A Defense of Ardor

Writing in Polish

People sometimes ask me: "Why don't you write in English?" Or-if I'm in France-why not in French? They clearly assume that I'd benefit, that I'd do better using some universal language instead of my provincial Polish. And I agree in principle; it would certainly be easier to write in some more important language (if I could pull it off!). It reminds me of a story about George Bernard Shaw, who supposedly confessed in a letter to Henryk Sienkiewicz that he couldn't understand why the Poles didn't simply switch to Russian. The Irish had, after all, mastered English and were managing beautifully! Really.
    Writing in Polish-in the nineteenth century, after the partitions-was an act of patriotism. The Polish language was in grave danger, especially in the Russian sector. Today it's no longer a question. Even if he remembers his city's past-and such remembrance is in fashion these days-a young poet born in Gdansk won't hesitate in choosing which language to use. He only knows one, after all. Only someone like myself, who's lived abroad for years, meets up with the-naive?-question of picking his language.

Adam Zagajewski

Note: Gấu "đi" bài này, chủ yếu là để chửi lũ Mít bày đặt viết bằng tiếng mũi lõ!
Tính “đi” lâu rồi!

Người ta hỏi tôi, tại sao không viết bằng tiếng Hồng Mao? Hay là - nếu tôi ở Tẩy, tại sao không chơi 1 đường tiếng... Đầm? Hẳn là họ yên chí, sẽ có lợi cho tôi rất nhiều, nếu sử dụng 1 thứ tiếng quốc tế thay vì đặc sản Ba Lan. Về nguyên tắc, tôi OK. Viết bằng 1 thứ tiếng quan trọng thì dễ dàng hơn nhiều (thì cứ giả dụ như tôi rất rành tiếng Anh, hoặc tiếng Tẩy, mà cho dù không rành cũng không sao, mướn 1 thằng nào đó viết cho mình, dễ cái ợt, văn bằng tiến sỡi của Thầy Kuốc hẳn là ở trong trường hợp này, hà, hà!)
Nó làm tôi nhớ câu chuyện về Trạng Quỳnh. Một lần, ông viết thư cho 1 người bạn, tỏ ý thắc mắc, tại sao tụi Mít không viết, và nói bằng tiếng…  Tẫu?

Intellectual Krakow

The structure of many European (and North American) cities is governed by a mysterious law, which I have discovered and which may one day bear my name. Districts on the east side of town are generally proletariat in character, while western districts are bourgeois and comparatively intellectual. Just take a look at maps of London, Paris, Berlin, to name but a few metropolises. Aren't I right? The same pattern turns up time and again. In London we have, as everyone knows, the East and West Ends. In Paris, the wealthy sixteenth district is on the west, while the humbler twelfth and twentieth districts lie eastward. The western suburbs are likewise safer and more prosperous than their eastern counterparts. West Berlin was the wealthy part of town long before the wall went up. This law also holds for Warsaw.
    I've spoken with knowledgeable geographers and sociologists who've been unable to explain this phenomenon. Does this peculiarity of city planning perhaps reflect the medieval principle of building churches along an east-west axis?
    Krakow-a far smaller town than the behemoths I've mentioned-is subject to the same principle. The bourgeoisie and intellectuals have long since divided the territory west of the Market Square between them. Under communist rule this region grew grayer and became the kind of district that traditional guidebooks would be hard pressed to define. For Krakow's inhabitants, who don't require guidebooks, the answer was and remains simply "the intellectual district."
    West of Market Square: that is, up Szewska Street past the Planty Gardens to Karmelicka Street and then Krolewska, and then along both sides of this axis, up to Wola Justowska. The intellectuals' apartments hid, and still hide, along both sides of Karmelicka Street in the quiet buildings on the side streets. The editor Jerzy Turowicz, who ran the Catholic newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny wisely and courageously for over fifty years, lived here until his death. The novelist and essayist Hanna Malewska lived here. Andrzej Kijowski was born here. The philosopher Roman Ingarden lived a bit further down. As did the historian Henryk Wereszycki. The composer Wladyslaw Zelenski lived here before then. And there were many others. And who didn't live in the Writers' House on Krupnicza Street at one time or another? That's where the painter and writer Stanislaw Wyspianski was born as well. The splendid painters Jt zef Mehoffer and Wojciech Weiss also lived on Krupnicza. The Rostworowski family lived nearby on Salwator.
    Exceptions do occur: the president of Polish poetry, and Polish intellectuals, Czeslaw Milosz lives not far from Market Square, but on the southeast side. The poet Ryszard Krynicki and his wife, the publisher Krystyna Krynicka, live even further off, across the Vistula River in Podgorze.
    But let's get back to the western territories: all these remarkable sites were left in ruins, or at least an advanced state of neglect, following the Nazi and Stalinist years.
    This is why, seen with a cold, objective eye, these homes and streets don't seem to conceal any mystery. When my friend the American poet Edward Hirsch came to Krakow in the fall of 1996 to interview Wislawa Szymborska for The New York Times Magazine-she'd just received the Nobel Prize-he called the area she lived in then (on Chocimska Street) "proletarian and nondescript."
    Nondescript. I was outraged and objected: I tried to explain that he hadn't discerned the streets' latent nobility, the delicate gleam of certain windows, the charm of their small parks, the possibilities contained by certain courtyards.
    I realized then that someone like myself who loves Krakow and has known it for years must perfect a complex system of perceptions. In other words, I understood that I saw the possibilities, the potentialities, the unfulfilled entelechies of this district, I sensed what it might become under more favorable conditions. I knew how many truly great artists had lived here (Wislawa Szyrnborska's neighbors for many years included the writer Kornel Filipowicz and the director Tadeusz Kantor; the director Krystian Lupa apparently still lives somewhere nearby). And I had mentally mixed their talents with the houses' unprepossessing plaster. I also knew the district's past, I was familiar with its history and could imagine its bygone charms. At the same time few of its homes could match such expectations today. Even the famous "professors'" house at the corner of Slowacki Boulevard and Lobzowska Street, where university employees once lived-it was nicknamed the "coffin" due to its black ceramic facade-s-now blended into its banal surroundings.
    My American friend had seen only what really existed; a run-down district with lopsided sidewalks, streets full of pot- holes, buildings needing new plaster with drunks huddled in their doorways. Whereas I saw neighborhoods that had given birth to books, paintings, plays, and performances. I also some- times knew, or imagined with the help of books and the tales of older cousins, what these buildings and gardens had once been, and what they had held. But a new arrival from another, sober, empirical world could perceive only shabby, tired objects.
    The venerable, medieval, Renaissance, or baroque Krakow is a different matter: the massive forms of churches and palaces don't need desperate feats of imagination, they're clearly defined against the sky's backdrop both day and evening, as the sun slowly descends. But the intellectual district demands a different approach. Only visitors from other ex-communist countries can truly understand this, since they've witnessed the same process-the fading of cities. They still remember that certain cities, or perhaps just certain districts, can best be caught by way of sympathetic imagination, aided by a rudimentary knowledge of history: such spots escape the camera's objective eye.
    Later I thought that perhaps my mistake, my optimistic vision of the district and my reaction to my American friend's incomprehension, might be something more than an accidental optical or psychological phenomenon.
    Perhaps we view not only certain districts but even our country as such too leniently, expanding reality through reverie, enhancing a sometimes dreary external world by means of introspection.
    Perhaps that's why we have poetry.