­ iuroliterackie​.p ­ l​/­biblioteka​/n ­ agrania​/­odsiecz​/­.

3. Home Literary Salons 1. An expression used by Magdalena Kay in the chapter “Slavic Chic” to describe the way East Eu­ro­pean poetry was viewed in the West when it became fash­ ion­able. Magdalena Kay, In Gratitude for All the Gifts: Seamus Heaney and Eastern Eu­rope (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 26. 2. Translation mine. Adam Zagajewski, “Kawa po turecku,” in Zachwyt i roz­ pacz: Wspomnienia o Wisławie Szymborskiej, ed. Agnieszka Papieska (Warszawa: PWN, 2014), 484–485. 3. See, for instance, Anna Grochowska, Wszystkie drogi prowadzą na Krupniczą: O Domu Literatów (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2017). See also “Dom 101 pisarzy: Wspomnienia z Krupniczej,” archival Polish Radio broadcast, Polskie Radio, accessed January  21, 2019, https://­w ww​.­polskieradio​.­pl​/­8​/­3664​/­A rtykul​ /­1383093,Dom​-­101​-p ­ isarzy​-­Wspomnienia​-­z-​ K ­ rupniczej. Among the best known poets who spent time on Krupnicza ­were Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, Wisława Szymborska, Tadeusz Różewicz, Halina Poświatowska, Anna Świrszczyńska, Ewa Lipska, Tadeusz Nowak, and Bronisław Maj, not to mention such prose writers and playwrights as Sławomir Mrożek and Jerzy Andrzejewski. 4. On Stachura, see Sylwia D. Ejmont, “The Troubadour Takes the Tram: Experience in Polish Poetry and ­Music” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008), 3,

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62. On bards and students, see Bardowie, ed. Jadwiga Sawicka and Ewa Paczoska (Łódź: Ibidem, 2001). On Hartwig, Stachura, Zagajewski, and Wat, see Michael J. Mikoś, Polish Lit­er­a­ture from 1918 to 2000: An Anthology (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2008), 273, 277, 305, 217. On Barańczak, see Postwar Polish Poetry, expanded ed., ed. Czesław Miłosz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 183. On Herbert, see Andrzej Franaszek, Herbert: Biografia, vol. 2: Pan Cogito (Kraków: Znak, 2018). 5. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage, 1990), 64–66. 6. On his small room filled with too many books, see Stanisław Barańczak, “Życie zaczyna się po trzydziestce?,” in Stanisław Barańczak, Etyka i poetyka (Kraków: Znak, 2009), 153. 7. “Wspomnienie o Annie Kamieńskiej—­Z apiski ze współczesności,” 2001, archival Polish Radio program, http://­archiwum​.­nina​.­gov​.­pl​/­fi lm​/­wspomnienie​-o ­ ​ -­a nnie​-­k amienskiej​-­1 (the entire recording is available in the National Film Archive—Audiovisual Institute). See especially parts 1 and 4, featuring the memories of Iwona Smolka and Piotr Matywiecki. 8. Alissa Valles, “Introduction,” in Ryszard Krynicki, Our Life Grows, trans. Alissa Valles (New York: New York Review of Books, 2018), x. 9. This tradition is explored in Bohdan Cywiński, Rodowody niepokornych (Kraków: Znak, 1971). Beyond po­liti­cal and illegal home seminars, one could mention, for example, Prof. Maria Renata Mayenowa’s home seminar in poetics. This practice was continued by ­others long ­a fter the po­l iti­cal transition—­for instance, at the home gradu­ate seminar or­ga­nized by Prof. Zofia Mitosek (literary theory) or Prof. Paweł Śpiewak’s private seminars (sociology). On Śpiewak, see Agnieszka Sabor, “Parch pro toto,” Tygodnik Powszechny, May 7, 2012, https://­w ww​ .­t ygodnikpowszechny​.­pl​/­parch​-­pro​-­toto​-1­ 5975. For more on the role of apartments, particularly in the light of l­ imited café culture and bad weather in Poland, see Weronika Parfianowicz-­Vertun, “Pokoik Mirona: Sztuka mieszkania Mirona Białoszewskiego,” in Topo-­g rafie, online proj­ect mapping Białoszewski’s life and writing, ed. Pracownia Studiów Miejskich, Instytut Kultury Polskiej, Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2017, http://­topo​-­g rafie​.­uw​ .­edu​.­pl. 10. Białoszewski himself did not have a landline. See Adam Poprawa, “Posłowie,” in Jadwiga Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, rev. ed. (Wrocław: Warstwy, 2015), 429. 11. Salons, literary as well as nonliterary, ­were or­ga­nized in other communist countries as well. Jonathan Bolton defines them more loosely, speaking of informal meetings, “some of which approached the frequency of what we might call salons—­informal but regular centers of intellectual life, where a range of ­people could come together and discuss politics and culture freely.” See Jona-

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than Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic ­People of the Universe, and Czech Culture ­under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 95. 12. Patrice  M. Dabrowski, Poland: The First Thousand Years (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), 266; Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Con­ versation, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005). 13. A postwar salon modeled on prewar habits was that of the writer Irena Krzywicka, or­ga­nized in Warsaw, in the years 1955–1962. It was called a “salon” by the contemporaries, and it revived prewar customs instead of establishing a clearly new format and attitude, which interest me in this chapter. See Agata Tuszyńska, Długie życie gorszycielki: Losy i świat Ireny Krzywickiej (Warszawa: Iskry, 1999), 193–208. 14. Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation, xiii. 15. I mean Białoszewski’s first book from 1956 and Szymborska’s book from 1957. He moved in 1958, she in 1963. See “Kalendarium życia i twórczości Wisławy Szymborskiej,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 501; Topo-­grafie. 16. Kazimiera Białoszewska-­Piekutowa, “Mówi matka,” in Miron: Wspom­ nienia o poecie, ed. Hanna Kirchner (Warszawa: Tenten, 1996), 890–891. 17. Sabina Jurgielewiczowa, “Byłam przy jego urodzeniu,” in Kirchner, Miron, 15; Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik (Kraków: Znak, 2012), 891. 18. On classical and religious ­music, see Białoszewski, Donosy rzeczywistości (Warszawa: PIW, 2013), 22, 24, 91, 97, 100, 101, 107, 109, 155–156, 197, 201, 227, 229. On Japa­nese and Tibetan rec­ords, see Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 811. On pro­ cessions in Warsaw, see Białoszewski, Szumy, zlepy, ciągi (Warszawa: PIW, 1989), 227–229. On his interest in liturgy, see Stanisław Prószyński, “Poezja, teatr, muzyka,” in Kirchner, Miron, 24. For more on orality in everyday prewar life, see Krzysztof Rutkowski, Przeciw (w) literaturze: Esej o “poezji czynnej” Mirona Bia­ło­ szewskiego i Edwarda Stachury (Bydgoszcz: Pomorze, 1987), 122–123, 126–127. See also Mikołaj Gliński, “Miron—­człowiek audiowizualny?,” Culture.pl, March 25, 2014, https://­culture​.­pl​/­pl​/­artykul​/­miron​-­czlowiek​-­audiowizualny. In some cases Białoszewski was interested not only in the ­music, but also in the very ritual; for example, in the 1970s and 1980s Białoszewski would still sometimes attend early morning Masses of the Resurrection or shepherds’ masses at midnight on Christmas Eve. He was also fascinated by small-­town folk prayers, half-­sung, half-­recited, and very rhythmical, such as the ones he saw by his ­mother’s coffin in her ­house in Garwolin in 1980. See Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 699, 261, 702. 19. Jacek Kopciński, “Od ballady do oratorium: Miron Białoszewski: ‘Osmę­ deusze,’ ” Pamiętnik Literacki 83, no. 4 (1992): 68. 20. Irena Prudil, “Znałam kiedyś chłopca,” in Kirchner, Miron, 62. 21. Prudil, “Znałam kiedyś chłopca,” 64; Prószyński, “Poezja, teatr, muzyka,” 21.

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22. Th ­ ese events are described in Prudil, “Znałam kiedyś chłopca,” 64–65, and Prószyński, “Poezja, teatr, muzyka,” 25–26. See also Tadeusz Sobolewski, Czło­ wiek Miron (Kraków: Znak, 2012), 178–179. 23. Igor Piotrowski, “Obroty rzeczy, czyli stare życie 2 (Chłodna 40)” and “O przefrunięciu miejsca przez wieki (Żelazna),” Topo-­grafie; Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 180–182. 24. Joanna Niżyńska, The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Białoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 54–55; Miron Białoszewski, A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York: New York Review Books, 2015), 48–49, 84–85. 25. Białoszewski, A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, 84. 26. Prudil, “Znałam kiedyś chłopca,” 70–71; Prószyński, “Poezja, teatr, muzy­ka,” 30–31. 27. Białoszewski, Szumy, zlepy, ciągi, 112, 119, 122, 142, 147. Białoszewski admits that he revised his occasional texts in line with the requirements of the institutions. Prószyński, “Poezja, teatr, muzyka,” 33. See also Kornelia Sobczak, “Herbata i inne używki,” and “Poznańska, czyli połówka,” Topo-­grafie; Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 185; Tadeusz Sobolewski, “Człowiek Miron,” in Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 8; Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 68, 212–214. 28. Prudil, “Znałam kiedyś chłopca,” 78–79; Prószyński, “Poezja, teatr, muzyka,” 37; Jan Józef Lipski, “Miron widziany przeze mnie,” in Kirchner, Miron, 130–131; Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 213, 218, 229, 230. 29. Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 215; Kornelia Sobczak, “Menora i świątki.” 30. Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 218; Białoszewski, Donosy rzeczywistości, 31–32 (see the piece “Bitnik” from 1965). Compare Andrzej Pietrasz, Allen Ginsberg w Polsce (Warszawa: Semper, 2014), 75. 31. Prószyński, “Poezja, teatr, muzyka,” 38–41; Lipski, “Miron widziany przeze mnie,” 132–133; Gracja Kerényi, Odtańcowywanie poezji czyli dzieje teatru Mirona Białoszewskiego (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1973), 14, 215; Łukasz Buko­ wiecki, “Mikrotopografie (nie)codzienności,” and “Niszowa rewolucja,” Topo-­ gra­fie; Niżyńska, The Kingdom of Insignificance, 31–32. 32. Artur Sandauer, “Podzwonne Białoszewskiemu,” in Kirchner, Miron, 163– 170; Niżyńska, The Kingdom of Insignificance, 26. 33. Kerényi, Odtańcowywanie poezji, 96. 34. See “Miron Białoszewski,” Encyklopedia Teatru Polskiego, accessed December  14, 2018, http://­encyklopediateatru​.­pl; Hanna Kirchner, “O Mironie, o Ludwiku,” in Kirchner, Miron, 296; Niżyńska, The Kingdom of Insignificance, 22, 31–32; Marta Bukowiecka and Łukasz Bukowiecki, “W stronę Teatru Osobnego,” Topo-­grafie. 35. Marcin Gołąb, “Mieszkanie Mirona i Le. (pl. Dąbrowskiego 7  m. 13),” Topo-­g rafie; Sobczak, “Menora i świątki”; Madeline  G. Levine, Con­temporary

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Polish Poetry, 1925–1975 (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 106; Białoszewski, Szumy, zlepy, ciągi, 95; Paweł Gawlik, “Mieszkanie Mirona Białoszewskiego przy pl. Dąbrowskiego było teatrem,” Gazeta Wyborcza: Magazyn Warszawa, March  4, 2016, https://­ warszawa​.­w yborcza​.­pl​/­w arszawa​/­1,150427,19716010,mieszkanie​-­m irona​-­bialo​ szewskiego​-­przy​-­pl​-­dabrowskiego​-­bylo​.­html; Bożena Shallcross, “Efekt nie­ sprzątniętego pokoju,” in (Nie)przezroczystość normalności: Obrazy ładu, porządku w literaturze polskiej XIX i XX wieku, ed. Hanna Gosk and Bożena Karwowska (Warszawa: Elipsa, 2014), 244–263. On night walks and covered win­dows, see Prudil, “Znałam kiedyś chłopca,” 11–14; Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 82–83. 36. Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 68; Prudil, “Znałam kiedyś chłopca,” 82. 37. See recordings nos. M.00957 and M.00958 made for Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw (hereafter cited as Museum of Lit­er­a­ture) on March 2, 1983. 38. Niżyńska, The Kingdom of Insignificance, 150. 39. Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 133. 40. Piotr Sobolczyk, Dyskursywizowanie Białoszewskiego, vol.  1 (Gdańsk: słowo / obraz terytoria, 2013), 211–212. 41. Niżyńska, The Kingdom of Insignificance, 74, 76, 86–87. 42. Ewa Berberyusz, “Zabrali mi piec,” in Kirchner, Miron, 207; Kirchner, “O Mironie, o Ludwiku,” 280. On participants, see the footnotes in Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 12, 13, 20, 22, 23. On Kostrzębska as introduced by Białoszewski’s old friend Jan Józef Lipski, see Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 114–115. 43. Parfianowicz-­Vertun, “Pokoik Mirona”; Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 17. 44. Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 417. 45. Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 43; Białoszewski, Donosy rzeczywistości, 201, 216, 217–219, 228. On the early meetings, see Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 114– 115. Compare Berberyusz, “Zabrali mi piec,” 207. 46. Jadwiga Stańczakowa, “Odmienił moje życie,” in Kirchner, Miron, 254. For other readings attended by PIW editors, see Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 317. 47. See Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 35. Stańczakowa also called them “the three ladies M.” See Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 416. For t­hese and other scholars (e.g., Michał Głowiński, Hanna Kirchner, Henryk Markiewicz, Jacek Trznadel), see Kirchner, “O Mironie, o Ludwiku,” 280; Białoszewski, Tajny ­dziennik, 363, 757, 849; Małgorzata Baranowska, “Mistyfikacja ‘samego życia,’ ” in Kirchner, Miron, 305. 48. Berberyusz, “Zabrali mi piec,” 207; Baranowska, “Mistyfikacja ‘samego życia,’ ” 305; Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 8–9; Adam Poprawa, “Mistrz duchowy w trafach społecznych,” in Białoszewski przed dziennikiem, ed. Wojciech Browarny and Adam Poprawa (Kraków: Universitas, 2010), 144–145. 49. See Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 58–59, 76, 416; Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 433.

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50. On knocking, see Gołąb, “Mieszkanie Mirona i Le.” See also Białoszewski, Donosy rzeczywistości, 102. On knowing who exactly was invited, even when twenty to thirty ­people came over, see Baranowska, “Mistyfikacja ‘samego życia,’ ” 305. On win­dows, see Agnieszka Karpowicz, “ ‘Miasto się odrąbało,’ ” Topo-­grafie. On the open door, see Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 43. 51. On the new building, see Piotr Kubkowski, “Chamowo—­zrozumieć blokowisko,” and “Korytarz: ‘diabelski młyn na poziomo,’ ” Topo-­grafie. On old neighbors, see Białoszewski, Donosy rzeczywistości, 220. On objects, see Miron Białoszewski, Chamowo (Warszawa: PIW, 2009), 13. 52. Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 76. The first Tuesday took place ­earlier, on June 18. Białoszewski, Chamowo, 17–19. 53. Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 58–59, 76, 79–80. 54. Agnieszka Karpowicz, Proza życia: Mowa, pismo, literatura (Białoszewski, Stachura, Nowakowski, Anderman, Redliński, Schubert) (Warszawa: WUW, 2012), 381–392. 55. A statement on their unusual character comes from a journalist in 1977, see Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 340. On neo-­avant-­garde interpretations of Białoszewski’s works, in the context of per­for­mances and happenings, see Ryszard Nycz, “  ‘Szare eminencje zachwytu,’  ” in Pisanie Białoszewskiego: Szkice, ed. Michał Głowiński and Zdzisław Łapiński (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL, 1993), 180–181; Joanna Orska, “Życie jako happening: O artystyczności ‘tajnego dziennika’ Białoszewskiego,” in Browarny and Poprawa, Białoszewski przed dzienni­ kiem, 106; Tadeusz Drewnowski, Literatura polska, 1944–1989: Próba scalenia, (Kraków: Universitas, 2004, 180); Alina Świeściak, “Miron Białoszewski: Alie­ nacja i utopia—­O neoawangardowych kontekstach poezji Białoszewskiego,” Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne: Seria Literacka, no. 24 (2014): 269–282; and Izabela Tomczyk, “Filmikowanie w twórczości Mirona Białoszewskiego,” Kwartalnik Filmowy 44 (2003): 176–194. 56. Berberyusz, “Zabrali mi piec,” 213; Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 848–849; Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 79–80; Białoszewski, Chamowo, 116–117. 57. Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 258; Stańczakowa, “Odmienił moje życie,” 254. On the Tuesdays in the Wołyńskis’ apartment, see Kirchner, “O Mironie, o Ludwiku,” 278; Baranowska, “Mistyfikacja ‘samego życia,’ ” 305; Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 310, 119. On readings in Stańczakowa’s apartment, see Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 322, 342–342; Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 95–97, 334. Other friends’ apartments are mentioned occasionally, too, especially the apartment of Anna and Tadeusz Sobolewski (see Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 300) or Anna Żurowska, Ewa Berberyusz, and Irena Prudil (Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 777); Berberyusz, “Zabrali mi piec,” 213. 58. Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 387. 59. Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 404.

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60. On a “Wednesday Tuesday” and a Tuesday held in a library, see Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 322, 240. On other occasions, see Białoszewski, Tajny dzi­ ennik, 764. On the hospital, see Hanna Kirchner, “Tworzenie Mirona,” in Gło­ wiński and Łapiński, Pisanie Białoszewskiego, 255. 61. Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 374; Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 533–534. 62. Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 416–417. Compare Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 533–534. 63. On dif­fer­ent readings between 1975 and 1978, see Stańczakowa, “Odmienił moje życie,” 261. 64. On d ­ oing vari­ous ­house­hold chores for Białoszewski, see Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 65, 76, 89–90. 65. Konrad Rokicki, “Salon Walendowskich,” Biuletyn IPN 4 (2004): 91–92; Jerzy S. Majewski, “40-­lecie KOR-­u: Mieszkania, w których zaczęła się rewolucja,” Gazeta Wyborcza: Magazyn Stołeczny, September  23, 2016, https://­warszawa​ .­w yborcza ​.­pl ​/­warszawa ​/­1,150427,20733575,40​-­lecie​-­kor​-­u​-­m ieszkania​-­w​-­k torych​ -­zaczela​-­sie​-­rewolucja​.­html. For more on under­ground salons, see Andrea  F. Bohlman, Musical Solidarities: Po­ liti­ cal Action and ­ Music in Late Twentieth-­ Century Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 85–86. 66. Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 534–535. 67. Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 811; Berberyusz, “Zabrali mi piec,” 213. 68. Kirchner, “O Mironie, o Ludwiku,” 278–281; Baranowska, “Mistyfikacja ‘samego życia,’ ” 305; Stańczakowa, “Odmienił moje życie,” 254; Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 99, 131. 69. Prudil, “Znałam kiedyś chłopca,” 83. 70. Lipski, “Miron widziany przeze mnie,” 127–136. 71. Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 693, 819–820, 823. 72. Berberyusz, “Zabrali mi piec,” 213. Białoszewski was published by PIW throughout his lifetime. His poems w ­ ere also included in an émigré anthology of poetry of witness edited by Stanisław Barańczak. See Poeta pamięta: Antologia poezji świadectwa i sprzeciwu, 1844–1984, ed. Stanisław Barańczak (London: Puls, 1984). Białoszewski was also visited by Wojciech Siemion, whom one of his friends called a “collaborationist” during martial law: Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 848. ­There w ­ ere, however, some controversies regarding Białoszewski’s decision to publish his poems in the journal Poezja at the time when its editor was regime-­ related Bohdan Drozdowski. 73. Lipski, “Miron widziany przeze mnie,” 136. 74. Translation mine. Miron Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 94. In Polish: “Od razu wiedziałem, że podpisywanie listu protestacyjnego przeciw zmianie pewnego punktu konstytucji i w sprawie nieograniczania wolności jednostki. Jan Józef L. dał mi do przeglądania to, co jest do podpisania. Ale ja spojrzałem na to i

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powiedziałem ‘Nie będę studiował, bo i tak nie zorientuję się dokładnie, o co chodzi, ale podpiszę.’ ‘Podpiszesz?’ ‘Podpiszę.’ ” Additionally, Ewa Berberyusz claims in her recollection that she once saw that Białoszewski had signed something from Lipski without asking. If she was t­ here and Białoszewski’s intention was to not let her know what it was, he succeeded. Berberyusz, “Zabrali mi piec,” 213. The diary was published in 2012. The diary itself contains a remark from Białoszewski that it should not be published before 2000, and that 2010 would actually be better—­which suggests, of course, that the text was meant to be printed. See Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 61. 75. Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 96–97. 76. Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 348–349, 781. 77. Białoszewski himself admitted that it was a dif­fer­ent, related letter. Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 96–97. What he signed was an additional list of signatures to the so-­called Letter of 101, whereas what he thought he had signed was the Letter of 59. While some p ­ eople in the opposition condemned t­ hose who did not sign, ­others admitted that it was better, for instance, that Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble got made than if the director had been banned for signing a protest letter. See Anna Bikont and Joanna Szczęsna, Lawina i kamienie: Pisarze wobec komunizmu (Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 2006), 403–405. On lists and published signatures (without Białoszewski), see Memoriał 59 oraz inne dokumenty i wypowiedzi związane z obroną swobód obywatelskich i zmianą konstytucji w PRL, ed. Józef Ptaczek (München: Wydawnictwo Komitetu Głównego PPS and Log­os, 1976). In his diary, Białoszewski notes that he had refused to sign a pro-­state counter-­letter from 1964, in which writers w ­ ere asked to condemn the Letter of 34 against censorship. 78. Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 383, 777. 79. Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 741, 841. 80. See Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 16–17. 81. Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 383, 357–358. 82. Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 576. 83. Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 22, 56; Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 576. 84. Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 22. 85. The victim was Bohdan Piasecki. See Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 14, with the footnote. See also Białoszewski, Donosy rzeczywistości, 93; Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 21. 86. Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 227; Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, 31. 87. A topic that appears in Białoszewski’s secret journal much more frequently than in his books is his vivid interest in p ­ eople of diverse backgrounds, especially Protestants and Jews. He missed the diversity of prewar Warsaw. At the same time, Białoszewski knew that he should keep some observations to himself and lower his voice when in the com­pany of unknown ­people. Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 22. 88. Niżyńska, The Kingdom of Insignificance, 113.

