Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland – Mark Tardi (ed.)

[Litmus Press; 2024]

Tr. from the Polish by Mark Tardi, Lynn Suh, Małgorzata Myk, and Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi

Written poetry is probably the most daunting of artistic genres. I cannot name an art form that demands a higher buy-in from its audience. Unlike audio or visual media, books of verse cannot be glanced at or overheard. Poetry, it is said, requires undivided attention. And, in contrast to a novel or a bracing work of nonfiction, poetry can do without plot or an overarching message, the two things the reader needs to fully immerse themselves in a prose work and skip the boring bits. In a poem, every word counts, every punctuation mark, every inch of blank space on the page. 

After studying literature in college, I learned that poetry is meant to be read alone and in silence, then out loud (if the reader can get the rhythm right), and always by people with the aptitude and sensibility to appreciate the poet’s mystic work. It was around the same time that written poetry began to feel a bit inaccessible, a bit too elevated for my tastes. Once I understood how to read poetry correctly, I became afraid of doing it wrong, or worse, doing it right for the wrong poem. The poems I liked were almost always the ones skipped over in class: song lyrics, bawdy rhymes, microfiction. You’re a poetry person, or you’re not, a professor of mine said. I guess I’m not, I thought, and discarded that self-exegesis in the dustbin, like a piece of lint plucked from an old scarf. Only two people in a thousand like poetry, anyway, at least according to Wisława Szymborska’s poem, “Niektórzy lubią poezję” (“Some People Like Poetry”). 

Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland gives everyone the chance to be a poetry person, if only for a page. The bilingual anthology samples eight living female poets who write in Polish: Anna Adamowicz, Maria Cyranowicz, Hanna Janczak, Natalia Malek, Joanna Oparek, Zofia Skrzypulec, Katarzyna Szaulińska, and Ilona Witkowska. The project is guided by a few, broad organizational principles and the tastes of four translators: Małgorzata Myk, Lynn Suh, Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi, and Mark Tardi, who also served as editor. As Tardi writes in the introduction, his selection aims to “present[] differing doorways for possible futures of Polish writing.” Whether the reader encounters the poems as they are arranged (in alphabetical order by author) or at random (the preferred method), they will probably discover something that will make them want to see how that future plays out, regardless of their thoughts on poetry or contemporary Polish literature. 

Tardi’s introduction likewise implies a close personal collaboration between the translators. Three of the four live in Łódź, a mid-sized city with a tragic past and an outsized presence in the arts, especially film; the Łódź Film School has produced a handful of superb directors and a disproportionate number of high-profile cinematographers. Auteur cinema and poetry employ parallel visual and visceral vocabularies, so it makes sense that poets and filmmakers would inhabit the same postindustrial, even ghostly spaces of Łódź.

All four translators display a genuine commitment to Anglophone and Polish literary communities. Tardi won a PEN/Heim grant in 2023 for his translation of Dogs of Smaller Breeds by Olga Hund. Like Tardi, Lynn Suh is an American with longstanding experience on the Polish-to-English literary translation scene. While living in Krakow for nearly a decade, he co-founded and edited WIDMA: A Journal of American and Polish Verse, a cool, bilingual journal without a paywall. Myk and Szuster-Tardi are Polish scholars of American literature, as well as translators. The reader can rest assured that they are in good hands, and that their foray into Polish poetry is being guided by four people with a high level of expertise in both English and Polish literature. Knowledge and fluency may seem like obvious prerequisites to publish a volume of poetry in translation, but in the age of online translation tools, it is not. 

The stylistic range on offer in Viscera is expansive. Adamowicz’s “the last song of the Kaua’i ‘ō’ō” takes the conceit of an extinct bird to form a four stanza poem on unsettling sounds and the feel of smooth glass. “Laws’ laws roundabout” by Cyranowicz verbalizes feelings of outrage at a protest. Invoking the 2020-1 protest against Poland’s abortion laws, the lyrical voice remarks on physicality of protesting, from the process of walking (“across the streets barging with hips knees feet shod in the walking march // with an aftermotion of arms hands spreading out transparency of events”), to the weather ( “down the black umbrellas/ / in streams went // the rain // of laughter and song”). In Janczak’s poems, misspelled words form a Lynchian journey, forcing a collection of tawdry, horrific, and at times comfortingly familiar images on the reader. And, like the works of the late director, her poems show glimmers of humor without much expecting you to laugh. Take, for instance, “Wroclaw? Berlin 1:10 pm,” which seemed to me like a rapid-fire sequence of uncanny jokes: 

we’re still seen by

the lizards for whom we

obscure the sun.  

a baby’s cry like the scream of a bird outside the

windowpane. equal for a moment before they exceed each

other in shades of blue.  

the baby needs to be distracted. it’s

best to poke the screaming bird in its

eye.  

then they bring out the drinks and

everyone starts to feel light.  

