11/15/2017
Leading Polish poet Krynicki was born in a German labor camp in Austria to Polish slave laborers who remained in transit (with the father forced into the Red Army) for some time after the war. Not surprisingly, his verse is dark, with death a frequent theme; even tenderness, "harsh as parting," means faded violets and a child's ribbon from a pogrom. But somehow Krynicki is neither grim nor raging, delivering the specifics of history and politics yet transcending them in poems patient, observant, and radiant with a clear-eyed sense of life's hard contours. Near Kafka's grave, a last glowing chestnut drops from a tree, capturing those contours perfectly. VERDICT Readers of international poetry will appreciate discovering a splendidly translated new voice; others will appreciate the lucid writing.
09/18/2017
Krynicki was born in 1943 in a Nazi labor camp in Austria, where his parents were deported from Eastern Poland to work as slave laborers in a tank factory. A “posthumous child,” as the author of this marvelous book of poems calls himself, Krynicki remembers being frightened by screams while growing up and being even more afraid of laughter, and his father teaching him every kind of physical labor and telling him that only by working with his hands would he be saved when the next war came. If his hands were rough, he’d be spared; if they turned out to be delicate, he’d be sent to a camp or put up against a wall to be shot. “Can you describe this?” A woman once asked the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova as they waited outside a Leningrad prison for news of their sons arrested by Stalin’s secret police. Indeed, this has been the perennial question for poets and writers who, over the past century, have had firsthand knowledge of political oppression and war. “Yes,” Akhmatova told the woman, “I can describe it.” Krynicki is less sure; the poems about his childhood tend to be about the kind of emotions that words do not fully capture or that elude language completely. The poems in this volume can be divided into private and public. On one hand, the inner torments of a man with an extraordinary life story; on the other, poems about the age we live in. Citizens of “Planet Phantasmagoria” is what he calls us. Active in Poland’s Solidarity movement during the early 1980s, Krynicki describes fascists changing shirts in one poem and, in another, “the one-thousand-nine-hundred-seventy-three-year-old Christ” being killed and resurrected, killed and resurrected. His poems are full of memorable quips, in the manner of Greek epigrams. One such poem, “The Age,” is just three lines long: The age of progress liberated demons of which the Middle Ages never dreamed.... What unifies Krynicki’s work is his alert eye and empathy for every kind of suffering. In a poem describing a visit to a museum in Paris on a snowy afternoon, he notices a gray lump bundled on the sidewalk’s edge, some refugee, he thinks, from a country caught in civil war. In “Leaving Assisi,” that birthplace of St. Francis and so much great art, he spots the helpless gaze of a calf taken to slaughter. On another occasion, he’s given a chance to offer a helping hand to another of God’s creatures: “Secretly, discreetly/ I lift my older brother,/ the snail/ from the path,/ so that no one will step on him.” Master of luminous detail and a well-turned phrase, Krynicki’s poems, even the exceedingly short, rarely fail to move us. (Nov.)Charles Simic is a former poet laureate of the United States. His latest book, Scribbled in the Dark, is out now from Ecco.
"Clear water knapped to obsidian sharpness - this is the quality of Ryszard Krynicki's poems. Krynicki plays on his almost-impossible instrument a human music unheard elsewhere. Within its notes: personal history; politics; the earth's beings, salts, and resins; friendships and eros; ferocity and acceptance; the pages of newspapers and cities; morality's subtle explorations. This long-awaited translation brings to English-language readers a poet who retunes the ears."
"At last, a very welcome and representative selection from this major poet of the fabled, fiercely resistant, Polish 'Generation of 68,' in ever scrupulous and sensitive translations by Clare Cavanagh. We witness the work as it evolves from powerfully defamiliarizing early poems to the movingly spare and lyrical economy of the later writings. All along, however, Krynicki holds up the fun-house mirror to the citizens and rulers of planet Phantasmagoria. His hand is steady."
"These are spellbinding poems: hieroglyphs, "reports from the agents of secret reality," traces left by the poet Issa reincarnated as a snail. In Clare Cavanagh's English, Ryszard Krynicki's Polish courts silence and flickers in paradox. It's a chaste and dire art: political, private, inviolable. I'm transfixed. Here's poetry doing its true work in two languages at once."
"Part Issa haiku, part mystic speech, these delicate poems come from a time when men and women died for poetry."
"Krynicki’s work is greatly compact—it resists what Herbert called "gibberish from the tribune black newspaper froth," and aspires to a kind of sacred speech."
"Krynicki has a rare gift of naming things even in shortest poems, he goes straight to the essence. Among Polish poets and readers he has the reputation of a master, of an archer who never misses."
"Ryszard Krynicki lives with six cats, and I feel he must have captured some of the magic of those lithe creatures in his poetry. Krynicki must look into people the way that cats do. He must dream the way that cats see. Though his short poems are my favorites, his longer works are punctuated with lyrical acuity. This collected translation is a gift and I am blessed to have read it."
"A revelation. And a treasure. I thought I 'd known most of the current Polish poets - but here was a glaring omission. He writes with an undercurrent of horror, and yet affirms the sacred, making me believe in the power of poetry to redeem us. As he writes, not without some irony, 'the world still exists.' The translations are superb."
"There's nothing in English like these versions of this sharp, scary, un-ignorable Polish poet, whose decades of work speak, at the same time, to the privations and the frustrations of the unfree postwar state in which he lived and to the limits and ironies endemic to human life. If you have ever felt that 'we've outstripped everything, even the future'; if you have ever wanted to apologize to a moth, on behalf of the flame; if you find yourself having to say - or wanting your poets to say - 'I'm not extinct'; if you want to know how short a universally applicable poem can get, or how to love shadows, or how to see past endemic grief - and whether or not you already follow Cavanagh's sharp translations of Krynicki's coevals - Krynicki may be a poet you need."