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89. See a booklet by Maciej Byliniak, included with the four-­CD set Białoszewski do słuchu (Warszawa: Bołt Rec­ords, 2013); Maciej Byliniak, “Miron nie potrzebował walkmana,” Culture.pl, March 25, 2014, https://­culture​.­pl​/­pl​/­artykul​/­maciej​-­byliniak​ -­miron​-n ­ ie​-­potrzebowal​-­walkmana​-w ­ ywiad; Marta Bukowiecka, “Między tekstem a nagraniem: Formy niesystemowej dźwiękowości w poezji Mirona Biało​szew­ skiego,” Teksty Drugie, no. 4 (2017): 437–438. On dif­fer­ent recordings, see Jadwiga Stańczakowa, “Informacja o Archiwum Mirona Białoszewskiego,” in Głowiński and Łapiński, Pisanie Białoszewskiego, 264–265. 90. Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 34. See the editor’s note in Miron Białoszewski, Pamiętnik z powstania warszawskiego (Warszawa: PIW, 2014), 239–241. 91. Byliniak, “Miron nie potrzebował walkmana.” 92. Adam Repucha, “Mi(k)ro(fo)n Białoszewski,” Widok: Teorie i praktyki kultury wizualnej, no. 5 (2014): 8. 93. Białoszewski’s Mickiewicz has now been recovered and released on CD. See Miron Białoszewski plays Adam Mickiewicz Dziady (Warszawa: Bołt Rec­ords, 2012). The date is given on the CD booklet and was written on the box for the tape. See also Maciej Byliniak, “Dziady według Białoszewskiego: Rytuał i buffo—­ Rozmawiał Tadeusz Sobolewski,” Gazeta Wyborcza, June  29, 2012, https://­ wyborcza​.­pl​/­1,75410,12033130,​_ ­D ziady​_ ­​_­wedlug ​_ ­Bialoszewskiego​_ ­​_ ­Rytual ​_ ­i​ _­buffo​.­html. 94. Miron Białoszewski, “O tym Mickiewiczu jak go mówię,” Odra 6 (1967): 33–38; Kerényi, Odtańcowywanie poezji, 201, 208. 95. Based on Miron Białoszewski plays Adam Mickiewicz Dziady. See also Kerényi, Odtańcowywanie poezji, 25, 204, 205, 215. 96. Białoszewski, “O tym Mickiewiczu jak go mówię,” 37. 97. Repucha, “Mi(k)ro(fo)n Białoszewski,” 5. 98. Jacek Kopciński, “Człowiek transu: Magnetofonowe sesje Mirona Biało­ szewskiego,” Teksty Drugie, no. 4 (2011): 209. See the lists of under­ground cassettes in “Polska Solidarna,” Sowiniec. Fundacja Centrum Dokumentacji Czynu Niepod­ ległościowego, accessed July  12, 2018, http://­w ww​.­sowiniec​.­com​.­pl; Leszek Jaranowski, “Niezależne publikacje fonograficzne podziemia solidarnościowego (1982–1989),” accessed July 12, 2018, http://­w ww​.­d arpoint​.­pl​/­pages​/­Oficyna%20 fonograficzna​/­wojenne%20kasety%20audio​.­htm; see especially the cassettes: Boj­kot: Aktorzy przeciwko stanowi wojennemu, ed. Jan Gall (Warszawa: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1983), ser. nk, no.  004; Przemek Gintrowski, Pamiątki (Warszawa: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1983), ser. nk, no. 008. Both (and ­others) available in the National Library in Warsaw. See Justyna Błażejowska, “Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza NOWa,” Encyklopedia Solidarności, accessed July 12, 2018, http://­w ww​ .­encysol​.p ­ l​/­wiki​/­Niezale%C5%BCna​_­Oficyna​_­Wydawnicza. 99. Stańczakowa, “Informacja,” 264–265. Copies of t­hese cassettes are now stored in the Museum of Lit­er­a­ture.

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100. See, e.g., Katarzyna Cudzich-­Budniak, “Dynamika muzyczna w poezji na podstawie nagrania Miron Białoszewski plays Adam Mickiewicz ‘Dziady,’” in Potencjał wiersza, ed. Witold Sadowski (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL, 2013), 231–244; Magdalena Żukowska, “Twórczość Mirona Białoszewskiego w nagraniach autorskich wobec dotychczasowych przekazów drukowanych: Szczegółowy wykaz różnic” (BA thesis, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, Warsaw, 2015); Michał Boenisch, “Przyjemność głosu,” Dwutygodnik, no.  5 (2014), https://­w ww​.d ­ wu​ tygodnik​.­com​/­artykul​/­5202​-­przyjemnosc​-­glosu​.­html; Bukowiecka, “Między tekstem a nagraniem”; Repucha, “Mi(k)ro(fo)n Białoszewski”; Natalia Ambroziak, “ ‘To tylko rodzaj czasu: Płeć czasu’: Białoszewskiego radio z babą,” in Communicare: Almanach antropologiczny, vol. 4, ed. Grzegorz Godlewski, Agnieszka Karpowicz, Marta Rakoczy, and Paweł Rodak (Warszawa: WUW 2014), 165–184; Agnieszka Karpowicz, “Wibracje Mitsuku. Archiwum głosu Mirona Białoszewskiego,” Teksty Drugie, no. 3 (2019): 79–94. 101. Kopciński, “Człowiek transu,” 212–214. 102. He mentions it in both “Człowiek transu” and “Od ballady do oratorium.” 103. Tadeusz Sobolewski describes a 2008 happening during which young ­people read Białoszewski’s poem out loud, played some Mozart, and began to dance in a dark room. The effect, he says, was similar to his visits to Białoszewski in his youth, as it created a par­tic­u ­lar atmosphere. Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 132. 104. On Janusz Sławiński hearing the tapes in the 1960s, see Kopciński, “Od ballady do oratorium,” 77. On playing tapes at an event in Poznań in 1969, see Białoszewski, Donosy rzeczywistości, 121. On ­these tapes played in Warsaw in the 1970s, see Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 43. 105. Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 84, 91, 95, 135. On the radio recording from 1981, see the note in Białoszewski, Pamiętnik z powstania warszawskiego, 240. For the Union of the Blind, 1975, see recording no. M.01452 in the Museum of Lit­er­at­ ure (August 1975). On Memoir for the Union of the Blind, see Kopciński, “Człowiek transu,” 211. On his vari­ous radio recordings from 1977 and 1978, see Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 343, 416–417. Recordings from ­t hese years also appear in cata­logs of the Polish Radio Archive in Warsaw. 106. Miron Białoszewski, “Moja wypowiedź o sobie,” quoted a­ fter Piotr Bogalecki, Wiersze-­partytury w poezji polskiej neoawangardy: Białoszewski, Czycz, Drahan, Grześczak, Partum, Wirpsza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2020), 189. 107. Stanisław Barańczak, Język poetycki Mirona Białoszewskiego, 2nd  ed. (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 2016), 128, 132; Andrzej Hejmej, Muzyka w literaturze: Perspektywy komparatystyki interdyscyplinarnej (Kraków: Universitas, 2012), 139–168; Jolanta Chojak, “Grafia a iluzja mowy potocznej,” in Głowiński and Łapiński, Pisanie Białoszewskiego, 164–177; Witold Sadowski, Tekst graficzny Białoszewskiego (Warszawa: Wydział Polonistyki UW, 1999). Other scholars had

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the idea of treating the poems as scores for choreography. See Jan Potkański, Sens nowoczesnego wiersza: Wersyfikacja Białoszewskiego, Przybosia, Miłosza i Herberta (Warszawa: Wydział Polonistyki UW, 2004). 108. Bogalecki, Wiersze-­partytury, 182–188. 109. Bogalecki, Wiersze-­partytury, 185. 110. Title translation from Niżyńska, The Kingdom of Insignificance, 4. 111. Kerényi, Odtańcowywanie poezji, 50–51. 112. Text: Miron Białoszewski, Obroty rzeczy—Rachunek zachciankowy—­ Mylne wzruszenia—­Było i było (Warszawa: PIW, 1987), 215. Audio: Białoszewski do słuchu, vol. 2; Miron Białoszewski, “Poetry Reading,” undated recording, Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University, no. PG7161.I2 P64 1950. Pos­si­ble dates are given as 1950–1969, but the reel-­to-­reel tape-­recording encompasses se­lections from all of Białoszewski’s poetry books from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as from Forefathers’ Eve. A more probable date is thus the mid-­to late 1960s. An undated recording with the same composition can be found in the National Digital Archives (no. 33-­T-7100), where it is presented as made by the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Acad­emy of Sciences. 113. See Murawska’s per­for­mance, recorded in 1958 as a part of their common repertoire, and then the same text recorded by Białoszewski in the 1970s: Białoszewski do słuchu, vols. 2 and 4. In vol. 2 Ludwik Hering is given as the author. For the text, see Białoszewski, Obroty rzeczy, 193. 114. Białoszewski, Obroty rzeczy, 192. It is also known by the title “Zatrzaśnięcia się.” Note in Polish: “krakowiaczek dotąd śpiewamy dokąd się sam nie urwie.” Undated Harvard recording and Białoszewski do słuchu, vol. 2, which gives Hering as the author of the piece. 115. Miron Białoszewski, “Odczepić się” i inne wiersze opublikowane w latach 1976–1980 (Warszawa: PIW, 1994), 66–67; Białoszewski do słuchu, vol. 4. 116. Białoszewski, Obroty rzeczy, 13–15; Białoszewski, “Poetry Reading,” undated recording, Woodberry Poetry Room. 117. Translation mine. Białoszewski, “Odczepić się,” 85: “Coraz wyżej rusztowania / coraz wyżej. / / Kosmos w klatce!” 118. My study of the acoustics of Białoszewski’s recordings started out in cooperation with the linguist Agnieszka Wagner, who first prepared technical analyses of pitch contours of his two poems from among a few I suggested. Agnieszka Wagner, “Współczesne metody badań nad intonacją wypowiedzi słownych: Przykład zastosowania wybranych metod do analizy melodii wiersza,” Poradnik Językowy 7 (2016): 54–67. ­These two recordings ­were “Aniela w miasteczku Folino” and “Ach, gdyby, gdyby nawet piec zabrali.” 119. Miron Białoszewski, The Revolution of ­Things, trans. Andrzej Busza and Bogdan Czaykowski (Washington, DC: Char­i­ot­eer Press, 1974), 12. For the Polish, see Białoszewski, Obroty rzeczy, 116. 120. Barańczak, Język poetycki Mirona Białoszewskiego, 146–148.

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121. Białoszewski, The Revolution of ­Things, 12. 122. The first technical analy­sis of pitch in the 1983 recording can be found in Wagner, “Współczesne metody badań nad intonacją wypowiedzi słownych.” 123. I have slightly modified the punctuation ­here to match the original. 124. For more on this subject, see Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron, 16, 79. 125. Michał Rusinek, Nic zwyczajnego: O Wisławie Szymborskiej (Kraków: Znak, 2016), 108. 126. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 127. Anna Zarzycka, Rewolucja Szymborskiej, 1945–1957: O wczesnej twórczości poetki na tle epoki (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2010), 49. For more on Szymborska’s life, see “Kalendarium życia i twórczości Wisławy Szymborskiej,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 499–508. See also “Kalendarium,” in the booklet Wisława Szymborska, authored by Anna Bikont, Joanna Szczęsna, and Antonina Turnau, included with the four-­CD set Wisława Szymborska (Warszawa: Agora SA, 2010). 128. “Kalendarium życia i twórczości.” On 1966, see also Bikont and Szczęsna, Lawina i kamienie, 347. 129. Her books, however, ­were still published afterward. See “Kalendarium życia i twórczości,” “Kalendarium” from the CD set, and “Chronology” at the website of The Wisława Szymborska Foundation, accessed December 27, 2020, https://­w ww​.­szymborska​.­org​.­pl​/­en​/­w islawa​/­chronology​/­. ­Here one can also find several recordings of the poet. 130. Subsequently she also agreed to occasional readings in churches. See Marek Skwarnicki, “Podziękowanie Wisławie Szymborskiej,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 411, and Ireneusz Kania, “Wchodzimy w tajemnicę jak w kałużę,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 149. 131. See “Kalendarium życia i twórczości”; Bronisław Maj, “Kilka słów . . . ,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 290–291. Quotes in En­glish from Wisława Szym­ borska, Map: Collected and Last Poems, trans. Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak, ed. Clare Cavanagh (Boston: Mari­ner Books, 2016), 266. In Polish: “Nie ma rozpusty gorszej niż myślenie.” “Dla takich, którzy myślą, święte nie jest nic.” From Wisława Szymborska, Wiersze wybrane, rev. ed. (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2012), 275. 132. Stanisław Balbus, “Tyle śmierci, ile życia,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 22, 25; Jerzy Pilch, “O przewadze życia duchowego nad materialnym,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 361. 133. “Kalendarium życia i twórczości.” 134. Maj, “Kilka słów . . . ,” 291. 135. Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Rus­sia, Poland, and the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 177.

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136. “Dialogi poetów: Czesław Miłosz i Tadeusz Różewicz,” in Wbrew sobie: Rozmowy z Tadeuszem Różewiczem, ed. Jan Stolarczyk (Wrocław: Biuro Lite­ rackie, 2011). Audio files in “Różewicz i Miłosz—­jedyna taka rozmowa,” Polskie Radio, accessed January 17, 2019, https://­w ww​.­polskieradio​.­pl​/­8​/­195​/A ­ rtykul​/­1204​ 643,Rozewicz​-i­ ​-­Milosz​-­%E2%80%93​-­jedyna​-t­ aka​-­rozmowa. 137. Małgorzata I. Niemczyńska, “Historia jednego donosu,” Gazeta Wyborcza, January 4, 2013, http://­w yborcza​.­pl​/­magazyn​/­1,124059,13144091,Historia​_­jednego​ _­donosu​.­html. 138. See Joanna Szczęsna’s contribution to the debate “Szymborska prywatna i kłopotliwa,” in Nowa Dekada Krakowska, no.  6 (2016): 8–9. When it comes to dedications, an exception was the poem dedicated to Halina Poświatowska. 139. Rusinek, Nic zwyczajnego, 164. 140. On self-­fashioning and hiding, see Michał Rusinek, “Zachwyt i rozpacz Piotrusia Pani,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 400. For friends’ views, anecdotes, and jokes, see Wisława Szymborska, Błysk rewolwru (Warszawa: Agora SA, 2013). For some collages and her new genres (moskaliki, odwódki, altruitki, lepieje), see Wisława Szymborska, Rymowanki dla dużych dzieci (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2003). 141. Wisława Szymborska and Kornel Filipowicz, Listy: Najlepiej w życiu ma Twój Kot (Kraków: Znak, 2016). See also Tomasz Fiałkowski’s contribution to the debate “Szymborska prywatna i kłopotliwa,” 11. 142. Rusinek, “Zachwyt i rozpacz Piotrusia Pani,” 400. 143. This idea is treated in Michał Rusinek’s contribution to the debate “Szymborska prywatna i kłopotliwa,” 12. 144. In En­ glish: Szymborska, Map, 296. In Polish: Szymborska, Wiersze wybrane, 304–305: “Umrzeć—­tego nie robi się kotu.” On the context, see “Kalendarium,” in the booklet Wisława Szymborska (year 1990). Michał Rusinek said he had heard her read the poem once. See Rusinek, Nic zwyczajnego, 99. 145. See Ryszard Krynicki, “Drugi talent Wisławy Szymborskiej,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 216–219, and Aleksander Fiut, “Wisława,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 100. 146. Pilch, “O przewadze życia duchowego nad materialnym,” 361; Maj, “Kilka słów . . . ,” 291; Rusinek, Nic zwyczajnego, 84–85. For more anecdotes, see Anna Bikont and Joanna Szczęsna, Pamiątkowe rupiecie: Przyjaciele i sny Wisławy Szymborskiej (Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 1997). 147. Balbus, “Tyle śmierci, ile życia,” 13. For more on composing limericks and selecting guests, see Rusinek, Nic zwyczajnego, 8, 84, 164; Kolenda-­ Zaleska, “Radość pisania, możność utrwalania,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 189. 148. Zagajewski, “Kawa po turecku,” 487. 149. Pilch, “O przewadze życia duchowego nad materialnym,” 360. 150. Rusinek, Nic zwyczajnego, 84.

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151. Szymborska, Rymowanki dla dużych dzieci, 17. 152. Marta Wyka, “Niepodobna do nikogo,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 475. See also her comments in “Szymborska prywatna i kłopotliwa,” 18. 153. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-­Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). Reference to Huizinga is also made in Bikont and Szczęsna, Pamiątkowe rupiecie. 154. For more on Łuszczewska (known as “Deotyma”), see, e.g., Andrzej Biernacki, “Jadwiga Łuszczewska,” Internetowy Polski Słownik Biograficzny, accessed January 22, 2019, https://­w ww​.­ipsb​.­nina​.­gov​.­pl​/a­ ​/b ­ iografia​/­jadwiga​-­luszczewska. 155. Szymborska, Map, 237–238. In Polish: Szymborska, Wiersze wybrane, 245. 156. Szymborska, Map, 126. In Polish: Szymborska, Wiersze wybrane, 132. 157. Szymborska, Map, 126–127. Excerpts in Polish: “Sponad życia. Z przyszłości,” “żyli w życiu,” “mogła być piękna.” See Szymborska, Wiersze wybrane, 132–133. 158. This anti-­t heatrical stance and relations to Greek tragedies are discussed in Wojciech Ligęza, O poezji Wisławy Szymborskiej: Świat w stanie korekty (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), 226–241. 159. Szymborska, Map, 285. In Polish: Szymborska, Wiersze wybrane, 293. 160. Translation mine. Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna, “Poezja”: “Nie wypije się tego, nie zje . . . ​ / Nie lubię, nie lubię poezji!” See Lucyna Marzec, “ ‘Nie lubię poezji’—­interpretacja liryku Poezja Kazimiery Iłłakowiczówny,” in Laboratorium poezji kobiecej XX wieku, ed. Joanna Grądziel-­Wójcik, Jerzy Kaniewski, Agnieszka Kwiatkowska, and Tomasz Umerle (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje, 2015), 17–28. 161. See the poem and its discussion in Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics, 251. 162. See, e.g., Teresa Walas in “Szymborska prywatna i kłopotliwa,” 17. For a reading of the poem in the context of the place, style, and tasks of poetry, see Jacek Brzozowski, “O dwóch wieczorach autorskich Wisławy Szymborskiej,” Acta Universitatis Lodziensis: Folia Litteraria Polonica, no. 1 (1998): 127–138. 163. Ligęza, O poezji Wisławy Szymborskiej, 247–259; Hanna Milewska, “Szymborska, koloratura i jazz,” Hi-­Fi Muzyka, no. 4 (2012): 89–91. 164. Zbigniew Granat, “Crossing the Curtain: Polish Jazz Meets Poetry in the europäische Heimat,” Jazz Research Journal 6, no. 2 (2012): 201–227. 165. Balbus, “Tyle śmierci, ile życia,” 10; Rusinek, Nic zwyczajnego, 87. 166. Wisława Szymborska and Tomasz Stańko, Tutaj / ­Here + CD (Kraków: Znak, 2012); Milewska, “Szymborska, koloratura i jazz,” 89–91; Tomasz Handzlik, “Wisława według Stańki: Wiersze do zagrania,” Gazeta Wyborcza, February 12, 2013, https://­w yborcza​.­pl​/­1,75410,13385594,Wislawa​_­wedlug​_ ­Stanki​_ ­​_­Wiersze​_­do​ _­zagrania​.­html; “Chronology,” at the website of The Wisława Szymborska Foundation.

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167. Szymborska, Map, 412. In Polish: Wisława Szymborska, Wybór poezji, ed. Wojciech Ligęza (Ossolineum: Wrocław, 2016), 444. 168. Milewska, “Szymborska, koloratura i jazz,” 89–91. 169. Milewska, “Szymborska, koloratura i jazz,” 90; Handzlik, “Wisława według Stańki.” 170. Rusinek, Nic zwyczajnego, 75, 107, 198; Kolenda-­Z aleska, “Radość pisania, możność utrwalania,” 188; Bogdan Tosza, “Ślad ptaka na piasku,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 432–433; Leonard Neuger, “Prosto z uchylonej jeszcze chwili,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 347; Tomas Venclova, “Spotkania z Wisławą Szymborską,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 442; Dominik Antonik, “Audiobook: Od brzmienia słów do głosu autora,” Teksty Drugie, no. 5 (2015): 146. On the Stockholm tragedy, see Michał Rusinek interviewed by Jacek Nizinkiewicz, “Szymborska jest jakby poza wiekiem, poza czasem i miejscem,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 385. Auditory impressions are based also on Szymborska’s CDs. 171. The 1971 recording was made for the radio program “Chwila poezji: Utwory poetyckie Wisławy Szymborskiej w interpretacji autorki.” See National Digital Archives in Warsaw, no. 33-­T-4250. The 2003 recording of Szymborska’s reading in Kraków was issued on a CD: Wisława Szymborska, Wiersze wybrane, added to her book ­under this title (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2012). 172. Szymborska, Map, 172. In Polish: Szymborska, Wybór poezji, 201. 173. See CDs 2 and 3 in the four-­CD set Wisława Szymborska. 174. Four documentary films about Szymborska, which feature her readings and her apartments, ­were made in her lifetime. See Katarzyna Wajda, “Radość oglądania,” Nowa Dekada Krakowska, no.  6 (2016): 142–154. The last one, the Dutch documentary film End and Beginning—­Meeting Wislawa Szymborska, directed by John Albert Jansen in 2011, had its Polish premiere in May 2012, a­ fter Szymborska’s death in February 2012. The film is more serious, almost elegiac in tone, which makes it similar to farewell audio recordings I analyze in Chapter 4, but it was not planned to be a poetic testament. It rec­ords the poet reading in a warm voice at home. For the information on the premiere, see “Pokaz filmu End and Beginning—­Meeting Wislawa Szymborska,” Culture.pl, accessed May 2, 2019, https://­c ulture​ .­pl ​ /­pl ​ /­w ydarzenie​ /­p okaz​ -­f ilmu​ -­e nd​ -­a nd​ -­b eginning​ -­m eeting​ -­wislawa​-s­ zymborska​.­ The film, Koniec i początek: Spotkanie z Wisławą Szymborską, was also published as a DVD added to Tygodnik Powszechny, October 7, 2012. 175. I am grateful to Michał Rusinek for the information about Szymborska’s attitude to home recording. Private correspondence, December 15, 2020. 176. Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje, 75, 127–128. He did like the actor Wojciech Siemion, however. See Kopciński, “Człowiek transu,” 211–212. 177. Szymborska, Map, 87. In Polish: Szymborska, Wiersze wybrane, 92. 178. Szymborska, Map, 367–368, 374–375. In Polish: Szymborska, Wybór poezji, 409, 418. For the Nobel lecture in Polish, see Szymborska, Wiersze wybrane,

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403–408. In En­glish, see “The Poet and the World,” December 7, 1996, https://­w ww​ .­nobelprize​.­org​/­prizes​/­literature​/­1996​/­szymborska​/­lecture​/­. 179. Michał Głowiński, “O Wisławie Szymborskiej słów kilka,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 115. 180. Bożena Karwowska, “The Female Persona in Wisława Szymborska’s Poems,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 48, no. 3–4 (2006): 315–333. On a dif­fer­ent approach to ­t hese aty­pi­cal personas, see Avery Slater, “Prepostrophe: Rethinking Modes of Lyric Address in Wisława Szymborska’s Poetry of the Non-­Human,” Thinking Verse 4, no. 1 (2014): 140–159. 181. For more on Białoszewski’s strategies and the taboos around him, see Niżyńska, The Kingdom of Insignificance. 182. In his textbook on Polish lit­er­a­ture Miłosz wrote, “Yet she often leans ­toward preciosity. She is prob­ably at her best where her ­woman’s sensibility outweighs her existential brand of rationalism.” In his anthology Postwar Polish Po­ etry he included only one of her poems, for which he apologized in l­ater editions (see Postwar Polish Poetry, 109). Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Lit­er­a­ture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 485. On Rusinek, who had already changed his mind in high school, see Rusinek, “Szymborska jest jakby poza wiekiem, poza czasem i miejscem,” 393. 183. Czesław Miłosz, “Poezja jako świadomość,” Teksty Drugie, no. 4 (1991): 5–7. 184. Translation mine. Teresa Walas, “Stać między światem a Szymborską,” in Papieska, Zachwyt i rozpacz, 464–465. For more on Miłosz visiting Szymborska and their relationship, see also “Spotkanie z prof. Teresą Walas w Szufladzie Szymborskiej,” published by Fundacja Wisławy Szymborskiej on November 29, 2013, https://­w ww​.y­ outube​.c­ om​/­watch​?­v​= Q ­ H0vNwpclCc. This is naturally a dif­ fer­ent image of Miłosz than the one I described in Chapter 2. For more on the contradictory nature of Miłosz’s images, see Mikołaj Golubiewski, The Persona of Czesław Miłosz: Authorial Poetics, Critical Debates, Reception Games (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018). 185. See Jerzy Jarzębski, “Kilka zdań o wstydzie istnienia,” Teksty Drugie, no. 4 (1991): 3. See also Google results for “pierwsza dama polskiej poezji.” Miłosz and Szymborska appeared together as Nobel Prize winners on several occasions— for instance, during the Meeting of the Poets of the East and the West in Kraków in 1997, or in Vilnius in 2000 with another Nobel Prize winner from the Baltic area, Günter Grass. See Venclova, “Spotkania z Wisławą Szymborską,” 441; Rusinek, Nic zwyczajnego, 86–87, 137. 186. Th ­ ese ideals remain valid to this day; see articles from the special issue “Dlaczego w Polsce nikt nie chce być elitą,” Kultura Liberalna, no. 2 (2019), https://­ kulturaliberalna​.­pl​/­2019​/­01​/­15​/­polska​-­elita​-­iiirp​-­inteligencja​-­hejt​/­. 187. For more on the link between privacy, distance from exhibitionism, and Szymborska’s prewar upbringing, see “Spotkanie z prof. Teresą Walas w Szuflad­zie

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Szymborskiej.” Filipowicz was similarly brought up. For more on Szymborska’s ­family, see the chapter on parents in Bikont and Szczęsna, Pamiątkowe rupiecie.

