Thoughts on Ewa Lipska

1.

Ewa Lipska is usually considered a Polish poet. She was born in Krakow in 1945. She won the Koscielski Prize (1973), the Polish PEN Club prize (1992) and the Jurzykowski Foundation Prize (1993). Currently, she lives between Krakow and Vienna.

“Much of her work emerges out of the events of World War II, and interrogates social and political issues with a skeptical surrealism. Her most recent volumes—1999, Sklepy Zoologiczne (Pet Shops), Ja (I), Gdzie Indziej(Somewhere Else), and Drzazga (Splinter, 2006)—are influenced in particular by her friendships with Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal.” [Words Without Borders]

2.

What I love about Lipska is her sensibility, the way she wants to let history make her cynical, and yet somehow the avenue of the poem, the motion itself, undercuts the cynicism. Lipska was close to Szymborska and Wiesenthal—she shares a birthplace, a certain sensibility—but sees herself as unaffiliated with any school or national boundary. Her rejection of nationalism is linked to the belief that art depends on fidelity to authentic experience rather than virtue signals.

In “Preface: The Absurdity of Beauty,” found at the beginning of A New Century (Northwestern University Press, 2009), Lipska asks if the poet who witnesses something terrible is allowed to "describe what took place so unexpectedly"--and how? Must it be a dictation of facts or a recreation of aura? Recounting an accident, the witness of it, Lipska attempts to discern the poet’s role in "the dictatorship of the moment" when "things conjoined irrevocably, a terror of fate and coincidence":

“May a poet take advantage of fate in such a situation and describe everything that took place so unexpectedly and suddenly? May he or she dictate to a typist the defenseless facts, add some details, empathize with the victim? To die on a sheet of paper playing the main part, at the same time avoiding compassion that leads to the inevitable corrosion of words? Whom to be in such a situation? An onlooker, a stray wanderer, an agitator? Can you hear the fear and uncertainty when I bend my head over a sheet of paper?”

This understanding of the poet as both riddle-maker and truth-seeker recurs in Lipska’s poetry, challenging the quality of reported truth or eyewitness accounts, revealing a less solid ontology than we might wish at a time when fake news costs so much.

3.

In “Four Notes on Ewa Lipska’s Poems,” Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska notes that Lipska “deeply mistrusts wena, a Polish term used mainly in highbrow literature” to describe moments of insight or revelation. For the poet, wena is just the vein carrying blood—it is neither god nor collective pronoun; neither kingdom nor nation. So what matters to the poet, if not the nation or the ego? Nowakowska says:

“Since artists mostly suffer from hubris and bravado, art does not matter much, unlike love, which is the most important factor conditioning human life and endowing it with meaning.”

Nowakowska also cites the recurrence of fate as a powerful mocking force in Lipska’s poetry, and I think this is true, but I also feel like Lipska’s focus on helplessness isn’t fatalism, or a worship of fatalist systems and their associated determinisms, but a general bow to uncertainty—to the reality of things happening outside our plans, systems, and social sciences.

4.

“Although Lipska is sometimes considered as part of the "New Wave" group of the 1970s, she distances herself from such associations, preferring to operate autonomously. Over the years, her mistrust of the language of her daily surroundings, for her a language of masks and lies, has grown. In response, Lipska has developed an inverted language, which is confrontational and frequently ominous. Her poems are lucid, and in few words, she puts forth her own reality with gentle irony. Fascinated by human behaviour, she strips away the false meaning of words…” [Poetry International]

According to Robin Davidson, Ewa Lipska describes her poetry as a sort of "skeptical surrealism, meaning she calls into question even the surrealists’ claim that images are purified of social or political motive, for any system of art may give rise to a fascist aesthetic.”

This irreverence for systems plays out in a sort of hermeticism, a gaze which looks forward while also looking back, a sort of historical rubber-necking gesture which loosens temporality in her poems. Her use of cliches in poetry--her rupturing of them to forge an individual voice--reclaims language from ruins somehow. 

What does Lipska do at the level of the line? What part of her work fascinates me? A few short comments, acknowledging that I do not know Polish, and so my thoughts on translation and poetics are limited by this formal constraint.

She mobilizes the energy of the short couplet and tercet with impeccable images and metaphors. This is fairly constant in her work, and I study the brisk syntax of her lines like butter on bread in a terrible forest.

She begins a poem in the key of refusenik, as in from “No One” translated by Robin Davidson & Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska:

I agree to this landscape
which does not exist.

She interiorizes images associated with revolution, and lets them be altered by the motion into the body, as in “The New Century”:

We speak to each other in fireworks.
A groggy noun in the mouth.

She embraces the faux-pas of referring back to the title and explaining it in the final breaths of a poem—which, I have been told, is an amateur move in contemporary American poetics. See, for example, from “Number One”:

And so what
when love
a twig brushed by the wind
is always Number One
and leans toward us.

She ends the poem, “A Juicer,” in a single-word stanza with a period: “Yes.”

She works diaphoric metaphors for memory so well, so carefully, resisting simple equivocations, as one sees in “A Splinter” translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska:

Problems begin
with a splinter lodged in memory.

It is hard to remove it
much harder to describe.

Wood shavings fly. The apple cores of angels.
Dust up to the heavens.

She flexes the short poem’s form in ways that both suggest cliche and undermine it. Here is the entirety of “Indiscretion” as translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska:

Had she busied herself in time
with the systematic counting
of ship screws
it would not have come to this—
indecent acts of poetry.

She reexamines the idea of inheritance in the context of a barbaric European history—by dragging images through the poem, linking them to motions, anchoring them in dust—as one sees in “Helplessness.”

She brings divinity down to the earth of concurrent disasters which most gods and monsters want to stay above, as the longer poem, “Newton’s Orange”:

Now everything has become clearer.

God has admitted
to being only human.

5.

And yet I find some translations of Lipska preferable to others—for the way in which the seam of the poem is split. For example, “The Smells of Evil” translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska, keeps this critical couplet:

The valedictorian of the unenlightened star
gazing into the sky of hypocrisy.

But other parts of this translation feel less realized, less lush in their barrenness, than the translation by Susan Bassnett and Piotr Kuhiwczak shared below.

And here’s another Lipska poem by the same translators (which I found in my typed notes and need to source properly)…..

6.

And here’s Lipska’s “Dictation” in its entirety, with my clumsy apology for not being sure which translation this might be that I scribbled into my notebook…. Although many of her poems feel ars-like, “Dictation” does so on multiple levels, including the title—and I think this makes sense to anyone from former Eastern Bloc countries.

7.

And here is me, realizing my kids haven’t had lunch, and wanting to write more but also to end, to end, to end with Lipska’s words from the preface to A New Century, because they are instructive somehow—they speak both to our hunger for belonging and all the desperate, dehumanizing ideologies humans support in order to feel themselves part of something, kindred to a larger group of meaning and existence.

"The boundaries of the soul and the boundaries of countries do not overlap."

8.

2001

translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska

2001, dear Mrs. Schubert, is not only the beginning
of the new century, but also the number of my imagination.
As you know, for some time now my fiction
has resented my flirting with reality,
consorting with useless time.
I therefore inform you that the dead season is coming,
which, as usual, I am spending
on the short-term list of missing persons.