Malek’s work amply inhabits the page. She uses space to furnish her words with multiple readings: 

She was fleeing from Jarosław the cyclone. Visited her grandparents. Felt the

rush  

of ideas, then – of layers.  

“Jarosław the cyclone” may be none other than Jarosław Kaczyński, a far-right politician who got his start as a child actor in The Two Who Stole the Moon (1962), alongside his identical twin, the late president Lech Kaczyński. 

Oparek’s only piece in the collection is taken from her Berlin Porn book. Laced together by leather threads of various mirror-image themes (Berlin, Vienna, serial killers, prostitutes, sirens, fish), it bursts forth, fleshy with cultural references, such a sly wink at Liliana Cavani’s sadomasochistic Holocaust film, The Night Porter (1974). Skrzypulec proves an unconventional user of capitalization and punctuation, although her deployment of a smiley face emoji in “Garden roller” stunned me with its sweetness. I also appreciated the phrase “wide, crowded street laid with pavers (post-German, elegant, indestructible),” repeated five times in her poem “idyll order.” As she proved in her 2022 short story collection, Czarna ręka, zsiadłe mleko (Black Hand, Soured Milk, an excerpt of which appears in Guernica in Tardi’s translation), Szaulińska is a master of understated body horror. The lines, “& maybe i’ll leave more than just dirt behind // a kind of egg carton emptied of my body” displays an inventive deployment of old groceries. Finally, “those whom we” by Witkowska includes the imagery of a long dead butterfly on the staircase of an apartment building, as well as non-prescriptive wisdom: “one moment it’s over, then again it’s not, //these are the two greatest insights […].” Witkowska’s quiet philosophy of the everyday may well remind you of Szymborska’s poem-cum-hit song, ,,Nic dwa razy” (“Nothing Twice”). 

By including the original Polish-language poems at the back of the volume—arranged in the same octet of authors, but in reverse—the book invites the bilingual reader to compare the parallel texts as they wish. The anthology is clearly a labor of love, as selecting these poems under such open-ended conditions and reproducing them in rhyme-poor, caseless, castrated English (Polish nouns are classified as virile and non-virile, after all) must have been a Herculean task. That being said, I found that the erotic charge of “[ ] a motto from Jean Cocteau” by Anna Adamowicz was diminished by the choice to downplay the protagonists’ gender. In the original Polish, the first line introduces a female director (“reżyserka”) and an actress (“aktorka”), just as the fourth line reveals that the lyrical subject is also a woman. Remembering “an erudite book” she once read on filmmaking, the lyrical subject recalls that a vat of mercury can be used to create the illusion of a hand reaching through a mirror. Fed up with reading and overcome by erotic desire, she tells her addressee that she longs to plunge her hands “in your body, enter you” like “the [female] director enters the actress in a cheap film.” Although female pronouns are used in Suh’s translation, the selection of the ambiguous “director” and “actor” made the brazenly queer eroticism of the poem much less explicit and visceral. Similarly, the ecstatically embodied climax of the original is altered by the insertion of the mundane euphemism, “making her move.” It reads, “plunge my hands into your body like a mirror, enter // you like a director making her move on the actor in a cheap movie.” To me, this phrasing brings to mind awkward or predatory behavior, rather than the purely sexual image conjured by the lyrical voice in the original. 

Since poetry can be so fraught with judgement and peculiar to the individual reader, I will not go further in identifying which poems I enjoyed and which ones I passed by, unimpressed. The beauty of the anthology—and the extratextual plot of its construction by the translators—is how the reader decides to approach the texts, which door to open and which to leave shut. To this end, the translators refrain from explaining why exactly these poets belong in the same collection. Beyond their gender and status as “emerging or under-translated,” the assembled poets have very little in common. All have been published by major Polish journals, some of them have won major literary awards, and none of them have been printed together as a book-length collection, in Polish or English. Their ages range widely (Zofia Skrzypulec was born four decades after Joanna Oparek), just as their hometowns and current residences are dotted all over Poland, from Warsaw and Krakow, to Lublin and Sokołowsko. The poets’ biographies occasionally mention disparate day jobs and assorted family members and read like microfiction. Because of this biographical and textual heterogeneity, the poets cannot be grouped into a literary school or boxed into the frequent ideological markers of “poet-dissident,” or “bard.” 