4. Taped Farewells 1. For Illg’s recollection, see Jerzy Illg, Mój Znak: O noblistach, kabaretach, przyjaźniach, książkach, kobietach (Kraków: Znak, 2009), 103. For other accounts of the event (that d ­ on’t discuss the or­ga­niz­er’s surprise), see Marzena Broda, “Odkrywca świata,” Kwartalnik Artystyczny, no.  3 (2004): 120; and Michał Olszewski, “Wieczorne pożegnanie Czesława Miłosza,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 27, 2004, http://­krakow​.­w yborcza​.p ­ l​/­krakow​/­1,44425,2255149​.­html. For the poem, see Czesław Miłosz, New and Collected Poems (1931–2001) (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 376. In Polish: “O piękno, błogosławieństwo: Was tylko zebrałem / Z życia, które było gorzkie i pomylone.” See Czesław Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie (Kraków: Znak, 2011), 738. Given Illg’s description and the order of the two poems, the recording must have been the first CD from the collection Czesław Miłosz czyta Mickiewicza: Czesław Miłosz czyta Miłosza, 2 CDs (Warszawa: CD Accord and Polskie Radio SA, 1996). This was a recording of the 1996 PEN Club meeting in Warsaw. 2. On other examples of associations with death, see the chapter “Gramophones,” in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 108–114; and Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 287–301. 3. Thomas Edison, “The Phonograph and Its ­Future,” The North American Re­ view, January  1, 1878, 533. See also Alexander Rehding, “Wax Cylinder Revolutions,” The Musical Quarterly 88, no. 1 (March 2005): 123–160. 4. Sterne, The Audible Past, 301–311. 5. Helen Vendler, Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2010), 1, 2. See also Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005). 6. Sterne, The Audible Past, 292–300, 332–333. 7. Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut, “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane,” TDR: The Drama Review 54, no. 1 (2010): 20. 8. Halina Tchórzewska-­ Kabata, “Zbiory Foniczne Muzeum Literatury im. Adama Mickiewicza,” Muzealnictwo, no. 31 (1988): 65–71. 9. On Wat’s life, see Anna Micińska, “Aleksander Wat—­Elementy do portretu,” in Aleksander Wat, Poezje zebrane, ed. Anna Micińska and Jan Zieliński (Kraków: Znak, 1992), 30–33, 47–65; Stanisław Barańczak, “Four Walls of Pain:

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The Late Poetry of Aleksander Wat,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 33, no. 2 (1989): 173–176; and Tomas Venclova, Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 246. 10. Micińska, “Aleksander Wat,” 65–67. “Spoken memoir” (“pamiętnik mó­ wiony”) is the subtitle of the Polish edition. See Aleksander Wat, My ­Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Aleksander Wat, Mój wiek: Pamiętnik mówiony, ed. Rafał Habielski (Kraków: Universitas, 2011). The dates of Wat’s stay in Berkeley (­u ntil June 1965) and his further work with Miłosz (in July  1965) are given in an appendix to Czesław Miłosz and Ola Watowa, Listy o tym, co najważniejsze, ed. Barbara Toruńczyk (Warszawa: Fundacja Zeszytów Literackich, 2009), 173. See also Wat, Mój wiek, pt. 2, 530. During one taped session, however, Miłosz says that their previous recording session had taken place on June 19, and that now in Paris it was August 6. I used Beinecke Digital Collections of Mój wiek, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (hereafter cited as Beinecke Library), box 17, folder 414, accessed February  13, 2019, https:// ­brbl​-­d l​.­l ibrary​.­yale​.­edu​/­v ufind ​/­Search​ /­Results​?­lookfor​= ­moj+wiek&type​=A ­ llFields&page​= ­3. In 2021 ­t hese recordings ­were no longer available online. 11. The purchase of the Grundig is mentioned by Alina Kowalczykowa, who gives the year of purchase as 1966, which may be wrong. See Aleksander Wat, Korespondencja, ed. Alina Kowalczykowa (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 2005), pt. 2, 94. Wat mentions the cost of his tape recorder (in dollars) in a note dated August 1965, in Aleksander Wat, Notatniki, ed. Adam Dziadek and Jan Zieliński (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2015), 862. Wat also mentions the Grundig TK-41  in a letter to Miłosz from September  22, 1965, Czesław Miłosz Papers, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 661, box 67, folder 923. All analog box numbers are given on the basis of archival research at the Beinecke Library in January 2018. 12. Wat, Korespondencja, pt. 1, 109–110 (Wat’s letter to Józef Czapski from October 14, 1965). Compare Wat’s letter to Janina Miłosz from August 29, 1965, and to Czesław Miłosz from September  22 and October  28, 1965, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 661, box 67, folder 923. 13. Wat, Korespondencja, pt. 1, 110 (Wat’s letter to Józef Czapski from October 14, 1965). Compare with Wat’s letters to Miłosz from October 22 and 28, 1965, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 661, box 67, folder 923. See Wat’s letter to Miłosz from December 8, 1965, Aleksander Wat Papers, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 705, box 4, folder 159. 14. See the relevant section of Aleksander Wat, Ciemne świecidło (Paris: Libella, 1968), and Wat, Against the Devil in History: Poems, Short Stories, Essays, Frag­ ments, trans. Frank L. Vigoda, ed. and intro. Gwido Zlatkes (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2018).

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15. All three quotes are from untitled poems published only ­a fter Wat’s death. Translation mine. In Polish, they are: “Ocalićby ze snu ciepło jej ręki,” Wat, Poezje zebrane, 418; “Dla wiersza mego kim jestem? / Tym, kto śni mu się / natrętny”; and “wolno wystygła krew atramentu,” Wat, Poezje zebrane, 415. A dif­fer­ent translation of t­ hese poems is also available in Wat, Against the Devil in History, 98, 100. 16. Wat’s letter to Miłosz from December  26, 1965, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 661, box 67, folder 923. 17. On the role of listeners, see Józef Olejniczak, “Krzyki i szepty: Poeci i magnetofon,” Czas Kultury, no. 3 (2017): 80. 18. The phrase Wat uses in Polish is “przepuścić wiersz przez magnetofon.” Wat’s letter to Miłosz from December 26, 1965, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 661, box 67, folder 923. 19. See Lytle Shaw, Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); and Henri Chopin, Poésie sonore internationale (Paris: Jean-­Michel Place Éditeur, 1979). 20. Wat, Korespondencja, pt. 2, 53 (Czapski’s letter to Wat from December 15, 1965). Compare with Maria Czapska’s letter to Ola Wat, December 23, 1965, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 705, box 1, folder 40. 21. Wat’s letter to Miłosz from December 8, 1965, and an undated letter, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 705, box 4, folder 159. See also Wat, Korespondencja, pt. 2, 96–97 (Herbert’s letter to Olga Scherer from December 1965). 22. Wat, Korespondencja, pt. 2, 96–97 (Herbert’s letter to Olga Scherer from December 1965). Compare with the letter in Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 705, box 2, folder 81. 23. Wat, Korespondencja, pt. 2, 93 (Herbert’s letter to Wat from February 2, 1966, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 705, box 2, folder 81). 24. Andrzej Franaszek, Herbert: Biografia, vol. 2: Pan Cogito (Kraków: Znak, 2018), 111–112, 858–859. He prob­ably received the recorder during a series of poetry readings in West Germany, where he stayed in May–­June 1966. 25. Zbigniew Herbert, Selected Poems, trans. John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 22. See “Prolog,” in Zbigniew Herbert, Wiersze wybrane, rev. ed., ed. Ryszard Krynicki (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2017), 115. Franaszek, Herbert, 2:112, 116. 26. Apart from the recordings with My ­Century available in the Beinecke Library at Yale and the recordings from the National Library in Warsaw, other tapes I discuss in this chapter are not part of authors’ archives and seem to be lost. 27. Franaszek, Herbert, 2:286–302. 28. To be precise, some of Wat’s poems appeared in Miłosz’s translations, together with other Polish poets, even before his split with Poland on the BBC. See Wat’s correspondence with the BBC and the program “New Poetry in Poland”

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from February 12, 1963, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 705, box 1, folder 18. Unlike Herbert, Wat was not sufficiently well known to be broadcast more often. See Wat’s letters to Jan Nowak from October  8, 1963, and November  16, 1965; and ­others from Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 705, box 5, folder 167. See Wat’s correspondence with Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope, especially with Nowak from April 15, 1966, and Tadeusz Zawadzki from November 11 and December 14, 1966, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 705, box 5, folder 185. On Radio ­Free Eu­rope’s profile, see Wojciech Karpiński, “Głos z Angielskiego Ogrodu,” in Jan Nowak-­Jeziorański: Głos wolnej Europy, ed. Barbara Toruńczyk (Warszawa: Zeszyty Literackie, 2005), 23–24. On Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope’s profile and Miłosz, see Barbara Toruńczyk, “Wysłannik zapomnianej tradycji,” in Jan Nowak-­ Jeziorański, 53–54; and Beata Dorosz, “Czesław Miłosz in the Context of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in Amer­i­ca,” The Polish Review 56, no. 4 (2011): 303– 304. On Wat’s correspondence with Radio ­Free Eu­rope, see Wat, Korespondencja, pt. 1, 450, and Wat, Korespondencja, pt. 2, 488–490. Miłosz appeared on Radio ­Free Eu­rope ­later—­e.g., during martial law he read his poem about Lech Wałęsa. See a note in Miron Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik (Kraków: Znak, 2012), 809. 29. For the text, see Aleksander Wat, “ ‘. . . ​jak upiór staję między wami i pytam o źródło złego,’ ” Na Antenie: Mówi Rozgłośnia Polska Radia Wolna Eu­ ropa 4, no. 43 (November 6, 1966): 1. The magazine presented a se­lection of broadcast programs. Wat’s voice can be heard in “Aleksander Wat o kulturze polskiej w PRL,” archival Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope broadcast, Radia Wolności, accessed February 20, 2019, https://www.polskieradio.pl/68/2461/Audio/585246. The website does not always show the right findings, so it is helpful to search for programs using titles or authors. 30. On sound reportage, see an announcement from Na Antenie 4, no. 43 (November 6, 1966): 5. For the letter to Nowak from February 3, 1967, see Wat, Kore­ spondencja, pt. 1, 450. Other letters on tapes with poetry are in Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 705, box 5, folder 167 (two undated letters to Nowak about plans to send a twenty-­minute tape) and folder 185 (letters from Zawadzki asking about recorded poems on January 12, March 14, and April 11, 1967). For Zawadzki’s worries about Wat’s health, see an e­ arlier letter from December  14, 1966, in Wat, Kore­ spondencja, pt. 2, 488–490. 31. For Wat’s letter to Juliusz Sakowski, June 1, 1967, see Wat, Korespondencja, pt. 1, 475. Zawadzki’s letter from July 18, 1967, is in Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 705, box 5, folder 185. On Literary Corner segment no.  376 on July  15, 1967, see the scripts from that day in the collection of the Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope Polish Ser­v ice, National Digital Archives, Warsaw, accessed February  20, 2019, https://­szukaj​ warchiwach​.­pl​/­3​/­36​/­0#tabZespol. 32. For his stay in Majorca, see changing dates and places given in his correspondence with Zawadzki, Beinecke Library, GEN MSS 705, box 5, folder 185. On

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studying theater, see Micińska, “Aleksander Wat,” 25. On Wat hoping to or­ga­nize his wife’s poetry recitations a­ fter his death, see Wat’s letter to Juliusz Sakowski, June  1, 1967, in Wat, Korespondencja, pt.  1, 475. The poetry rehearsal I am describing is interrupted by breaks and noises and did not necessarily take place on one day. The digitized version was accessed ­under Mój wiek in the Beinecke Digital Collections on February  20, 2019, https://­brbl​-­d l​.l­ ibrary​.­yale​.­edu​/­v ufind​/­Record​ /­3749222, as GEN MSS 705, box 17, folder 413, track 2 of 2. In 2021 it was no longer available online. This online division among boxes and folders and their taped contents (especially the numbers of recording sessions of My ­Century) did not match the brief contents given for the analog boxes in the Guide to the Alek­ sander Wat Papers (in both its 2019 and 2021 versions). In the guide, the My ­Century recordings are ascribed to boxes 47–49 (in the past, this was given as boxes 15–17). Poems are said to be in box 48, together with the nineteenth session of My ­Century. In the online version, however, the nineteenth session was located in digital box 16, folder 411, but t­ here w ­ ere no poems. The poems w ­ ere in digital box 17. 33. Venclova, Aleksander Wat, 14–15, 252; Aleksander Wat, “O solidarność z Izraelem: Do redaktora Wiadomości,” Wiadomości, no. 27 (July 2, 1967): 6. On his suicide and “Last Poem,” see Ola Watowa, Wszystko, co najważniejsze, 2nd ed. (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 2000), 214–215; Miłosz and Watowa, Listy o tym, co najważniejsze, 8; and Wat, Notatniki, 799, 802–804, 806–811. Wat’s notes to his ­family have the following dates: May  21, 26, 29, 30; two are dated much ­earlier, while many are not dated at all. Three versions of his “Last Poem” (“Wiersz ostatni”) are dated May 29 and May 30. 34. Andrzej Wat’s statement from Joanna Szwedowska’s broadcast “Genewskie polonica” (produced November 18, 2006, transmitted November 20, 2006), cata­log number 1021 / 06 II in the Polish Radio Archive. The book, printed in 1968, was Wat, Ciemne świecidło. “The Last Poem” was not the last one he wrote. 35. For translations and more readings of the title, see Venclova, Aleksander Wat, 296–299. See also Barańczak, “Four Walls of Pain,” 174; and Wat, Against the Devil in History, 56. 36. On Wat’s suicide, see Venclova, Aleksander Wat, 253. On first publications, see the notes in Poezje zebrane. “Ewokacja” in Polish reads: “Już spektakl skończył się, rozbiegli się widzowie. / Zamknijcie mnie, katowie, w celi ciemnej.” See Aleksander Wat, Wybór wierszy, ed. Adam Dziadek (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 2008), 207. Translation mine. 37. CD copies of Wat’s tapes in the National Library in Warsaw are cata­loged as Fon.K.616 and Fon.K.617. Reel-­to-­reel tapes from the National Digital Archives (33-­T-7108) consist only of selected poems from the same recording. Many poems (with edits) can also be heard on the website Radia Wolności, accessed January 29, 2021, http://­w ww​.­polskieradio​.­pl​/­68​/­787​/­Tag ​/­48576. Thanks to Jan Zieliński, I

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had access to a reel-­to-­reel copy he had received from Ola Watowa. On her listening to the tape, see Watowa, Wszystko, co najważniejsze, 222. On using the tape at an event in Geneva in the 1980s, see “Genewskie polonica,” cata­log number 1021 / 06 II in the Polish Radio Archive. For Miłosz’s pronouncement, see Miłosz and Watowa, Listy o tym, co najważniejsze, 56. 38. On biography, see Micińska, “Aleksander Wat,” 8–77; on the doubts ­after Wat’s baptism, see Tomasz Żukowski, Obrazy Chrystusa w twórczości Aleksandra Wata i Tadeusza Różewicza (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2013), 112–113. 39. Micińska, “Aleksander Wat,” 5–6. 40. Barańczak, “Four Walls of Pain,” 176; Adam Dziadek, Podmiot i rytm w liryce Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza i Aleksandra Wata (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uni­ wersytetu Śląskiego, 1999), 87–95. See also, for the concepts of the ­whole books, Edyta Molęda, Mowa cierpienia: Interpretacja poezji Aleksandra Wata (Kraków: Universitas, 2001); and Krystyna Pietrych, Co poezji po bólu: Empatyczne przestrzenie lektury (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2009). A list of other names is given in Dziadek’s introduction to Wat, Wybór wierszy, xix. 41. Wat, Ciemne świecidło, 139, 60, 53. 42. Aleksander Wat, Świat na haku i pod kluczem, ed. Krzysztof Rutkowski (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1991), 7. 43. Molęda, Mowa cierpienia, 14. 44. On the poem’s history, see the notes in Wat, Poezje zebrane, 513–514. See also Aleksander Wat, With the Skin: Poems of Aleksander Wat, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan (New York: Ecco Press, 1989), 81–83. 45. Aleksander Wat, “Oda Trzecia,” Wiadomości, no. 36 (September 3, 1967): 2; Wat, Ciemne świecidło, 19–20. In my analyses below I mostly refer to the copy of “Ode III” at the National Digital Archives, Warsaw. In the book version, the three parts missing in the recitation start with the following words: “With my skin I mea­sured . . . ,” “I used to escape,” and “when I, in my pride . . .” in the translation by Miłosz and Nathan. ­These and other parts resemble Bible verses: they are longer than typical verse lines, shorter than typical paragraphs, and consist of sentences or clauses. 46. Barańczak, “Four Walls of Pain,” 179. 47. This and all other En­glish quotations from the ode come from Wat, With the Skin, 81–83. All quotes in Polish come from Wat, Wybór wierszy, 203–206. I quote from the book version of the ode. Th ­ ere are very minor differences in Wat’s recitation of t­ hese passages. For instance, he adds “że” before “jest dobrze,” and in the final passages, which I quote l­ ater in the text, he says “nagą” rather than “gołą” and does not read one “długo.” 48. Dziadek, Podmiot i rytm, 116; and Aleksander Wat, Wiersze śródzie­ mnomorskie: Ciemne świecidło, ed. Jan Zieliński (Gdańsk: słowo / obraz terytoria, 2008), 195–196.

