Poland

So, first things first. I have been running around like crazy for the past few days, and we now need to pretend that, actually, it’s still Tuesday, still 11 November. Got it? Great, now that that’s covered: happy Independence Day, Poland! This is actually the day on which the formation of Poland was redeclared in 1918—you know, Armistice Day, or, as we Australians think of it, Remembrance Day.

I’ve been in love with Poland for a while—on my one trip to Europe I visited Krakow—and stayed longer than I had thought I would. I still haven’t had a chance to go back, and travel all over. But Krakow is a magical place for me. I read all the books of Ryszard Kapuściński that were then available in English in a week. I lay on the grass outside Wawel castle. I walked all over the city, and around Kazimierz. I fell seriously in love with the Polish poets—especially Zbigniew Herbert and Czesław Miłosz. I looked at art and visited the pharmacology museum and ate the most divine caramel apple. It was like a drug. I also met Ania, a beautiful Polish girl who was my age. It was one of those moments when I recognized myself, in a different context. I’m not always great at asking questions, but I asked Ania a lot. She was a child under communism, and remembered the feeling of hope associated with Solidarity more than the events. When she started high school it was the first year that students could choose to learn English instead of Russian. Everyone chose English. The way she spoke about it, it seemed like there was this real feeling of breaking out.

And people in the west think of Poland as being an Eastern European country. It’s really a Central European place. The Eastern Bloc has really changed our idea of geography. Sometimes its good to go back and stare at the map. Though, yes, it is on the Eastern edge of the European Union as it stands today.

Like other places sandwiched between Germany and Russia, Poland’s been through a lot. And, too, it was the site of the most famous Nazi death camp—Auschwitz Birkenau. It’s startling to visit the Jewish districts of towns that, before World War II, had Jewish populations in the hundreds of thousands—and now claim fewer than a thousand Jewish citizens. They are different places, and their former states are irrecoverable at the same time as they are inescapable.

For me, Poland is all bound up in Ania—she’s one of the people I am most grateful for having met. Having lived at the end of the aftermath of World War II, and the beginning of the post-Communist era, she was still so aware of everything that had changed, had taken it in from her family.

I can’t wait to go back to Poland. To sit alongside the Vistula again.

In the mean time, I continue to read the poets. Like Herbert. His Collected Poems is available now in English. Read him. Please.

Elegy of Fortinbras

for C. M.

Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenseless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippers

You will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
There will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
      drums drums I know nothing exquisite
those will be my maneuvers before I start to rule
one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bit

Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe

Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial

Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy

It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on
      archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do
      prince

—Zbigniew Herbert
from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
translated from the Polish by Czesław Miłosz