| About the book
Since the envoys had brought news of the arrival of the Emperor, Bolesław’s kingdom had been overwhelmed by an all-encompassing state of commotion. Aside from the settlers living deep within the deepest forests, there was probably no one who did not, in some way or other, (...)
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| | About the book
8
The phones are always going wrong, so my parents aren’t upset when there’s no dialling tone. They’re at the fortieth birthday party of a female friend from their class at high school. They say they’re going downstairs to the phone booth for a (...)
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Maciej NiemiecParisian White
Recipient of numerous awards, and Paris resident since 1987, Maciej Niemiec is one of the most intriguing and original poets to follow the "New Wave" generation. Niemiec had already developed his individual style by the 1980s, when Polish poetry was dominated by political circumstances; but it was not until he received the prestigious Koscielski Prize in 1994 that he became known to a wider public. The reality of Niemiec's poetry, which is void of references to society, comes from the poet's individual experiences, from his life - "like an elaborate drawing." For him, writing is an unending search for truth and permanent values in a impermanent world; likewise, it is the search for a form capable of articulating the experience of transitoriness, of time's destructiveness, loneliness, and unhappy love. With an occasionally pedantic precision, the poet describes: houses, windows, a landscape of rooftops, the morning sun, rain pelting the tin on the eaves, a map of crevices and cobwebs on a wall. The topography of Paris surfaces before the reader's eyes, as does that of human interiority. Niemiec is an accomplished observer of psychic processes, which are revealed to us not through analysis, but by the recounting of things, facts, and events: "In the end, we cried, burrowed into the comfortingly numb sheets, so impenetrably had we been confronted with it, with who we had been just a moment before." He is equally sensitive in perceiving and describing both exterior and interior worlds: "Night stood on its hands like a curious child at a keyhole."
There is no certainty in life. Absolute knowledge is unattainable. What remains is memory and poetic language, which can both preserve the transitory and create - beyond the world of things and the world of our consciousness - a third, spiritual world with new, even greater value. It is this kind of beautiful, perfect world that Maciej Niemiec has created in his poems.
Parisian White.
Selected Poems
Fairy Talefor a madwoman
High over the city night
whispers: you've done enough.
In the high night, in the dark
windows like lovers look
each other in the eye.
A tremor of universes or hearts
separated - so it shall be
until dawn, and even in daytime
the windows will keep looking.
What else can they do?
You have done enough -says
the deep airshaft, mouthless, unknowing.
You will hear no more today,
silence fills the airshaft, a liquid
dissolved like acid by sounds,
floor by floor, the angular puzzle
of the landscape of roofs falls silent.
A moth beats its soft wings between
the windowpanes of the locked loft
before flying into a life of adventures
that will never be explained.
Outside, after hesitating for years,
A flake of plaster tenses
with granite determination and falls
to the eaves a half a floor down.
You have done enough. Night
looks where in the heart of even
a tiny flake of plaster there is desire
for two moments - encounter and parting.
The stairs climb towards
ever-higher floors,
closed to ordinary climbers,
where no one ever lived
except our happiness and woes,
which reside high. The stairs
will be dark when the door opens
to the soft and heavy touch of light within;
the warm mirror has captured the shallow
image acutely, consciousness: gray
wood of narrow risers, railings plunging
in a nimble spasm, a nail's reddish head,
the eye of solitude, maps of cracks
and spiderwebs on the wall.
High above the city, night
whispers something you can't hear,
or perhaps not understand. So it must be,
night whispers. You have surely done enough.
ONLY WATERLOGGED PAPER SHIPS
arrive on the shores of joy.
We won't be there.
No one will be able to say
that it was impossible.
Translated by William Brand
Maciej NIEMIEC (b. 1953) - Poet. Paris resident since 1987. He has published five books of poetry, the most recent, Street of Waters, in 1996. Recipient of the Koscielski Prize (1994) and the Karl Dedecius Award (1996).
Polish edition by Wydawnictwo a5
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