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49. Adam Dziadek has analyzed the intonational patterns of Wat’s ode in print, but the intonational patterns identified by the scholar on the basis of punctuation and Polish grammar inevitably differ from Wat’s highly distinctive per­for­mance (Dziadek, Podmiot i rytm, 119). For instance, Maria Dłuska has written on the relation between intonation and verse; for more on the role of recitation in this context, see Witold Sadowski, Litania i poezja: Na materiale literatury polskiej od XI do XXI wieku (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2011), 120. Interestingly, even Ola Watowa and the actor Gustaw Holoubek ­were uncertain w ­ hether a long pause in another poem from Wat’s recording signaled the end of the poem. This minor confusion can be heard in the recording of a poetry reading or­ga­nized in Geneva in the 1980s. During this event, which was devoted to Wat, Watowa and Holoubek read Wat’s poetry and played his recordings. Fragments of the event are presented in the broadcast “Genewskie polonica,” cata­log no.  1021 / 06 II in the Polish Radio Archive. Th ­ ese unexpectedly long pauses have been cut in the copies of “Ode III” available on the Internet and at the National Digital Archives, Warsaw. 50. Th ­ ese statistics are derived by my collaborator, the linguist Agnieszka Wagner. By her count, the average f0 max for “skin” = approx. 194 Hz, for all other words = approx. 146 Hz. Her technical analy­sis of some of the acoustic features of “Ode III” can be found in Agnieszka Wagner, “Współczesne metody badań nad intonacją wypowiedzi słownych: Przykład zastosowania wybranych metod do analizy melodii wiersza,” Poradnik Językowy, no. 7 (2016): 59–62. 51. In order to be perceived as intentional, a pause only needs to be 0.1 seconds long. See Leokadia Dukiewicz and Irena Sawicka, Fonetyka i fonologia, ed. Henryk Wróbel (Kraków: IJP PAN, 1995), 182. 52. This was noted by Jarosław Borowski, “Między bluźniercą a wyznawcą”: Doświadczenie sacrum w poezji Aleksandra Wata (Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, 1998), 232. 53. Witold Sadowski, “Prosodic Memory: Claudel—­Eliot—­Liebert,” Prace Filo­ logiczne: Literaturoznawstwo 3, no. 6, pt. 1 (2013): 11. 54. On Greek ode and Polish poetry, see Teresa Kostkiewiczowa, Oda w poezji polskiej: Dzieje gatunku (Wrocław: Monografie FNP and Leopoldinum, 1996), 40–50, 57–63, 342. 55. Wat, Poezje zebrane, 311. In its loose treatment of the Kaddish prayer as an inspiration, “Ode III” resembles Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish. Ginsberg’s poem was published in En­glish before Wat’s visit to the United States, but ­t here are no indications that Wat was inspired by Ginsberg. For the Polish, see Allen Ginsberg, Kadysz i inne wiersze, 1958–1960 / Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958–1960, trans. Grzegorz Musiał (Bydgoszcz: Pomorze, 1992). 56. On repetition, see Dziadek, Podmiot i rytm, 118. For standard definitions of litany and the strong link between litany and chanting, see Sadowski, Litania i

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poezja, 19–21, 136–137. Sadowski gives numerous examples of Polish texts that use the form of litany, not for prayer, but to enumerate and describe dif­fer­ent places, objects, words. Still, the very form of litany gives ­t hese texts sacral overtones—­ because of the tradition of the genre (328–331). 57. Wat, Ciemne świecidło, 60. 58. Borowski, “Między bluźniercą a wyznawcą,” 222. 59. Wat, Korespondencja, pt. 1, 487; and Sławomir Jacek Żurek, Synowie księżyca: Zapisy poetyckie Aleksandra Wata i Henryka Grynberga w świetle tradycji i teo­ logii żydowskiej (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2004), 227. 60. Translation mine. In Polish: “dopóki i człowiek nie będzie wyzwolon / od śmierci i bolu.” Wat, Ciemne świecidło, 75. See also Barańczak, “Four Walls of Pain,” 186–187; and Żurek, Synowie księżyca, 224–227. 61. Borowski, “Między bluźniercą a wyznawcą,” 167–168. 62. Piotr Bogalecki, “Wszystkich brat? Krzyżując Ody,” Czas Kultury, no.  3 (2017): 137. See the International Committee on En­glish in the Liturgy, “The Order of Mass: Excerpts of the En­glish translation of the Roman Missal,” accessed February 21, 2019, https://­w ww​.c­ atholicbishops​.i­ e​/w ­ p​-­content​/­uploads​/2­ 011​/­02​/­Order​ -­of​-­Mass​.­pdf. 63. The blasphemy of a new offering without redemption is mentioned by Bogalecki, “Wszystkich brat?,” 137. The post-­Holocaust blasphemy is mentioned in Venclova, Aleksander Wat, 218. 64. This point is also made in Bogalecki, “Wszystkich brat?,” 137. 65. Translation mine. “Ewokacja.” Excerpt in Polish: “Więc może wrócić mi w praojców moich grody? / i może znów mi tam zabiegniesz drogę w Emaus, / bym jeszcze zdążył palce włożyć w Twoje wrzody, / te stare palce moje, ślepe, głucho­ nieme.” See Wat, Wybór wierszy, 210. On the tapes I have heard, ­t here is a cut, and the last word “głuchonieme” is missing. 66. On broadcasts in Austria and Herbert’s radio dramas on German radios, see Franaszek, Herbert, 2:95, 122. Herbert’s interviews for German and Austrian media are also studied by Henryk Citko (private correspondence from May 17, 2018). On Herbert avoiding an event ­under the auspices of Radio ­Free Eu­rope, see Franaszek, Herbert, 2:290. See also the Polish Radio cata­logs u ­ nder his name. For the 1961 broadcast, see file no. 8761 / 1. 67. Zbigniew Herbert, “O poezji na głos,” in Herbert, Węzeł gordyjski oraz inne pisma rozproszone, 1948–1998 (Warszawa: Biblioteka Więzi, 2001), 432. 68. On radio dramas, see Michał Mizera, “Kalendarium realizacji dramatów Zbigniewa Herberta,” in Jacek Kopciński, Nasłuchiwanie: Sztuki na głosy Zbigniewa Herberta (Warszawa: Biblioteka Więzi, 2008), 431–559. 69. See especially the chapter “Ja jestem trwa: Rekonstrukcja poety” in Kopciński, Nasłuchiwanie, and pages  126–127. Due to this popularity, radio plays ­were also more carefully checked by censors.

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70. See especially the chapters “ ‘Sztuki na głosy’ ” and “Ja jestem trwa: Rekonstrukcja poety” in Kopciński, Nasłuchiwanie, and pages 16–17. 71. See Paweł Kądziela, “Kalendarium zagranicznych realizacji dramatów Zbigniewa Herberta,” in Kopciński, Nasłuchiwanie, 460–463. The BBC produced Herbert’s dramas in 1962, 1963, and 1964. On the poetry program from 1963, see Al Alvarez, “Scenariusz audycji radiowej o twórczości Zbigniewa Herberta,” Rps. Akc. 17.895 in the National Library in Warsaw. 72. On tele­v i­sion, see Brian Porter-­Szűcs, Poland in the Modern World: Be­ yond Martyrdom (Chichester, UK: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2014), 276. 73. Franaszek, Herbert, 2:395, 420–423. See the cassettes: Bojkot: Aktorzy przeciwko stanowi wojennemu, ed. Jan Gall (Warszawa: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1983), ser. nk, no. 004; Przemek Gintrowski, Pamiątki (Warszawa: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1983), ser. nk, no. 008. Both (and o ­ thers) available in the National Library in Warsaw. 74. On a recording of Herbert’s poetry reading in France appearing on Radio ­Free Eu­rope in 1986, see Zdzisław Najder’s letter to Herbert from September  1, 1986, Zbigniew Herbert Archive, National Library, Warsaw, Rps. Akc. 17.987 / 2. For other recordings from 1988, see Radia Wolności, accessed February 20, 2019, https://www.polskieradio.pl/68/2461/Audio/310741. 75. Franaszek, Herbert, 2:199–213 (on his alcoholism and bipolar disorder), and 616, 807–809 (on his lungs). 76. See Kopciński, “Głos poety,” in Kopciński, Nasłuchiwanie, 7–11. See AMS, “Herbert czyta Herberta, Różewicz czyta Różewicza,” Dziennik Polski, Decem­ber 3, 1998, https://­dziennikpolski24​.­pl​/­herbert​-c­ zyta​-­herberta​-­rozewicz​-­czyta​-­rozewicza​ /­ar​/­1959510; Franaszek, Herbert, 2:808–810; and the CD Zbigniew Herbert czyta swoje wiersze (Kraków: Radio Kraków, 1998). 77. Kopciński, “Głos poety,” 8–10. 78. All titles in this paragraph are taken from translations in Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Poems, 1956–1998, trans. and ed. Alissa Valles (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). For consistency h ­ ere and elsewhere I have added a period ­a fter “Mr.” The titles in Polish are: “Dwie krople,” “Nasz strach,” “Pan Cogito szuka rady,” “17 IX,” “Pan Cogito myśli o powrocie do rodzinnego miasta,” “Węgrom,” “Raport z oblężonego miasta,” “Domy przedmieścia,” “Przemiany Liwiusza,” “Fotografia,” “Przesłanie Pana Cogito.” Hereinafter all quotes from “Envoy” are given in John and Bogdana Carpenter’s translation in Postwar Polish Poetry, expanded ed., ed. Czesław Miłosz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 147–149. Quotes from “Envoy” in Polish, h ­ ere and elsewhere, come from Herbert, Wiersze wybrane, 189–190. 79. In contrast with what he sometimes claimed, Herbert did not fight in the Home Army. For a discussion of vari­ous sources and Herbert’s views on the Uprising, see Franaszek, Herbert, vol. 1: Niepokój, 195–212 (in all other notes I quote

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vol.  2). For a more universal reading of his poetry, see Aldona Kopkiewicz, “Kołatka i pudełko,” Dwutygodnik, no. 247 (2018), https://­w ww​.­dwutygodnik​.c­ om​ /­artykul​/­7785​-­kolatka​-­i​-­pudelko​.­html. For Herbert’s claim from the 1980s, see his recording, part 25 in the CD Zbigniew Herbert w Poznaniu 11 grudnia 1984 roku, added to Zbigniew Herbert, Wiersze wybrane (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2017). 80. For a summary of debates on fidelity and Herbert, see Zdzisław Najder, “Przesłanie Josepha Conrada,” Znak, no. 2 (2001): 12–22. See also Jan Józef Szcze­ pański, “Letter to Julian Stryjkowski,” trans. Alissa Valles, in Polish Writers on Writing, ed. Adam Zagajewski (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2007), 147–157. 81. On dedicating the poem “The Power of Taste” to Dąmbska, see Zbigniew Herbert and Jerzy Turowicz, Korespondencja (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2005), 206. On her life and on Herbert’s beliefs, see Franaszek, Herbert, 2:425, 819–822. 82. See Juliusz Słowacki, “Sowiński w okopach Woli,” Wolne Lektury, accessed February 26, 2019, https://­wolnelektury​.­pl​/­katalog​/­lektura​/­sowinski​-­w​-­okopach​-­woli​ .­html. Herbert in Polish: “I broni się,” in the text “I wrogom się broni.” 83. Franaszek, Herbert, 2:596–610, 663–671. 84. On Herbert’s politics and his choice to publish in Tygodnik Solidarność, while Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska published in Gazeta Wyborcza, see Franaszek, Herbert, 2:734–747, 773. 85. Stanisław Barańczak, “Heroes to H ­ umans,” Salamagundi, no. 88 / 89 (Fall 1990–­Winter 1991): 8. 86. Herbert read five poems from Mr. Cogito and five from Report . . . ​, only two from the Elegy for the Departure (1990), and nothing from his l­ ater books. He read a ­couple of poems from each of his ­earlier books, but not the most representative texts. 87. See, e.g., Kopkiewicz, “Kołatka i pudełko”; Piotr Śliwiński, “Polish Twen­ tieth-­Century Poetry,” in Being Poland: A New History of Polish Lit­er­a­ture and Culture since 1918, ed. Tamara Trojanowska, Joanna Niżyńska, and Przemysław Cza­pliński, with the assistance of Agnieszka Polakowska (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 455–456. For more on not reading Herbert, see Franaszek, Herbert, 2:760–763. 88. See Kopkiewicz, “Kołatka i pudełko”; Stefan Chwin, Zwodnicze piękno (Kraków: Biblioteka Tygodnika Powszechnego, 2016); and “Złote runo nicości” (conversation), Tygodnik Powszechny, November  4, 2008, https://­w ww​.t­ ygodnik​ powszechny​.­pl​/­zlote​-­runo​-­nicosci​-­133641. 89. For example, in 2011 and 2012 Herbert’s phrase “­those betrayed at dawn” was used in the context of the Smoleńsk plane crash, suggesting the crash was a result of a betrayal, similar to betrayals during communist times. Herbert’s ­widow criticized uses of Herbert’s words to describe the po­liti­cal agenda of the Law and Justice party. Commentators from the right saw it as justified by Herbert’s own po­liti­cal

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preferences in the 1990s. See MJ / PAP, “Czy Kaczyński mógł cytować Herberta? Wdowa jest przeciw,” Newsweek (Polish edition), April  14, 2011, https://­w ww​ .­n ewsweek​.­p l​/­p olska​/­z dradzeni​-­o​-­s wicie​-­w dowa​-­p o​-­h erbercie​-­p rzeciw​ -­c ytowaniu​-­herberta ​/­2p6bty8; “Wdowa po Herbercie o słowach prezesa PiS: Ludzka słabość,” TVN24, April  13, 2012, https://­w ww​.­t vn24​.­pl​/­w iadomosci​-­z​ -­k raju,3​/­wdowa​-­p o​-­herbercie​-­o​-­s lowach​ -­prezesa​ -­pis​ -­ludzka​ -­s labosc,206735​ .­html; Michał Karnowski, “Herbert apolityczny? Zadziwiające, naprawdę zadziwiające jest oświadczenie pani Katarzyny Herbert,” wPolityce.pl, April 14, 2011, https://­wpolityce​.­pl​/­polityka​/­112373​-­herbert​-­apolityczny​-­zadziwiajace​-­naprawde​ -­zadziwiajace​-­jest​-o ­ swiadczenie​-­pani​-­katarzyny​-­herbert. On Katarzyna Herbert’s initial doubts, see Franaszek, Herbert, 2:420. 90. Translation mine. Quote a­ fter Franaszek, Herbert, 2:672; see also 663–671. 91. Juliusz Słowacki, Ta siła fatalna / This Fateful Power: Sesquicentennial An­ thology, 1809–1849, ed. and trans. Michael J. Mikoś (Lublin: Norbertinum, 1999), 31. For the Polish, see Juliusz Słowacki, “Testament mój,” Wolne Lektury, accessed February 26, 2019, https://­wolnelektury​.­pl​/­katalog ​/­lektura​/­testament​-­moj​ .­html. On the event, see Kopciński, “Głos poety,” 10–11; Zbigniew Herbert, “Słowo na wieczorze poetyckim w Teatrze Narodowym 25 maja 1998 roku,” in Węzeł gordyjski, 94–99. 92. En­glish expressions taken from Słowacki, Ta siła fatalna, 69. For the Polish, see Juliusz Słowacki, “Grób Agamemnona,” Wolne Lektury, accessed February 26, 2019, https://­wolnelektury​.­pl​/­katalog​/­lektura​/­grob​-­agamemnona​.­html. 93. Stanisław Barańczak, Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 109–115. 94. Translation mine. Herbert said, “ale mimo że był ogarnięty duchem kapitalizmu, jego serce zostało przy Polsce, przy matce.” 95. Słowacki, Ta siła fatalna, 29. For the Polish, see Słowacki, “Testament mój.” For his life, see Słowacki, Ta siła fatalna, 15. 96. I quote this book throughout the chapter: Franaszek, Herbert, 2 vols., approx. 2,000 pages. 97. See “Mr.  Cogito and Pop,” in Herbert, The Collected Poems, 303. For the Polish, see “Pan Cogito a pop,” in Zbigniew Herbert, Wiersze zebrane (Kraków: Wydawnictwo a5, 2008), 406–408. 98. See the ­whole recording, but especially parts 21 and 22, on the 1984 CD Zbigniew Herbert w Poznaniu 11 grudnia 1984 roku. 99. I mean ­here especially per­for­mances by the bard Przemysław Gintrowski; see the under­ g round cassette Przemek Gintrowski, Pamiątki (Warszawa: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1983), ser. nk, no.  008; and recitations by the actor Zbigniew Zapasiewicz—­e.g., his monodrama Pan Cogito, especially the recitation of “Envoy,” produced by Polish TV in 1981. The declamation of the actor Andrzej Łapicki was, however, more conversational; see his “Envoy,” in Gall,

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Bojkot, ser. nk, no.  004. A similar impression of non-­authorial recitations as losing some of the nuances of the work and heightening its message can be found in Aleksander Nawarecki, “Trzy ostatnie słowa Pana Cogito: O wierszu Zbigniewa Herberta ‘Przesłanie Pana Cogito,’ ” in Kanonada. Interpretacje wierszy polskich (1939–1989), ed. Aleksander Nawarecki, with the help of Dariusz Pawelec (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1999), 147, 151. 100. Recording no. M.00722, from the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw (hereafter cited as Museum of Lit­er­a­ture), made on February 12, 1981. 101. Anna Kamieńska, Notatnik 1965–1972 (Poznań: W drodze, 1982), 262, 264. I mean the series Współczesna poezja polska: Wiersze wybrane czytają autorzy (Warszawa: Polskie Nagrania “Muza,” 1965, 1968, 1972) and the rec­ord Jan Śpiewak: Wiersze wybrane czyta autor. No dates are given on the rec­ords; the years above come from the cata­logs of the National Library, but other libraries give dif­fer­ent dates. Kamieńska’s note from 1972, about listening to the rec­ord for the first time, corresponds with the date 1972 suggested in the National Library for this rec­ord. Kamieńska’s own recording, according to this source, would be 1965. Fragments of Śpiewak’s poems from this rec­ord can be heard online at e-­biblioteka: Woje­ wódzka i Miejska Biblioteka Publiczna w Rzeszowie, accessed March  4, 2019, http://­e​-­biblioteka​.­rzeszow​.­pl​/­pl​-­PL​/­dokumenty​-­d zwiekowe​/­muzyka​/­item​/­5373​ -­jan​-­spiewak​-­w iersze​-­w ybrane​-­czyta​-­autor. 102. See Agnieszka Sabor quoting Paweł Śpiewak in Sabor, “Parch pro toto,” Tygodnik Powszechny, May 7, 2012, https://­w ww​.­tygodnikpowszechny​.­pl​/­parch​-­pro​ -­toto​-­15975. 103. Translation mine. Kamieńska, Notatnik, 262. 104. On her biographical writing, see Iwona Gralewicz-­Wolny, Pisz o milczeniu: Świat poetycki Anny Kamieńskiej (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Gnome, 2002), 15–16. On her growing distrust in words, see the recording. 105. See the recollections of Iwona Smolka and Ludmiła Marjańska in parts 1 and 3 of “Wspomnienie o Annie Kamieńskiej—­Zapiski ze współczesności,” 2001, archival Polish Radio program, digital copy in the National Film Archive—Audiovisual Institute in Warsaw. 106. See Gralewicz-­Wolny, Pisz o milczeniu, 9–11 (on socialist realism); Zbi­ gniew Chojnowski, Metamorfozy Anny Kamieńskiej (Olsztyn: Wyższa Szkoła Pe­ dagogiczna, 1995), 16, 142–143, 150–151 (on Marxism, Marian poems, and countryside); Zofia Zarębianka, Zakorzenienia Anny Kamieńskiej (Kraków: Universitas, 1997), 60, 68 (on religious involvements and contacts with establishment); Zarębianka, Świadectwo słowa: Rzecz o twórczości Anny Kamieńskiej (Kraków: Wydawnictwo m, 1993), 116 (on folklore); all parts of “Wspomnienie o Annie Kamieńskiej” (on her l­ ater involvements and visits of young poets). 107. See the recollections of Julia Hartwig in part 2 of “Wspomnienie o Annie Kamieńskiej.” 108. Gralewicz-­Wolny, Pisz o milczeniu, 18–19.

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109. Czesław Miłosz, “Reading the Notebook of Anna Kamienska,” in Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 531. For the Polish, see Czesław Miłosz, “Czytając No­ tatnik Anny Kamieńskiej,” in Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 1002. 110. Czesław Miłosz, “Postscript,” in Anna Swir, Talking to My Body, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canopy Press, 1996), 157. 111. See Czesław Miłosz, Jakiegoż to gościa mieliśmy: O Annie Świrszczyńskiej (Kraków: Znak, 1996). For more on Miłosz’s strategy of strengthening Świrszczyńska’s position through promoting her in the United States, as well as Miłosz softening her feminism, see Mira Rosenthal, “Revising Anna Świrszczyńska: The Shifting Stance of Czesław Miłosz’s En­g lish Translations,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 52, no. 1–2 (March–­June 2010): 60–78. Miłosz was criticized for diminishing her feminism due to his own ambivalent attitude to feminism, but we need to remember that as a “feminist poet” she would never have become more mainstream in the 1990s in Poland, a time when critics called more courageous examples of ­women’s prose “menstruation lit­er­at­ ure.” For more on Miłosz’s strategy of shifting focus to her other poems, see Renata Ingbrant, From Her Point of View: W ­ oman’s Anti-­ World in the Poetry of Anna Świrszczyńska (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2007), 79–86; and Julia Fiedorczuk, “Strangers in the Country of the Poet,” World Lit­er­at­ ure ­Today, January–­February 2017, 46–49. 112. Ingbrant, From Her Point of View, 57–59; and Agnieszka Stapkiewicz, Ciało, kobiecość i śmiech w poezji Anny Świrszczyńskiej (Kraków: Universitas, 2014), 34–35. ­There ­were also other topics, like childbirth, and the treatment of old ­women and their erotic needs, but the issues of social justice ­were most controversial. 113. Ingbrant, From Her Point of View, 41; Stapkiewicz, Ciało, kobiecość i śmiech, 11. 114. On Kamieńska and Konopnicka, see Chojnowski, Metamorfozy Anny Kamieńskiej, 146–162, and Ingbrant, From Her Point of View, 42. 115. See, e.g., Andrea Lanoux, “Euphoria of the Ordinary (Anna Świrsz­ czyńska),” in Trojanowska et al., Being Poland, 491. 116. Stapkiewicz, Ciało, kobiecość i śmiech, 12–16; and Ingbrant, From Her Point of View, 16–18. The book was Building the Barricade. 117. Stapkiewicz, Ciało, kobiecość i śmiech, 8–10. 118. Lanoux, “Euphoria of the Ordinary,” 490. 119. Stapkiewicz, Ciało, kobiecość i śmiech, 22. 120. On Miłosz’s translation of “baba” as “­woman,” see, e.g., Rosenthal, “Revising Anna Świrszczyńska,” 70. Most critics focus on losing the derogatory connotation and old age, as in “hag” or “crone.” But as Świrszczyńska herself highlighted, “baba” implied in her case mostly the identification with s­ imple ­women from villages and cities, as opposed to ladies and w ­ omen of salons. See part 1 of “Anna Świrszczyńska—­Finezje Literackie,” 1997, archival Polish Radio program,

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digital copy in the National Film Archive—Audiovisual Institute in Warsaw. Stapkiewicz, Ciało, kobiecość i śmiech, 18. 121. Recording no. M.00379, Museum of Lit­er­a­ture. All further details come from Praat analyses of this recording. It is the only poetry recording of Świrsz­ czyńska I know of. Even when she appeared on Polish Radio, her poems w ­ ere read by actors. The comment from the CD Głosy poetów, ed. Romana Bobrowska (Kraków: Radio Kraków 1997), actually states that no recording of Świrszczyńska reading poetry could be found. 122. See Jakub Lichański’s recollection from part 3 of “Anna Świrszczyńska—­ Finezje Literackie.” 123. Marit  J. MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee  M. Miller, “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (April 18, 2018): 34, 46, 56–57, 69. 124. Stapkiewicz, Ciało, kobiecość i śmiech, 45–46. For her poetic credo, see the recording; but many of the ideas she mentions also appear in her published texts. 125. This is how Świrszczyńska presented it in the recording. For the text and some En­glish phrases I use to summarize it, see Anna Swir, “I Knocked My Head against the Wall,” in Swir, Talking to My Body, 93. For the Polish, see Anna Świrsz­ czyńska, “Biłam głową o ścianę,” in Anna Świrszczyńska, Poezja (Warszawa: PIW, 1997), 333–334. 126. Swir, Talking to My Body, 93; Świrszczyńska, Poezja, 333. 127. Kamieńska reads such poems as “Druga strona samotności,” “Jak na jedno życie,” “Drugie szczęście Hioba,” “Jeszcze życie,” and “Tożsamość.” For a discussion and examples of Świrszczyńska’s last poems, see Miłosz, Jakiegoż to gościa mieliśmy, 99–107. 128. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 880. The text in French was published in 1975. 129. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 881.