Such freedom is rarely afforded to Polish poets in English translation. Ever since the Partitions of Poland at the start of the nineteenth century, Polish poets have taken the liberty of speaking for their sad nation and her people to global audiences. Adam Mickiewicz embodied this role in Parisian exile, improvising lectures on his lost Arcadian homeland for students at the Collège de France. For his part, Joseph Conrad (born Józef Korzeniowski) was criticized by Polish and English critics alike for his choice not to let the question of Polish sovereignty hijack his novels.  

The Polish messianic poet entered the American cultural consciousness in the mid-twentieth century, when the political exile, scholar, and poet Czesław Miłosz published his nonfiction Zniewolony umysł (The Captive Mind, 1953) before taking a job in the Slavic Department at Berkeley. By the 1980s, the bard-activist loomed even larger over the Anglophone poetry scene, as poets associated with the anti-Communist opposition such as Zbigniew Herbert, Stanisław Barańczak, Ryszard Krynicki, and Adam Zagajewski were published in self-translations and by translators including Clare Cavanagh, Bogdana and John Carpenter, and Alissa Valles. 

While important political events helped some artists to achieve success abroad, the role of the dissident poet proved quite restrictive. In his 1986 poem “Garden Party,” Barańczak satirizes this phenomenon, taking the reader along to a gathering of American elites and forcing them to listen to a litany of inane questions about Lech Wałęsa (referred to as “moustache guy”) and the Pope. None of the partygoers seem the least bit interested in Barańczak’s poems, or even his responses to their questions and statements about Poland. And, as you might guess, the poet-as-savior model centers on male lyric voices, at the expense of everyone else and subject matters bereft of national symbolism. Perhaps this is why Polish women are largely underrepresented in poetry collections, a decisive factor in the anthology’s creation. 

Viscera exists in opposition to a politicizing tendency in the reception of Polish poetry in translation. It builds on the success of non-national or post-national poets that have appeared in English translation in the past thirty years, from the Nobel-laureate Szymborska, to the numerous translations of Tomasz Różycki by Mira Rosenthal and Bill Johnston respectively, to a recent set of Urszula Honek poems translated by Dawid Mobolaji in The Dial. 

The anthology also reflects an unusually stable moment in Polish cultural history. Although the threat of Russian invasion looms, Poland is nonetheless a thriving, increasingly prosperous democracy. National sovereignty has been restored, cyclone Jarosław seems to have passed. For the first time in a very long time, Polish artists are able to share their work widely, and on their own terms. Case in point, shortly after the release of this anthology, Poland assumed the presidency of the Council of the European Union, leading the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (named, of course, after the nineteenth-century bard) to organize an intensive, multidisciplinary roster of cultural programming taking place in over twenty European countries. The motto of the program is “culture sparks unity.” 

Without any formal link between the two, it seems clear that both the Viscera anthology and this year’s E.U. celebrations share a similar ethos and directionality. Each poem in Viscera operates in its own stylistic universe, but all of them are connected through their freedom to exist, side-by-side, without a message or plot. Their doors are open. The reader is invited into the future worlds suggested by each poem, and to enjoy them as they see fit. There’s no one way to be a Polish poet, and there’s no right way to read poetry in an anthology. 

And there might not even be such a thing as a poetry person. After remarking that not everyone likes poetry, the lyric voice of Szymborska’s “Some People Like Poetry” reminds the reader that people like a lot of things, including “chicken noodle soup” and “compliments, and the color blue.” Until we start to label ourselves as “chicken noodle soup” people, I can admit that I like poetry sometimes, especially when it is set to music. 

Jess Jensen Mitchell is a scholar and translator of Polish literature. She is finishing her dissertation on contemporary depictions of Upper Silesia, a region in Western Poland known for its mining industry, distinct language, and superb rail system. To learn more about her work, see https://jessjensenmitchell.com/.