5. Unbeautiful Readings 1. Tadeusz Różewicz, “Preparation for a Poetry Reading,” trans. Alissa Valles, in Polish Writers on Writing, ed. Adam Zagajewski (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2007), 170. For the Polish, see Tadeusz Różewicz, Przygotowanie do wieczoru autorskiego, 2nd ed. (Warszawa: PIW, 1977), 175. 2. Różewicz was born in 1921, had his collected poems published in 1957, and wrote this piece in 1959. See Tadeusz Drewnowski, Walka o oddech: Bio-­poetyka: O pisarstwie Tadeusza Różewicza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002), 322, 326, 121.

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3. The first five genres are enumerated in Andrzej Skrendo, “Depth of Doubt,” in Being Poland: A New History of Polish Lit­er­a­ture and Culture since 1918, ed. Tamara Trojanowska, Joanna Niżyńska, and Przemysław Czapliński, with the assistance of Agnieszka Polakowska (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 483. 4. Translation mine. Wbrew sobie: Rozmowy z Tadeuszem Różewiczem, ed. Jan Stolarczyk (Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2011), 11. 5. Halina Filipowicz, A Laboratory of Impure Forms: The Plays of Tadeusz Różewicz (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 4. 6. Teresa Dobrzyńska and Lucylla Pszczołowska, “Wiersz a recytacja,” Pamiętnik Literacki 73, no. 3–4 (1982): 278. The rec­ord Tadeusz Różewicz: Współczesna poezja polska: Wiersze wybrane czyta autor (Warszawa: Polskie Nagrania “Muza,” [1965?]) is available in the National Library in Warsaw. 7. See recording no. 33-­T-7103 in the National Digital Archives in Poland. It was part of a now poorly documented series of recordings made by the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Acad­emy of Sciences (IBL). 8. See recordings M.01545–­M.01547, the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ ture in Warsaw (hereafter cited as Museum of Lit­er­a­ture), made on January 28, 1986. Różewicz says t­ hese words a­ fter around fourteen minutes on the first tape. 9. Translation by Richard Sokoloski, and his impression of stumbling. See Richard Sokoloski, “Modern Polish Verse Structures: Reemergence of the Line in the Poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 37, no. 3–4 (1995): 451. 10. See the poetry cata­logs in the Polish Radio Archive. Th ­ ere are numerous broadcasts with actors reading Różewicz’s work between the 1950s and 1990s. 11. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 326–343. 12. Tadeusz Różewicz czyta swoje wiersze, ed. Romana Bobrowska (Kraków: Radio Kraków, 1998). The CD was l­ater reissued and added to Tadeusz Różewicz, Wiersze przeczytane (Wrocław: Warstwy, 2014). 13. “Dialogi poetów: Czesław Miłosz i Tadeusz Różewicz,” in Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 424. 14. Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 131, 223. 15. Karl Dedecius and Tadeusz Różewicz, Listy, 1961–2013, vol.  1, ed. Andreas Lawaty and Marek Zybura (Kraków: Universitas, 2017), 131. 16. Richard Sokoloski, “Sources of Tadeusz Różewicz’s Correspondence: Julian Przyboś, 1945–1962,” The Polish Review 41, no. 1 (1996): 5, 7. 17. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 66–67. 18. Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 229; and Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 38, 44–46. 19. Madeline  G. Levine, Con­ temporary Polish Poetry, 1925–1975 (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 22; and Józef Duk, “Czas tworzenia (O życiu Juliana Przybosia),” in Julian Przyboś: Życie i dzieło poetyckie, ed. Stanisław Fryci (Rzeszów: Towa­ rzystwo Naukowe Rzeszowskie, 1976), 21–43.

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20. Sokoloski, “Sources of Tadeusz Różewicz’s Correspondence,” 7. The translation I give is modified and revised. 21. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 66, 68; and Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 215. 22. Levine, Con­temporary Polish Poetry, 73. 23. Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 218–219. 24. Jacek Łukasiewicz, TR (Kraków: Universitas, 2012), 30–31; and Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 86–89. 25. Bogdana Carpenter, “Meta­phor, Vision, and Poetic Construction (Julian Przyboś),” in Trojanowska et al., Being Poland, 475–478. For more on the Kraków Avant-Garde, see also Piotr Śliwiński, “Polish Twentieth-­Century Poetry,” in Trojanowska et al., Being Poland, 428–469. 26. Levine, Con­temporary Polish Poetry, 21; and Jerzy Kwiatkowski, Dwudziesto­ lecie międzywojenne (Warszawa: PWN, 2001), 96–97, 178–179. 27. I modified a translation by Richard Sokoloski (“barriers” and “appeared” are mine). In Polish: “Znowu ufałaś—­i wątpiłaś znowu / (krakało spłoszone zamykanie ramp  .  .  .) / gdy / pod konstrukcjami z żelaza i szkła / stał się pociąg, / fakt, / który uderzeniami kół poza rozpacz wykraczał.” See Sokoloski, “Modern Polish Verse Structures,” 437–438. 28. Levine, Con­temporary Polish Poetry, 22–23, 35; and Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Lit­er­a­ture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 404. 29. For nonpo­l iti­cal descriptions of the prewar avant-­garde, see Kwiatkowski, Dwudziestolecie międzywojenne; or Janusz Sławiński, Koncepcja języka poetyc­ kiego awangardy krakowskiej (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1965). For more on the Polish view of the avant-­garde, see Igor Stokfiszewski, “Staranne kałuże,” in Gada!zabić? Pa(n)tologia neolingwizmu, ed. Maria Cyranowicz and Paweł Kozioł (Warszawa: Staromiejski Dom Kultury, 2005), 291–293. For more on prewar Przyboś (“an artist’s first duty t­oward mankind is to create good art and not to renounce high standards in the name of any supra-­artistic goal”), see Miłosz, The History of Polish Lit­er­a­ture, 402; and Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 87. For prob­lems with the po­liti­cal view of futurism, see Aleksander Wat, Mój wiek, ed. Rafał Habielski, vol. 1 (Kraków: Universitas, 2011), 30–31, 35, 40. 30. On restored “laboratory privileges” and reduced appeal to the larger public, see Miłosz, The History of Polish Lit­er­a­ture, 478. On sanctioned avant-­garde, see Włodzimierz Bolecki, “A Concise Companion to Polish Modernism,” in Trojanowska et al., Being Poland, 105–131. On sanctioned institutions, see Piotr Pio­ trowski, Znaczenia modernizmu: W stronę historii sztuki polskiej po 1945 roku (Poznań: Rebis, 2011), 211–220. On tolerating the Polish neo-­avant-­garde in the 1970s, more so than in Czecho­slo­va­k ia, Hungary, and East Germany, see Piotr Pio­ trowski, Awangarda w cieniu Jałty: Sztuka w Europie Środkowo-­Wschodniej w latach 1945–1989, (Poznań: Rebis, 2005), 261–269, 312. 31. Małgorzata Dawidek-­Gryglicka, “Suwerenność neoawangardy: W poszukiwaniu odrębności polskiej poezji konkretnej i sztuki konceptualnej,” in Awangarda Środkowej i Wschodniej Europy—­innowacja czy naśladownictwo? Interpretacje,

NOTE S TO PAGE S 223 –227

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ed. Michalina Kmiecik and Małgorzata Szumna (Kraków: WUJ, 2014), 261, 264, 265, 277, 281; and Joanna Orska, “Nauka chodzenia: O tekstach programowych późnej awangardy,” in Nauka chodzenia: Teksty programowe późnej awangardy, ed. Wojciech Browarny, Paweł Mackiewicz, and Joanna Orska, vol. 1 (Kraków: WUJ, 2018), 14–16. 32. Jarosław Jakimczyk, Najweselszy barak w obozie: Tajna policja komunisty­ czna jako krytyk artystyczny i kurator sztuki w PRL (Warszawa: Akces, 2015). 33. Stanisław Barańczak, Nieufni i zadufani: Romantyzm i klasycyzm w młodej poezji lat sześćdziesiątych (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1971), 29–30. 34. Barańczak, Nieufni i zadufani, 28. 35. For more on Generation ’68, Barańczak’s book, and the modification of his views, see Lidia Burska, Awangarda i inne złudzenia: O pokoleniu ’68 w Polsce (Gdańsk: słowo / obraz terytoria, 2012), 164, 176–178, 288, 304, 324. 36. Czesław Miłosz, “Nobel Lecture,” The Nobel Prize, December  8, 1980, https://­w ww​.­nobelprize​.­org​/­prizes​/­literature​/­1980​/­milosz​/­lecture​/­. 37. Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 26–30; and Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-­Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, foreword by Jochen Schulte-­Sasse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 48–49. 38. Recording no. 33-­T-7103, National Digital Archives, Poland. 39. Duk, “Czas tworzenia,” 51. 40. Edward Balcerzan, “ ‘Kim jestem? Wygnańcem ptaków,’ ” in Wspomnienia o Julianie Przybosiu, ed. Janusz Sławiński (Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wy­ daw­nicza, 1976), 399–403. 41. Andrzej K. Waśkiewicz, “Spotkania z Julianem Przybosiem,” in Sławiński, Wspomnienia o Julianie Przybosiu, 364. For more praise of his recitations, see Wspomnienia, 291, 396. 42. Julian Przyboś, “Jak mówić wiersze?,” in Linia i gwar: Szkice, vol.  2 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1959), 257–261. See also Przyboś, “Jak mówić wiersze?,” in Zapiski bez daty (Warszawa: PIW, 1970), 209–211. 43. The analyses below come from two sources: recording no. 33-­T-2228 from the National Digital Archives, described as copied from Polish Radio and dated to 1969 (which is not necessarily reliable, as the analogous recording 33-­T-2230 has the date 1971—­t hat is, ­a fter the poet’s death). The second source is a digital version of the vinyl rec­ord Julian Przyboś: Współczesna poezja polska: Wiersze wybrane czyta autor (Warszawa: Polskie Nagrania “Muza,” [1965?]). 44. Maria Dłuska, Próba teorii wiersza polskiego, 2nd ed. (Kraków: Wydaw­ nictwo Literackie, 1980), especially the chapters “System wersyfikacyjny” and “Węzłowe punkty wersów i ich traktowanie.” 45. Aleksandra Okopień-­Sławińska, “Pomysły do teorii wiersza współczesnego (Na przykładzie poezji Przybosia),” in Styl i kompozycja: Konferencje teoretycz­ noliterackie w Toruniu i Ustroniu, ed. Jan Trzynadlowski (Wrocław: Ossoli­ neum, 1965), 175–179; Jan Potkański, Sens nowoczesnego wiersza: Wersyfikacja

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Białoszewskiego, Przybosia, Miłosza i Herberta (Warszawa: Wydział Polonistyki UW, 2004), 51–53; and Sławiński, Koncepcja języka poetyckiego, 96. 46. See Adam Kulawik, Poetyka: Wstęp do teorii dzieła literackiego (Kraków: Antykwa, 1997), 151–159; and Witold Sadowski, Wiersz wolny jako tekst graficzny (Kraków: Universitas, 2004). 47. Julian Przyboś, “O wersologii,” in Linia i gwar, 2:233–234. 48. Tadeusz Różewicz, Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Róże­ wicz, trans. Joanna Trzeciak, foreword by Edward Hirsch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 32. For the Polish, see Tadeusz Różewicz, Poezja, 2 vols. (Kraków: Wydaw­ nictwo Literackie, 1988), 1:21. 49. For more on Różewicz’s verse being called a separate versification system based on shorter prosodic units, see Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 89–91. 50. In Polish: “Szukam nauczyciela i mistrza” and “niech oddzieli światło od ciemności.” Różewicz, Poezja, 1:21–22. Różewicz himself connected this search for a master with his relation to Przyboś. See Paweł Stępień, Zadanie: “Cha­ skiel” Tadeusza Różewicza (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Sub Lupa, 2017), 16. 51. Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 219, 434. 52. Stępień, Zadanie, 7–9, 16–17, 35–37. See Pieśń ujdzie cało . . . ​Antologia wierszy o Żydach pod okupacją niemiecką, ed. Michał Borwicz (Warszawa: Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna w Polsce, 1947). 53. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 103–106; and Łukasiewicz, TR, 37–42, 45–52. 54. Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 219. 55. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 14–17; and Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 221–222. 56. Agnieszka Karpowicz, “Pop-­art: Czy pol-­art? TerytoriA, kontekstY, awangardY,” in Awangarda Środkowej i Wschodniej Europy, 231–253. 57. Różewicz, Sobbing Superpower, 108–109. For the Polish, see Różewicz, Poezja, 2:166. 58. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 14–15; and Sokoloski, “Sources of Tadeusz Różewicz’s Correspondence,” 3–7. 59. Translation mine. Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 219. 60. The muted voice is mentioned by Potkański (Sens nowoczesnego wiersza, 294); and new prosodic units by Siatkowski (Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 90). Sokoloski, “Modern Polish Verse Structures,” 447–448, 452. 61. Sokoloski, “Modern Polish Verse Structures,” 449, 452. (In Polish: “U Różewicza nie ma żadnych podpórek wersyfikacyjnych, jest trud poetycki.”) 62. Dobrzyńska and Pszczołowska, “Wiersz a recytacja,” 278. 63. The other poets who ­were studied—­Iwaszkiewicz, Iłłakowiczówna, Jastrun, and Miłosz—­were at least ten years older. Grochowiak was younger, but also unique in his stylistic use of metrical verse; in fact, he is not discussed at all in the context of reading f­ ree verse.

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64. A unique exception among older authors was Leopold Staff, a poet born in the nineteenth ­century and already active before the interwar years, as a symbolist and classicist artist affiliated with the Young Poland movement. Różewicz valued him highly: if Przyboś could be called Różewicz’s poetic f­ ather, Staff played the role of a grand­father. ­After World War II, Staff began writing f­ ree verse modeled on Różewicz, and modified his reading style accordingly. In his postwar recordings, we can hear both a declamatory mode used for metrical poems and a restrained, syntax-­based style used for f­ree verse. Staff was not analyzed in the article I discuss above. See recording no. 33-­T-962, National Digital Archives. 65. The IBL recording is not dated; the poems he reads come from the book Zielona róża (1961) as well as ­earlier ones. One poem, “Szkic do erotyku współczesnego,” was published in a book from 1964. See the list of poems in the cata­log of the National Digital Archives. 66. 1998: Tadeusz Różewicz czyta swoje wiersze. 1963: recording for Polish Radio, copy in the National Digital Archives, no. 33-­T-1695. 67. Agnieszka Wagner, “Czy języki posiadają stabilne, kontrastywne własności rytmiczne? Dowody eksperymentalne z języka polskiego,” Prace Filologiczne  / ​ Philological Studies 69 (2016): 518–520. 68. Recording no M.00256, Museum of Lit­er­a­ture, September  23, 1976. The drama comes from the same year. I mean, for example, the phrases “z artystami głodomorami jest podobnie” or “z bogami, prorokami, mesjaszami dzieje się podobnie.” 69. This is a spontaneous conversation, which is often interrupted. I mean such phrases as “ja tam łamię w tych miejscach, a w prozie bym tego nie miał,” “a to jest rzeczywiście czysty utwór prozą,” “niestety krytycy nie chcieli tego przepisu.” 70. Especially slow are his very short phrases, whose purpose is to continue an enumeration or a broken sentence. 71. Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 134. The interviewer was Teresa Krzemień. 72. ­These are the first lines of the poem “Białe groszki” in two dif­fer­ent readings, as well as lines 4–5 of the poem “List do ludożerców.” 73. Różewicz, Sobbing Superpower, 87. For the Polish, see Różewicz, Poezja, 1:433. 74. Różewicz, Sobbing Superpower, 87. For the Polish, see Różewicz, Poezja, 1:433. 75. To take two examples, in the poem “Śmierć,” the last vowel is lengthened in the word “złotówkę” to signal the rising tone, and in the poem “W środku życia,” the phrase “siedzę na progu domu” is spoken on a rising tone, as if the next line continued this sentence. 76. Dobrzyńska and Pszczołowska, “Wiersz a recytacja,” 278; Różewicz, Poezja, 1:73; and Tadeusz Różewicz, They Came to See a Poet: Selected Poems, trans. Adam Czerniawski (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2011), 46.

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77. Różewicz, They Came to See a Poet, 91. For the Polish, see Różewicz, Poezja, 1:490. The first lines in Polish say: “20 sierpnia wyszła z domu / i nie po­ wróciła / osiemdziesięcioletnia staruszka / chora na zanik pamięci.” 78. Translation mine. Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 46. 79. Translation mine. Piotr Mitzner, “Tadeusz Różewicz razy dwa: Żarłoczny poszukiwacz piękna i prawdy mówi w twoim imieniu,” Gazeta Wyborcza, July 22, 2018, https://­w yborcza​.­pl​/­7,75517,23703871,tadeusz​-­rozewicz​-­razy​-­dwa​-­zarloczny​ -­poszukiwacz​-­piekna​-­i​-­prawdy​.­html. 80. Translation mine. Dobrzyńska and Pszczołowska, “Wiersz a recytacja,” 278. 81. See Tadeusz Różewicz, Reading the Apocalypse in Bed: Selected Plays and Short Pieces, trans. Adam Czerniawski, Barbara Plebanek, and Tony Howard, intro. Tony Howard (London: Marion Boyars, 1998), 6. 82. I refer ­here to the Polish translation of the article “Verse and Declamation.” See S.  I. Bernsztejn, “Wiersz a recytacja,” trans. Zygmunt Saloni, in Ro­ syjska szkoła stylistyki, ed. Maria Renata Mayenowa and Zygmunt Saloni (Warszawa: PIW, 1970), 180–219. More references can be found in Chapter 2. In thinking about this change in verse theory, I refer especially to the work of Witold Sadowski, Wiersz wolny jako tekst graficzny, who claimed that Polish f­ ree verse in the 1960s was constituted as verse only by graphic divisions into lines, with the growing importance of ­silent reading and the innovative use of blank spaces and layout. According to this theory, though, Białoszewski’s poems would also be considered graphic texts, while the poet’s recordings suggest they ­were a reworking of an older, oral-­based way of thinking about lines. 83. Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 333. 84. On the early 1960s, see Michał Głowiński, “Spotkania i lektury,” in Sławiński, Wspomnienia o Julianie Przybosiu, 393–394. This recollection suggests that Przyboś was also recorded. Cata­logs of the National Digital Archives, where some tapes are now stored, give the year 1961 as the beginning of the proj­ect. In the Special Collections section of the IBL Library ­t here is a notebook started in 1971 where some ­earlier recordings are entered as “before 1961.” Prof. Michał Głowiński, who participated in some recordings, also remembers the early 1960s as the most plausible beginning of the proj­ect, and notes its connection to Mayenowa’s research interests, and the use of the studio of Polskie Nagrania on Krucza Street in Warsaw for some early recordings (private correspondence, March 21, 2019). For Mayenowa’s interests, see her introduction to the anthology Rosyjska szkoła stylistyki, where Bernshtein’s text on verse and declamation is published. See also Maria Renata Mayenowa, Poetyka teoretyczna, 2nd  ed. (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1979), 374–380, 414–419. The organ­ization of the archive could be related to Czesław Miłosz’s request in 1961 to rec­ord Polish poets for his department in Berkeley, but I have not found any proof of this connection. I write more about Mayenowa’s interest in voice and her intellectual milieu in Aleksandra Kremer, “Filologowie i przyrodnicy: Żywa mowa wiersza a badania eksperymentalne,” in Nowa Humani­

NOTE S TO PAGE S 243 –244

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styka: Zajmowanie pozycji, negocjowanie autonomii, ed. Przemysław Czapliński, Ryszard Nycz, Dominik Antonik, Joanna Bednarek, Agnieszka Dauksza, and Jakub Misun (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2017), 470–478. 85. This list of names is repeated in three sources: entries from the notebook in the IBL Library’s Special Collections, cata­logs of the National Digital Archives (nac​.­gov​.­pl), and Teresa Dobrzyńska’s book for which IBL recordings w ­ ere used: Teresa Dobrzyńska, Delimitacja tekstu literackiego (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1974). ­Later recordings from the IBL notebook seem to be copies from other sources rather than their own recordings. 86. Dobrzyńska and Pszczołowska, “Wiersz a recytacja.” The text is mostly based on vinyl rec­ords, while Dobrzyńska’s book Delimitacja tekstu literackiego also studies the IBL poetry readings. However, the book’s aim is not to study poetry or recitation, but to use ­t hese recordings to discuss the broader issue of how the delimitation of text (its beginning and end) can be signaled orally, for instance with a lower tempo. On the institutional side, see Teresa Dobrzyńska, “Maria Renata Mayenowa,” Teksty Drugie, no.  2 (1990): 149; Zbigniew Kloch, “Wspomnienie o Profesor Pszczołowskiej,” Teksty Drugie, no. 5 (2010): 247–248. 87. On Harvard, see an article by the curator of Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room: Christina Davis, “The Lost Speakers: When Poetry, Technology & Public-­ Speaking Converged,” Stylus: The Poetry Room Blog, March  26, 2017, https://­ woodberrypoetryroom​.­com​/­​?­p ​=2­ 745. On Columbia, see Chris Mustazza, “James Weldon Johnson and the Speech Lab Recordings,” Oral Tradition 30, no. 1 (2016): 95–110. 88. Maria Dłuska, Rytm spółgłoskowy polskich grup akcentowych (Kraków: PAU, 1932), 2–6. For kymographs, see the section titled “Instruments” in Julia Kursell, “A Gray Box: The Phonograph in Laboratory Experiments and Fieldwork, 1900–1920,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 89. Maria Dłuska, “Polskie afrykaty,” Prace Laboratorium Fonetyki Ekspery­ mentalnej Uniwersytetu Jana Kazimierza we Lwowie 2 (1937): 19–20, 29, 34–35. On French studies, see Chris Mustazza “ ‘La parole au timbre juste’: Apollinaire, Poetry, Audio, and Experimental French Phonetics,” Jacket2, issue Clipping, December 30, 2015, https://­jacket2​.­org ​/­commentary​/ ­la​-­parole​-­au​-­t imbre​-­juste​ -­apollinaire​-­poetry​-­audio​-­and​-­experimental​-­french​-­phonetics; Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and Richard Sieburth, “The Sound of Pound: A Listener’s Guide: The Work of Voice in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Penn Sound, accessed January  31, 2021, https://­w riting​.­upenn​.­edu​/­pennsound​/­x​/­text​/­Sieburth​-­R ichard​ _­Pound​.­html. 90. On Siedlecki’s reception of formalist attitudes to Sievers, see Maria Renata Mayenowa, “Wersologia Franciszka Siedleckiego i jej założenia teoretyczne,” in Franciszek Siedlecki, Pisma, ed. Maria Renata Mayenowa and Stanisław

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Żółkiewski (Warszawa: PIW, 1989) 62, 65; and Andrzej Karcz, The Polish Formalist School and Rus­sian Formalism (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 145–148. 91. Siedlecki, Pisma, 63, 167, 242, 253, 265. On Sievers, see Eduard Sievers, Rhythmisch-­melodische Studien (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1912). 92. Siedlecki, Pisma, 130, 78. 93. See, for instance, Galin Tikhanov, “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Eu­rope? (And Why Is It Now Dead?),” Common Knowledge 10, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 61–81. 94. Piotr Gierowski, Struktury historii: O czeskim projekcie dziejów literatury na tle recepcji praskiego strukturalizmu w Polsce (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2013), 131. 95. On prewar colleagues, see Michał Głowiński, “Pani Mayenowa—­próba portretu,” in Obecność: Maria Renata Mayenowa (1908–1988), ed. Bożena Chodźko, Elżbieta Feliksiak, and Marek Olesiewicz (Białystok: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku, 2006) 19–20, 27–28; Danuta Ulicka, “Między światami,” in Wiek teorii: Sto lat nowoczesnego literaturoznawstwa polskiego, ed. Danuta Ulicka (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2020), 589. On Marxist criticism, see Maria Dłuska, “O naukowość sporu naukowego,” Pamiętnik Literacki 48, no. 3 (1957): 130–145. On Siedlecki’s legacy, see Witold Sadowski, “Asensualność polskiej teorii wiersza,” Sensualność w kulturze polskiej, IBL, accessed May 27, 2016, http://­ sensualnosc​.b ­ n​.­org​.­pl (formerly http://­w ww​.­sensualnosc​.­ibl​.w ­ aw​.p ­ l). 96. On the date, see Ewa Rogalewska, “Białystok na szlakach życia Marii Renaty Mayenowej,” in Chodźko et al., Obecność, 45. The convictions about orality ­were confirmed by Prof. Teresa Dobrzyńska (her disciple) in private correspondence from April 23, 2016. On older poets’ relation to orality, see e­ arlier sections of this chapter and Chapter 2. 97. Rogalewska, “Białystok,” 49–51. 98. Głowiński, “Pani Mayenowa,” 17–19, 25. 99. Głowiński, “Pani Mayenowa,” 20, 27–28; and Rogalewska, “Białystok,” 51–53. The professor’s name was Tadeusz Czeżowski. 100. Głowiński, “Pani Mayenowa,” 28–29, 25–26. 101. I write more on readings by Polish futurists in Aleksandra Kremer, “Polish Futurism Revisited: Anatol Stern and His Post-­War Poetry Recording,” Modern Language Review 111, no. 1 (2016). Some of t­ hese per­for­mances w ­ ere very innovative in terms of places, costumes, and provocations; but h ­ ere I am mostly interested in pronunciation. When Jalu Kurek recorded his poetry in 1977, he tried to repeat his reading of a poem from 1927 but then quickly came to consider it pompous and funny from a con­temporary perspective. See “Kraków 422,” ed. Krystyna Szlaga, 1977, archival Radio Kraków program (no. T  A / 1272 1272  in Radio Kraków Archive). On Przyboś, see ­earlier in this chapter.

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102. On the limitations of Polish sound poetry, see Piotr Bogalecki, “Lewą ręką: Polscy teoretycy poezji konkretnej jako konkretyści (Józef Bujnowski, Tadeusz Sławek, Piotr Rypson),” Er(r)go. Teoria–­Literatura–­Kultura 36, no. 1 (2018). See the four-­CD set: Eugeniusz Rudnik, Studio Eksperymentalne Polskiego Radia (War­ szawa: Polskie Radio, 2008), especially the booklet Eugeniusz Rudnik: 50 lat w Studio Eksperymentalnym Polskiego Radia, by Bolesław Błaszczyk, 28, 58, 78–80, 184–186. ­Here the two works Divertimento (1971) and Śniadanie na trawie w grocie Lascaux (2002) are classified as sound poetry. 103. Poésie sonore internationale, ed. Henri Chopin (Paris: Jean-­Michel Place, 1979), 71–72. The quoted poem is a part of his text “Romans Peru.” Stern’s postwar vinyl rec­ord is also mentioned: Anatol Stern: Współczesna poezja polska: Wiersze wybrane czyta autor (Warszawa: Polskie Nagrania “Muza,” [1966?]), though this recording consists of far less experimental texts. Apparently, in Poland Stern tried to pre­sent his involvement with futurism as socially concerned, whereas in France he showcased his truly experimental and playful pieces—­t he anthology mentions he visited Paris in 1965 and that this poem was printed in the magazine Revue OU in 1967. 104. Most prob­ably, based on an auditory impression by Prof. Teresa Dobrzyńska, for whose help I am very grateful. Private email correspondence, October 22–24, 2018. 105. Różewicz was accused of being “drobnomieszczanin,” which associates his small-­town, lower-­middle-­class background with small-­minded, petty views. See, e.g., Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 9. 106. Translation mine. Wojciech Browarny, “Miasto otwarte: Tadeusz Róże­ wicz i neoawangardowy Wrocław na przełomie lat 60. i 70. XX wieku,” in Nauka chodzenia: Teksty programowe późnej awangardy, ed. Wojciech Browarny, Paweł Mackiewicz, and Joanna Orska, vol. 1 (Kraków: WUJ, 2018), 101. 107. Stępień, Zadanie, 178–182, 185; Anna Spólna, “Wskrzeszenie brata: Tade­ usza Różewicza historie rodzinne,” Napis: Pismo poświęcone literaturze okolicz­ nościowej i użytkowej 19 (2013): 228–246. The book on his m ­ other is: Tadeusz Różewicz, Matka odchodzi (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 2004). An En­ glish translation, ­Mother Departs, by Barbara Bogoczek, was published in 2013 (London: Stork Press). 108. On Różewicz and the Home Army, see Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 47– 59, esp. 46, 56, 59; and “Dialogi poetów: Czesław Miłosz i Tadeusz Różewicz,” 449–450. 109. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 97–109; Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 165–166, 293; and Różewicz, Sobbing Superpower, 362. In 1964 Różewicz did, however, sign a pro-­state ­counter letter against the so-­called Letter of 34. Wisława Szymborska signed its ­earlier, lighter version, too. Zbigniew Herbert and Miron Białoszewski did not sign it. See Anna Bikont and Joanna Szczęsna, Lawina i kamienie: Pisarze

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wobec komunizmu (Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 2006), 326–327; Andrzej Franaszek, Herbert: Biografia, vol.  2: Pan Cogito (Kraków: Znak, 2018), 142; and Miron Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik, (Kraków: Znak, 2012), 97. 110. Burska, Awangarda i inne złudzenia, 195, 237; and Dedecius and Różewicz, Listy 1961–2013, 1:308 (letter from November 6, 1975, and footnotes). 111. I mean his plays Do piachu and Białe małżeństwo. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 235–236, 245, 269, 271. 112. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 301–303. 113. Różewicz, Sobbing Superpower, 151–152. For the Polish, see Różewicz, Poezja, 2:427–428. 114. See Tadeusz Drewnowski, “Tadeusz Różewicz. Słowo o mistrzu,” Polityka, January  8, 2011, 94–97; Dedecius and Różewicz, Listy, 1961–2013, 2:81–86 (letter from May 6, 1985, and footnotes); Poeta pamięta: Antologia poezji świadectwa i sprzeciwu, 1944–1984, ed. Stanisław Barańczak (London: Puls, 1984); and Łukasiewicz, TR, 382–384, 388. 115. In the En­glish translation, two Reciters from Part 1 of the play are presented as Readers. They come out in front of the curtain and recite a poem that is supposed to convey the truth about civilization. See Grzegorz Niziołek, Ciało i słowo: Szkice o teatrze Tadeusza Różewicza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004), 74; and Różewicz, Reading the Apocalypse in Bed, 59–62. 116. This is a note from 1966, from Różewicz’s Teatr Niekonsekwencji, which includes early ideas for the l­ater play The Old ­Woman Broods. See Agnieszka Koecher-­Hensel, “Śmietnisko kultury i wieczna kobiecość,” Pamiętnik Teatralny 246, no. 3–4 (2013): 120. 117. On Białoszewski’s ­family, see Miron: Wspomnienia o poecie, ed. Hanna Kirchner (Warszawa: Tenten, 1996), 11–15. 118. For more on this contrast, see Joanna Grądziel-­Wójcik, “ ‘Święte życie na Lizbońskiej’: Architektura i sacrum w poezji Mirona Białoszewskiego,” Poznańskie Spotkania Językoznawcze 30 (2015): 51; Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 104. Though in other places Różewicz also mentioned his “shallow faith” and mourning his childhood beliefs, he saw vari­ous forms of religious cult as childish, not fascinating. Łukasiewicz, TR, 316–359. 119. Kirchner, Miron, 278–281, 305, 254; and Jadwiga Stańczakowa, Dziennik we dwoje (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Borgis, 1992), 98–99, 24, 113. 120. E.g., in Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-­Garde. 121. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 88. 122. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 40, 41–45. 123. Kirchner, Miron, 11–15. 124. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 49–50; “Dialogi poetów: Czesław Miłosz i Tadeusz Różewicz,” 430; and Stępień, Zadanie, 105. 125. Kirchner, Miron, 25, 64, 70–71. 126. Różewicz, Matka odchodzi, 88, 108, 89.

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127. See, for instance, the poem “Jazda autobusem do Anina po mszy,” in Miron Białoszewski, Odczepić się i inne wiersze (Warszawa: PIW, 1978), 205–206. 128. Grądziel-­Wójcik, “ ‘Święte życie na Lizbońskiej,’ ” 49–50. 129. On pollution, see Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 179, 195, 337–339. The play The Old ­Woman Broods is in Różewicz, Reading the Apocalypse in Bed. On TV, see Wbrew sobie, 319–320. On his love for the printed word and newspapers, see “Namiętność,” in Przygotowanie do wieczoru autorskiego, 125. 130. On criticism of Vogler and the role of the war, see Łukasiewicz, TR, 369–371; and Henryk Vogler, Tadeusz Różewicz (Warszawa: PIW, 1972), 9–10, 18–21. As Łukasiewicz has noted, Vogler focused on Różewicz’s loss of his small town rather than war­time trauma, though he himself was Jewish and had survived the ghetto and a concentration camp. Vogler’s attachment to the high culture of prewar times, which was very dif­fer­ent from Różewicz’s attitude, seems to be similar to Mayenowa’s. 131. Miron Białoszewski, “O tym Mickiewiczu jak go mówię,” Odra 6 (1967). 132. Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 243; for his dislike of advertisements in theater programs, see 180–181. 133. Levine, Con­temporary Polish Poetry, 83. 134. Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-­Avant-­Garde?,” October 70 (Fall 1994): 20. 135. “Dialogi poetów: Czesław Miłosz i Tadeusz Różewicz,” 427. 136. Andrzej Sosnowski, “Apel poległych (o poezji naiwnej i sentymentalnej w Polsce),” in Andrzej Sosnowski, Najryzykowniej (Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2007), 17–29. 137. Jerzy Illg, “Z Szymborską w Sztokholmie,” Tygodnik Powszechny, Decem­ber 15, 1996, http://­w ww​.­t ygodnik​.­com​.­pl​/­kontrapunkt​/­12​/­illg​.­html. 138. Różewicz, They Came to See a Poet, 108. In Polish: “Propozycja druga,” in Różewicz, Poezja, 2:24. 139. “Dialogi poetów: Czesław Miłosz i Tadeusz Różewicz,” 423. Verse is called ­here something external: rhymes, versification, which do not necessarily constitute poetry. Wiersze przeczytane, 17. Różewicz claims ­here that even in his youth he distinguished between verse and poetry, and that verse is only the body of poetry. An additional complication stems from the fact that the popu­lar Polish word for “poem” is not etymologically connected with poetry but with verse, and is actually the same word as “verse,” “wiersz.” In some cases when Różewicz speaks about a contrast between “wiersz” and “poezja,” it may mean a contrast between concrete texts and poetry as an abstract idea. In “Preparation for a Poetry Reading” in Alissa Valles’s translation Różewicz says, “I wrote poems for many years. Was I creating poetry?” (171), and h ­ ere is one such place where both senses of “wiersze” could be intended. 140. On the links between verse and the lyric, see Lucylla Pszczołowska, “Forma wierszowa a utwór liryczny,” in Problemy teorii literatury, ed. Henryk Markiewicz (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1987). On attempts at distinguishing verse

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and poetry in modern lit­er­a­ture, see Stefan Sawicki, “Wokół opozycji: wiersz—­ proza,” in Problemy teorii literatury. On the roots of the Polish classification of genres, see Teresa Michałowska, “Rodzaje czy rodzaj? Prob­lem taksonomii lite­ rackiej,” Pamiętnik Literacki 77, no. 1 (1986): 3–17. 141. Wiersze przeczytane, 17. Translation mine. 142. On rewriting, see Stanisław Jaworski, “Skreślenia—­gry tekstowe Różewicza,” Andrzej Skrendo, “Przepisywanie Różewicza,” and Irena Górska, “Korekcja jako prob­lem retoryczny i estetyczny w twórczości Tadeusza Różewicza,” all in Prze­ kraczanie granic: O twórczości Tadeusza Różewicza, ed. Wojciech Browarny, ­Joanna Orska, Adam Poprawa (Kraków: Universitas, 2007). 143. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 134–141. 144. Joanna Orska, “Nauka chodzenia,” 7–8. 145. For ­t hese views of the avant-­garde, neo-­avant-­garde, and postmodernism, see Stanisław Burkot, “Postmodernistyczne nieporozumienia,” in Przekraczanie granic, 147, 153, 157, 158. See also Krzysztof Uniłowski, “Ocalony a pop: Tadeusza Różewicza potyczki z kulturą masową,” in Przekraczanie granic, 273–275. In ­t hese articles the scholar Andrzej Skrendo is shown as a representative of the first type of the broad understanding of postmodernism, Halina Filipowicz of the second one. Both authors of the quoted articles, on the other hand, choose the narrower understanding, developed in close contact with American postmodern fiction rather than Eu­ro­pean neo-­avant-­garde. 146. Filipowicz, A Laboratory of Impure Forms, 14–15. 147. Różewicz, Wbrew sobie, 131. 148. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 304–306. 149. Różewicz, Reading the Apocalypse in Bed, 263. The dates appear in the text; see also page 6. 150. Różewicz, Reading the Apocalypse in Bed, 264. 151. Drewnowski, Walka o oddech, 180. 152. Różewicz, “Preparation for a Poetry Reading,” 178. In Polish, “Przygotowanie do wieczoru autorskiego,” 184. 153. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 82–95. For more on Różewicz’s nihilism, see Michał Januszkiewicz, “Różewicz–­nihilista,” in Przekraczanie granic, 165–182. 154. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 96, 95. 155. Różewicz, “Preparation for a Poetry Reading,” 178. In Polish, “Przygotowanie do wieczoru autorskiego,” 184. 156. The impression that young poets usually read their poems in a purposely bad and distanced manner is expressed in Adam Zagajewski, “Odeszli wielcy poeci,” in Adam Zagajewski, Substancja nieuporządkowana (Kraków: Znak, 2019), 114–115. Zagajewski links this style of reading with a general suspicion ­toward poetry and the age of irony. On Różewicz’s legacy, see (Polish) Poetry ­after Różewicz, ed. Marit MacArthur and Kacper Bartczak, Jacket2, November 14, 2015,

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https://­jacket2​.­org​/­polish​-­poetry​-­a fter​-­rozewicz. See also Grzegorz Hetman, “Życie, metafora, język—­o Różewiczowskich inspiracjach w twórczości poetów polskich debiutujących po 1989 roku,” in Przekraczanie granic, 445–456; and Piotr Śliwiński, “Polish Twentieth-­Century Poetry,” 461–462. This type of reading style is used by Krzysztof Siwczyk, among o ­ thers.

Epilogue 1. Audio recordings are included in “Jesteś samo śpiewa: Rozmowa z Krystyną Miłobędzką,” interview by Jarosław Borowiec, Dwutygodnik, no. 4 (2019), https://­​ www​.­dwutygodnik​.­com​/­artykul​/­8232​-­jestes​-­samo​-­spiewa​.­html. Zofia Król spoke on the circumstances of this recording in a talk given for the tenth anniversary of the magazine. A video of the talk can be viewed on Dwutygodnik’s Facebook website, posted on April 27, 2019. 2. Translation mine. In Polish: “może tylko nie ma komu powiedzieć siebie głośno z tymi od kiedy pamięta zacięciami w najbardziej nieoczekiwanych miejscach w tym samym zawsze oczekiwanym momencie?” See Krystyna Miłobędzka, Zbierane, gubione: 1960–2010 (Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2010), 274. For a different translation, see Krystyna Miłobędzka, Nothing More, trans. Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2013), 89. 3. “Umknąć z języka: Z Krystyną Miłobędzką rozmawiają Ewa Obrębowska-­ Piasecka i Violetta Szostak,” in Wielogłos: Krystyna Miłobędzka w recenzjach, szkicach, rozmowach, ed. Jarosław Borowiec (Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2012), 636; “Brak wprawy: Z Krystyną Miłobędzką [i Andrzejem Falkiewiczem] ­rozmawia Marcin Sendecki,” in Borowiec, Wielogłos, 685, 686, 688; Jarosław Borowiec, “Spotkanie,” in Szare światło: Rozmowy z Krystyną Miłobędzką i An­ drzejem Falkiewiczem (Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2009), 5. 4. “Reszta jest wielokrotnie zapisywaną gęstwiną: Z Krystyną Miłobędzką rozmawia Karol Maliszewski,” in Borowiec, Wielogłos, 633–634; Wojciech Bonowicz, “Szept,” in Borowiec, Wielogłos, 292. 5. On Miłobędzka’s late recognition, see Anna Legeżyńska, Od kochanki do ­psalmistki . . . ​Sylwetki, tematy i konwencje liryki kobiecej (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2009), 314. On vari­ous readings between 2000 and 2012 (her eightieth birthday), see Agnieszka Wolny-­Hamkało, “O nowej książce Krystyny Miłobędzkiej,” Dwutygodnik, no. 4 (2010), https://­w ww​.­dwutygodnik ​.­com​/­a rty​ kul​/­1051​-­o​-­nowej​-­ksiazce​-­k rystyny​-m ­ ilobedzkiej​.­html; Michał Szymański, “Zapiski portowe,” Dwutygodnik, no. 4 (2012), https://­w ww​.­dwutygodnik ​.­com​/­a rty​ kul​/­3473​-­z apiski​-p ­ ortowe​.­html. For an audio recording of Miłobędzka’s poetry reading from 2000, see Krystyna Miłobędzka, “Wszystkowiersze,” Biuro Lite­ rackie, accessed May 1, 2019, https://­w ww​.­biuroliterackie​.­pl​/­biblioteka​/­d zwieki​ /­wszyst​kowiersze​/­.

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6. “Umknąć z języka,” 639; “Zwiewność: Z Krystyną Miłobędzką i Andrzejem Falkiewiczem rozmawiają Katarzyna Czeczot i Agata Kula,” in Borowiec, Wielogłos, 664–665, 667; “Wiersza nie można zapisać, bo trzeba by było zapisać wszechświat: Z Krystyną Miłobędzką rozmawia Sergiusz Sterna-­Wachowiak,” in Borowiec, Wielogłos, 606. 7. “Reszta jest wielokrotnie zapisywaną gęstwiną,” 631, 633; “Po drugiej stronie słów: Z Krystyną Miłobędzką rozmawia Jarosław Borowiec,” in Borowiec, Wielo­ głos, 647. 8. “Wolne miejsce dla wyobraźni: Z Krystyną Miłobędzką rozmawia Ewa Tomaszewska,” in Borowiec, Wielogłos, 613; “Umknąć z języka,” 638. 9. “W momencie narodzin: Z Krystyną Miłobędzką rozmawiają Aleksandra Kuźma i Justyna Guziak,” in Borowiec, Wielogłos, 618; “Umknąć z języka,” 637. 10. Agnieszka Wolny-­Hamkało, “Not in En­glish Yet: New Book by Krystyna Miłobędzka,” trans. Marcin Wawrzyńczak, Dwutygodnik / Biweekly, no.  5 (2010), https://­w ww​.­biweekly​.­pl​/­a rticle​/­1133​-­not​-­i n​-­english​-­yet​-­new​-­book​-­by​-­k rystyna​ -­milobedzka​.h ­ tml; Jarosław Borowiec, “Wierzyć na słowo,” in Krystyna Miłobędzka, znikam jestem: cztery wieczory autorskie, ed. Jarosław Borowiec (Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2010), 9. 11. Krystyna Miłobędzka and Marcin Sendecki, “Po krzyku,” Biuro Literackie, accessed January 11, 2021, https://­w ww​.­biuroliterackie​.­pl​/ ­biblioteka ​/­dzwieki​/­po​ -­k rzyku​/­. 12. “Zwiewność,” 658; Leszek Szaruga, “Dochodzenie do wiersza,” in Borowiec, Wielogłos, 127. 13. “Wiersza nie można zapisać,” 608. 14. “Pisze się tak, jak toczy się życie: Z Krystyną Miłobędzką rozmawia Jarosław Borowiec,” in Miłobędzka wielokrotnie (Poznań: WBPiCAK, 2008), 184–185. 15. Miłobędzka, znikam jestem. 16. See DVD 010 Rekord BL, added to Borowiec, Wielogłos; see also Miłobędzka and Sendecki, “Po krzyku.” 17. I mean h ­ ere, for example, the new reading styles of Marta Podgórnik and Justyna Bargielska. 18. “Zwiewność,” 663–663; “Wszystko mi się gubi: Z Krystyną Miłobędzką rozmawia Tomasz Mizerkiewicz,” in Borowiec, Wielogłos, 682. 19. See the CD included with Julia Fiedorczuk, Psalmy (2014–2017) (Wrocław: Fundacja na rzecz Kultury i Edukacji im. Tymoteusza Karpowicza, 2017). The  recordings are now also available online: “Psalmy,” Bandcamp, accessed ­February  3, 2021, https://­t urquoisecoal​.­bandcamp​.­com​/­a lbum​/­psalmy​?­f bclid​ =­IwAR3X5kmpLd8nbh9j6Qmu​-­ckxYrcgrZNpg3VnYiQuyAqh​-­0sq2fQetacu2fM. 20. Wolny-­Hamkało, “Not in En­glish Yet.”

Acknowl­edgments

I have incurred many debts while writing this book. I started to work on this proj­ect as a ju­nior faculty member at the Institute of Polish Lit­er­a­ture of the University of Warsaw. The first stage of my research was financed by the National Science Centre in Poland (proj­ect no.  2014 / 13 / D / HS2 / 00978, “Voices of Polish Poetry,” 2015–2016). ­A fter I joined the Department of Slavic Languages and Lit­er­a­tures at Harvard University, the main draft of the book was written during my research leave, supported by Harvard University and by the John F. Cogan Ju­nior Faculty Leave Program from Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. I would like to thank all my colleagues from the Slavic Department for their continuing support and helpfulness: Jonathan Bolton, Julie Buckler, Steven Clancy, Michael Flier, George Grabowicz, Daria Khitrova, Stephanie Sandler, Nariman Skakov, William Mills Todd III, and Justin Weir. I owe special thanks to Jonathan Bolton, Stephanie Sandler, William Mills Todd III, and Justin Weir for their advice, mentoring, and many conversations about the book over ­these years. I am grateful to the colleagues who have given me feedback on portions and drafts of this manuscript: Stephanie Sandler, Jonathan Bolton, and Anna Barańczak. I am also grateful for the advice I received from colleagues from beyond the Slavic Department: Alexander Rehding and Kevin Ryan. I would like to thank Witold Sadowski for reading parts of the manuscript and for all the support since my time in gradu­ate school. I learned a lot from my collaboration with the linguist Agnieszka Wagner, who worked with me on the proj­ect “Voices of Polish Poetry.” I also would like to thank numerous p ­ eople who answered my smaller and bigger questions as I was working on this book, provided me with materials,

354 Ac k now ledgments

feedback, and new ideas, or commented on my conference and seminar papers. I am grateful to Mateusz Antoniuk, Lidia Bakensztos, Anna Barańczak, Piotr Bogalecki, Andrea Bohlman, Andrzej Brylak, Clare Cavanagh, Henryk Citko, Teresa Dobrzyńska, Beata Dorosz, Adam Dziadek, Andrzej Franaszek, George Gasyna, Michał Głowiński, Luba Golburt, Mikołaj Golubiewski, Monika Greenleaf, Andrzej Hejmej, Magda Heydel, Jerzy Jarniewicz, Kata­ rzyna Jerzak, Agnieszka Jeżyk, Agnieszka Karpowicz, Michalina Kmiecik, Ewa Kołodziejczyk, Andrzej Stanisław Kowalczyk, Ryszard Koziołek, Ryszard Krynicki, Michał Paweł Markowski, Piotr Mitzner, Michał Mrugalski, Joanna Niżyńska, Ryszard Nycz, Michał Rusinek, Schamma Schahadat, Beata Śniecikowska, Justyna Tabaszewska, Alissa Valles, Ewa Wampuszyc, Łukasz Wodzyński, and Jan Zieliński. I would like to acknowledge the helpful assistance of numerous ­people working in archives and libraries, especially Christina Davis and Mary Graham at the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard, Jarosław Klejnocki and Filip Bojarski at the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture in Warsaw, and Jerzy Pawełczyk at Radio Kraków. I am grateful to Philip Redko for copyediting my nonnative En­glish. I owe special thanks to the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript for Harvard University Press for very useful suggestions and comments, which helped me revise the book. At Harvard University Press, I would like to thank Lindsay W ­ aters and Sharmila Sen for their support and faith in my book proj­ect, and Emily Silk for all her support and insightful comments. Portions of Chapter 4 w ­ ere first published in “Testament and Testimony: Listening to ‘Ode III’ by Aleksander Wat,” The Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal, 61, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 92–110, and are reprinted ­here with the permission of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East Eu­ro­ pean Languages. All figures have been created with the software program Praat: D ­ oing Phonetics by Computer, created by Paul Boersma and David Weenink. I worked on the figures between 2018 and 2021. The latest version of the program I used was 6.1.30, retrieved  November 4, 2020, from http://­w ww​.­praat​.o ­ rg. I dedicate this book to Tymon.

Index

Acad­emy of American Poets, 80 actor recitations: of Barańczak’s poetry, 18; of Herbert’s poetry, 65–66, 197–198, 204, 206; interpretation of poet-­prophet in, 11–12; memorization in, 13; Miłosz’s criticism of, 107, 110, 111; of Miłosz’s poetry, 63–65, 117; ­after 1989, 67–68; prominence of, 1–2, 5–6; Przyboś’s criticism of, 224; radio stations favoring, 16, 28, 51, 60–61, 67; Różewicz’s criticism of, 219; during Solidarity and martial law, 61–66; of Szymborska’s poetry, 60, 164; textual condition and, 34–36; theatrical style of, 14–16, 276n41; of Tu­ wim’s poetry, 51, 61–62; of Wat’s poetry, 182, 331n49. See also individual actors Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­t ure (Muzeum Literatury im. Adama Mickiewicza), 150, 174–175, 206, 218, 281n10 Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, 17 Anglo-­A merican poetic culture, Polish culture versus, 1–6 anti-­expressivist readings, 15, 19–20, 276n47 anti-­Semitism, 39–40, 55, 59, 79, 86, 141, 183, 245, 280n2 applied lit­er­a­ture, 11, 274n29 Auden, W. H., 275n38 audience expectations: Polish Romantic tradition influencing, 12–19, 61–66; socialist realism influencing, 224 audio postcards: popularity of, 59–60, 289n76; in the Soviet Union, 289n76; of Tuwim’s “Grande Valse Brillante,” 24, 39–43, 49–51, 59–60 audio testaments. See poetic audio testaments Auschwitz, 45 Austin, J. L., 284n35 authorial per­for­mances: approach to analyzing, 19–24, 27–28, 30–38; increasing

interest in, 2, 4, 19–20, 49, 50, 54, 60–61, 66–67; poet-­prophet figure and, 6–12, 19, 65–66, 208; Poland as laboratory for poetry per­for­mance, 12–19; Polish versus Anglo­A merican scholarly approach to, 1–6; ­women’s voices in, 29–30, 68–74. See also individual authors avant-­garde, 13, 21–23, 26, 50, 115, 131, 219, 220–224, 246, 254, 256, 259, 264–265, 277n50, 278n58, 285n40, 340n29. See also futurism; Kraków Avant-­Garde; neo-­avant­garde Baczyński, Krzysztof Kamil, 59 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 154 Balbus, Stanisław, 159 Balcerzan, Edward, 224 Barańczak, Anna, 16–17 Barańczak, Stanisław: audience expectations of, 16–19; Białoszewski and, 138, 145–146; Generation ’68 and, 17, 223; Hartwig and, 121; on Herbert, 205; “Heroes to H ­ umans,” 202–203; Miłosz and, 116, 306n154; recordings of, 277n51; Spoiling Cannibals’ Fun, 121; Szymborska and, 159; “Voice Coaching,” 17–18, 116; on Wat’s “Ode,” 186 Baranowska, Małgorzata, 135 bard, poet as, 68; Herbert as, 65–66, 198, 203; Kamieńska versus, 208; Miłosz as, 19, 64–65, 170; in Polish Romanticism, 6–12, 129; during Solidarity and martial law, 16–19, 65–66; ­u nder Stalinism, 53–54, 56; Szymborska versus, 160–162, 170; during the war, 47. See also bards of guitar poetry bards of guitar poetry, 5, 8, 12, 59, 63, 125, 144, 198 Beat Generation, 3, 22, 131 Bem, Józef, 201

356inde x

Berberyusz, Ewa, 140, 315n74 Bernshtein, Sergei, 112–113, 146, 242–245, 300n84, 344n84 Bern­stein, Charles, 4; Close Listening, 2–3, 32, 33, 35 Białoszewski, Miron: artistic self-­creation and lifestyle of, 132–133, 138–142, 316n87; background and education of, 128–129; church m ­ usic interest of, 129–130; Generation ’68 and, 223; Mickiewicz performed by, 143–144; Miłobędzka and, 264; poetry and prose of (see Białoszewski, Miron, works of); politics and, 137–142; at postwar literary gatherings, 130–134; reading style and intonation patterns of, 27, 37–38, 145–153, 344n82; recordings of, 4, 22–23, 34, 142–147, 293n116, 319n112; Różewicz compared to, 219, 229, 251–255; score hypothesis about, 145–146; Separate Theater or­ga­nized by, 75, 131–134; Soliński and, 132, 135, 141, 143; Stańczakowa and, 134, 136, 137, 141, 144, 145, 179, 279n68; Szymborska compared to, 25–26, 127–128, 153–154, 167–171; Tuesday gatherings hosted by, 127–128, 134–142, 318n103; queer identity of, 132, 133, 141–142, 170; war­t ime literary gatherings or­ga­nized by, 129–130; Wat compared to, 179 Białoszewski, Miron, works of: “Aniela w miasteczku Folino” (Angela in the Town of Foligno), 147; “Barbara z Haczowa” (Barbara of Haczów), 147–148; “Jerozolima” (Jerusalem), 129; Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, 133, 142–143; “ ‘Oh! Oh! Should They Take Away My Stove . . .’ My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy,” 150–153; “O tym Mickiewiczu jak go mówię” (On This Mickiewicz as I Say Him), 143; Pieśni na krzesło i głos (Songs for Chair and Voice), 147; “Potęga mrówkowca,” 148–149; Rachunek zachciankowy (Calculus of Whims), 147; The Revolution of Th ­ ings, 132; Tajny dziennik (Secret Diary), 139–140; “Wypadek” (Accident), 147; “Wypadek z gramatyki” (A Grammatical Accident), 147; “Zbiorowe ustalanie charakteru Pani Doktór” (A Collective Investigation of Our Doctor’s Personality), 147 Bikont, Anna, 157 Biprostal Group, 160

Birkenau, 45 Black Mountain School, 3 Bobrowska, Romana, 198 Bogalecki, Piotr, 116, 145–146, 195 Bolton, Jonathan, 310n11 Borowiec, Jarosław, 266 Borowski, Jarosław, 195 Borwicz, Michał, Pieśń ujdzie cało . . . (The Song ­Will Survive Unscathed . . .), 44, 47, 228–229 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 198, 281n10, 282n19 Broniewski, Władysław, 53–54 Browarny, Wojciech, 247 Brzezińska, Olga, 276n42 Buczkówna, Mieczysława, 293n122 Buraczewska, Ada, 136 Bursa, Andrzej, 28, 278n63 Busza, Andrzej, 102–103, 150 cabarets, 5, 49, 51–53, 57–58, 68, 147 Carpenter, Bogdana, 122 Carpenter, John, 122 Catholicism: Catholic Intelligent­sia Club, 155; Catholic University in Lublin, 65, 76; church ­music in, 129; Herbert’s views of, 200–201; Kamieńska’s views of, 208–209; Miłosz and, 65; readings in churches, 16, 63, 65, 138, 172; Tygodnik Powszechny, 76; Wat’s views of, 185, 193–197; Weeks of Christian Culture, 63 Cavanagh, Clare, 86; Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics, 19, 156; Spoiling Cannibals’ Fun, 121 Cellar ­u nder the Rams (Piwnica Pod Bara­ nami), 57 Chetwynd, Richard, 275n37 Choiński, Bogusław, 131 Chopin, Frédéric, 40, 129 Cixous, Hélène, 215 Cold War, 4, 181 Committee for the Defense of Workers (Komitet Obrony Robotników, KOR), 16, 63, 138, 140 concentration camps, per­for­mance of Tuwim’s “The Prayer” in, 44–48, 284n33 Congress of Polish Culture (Kongres Kultury Polskiej), 181 Conrad, Joseph, 201 correspondence art. See mail art Craveri, Benedetta, 127

inde x

Czachorowski, Stanisław Swen, 129, 130, 131 Czałczyńska, Barbara, 160 Czapska, Maria, 179 Czapski, Józef, 177, 179, 201 Czaykowski, Bogdan, 102–103, 150 Czyżewska, Elżbieta, 82 Davis, Christina, 34 death, recording and. See poetic audio testaments declamatory style, 14–15; Miłosz’s use of, 19, 106, 110–112, 242; Przyboś’s use of, 226–227, 242; Różewicz’s use of, 238, 241; in Rus­sian culture, 276n41; Staff’s use of, 343n64; Tuwim’s use of, 51; Zagajewski’s use of, 276n47, 304n135 declamatory tendency (Bernshtein), 112–113, 146, 242–243, 245 Dedecius, Karl, 158, 180 Dejmek, Kazimierz, 64, 107 Demarczyk, Ewa, 57–59, 67, 69 Deotyma. See Łuszczewska, Jadwiga Derrida, Jacques, 33; Speech and Phenomena, 173–174, 177 Dickinson, Emily, 36, 264 Dłuska, Maria, 226–227, 244 Dobrzyńska, Teresa, 111, 231, 238, 243 Drake University, 119 Drewnowski, Tadeusz, 258 Drozdowski, Bohdan, 315n72 Dworkin, Craig, The Sound of Poetry, 27 Dwutygodnik (Biweekly) (journal), 263 Dziadek, Adam, 331n49 Edison, Thomas, 172 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 276n41 elegiac recordings. See poetic audio testaments Eliot, T. S., 90, 277n56 emigration: Barańczak’s, 17; émigré circles in Canada, 88; émigré circles in France, 75, 76, 114, 179–180, 184; émigré circles in the United Kingdom, 183; émigré circles in the United States, 40, 49, 78, 79; émigré circles in West Germany, 181; ­Great Emigration, 7–8; Karpowicz’s, 78; Miłosz’s, 75, 77, 85, 95; Tuwim’s, 39; Wat’s, 176, 181 enjambments: in Miłosz’s readings, 94–102, 110; in Różewicz’s readings, 238; in Zagajewski’s readings, 304n135 Ernst, Max, 158

357

farewells, taped. See poetic audio testaments feminine poetry (poezja kobieca): dismantling of niche of, 267–268; ste­reo­t ype of, 69, 120, 160–162, 168–170, 293n117. See also ­women poets Fiedorczuk, Julia, 267 Filipowicz, Halina, 350n145 Filipowicz, Kornel, 155, 157, 160 Fitzgerald, Ella, 164 Fiut, Aleksander, 84, 112, 113 Forefathers’ Eve (Mickiewicz): banning of, 7; Białoszewski’s recording of, 143–144; Dej­ mek’s staging of, 64; ­Great Improvisation in, 11, 110; Miłosz’s interest in, 109; Różewicz and, 249; Swinarski’s staging of, 107, 110 Foster, Hal, 255 Franaszek, Andrzej, 180, 206 ­f ree verse: definitions of, 14, 188, 226, 227, 275n39; Hartwig’s use of, 121; increasing interest in, 13, 61; memorization and, 14, 275n37; Miłosz’s use of, 94, 97, 102, 112–114, 118; Poświatowska’s use of, 71; Przyboś’s use of, 220, 226; Różewicz’s use of, 221, 227, 231, 238, 257; Staff’s use of, 343n64; Szymborska’s use of, 164 futurism, 51, 184, 196, 222, 224, 246, 285n40, 346n101, 347n103 Gajcy, Tadeusz, 201 Gałczyński, Konstanty Ildefons, 54, 287n59, 309n3 Gamdzyk, Malina, 134 Generation ’68 (poetry movement), 17, 56, 223, 248–249, 277n50 Giedroyc, Jerzy, 76, 78, 80, 114, 204 Ginczanka, Zuzanna, 48 Ginsberg, Allen, 121, 131, 308n171, 331n55 Gintrowski, Przemysław, 63, 65–66, 335n99 Głowiński, Michał, 169, 245, 344n84 Gombrowicz, Witold, 78, 293n116 Gomułka, Władysław, 288n67 Gorczyńska, Renata, 156 ­Grand Theater in Warsaw (Teatr Wielki), 61–64, 204 Green Balloon (Zielony Balonik), 49 Grochowiak, Stanisław, 229, 243, 342n63 Grossman, Gregory, 176 Grudzińska-­Gross, Irena, 81, 106 Guggenheim Museum, 80, 88, 122 guitar poets. See bards of guitar poetry

358inde x

Hartwig, Julia, 25, 308n171; French and American influences on, 119–120, 125; public image of, 121, 211, 264; reading style and intonation patterns of, 121–123; reception of, 120–122; “A Sentence,” 119 Harvard University, 17, 34, 76, 89, 116, 121, 244 Hass, Robert, 81, 87, 105 Herbert, Zbigniew: circulation of poetry of, 65–66, 197–198; lost recordings of, 28; memorization and, 14, 201–202; Miłosz and, 80, 81–82, 112, 204; poetic audio testament of, 26, 174, 197–206, 265; poetry and prose of (see Herbert, Zbigniew, works of); preference for own per­for­mances, 60, 197, 199; reading style and intonation patterns of, 199, 205–206; recordings of, 22–23, 29, 67, 180–181, 197–198; return to Poland, 64, 202; Romanticism and, 200–201, 204–205; travel by, 78, 125, 180–181, 206; Wat and, 180 Herbert, Zbigniew, works of: Alibi, 180; “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” 65–66, 198–200, 204–205; “Houses on the Outskirts,” 199; “Inner Voice,” 82; “Livy’s Metamorphoses,” 199; Mr. Cogito, 203; “Mr. Cogito Considers a Return to His Native Town,” 199; “Mr. Cogito Seeks Advice,” 199; “Our Fear,” 199; “Photo­graph,” 199; “Prologue,” 180, 204; “Report from the Besieged City,” 65, 199; Report from the Besieged City, 203; Selected Poems, 82; “September 17,” 199; “To the Hungarians,” 199; “Two Drops,” 199 Hering, Ludwik, 131–132, 141, 146–147 Hertz, Zygmunt, 75–76 Heydel, Magda, 81 Holmes, Alan, 267 Holocaust, 39, 43–45, 47–48, 55, 129, 134, 195, 207, 229, 245, 247 Holoubek, Gustaw, 331n49 Home Army (Armia Krajowa), 121, 220, 247–248, 251, 253, 333n79 home literary salons. See literary salons Huizinga, Johan, 160 Husserl, Edmund, 177 IBL. See Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Acad­emy of Sciences Iłłakowiczówna, Kazimiera, 243, 342n63

improvisation, 9–11, 18, 21, 29, 50, 110, 135, 160–161, 163–164, 259–260, 274n28 incantation, Miłosz’s use of, 88, 90, 112–113 Ingarden, Roman, 5, 35 Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Acad­emy of Sciences (Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, IBL), 135, 232–233, 243–247, 261 intonation and pitch contours: in Biało­ szewski’s readings, 145–153; in Herbert’s readings, 205; in Miłosz’s readings, 25, 27, 37, 81, 88–117; in Przyboś’s readings, 224–227; in Różewicz’s readings, 233–238; in Świrszczyńska’s readings, 163–172, 211–216; terminology for, 27–28, 93–94, 111, 113–114, 227, 299n76; in Wat’s readings, 186–197, 331n49. See also declama­tory style Iribarne, Louis, 88 Iron Curtain, 160, 179, 182; fall of, 1, 4, 66, Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław, 44, 243, 342n63 Jagiellonian University, 65, 71, 156 Janion, Maria, 135, 139, 273n17 Jansen, John Albert, End and Beginning—­ Meeting Wislawa Szymborska, 167, 323n174 Jastrun, Mieczysław, 243, 342n63 jazz, poetry and, 163–164 Jun, Irena, 60 Kaczmarski, Jacek, 8 Kaddish, 193, 204, 331n55 Kamieńska, Anna: home meetings or­ga­nized by, 125–126, 209; Notatnik (Notebook), 207; poetic audio testament of, 26, 206–209; as a prophet figure, 208; recordings of, 69, 206–207; religious views of, 208–209; “Tożsamość” (Identity), 214–215 Kantor, Tadeusz, 229 Karpowicz, Agnieszka, 229 Karpowicz, Tymoteusz, 75, 78, 223, 264 Karwowska, Bożena, 88, 169 Kasprowicz, Jan, 129 Kelus, Jan Krzysztof, 125 Khitrova, Daria, 284n35 Klewin, Roman, 136 Kochanowski, Jan, 114 Kołakowski, Leszek, 155 Komeda, Krzysztof, 163

359

inde x

Komorowska, Maja, 64 Konieczny, Zygmunt, 57–58 Konopnicka, Maria, 210, 274n28 Kopciński, Jacek, 145, 197, 199 Kostrzębska, Agnieszka, 133–134 Kraków Avant-­Garde, 220–224, 246 Kraków Rhapsodic Theater, 219 Kraków Writers’ House, 124, 128, 154, 159, 210 Król, Zofia, 263 Krynicka, Krystyna, 126 Krynicki, Ryszard, 126, 158 Krzywicka, Irena, 311n13 Kulawik, Adam, 227 Kultura (Culture) (journal), 114 Kurek, Jalu, 50, 246, 346n101 kymographs, 244 lamentation, reading styles resembling, 20, 42, 190–191, 196–197 Landau, Sonia. See Żywulska, Krystyna Łapicki, Andrzej, 335n99 Lebenstein, Jan, 179–180 Leśmian, Bolesław, 264 Letter of 34 (List 34), 316n77, 347n109 Letter of 59 (List 59), 155, 316n77 Letter of 101 (Memoriał 101), 316n77 Levine, Madeline, 221, 254 LGBTQ, 132, 133, 141–142, 170 linguistic poetry (poezja lingwistyczna), 23, 222, 223, 265, 306n154 Lipska, Ewa, 29, 160, 308n180, 309n3 Lipski, Jan Józef, 138–140 litany, 130, 193, 331n56 Literary Institute (Instytut Literacki), 75–76 literary salons, 21–22, 25–26, 285n40; Białoszewski’s early postwar gatherings, 130–131; Białoszewski’s Separate Theater, 131–134, 146–147; Białoszewski’s Tuesday gatherings, 134–142; characteristics of, 126–128, 310n11, 350n145; decline of, 49; home seminars, 63, 310n9; importance of, 125–126; Krynicki’s home gallery, 126; nineteenth-­century salons, 9–10, 21, 49; origins of, 124–126; postwar under­g round salons, 63, 138; Śpiewak’s and Kamieńska’s home meetings, 125–126, 209; Szymborska’s dinners, 156–160; war­t ime under­ ground salons, 44, 127, 129–130. See also Białoszewski, Miron; poetic culture; Szymborska, Wisława, under­ground classes

Lithuania, 8, 85, 108–109; Miłosz’s origins in, 85–86, 96, 108–110. See also Polish-­ Lithuanian Commonwealth liturgy, reading styles resembling, 20, 129, 196, 242 liveness, 32, 174 lotteries, 127, 159, 169 Lourie, Richard, 87, 92, 103 Łuszczewska, Jadwiga, 161, 274n28 MacArthur, Marit, 15, 212 machine-­a ided close listening, 27 Magritte, René, 158 mail art, 21 March 1968, in Poland: anti-­Semitic campaign, 59, 79, 86, 141, 245; student protests, 64, 107, 119 Markowski, Michał Paweł, 278n58 martial law, in Poland, 5, 12, 18, 53, 61–66, 138, 198, 208, 249 Marxism, 154, 208, 210, 223, 244, 277n50 materiality of text, 35–38 Matywiecki, Piotr, 280n2 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 224 Mayenowa, Maria Renata, 243–247, 310n9 McGann, Jerome, 33, 35 Meeting of the Poets of the East and the West (Spotkanie Poetów Wschodu i Zachodu), 123, 308n180 memorization: decline of, 13–14, 275n35, 276n42, 287n54; of Tuwim’s “The Prayer,” 44–48 metrical verse, decline of, 13–14, 275n35, 275n39 Mickiewicz, Adam: Białoszewski and, 129, 137, 143–144, 148; circulation of poetry of, 47; Forefathers’ Eve, 7, 11, 64, 107, 109–110, 143–144, 249; Konrad Wallenrod, 8, 10, 47; Miłosz and, 107–116; Pan Tadeusz, 108–109; poetic improvisation by, 9–10, 18, 21, 49; as poet-­prophet figure, 7–12; as progressive revolutionary, 53. See also Forefathers’ Eve Middleton, Peter, 3, 275n38 Międzyrzecki, Artur, 1, 119–121, 125 Miesięcznik Literacki (Literary Monthly) (journal), 176 Mikołajska, Halina, 18, 61, 63–64, 69 Miłobędzka, Krystyna, 27, 30, 263–268 Miłosz, Anthony, 89, 303n114

360inde x

Miłosz, Czesław: actor recitations criticized by, 107, 110–111, 219; American poetry readings of, 80–88; Barańczak and, 116, 306n154; circulation of poetry of, 63–65, 75–77; on experimental poetry, 116, 223, 306n154; Hartwig and, 120, 123; Herbert and, 80, 81–82, 112, 204; Hertz and, 75–76; on Kamieńska, 209; lack of memorization by, 14, 275n37; Lithuanian identity of, 85–86, 108–109; lost recordings of, 28, 76–77; memorial reading for, 172, 174; Mickiewicz and, 107–113; Nobel Prize awarded to, 64; as poet-­prophet figure, 19, 65, 170–171; poetry and prose of (see Miłosz, Czesław, works of); preference for own per­for­mances, 1, 19; Radio ­Free Eu­rope criticized by, 181; reading style and intonation patterns of, 19, 25, 27, 37–38, 89–107, 113–114; recordings of, 22–25, 29, 65, 67, 75–78, 109–110, 117; return from exile, 1, 19, 117, 123, 170; Różewicz and, 112, 231, 260–261; secondary originals of, 24–25, 88–107; Solidarity and, 63–65; stabilized tone studied by, 114–116, 306n144, 306n154; Świrszczyńska and, 209–210, 337n111; Szymborska and, 156, 170–171; translation strategy of, 24–25, 77–81, 102–107, 303n114; versification and syntax of, 89, 94–117; Wat and, 176–177, 185 Miłosz, Czesław, works of: “Ars Poetica?,” 88; “Bobo’s Metamorphosis,” 83, 91–94, 102–104, 117; “Bypassing Rue Descartes,” 84–85, 94, 117; “Cabeza,” 82, 86; “Campo dei Fiori,” 83–84; The Captive Mind, 53, 77, 125; Collected Poems, 80, 104; Daylight, 75–76; “Dedication,” 83; “Esse,” 83, 117; “Hope,” 64–65; “In a Jar,” 83–84; “Incantation,” 115; “I Sleep a Lot,” 86; “Język, narody” (Language, Nations), 114; King Popiel, 76; “Magpiety,” 87, 117; “Mickiewicz,” 111, 114; “Mittelbergheim,” 95–102, 117; Native Realm, 85–86; “Notes on Exile,” 79; “On Angels,” 83–84; “Outskirts,” 83; Pieśń niepodległa (The Invincible Song), 44, 46; “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” 83; Postwar Polish Poetry, 80, 209; Rescue, 76; Separate Notebooks, 104; “A Song on the End of the World,” 87–91, 117, 303n114; “The Thistle, the Nettle,” 87; “Throughout Our Lands,” 82–84, 87, 117;

“To Raja Rao,” 87; The Witness of Poetry, 223, 260; “The World,” 81, 104–106; Unattainable Earth, 116; “You Who Wronged,” 64–65 Mitzner, Piotr, 240 modernization. See poetic culture Morska, Maria, 51, 69 Mrozowska, Zofia, 61 Muldoon, Paul, 108 Murawska, Ludmiła, 131, 146–147 Museum of Lit­er­a­ture. See Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Lit­er­a­ture NaGłos (OutLoud) (journal), 155 National Digital Archives (Narodowe Archi­ ­w um Cyfrowe), 76, 89, 243 National Library (Biblioteka Narodowa), 185 neo-­avant-­garde, 21, 136, 222–223, 250–251, 254–255, 258–259, 264–265, 340n30, 350n145 Neustadt Prize, 81 Niżyńska, Joanna, The Kingdom of Insignifi­ cance, 133, 142 Nobel Prize, 81, 154, 156, 164, 167, 170, 203 non-­declamatory style, 29, 112, 242, 350n156 non-­declamatory tendency (Bernshtein), 112–113, 242, 245 Norwid, Cyprian Kamil, 36, 201 Nowak-­Jeziorański, Jan, 182 Nowosielski, Jerzy, 229 Odrodzenie (Rebirth) (journal), 220 Ohmann, Richard, 284n35 Okopień-­Sławińska, Aleksandra, 135, 226 Okudzhava, Bulat, 8 Ordonówna, Hanka, 51, 69 Osiecka, Agnieszka, 155 Ostashevsky, Eugene, 13–14 PEN Club: Hartwig’s readings in, 121; Miłosz’s readings in, 1, 117 per­for­mance poetry, 3, 9, 23, 28, 31, 276n47 performative speech act, 21, 26, 33, 42, 46, 60, 212, 251, 284n35 Perloff, Marjorie, The Sound of Poetry, 27 Pettman, Dominic, 69 Picador (Pod Picadorem), open readings at, 49–51, 285n40 Pilch, Jerzy, 159 Pinsky, Robert, 81, 87, 105 pitch. See intonation and pitch contours

361

inde x

PIW (Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy), 134, 315n72 Podgórnik, Marta, 308n180 “poetess,” public image of, 160–162, 168–169 poetic audio testaments, 26, 172–175; by Herbert, 197–206; by Kamieńska, 206–209, 214–216; by Świrszczyńska, 209–216; tension between presence and absence in, 173–175; by Wat, 37, 181–197 poetic culture: memorization and, 13–14, 275n35, 276n42, 287n54; modernization of, 5–6, 278n58; a­ fter 1989, 66–68; during Solidarity movement and martial law, 61–66; ­u nder Stalinism, 53–56; during the Thaw, 56–61; traditional, 5–6; Tuwim as liminal figure in, 48–53; during war­t ime occupation, 39–48; ­women’s voices in, 68–74, 293n117 poetic sound correspondence, 21–22, 24–25. See also audio postcards poet-­prophet. See bard, poet as poetry per­for­mance: approach to analyzing, 19–30, 30–38; definition of, 30–34; live and mediatized aspects of, 32; Poland as laboratory for, 12–19; Polish versus Anglo-­ American scholarly approach to, 1–6; in Romanticism, 6–12; written per­for­mance, 32–33 poetry readings (public events): by Barańczak, 16; by Białoszewski, 137; blurred bound­a ries of, 23; by Hartwig, 121–123; by Herbert, 65, 180, 197, 206; by Miłobędzka, 264–267; by Miłosz, 1, 65, 80–88, 117; postwar, 53–56, 61, 66; prewar, 3, 49; by Przyboś, 224; by Ró­że­ wicz, 217–219, 258, 260; by Szymborska, 163–164, 167 Poezja (Poetry) (journal), 315n72 Polish-­Lithuanian Commonwealth: creation of, 85; G ­ rand Duchy of Lithuania, 85, 108; partitioning of, 6–7 Polish Radio: authorial readings featured by, 3, 50, 67; Białoszewski recorded by, 145; Experimental Studio, 246; Herbert recorded by, 60, 197–198; Miłosz recorded by, 109; Polish Radio Theater, 197; postwar broadcasting of, 54; Przyboś recorded by, 224–225; Różewicz recorded by, 218; Tuwim’s job with, 40; during the war, 43, 282n19 Polish Romanticism. See Romanticism

po­liti­cal transition of 1989, 1, 4, 66, 128, 202, 259, 262 Polony, Anna, 60 Polskie Nagrania, 243, 344n84 Poniatowski, Stanisław August, 126 Porębski, Mieczysław, 229 Poświatowska, Halina, 70–74, 278n63, 309n3; Hymn bałwochwalczy (Idol Worship), 71; reading style and intonation patterns of, 73; recordings of, 24, 28, 70–72; textual variants of, 72, 294n125 Potkański, Jan, 226 Praat, 27, 92, 278n62, 300n84 Prague Linguistic Circle, 244 Prudil, Irena, 129 Przyboś, Julian, 26; avant-­garde poetics and, 220–224; “Departure,” 221–222; “Noc majowa” (May Night), 225–226; reading style and intonation patterns of, 224–227; Różewicz and, 219, 220–221, 229–230, 342n50 Pszczołowska, Lucylla, 111, 231, 238, 243 queerness. See LGBTQ Qui Pro Quo, 51 Radio F ­ ree Eu­rope, 77, 181–186, 288n63 Radio Kraków, 67, 166, 218, 286n46 Ramazani, Jahan, 284n35 Rayzacher, Maciej, 63 Reduta Institute, 51 Repucha, Adam, 143 rhyme, 27, 41, 46, 58, 81, 87–89, 114, 116, 117, 156, 159, 276n39; decline of, 13–14, 275n35 Romanticism: audience expectations s­ haped by, 12–19; Demarczyk and, 59; improvisation in, 9–11, 18, 21, 274n28; male and female poet-­performer models in, 160–171; poetry during the war and, 47–48; poetry per­for­mance in, 6–12; po­liti­cal sacrifice and loss in, 200; during Solidarity movement and martial law, 61–66; Stalinism and, 53–56. See also bard, poet as; Mickiewicz, Adam Różewicz, Tadeusz, 26–27, 309n3; actor recitations criticized by, 219; approach to poetry readings, 217–220, 257–260; Białoszewski compared to, 219, 229, 250–255; cultural environment of, 247–255, 261–262, 347n105, 347n109,

362inde x

Różewicz, Tadeusz (continued) 348n118; lack of memorization by, 14, 275n37; Miłosz and, 112, 231, 260–261; neo-­avant-­garde and, 222–223, 251–255, 258–260; poetry and prose of (see Różewicz, Tadeusz, works of); postmodernism and, 258; Przyboś and, 219, 220–221, 228–230, 342n50; reading style and intonation patterns of, 36–38, 231–243, 257–258; recordings of, 217–219, 243–247, 257–258; Staff and, 343n64; versification system of, 227–231, 349n139 Różewicz, Tadeusz, works of: Anxiety, 220–221, 228; Birth Rate, 259–260; The Card Index, 259; “Chestnut,” 238; Kartoteka rozrzucona (Card Index Scattered), 259; “Letter to the Cannibals,” 234–238, 253; “Notes t­ oward a Con­temporary Love Poem,” 229; Odejście Głodomora (Starveling’s Departure), 232; “Preparation for a Poetry Reading,” 217, 260, 266, 338n2, 349n139; “Proposition the Second,” 255–257; “Survivor,” 227–228; Teatr niekonsekwencji (The Theater of Inconsistency), 241; “They Came to See a Poet,” 250, 251; “White Spots,” 238–241, 243, 257; The Witnesses, 250 Różycki, Tomasz, 275n39 Rudnik, Eugeniusz, 246 Rusinek, Michał, 170 Rus­sia: declamatory and non-­declamatory poets in, 112–113, 242; declamatory and theatrical readings in, 276n41; futurism in, 224; Mayenowa and, 245; memorization and declamation of poetry in, 13–14, 276n42; Mickiewicz’s exile in, 7, 9; Miłosz and, 85; Poland partitioned by, 7. See also Soviet Union Sadowski, Witold, 191, 227, 344n82 salons. See literary salons Sandauer, Artur, 132 scores: Białoszewski’s poetry as, 145–146, 149, 150; Miłosz’s translations as, 106 Scott, Peter Dale, 80, 87 secondary originals, of Miłosz, 25, 88–107 Sedakova, Olga, 276n42 Separate Theater (Teatr Osobny), 131–134, 143–144, 146–147 Shallcross, Bożena, 48 Siedlecki, Franciszek, 244

Siemion, Wojciech, 315n72 Sievers, Eduard, 244 Siwczyk, Krzysztof, 351n156 Skrendo, Andrzej, 350n145 Skrzynecki, Piotr, 57 Skwarczyńska, Stefania, 11 slam, 9, 31, 276n47 Sławiński, Janusz, 135, 226 Słonimski, Antoni, 275n35, 282n19, 287n54 Słowacki, Juliusz, 129, 141, 201, 204–206; “My Testament,” 204–205 Smith College, 71 Sobolewska, Anna, 134, 135, 140–141 Sobolewski, Tadeusz, 133–134, 140–141, 316n87 socialist realism, 22, 53, 61, 175, 222 Society for Academic Courses (Flying University, Towarzystwo Kursów Naukowych), 63, 139, 155 Sokoloski, Richard, 230, 238 Solidarity, 16, 18, 61–66, 138, 140, 198, 248 Soliński, Leszek, 132, 135, 141, 143 Sosnowski, Andrzej, 66–68, 268 sound, definition of, 27–28 sound poetry, 22, 23, 36, 246 sound postcards. See audio postcards Soviet Union, 85; audio postcards in, 289n76; occupation by, 43, 176, 199; Polish government sponsored by, 220, 248; Polish modernization backed by, 54–56, 68; prisons in, 176, 185; repressions in, 13; Six-­Day War and, 183; surviving the Holocaust in, 207. See also Rus­sia Śpiewak, Jan, 125, 207 Śpiewak, Paweł, 310n9 Stachura, Edward, 125 Staff, Leopold, 343n64 Stalinism: Białoszewski’s life ­u nder, 131; Herbert’s life u ­ nder, 200; Kamieńska’s life ­u nder, 208; lit­er­a­ture and visual arts ­u nder, 53–56; Przyboś’s life u ­ nder, 222; Różewicz’s life u ­ nder, 248; socialist realism during, 22, 53, 61, 175, 222; Świrszczyńska’s life ­u nder, 210; Szymborska’s life ­u nder, 154; Wat’s life ­u nder, 175–176 Stańczakowa, Jadwiga, 134, 136, 137, 141, 144, 179, 279n68 Stańko, Tomasz, 163–164 Stanyek, Jason, 174 State University of New York at Stony Brook, 80, 81, 119

inde x

Stawiński, Julian, 39 Stefan Batory University, 245 Stefanowska, Zofia, 11 Stefański, Lech Emfazy, 131 Stepanova, Maria, 276n42 Stern, Anatol, 246, 347n103 Sterne, Jonathan, 172 Stewart, Susan, 117 stress, 113–114, 305n140 sung poetry, 57–59. See also bards of guitar poetry Święcicki, Mieczysław, 288n70 Świetlicki, Marcin, 66–67 Swinarski, Konrad, 107, 110–111, 304n127 Swir, Anna. See Świrszczyńska, Anna Świrszczyńska, Anna, 26, 209–216, 309n3; Happy as a Dog Tail, 211; “I Knocked My Head against the Wall,” 212–214; Jestem baba (I Am a ­Woman), 210; Miłosz and, 209–210, 337n111; poetic audio testament of, 211–216; reading style and intonation patterns of, 211–216; recordings of, 26, 28 syllabic verse, 80, 94, 97, 102, 104, 113–114, 221; decline of, 13–14 Szczęsna, Joanna, 157 Szlengel, Władysław, 43; “Counterattack,” 45 Szpotański, Janusz, Cisi i gęgacze, 288n67 Szymborska, Wisława, 25–26, 123; actor recitations of, 60, 61, 164; ambivalent attitude to voice, 29, 157, 159–160, 167; background of, 153–155; Białoszewski compared to, 127–128, 167–171; dinners and at-­home literary events, 127, 154–160; Filipowicz and, 155, 157; gendered versus universalist identity of, 160–162, 168–170; Miłosz and, 170–171; Nobel Prize awarded to, 154, 156, 164, 167, 170–171, 203–204; poetry and prose of (see Szymborska, Wisława, works of); reading style and intonation patterns of, 69, 163–167, 216; Stańko and, 163–164 Szymborska, Wisława, works of: Calling Out to Yeti, 155; “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” 157–158; “The Courtesy of the Blind,” 168; “Dinosaur Skeleton,” 165–166; ­Here, 163; “An Opinion on the Question of Pornography,” 155, 158; “Poetry Reading,” 168; “The Poet’s Nightmare,” 168; “Soliloquy for Cassandra,” 162; “Some P ­ eople Like Poetry,” 162–163; “Stage Fright,” 161

363

tape-­recording technology, 22–23; availability of, 2, 28, 60, 70–71; Białoszewski’s use of, 142–146; cassettes, 20, 63–65, 89, 144, 198; death and, 172–173; Herbert’s use of, 180; Miłosz’s use of, 75–77; Wat’s use of, 177–183 textual condition, 33–35 Thaw, lit­er­a­ture and visual arts ­u nder, 56–61 theatrical style, 14, 276n41 Thigpen, Carol, 170 Thomas, Dylan, 3 Tkaczyszyn-­D ycki, Eugeniusz, 66–67, 268 translation: examples of Miłosz’s, 88–106; Miłosz’s strategy for, 25, 79–81, 102–107, 118–119, 303n114; prob­lems of, 78, 80, 87 Tsur, Reuven, 300n84 Tuwim, Irena, 39, 280n1 Tuwim, Julian: anti-­Semitic attacks against, 39–40, 55; death of ­mother, 39, 56; “Grande Valse Brillante,” 39–43, 49–51, 57–60, 281n10; guilt and agoraphobia experienced by, 39–40, 44, 55, 280n2; Kwiaty polskie (Polish Flowers), 43, 49, 54; as liminal figure, 48; open readings by, 49–50; popularity of, 67–68; “The Prayer,” 44–48, 55, 61–62, 284n33; recordings of, 24, 40, 50, 55; return to Poland, 54–55; secular upbringing of, 40, 281n6; Stalinism and, 53–56 Tuwim, Stefania, 39–40 Tygodnik Powszechny (Universal Weekly) (journal), 76 under­g round classes, 44, 63, 76, 129, 139, 154, 155. See also Society for Academic Courses under­ground publishing, 16, 20, 43, 44, 46, 47, 63, 65, 144, 208, 253, 277n55 Union of the Blind, 145, 150 University of California, Berkeley, 22, 75, 77, 109, 176, 179, 181 University of Illinois, Chicago, 78 University of Iowa, 119, 121 University of Warsaw, 129, 133, 140, 245 Valentine, Jean, 88 Vendler, Helen: Invisible Listeners, 173; Last Looks, Last Books, 173 Vincenz, Andrzej, 115, 306n154 Vincenz, Stanisław, 306n154 Vogler, Henryk, 254, 349n130 voice, definition of, 27–28 Voice-­O-­Graph, 40, 281n7

364inde x

Wachtel, Andrew, 7 Wagner, Agnieszka, 300n84, 319n118, 320n122, 331n50 Wajda, Andrzej, Man of Iron, 64 Walas, Teresa, 170–171 Wałęsa, Lech, 202 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943), 45 Warsaw Uprising (1944), 43, 65, 130, 133, 201, 210, 287n59 Wat, Aleksander: Białoszewski compared to, 179; death of, 183–184; exile of, 175–176; generational span of, 30, 268; health of, 175–176, 183; Herbert and, 180–181; Miło­ będzka compared to, 267; Miłosz and, 176–177, 185; poetic audio testament of, 26, 37, 173–174, 182–197; poetry and prose of (see Wat, Aleksander, works of); reading style and intonation patterns of, 27, 186–197, 331n49; recordings of, 22–23, 29, 34, 175–186, 329n37; religious views of, 185, 193–197; textual variants of, 34, 186 Wat, Aleksander, works of: Ciemne świecidło (Dark Light), 184–186; “Ewokacja” (Evocation), 184, 195, 196–197; “Inwokacja” (Invocation), 186, 193; “The Last Poem,” 183–184; My ­C entury, 177, 182–183; “Ode III,” 186–197; “Skin and Death,” 186; “Somatic Poems,” 185; “Trzy sonety” (Three Sonnets), 194; “Whispers to a Tape Recorder,” 177–178; Wiersze (Poems), 176 Wat, Andrzej, 183 Wat, Ola. See Watowa, Ola Watowa, Ola, 34, 183, 185, 331n49

Weintraub, Wiktor, 9 Wiadomości (News) (journal), 183, 186 Wierzyński, Kazimierz, 287n54, 288n63 “wieszcz.” See bard, poet as Williams, William Carlos, 112 Wirpsza, Witold, 223 Wiśniewska, Zofia. See Żywulska, Krystyna Włodek, Adam, 154, 160 Wolny-­Hamkało, Agnieszka, 268 Wołyńska, Małgorzata, 137 Wołyński, Olgierd, 137 ­women poets: feminine ste­reo­type of, 69–70, 120, 160–162, 168–170, 210–211, 267–268, 293n117; marginalization of, 29–30; recordings of, 29–31, 38, 68–74. See also individual authors Writers’ Union, 63, 124, 154–155, 175, 220, 248 Współczesna poezja polska: Wiersze wybrane czytają autorzy (vinyl rec­ords), 3, 60, 69, 207, 217–218, 231–232, 238, 243, 347n103 Wyka, Marta, 160 Wyszyński, Stefan, 76 Zagajewski, Adam, 56, 124, 159, 276n47, 304n135 Zaleski, Marek, 91 Zapasiewicz, Zbigniew, 61–62, 65 Zarzycka, Anna, 154 Zawadzki-­Ż enczykowski, Tadeusz, 182 Zieliński, Jan, 329n37 Żmigrodzka, Maria, 135 Żurowska, Anna, 134 Żywulska, Krystyna, 44–47, 283n26, 284n33