The Languages of Faith
Andrzej Sulikowski
Andrzej Sulikowski
The Languages of Faith: Religious Literature in Poland
Religious literature developed fairly intensely in Poland after 1945, despite the existence of communist censorship that limited freedom of expression in this domain.
A significant role was played initially by the Cracow circles associated with Tygodnik Powszechny, created 55 years ago by Jerzy Turowicz, and the monthly Znak, where the outstanding novelist Hanna Malewska began her career. During the Stalinist era, she published an accomplished two-volume Gothic epic, Przemija postac swiata (1954), about the destruction of the ancient world, the fall of Rome, and the birth of a new epoch. In terms of historical import, strength of artistic impression, erudition, and compositional transparency, the work still belongs amonst the finest Polish achievements in the genre, worthy of comparison with the historical novels of Teodor Parnicki. It also had an influence on the intellectual development of Karol Wojtyla and Zbigniew Herbert, a pair of extremely well-educated 'academic' poets who approached Christian thought in their own, easily recognizable idioms.
Wojtyla's idiom is the phraseology of the meditative tract, an essentially philosophical manner of explication that places high demands on the reader and encourages a meditative sort of reading. While the poet's own standpoint is sketched out discreetly, and at times almost imperceptibly, Wojtyła's poems contain a far-reaching, radiant plan of revelation in which people can find positive answers to all the fundamental questions about the sense of suffering and everyday life, and about salvation, redemption, and closeness to God. It is clear to the literary historian that Karol Wojtyla's poems and plays make up a logical, pre-pastoral link in the life's work of this outstanding priest who fell silent as a poet-in the strictest sense of the word-on October 16, 1978, when he chose the name John Paul II as pope.
Herbert draws upon Christian thought and uses Biblical imagery. Thanks to the particular ironic ambiguity of his texts, his verse most frequently describes the phenomenon of faith from the vantage point of someone wandering along the thorny path of purification, sentenced above all to negative experiences of his own weakness, internal wavering, and darkness. This is the way that the 1964 Pan Cogito collection is constructed, as well as the poems in the gripping posthumous cycle, Brewiarz. Herbert's predominantly pessimistic and agnostic tone will puzzle readers in future centuries because of its special spiritual atmosphere depicting the temptation and fall of a soul subjected to the torment of existence in a totalitarian culture. While making use of the European cultural heritage (from the Etruscans and Atlantis through the Dutch masters of the still life to the present), Herbert remains a solitary master-despite being imitated by younger authors like Stanislaw Baranczak, Ryszard Krynicki, and Jan Polkowski, whose spiritual patron he is.
Father Jan Twardowski is a poet with a distinct language of faith. Because of resistance by the communist censor, Twardowski made his literary debut several times, at intervals of over ten years. He enjoys great popularity at the moment. He uses the simplest of idioms, almost colloquial and childlike, and draws upon the achievements in versification of his younger contemporary, Tadeusz Rozewicz. Recently, Father Twardowski passed the one-and-a-half million mark in the total print run of all his works, an unprecedented achievement in the history of Polish literature. Nevertheless, Twardowski's poetry, full of paradoxes, jests, colors, and intellectual values, submits to serious interpretation only when all the accomplishments of European mysticism-Carmelite, Franciscan, and Salesian-are called upon. Biblical contexts, especially from the Gospels, are also indispensable to Twardowski. No one had previously used humor in Polish religious poetry, or written stylistically "lowbrow" texts that also appeal to the 'theology of a smiling God.' The resonance of Twardowski's poetry around the world shows that he is an unprecedented phenomenon. It also testifies about the vital need for acquaintance with religious verse.
From 1939 to 1989, Polish writers living abroad were able to take up religious themes almost without limitation. Czeslaw Milosz, whose religious verse employs various poetics, often almost contradictory, holds a special place among émigré poets. Some of his texts are written in august, hieratic language, as in the case of his superb biblical translations. Others appeal to the Polish baroque and romanticism, while others still are contemporary and almost avant-garde, with frequent bows in the direction of the miniature or even of the haiku. Milosz manages, while dealing with christological or Marian themes, to transcend the boundaries of European culture and roam freely among the Far Eastern religions.
Among contemporary biblical translators and commentators, Milosz can perhaps be compared, in terms of linguistic competence and force of poetic expression, only with Roman Brandstaetter, author of a translation of the Psalms, outstanding if rather bathetic religious verse, and the monumental novel Jezus z Nazarethu.
The poet Marek Skwarnicki has been following an inconspicuous and at times almost anonymous road of his own. At the request of the Episcopate, he translated the psalms and canticles used in daily church services, lectionaries, and breviaries into supple, contemporary Polish (1976). He followed Byzantine examples in his Akathistos polski. Hymn ku czci Bogarodzicy (1981), which has since been repeatedly reprinted and is sung in churches as a paraliturgical service. Furthermore, Skwarnicki is the author of a series of verse collections, with Intensywna terapia (1993), a profound and movingly artistic testimony about the experience of clinical death, at the top of the list. Another great accomplishment is represented by Skwarnicki's dozens of articles on John Paul II's pilgrimages.
Only the leading names have been mentioned here. Yet, in the works of almost every contemporary author-as indeed is the case in every literary generation-we find works of a religious nature. Sometimes a religious writer becomes generally known only after his death. So it was with Father Janusz Stanislaw Pasierb. Since the liquidation of censorship in 1989, we have been discovering new texts that affirm the vitality of Polish literature while drawing on the resources of Christianity, Judaism, and the Orient.
Sometimes, the language of literature 'collapses' and 'falls apart' before our very eyes, as in the case of Miron Bialoszewski. At other times, verse in the traditional sense of the word dies away, as in Tadeusz Rozewicz. Nevertheless, something of the atmosphere of the spirit remains in poetry: the glimmer of sovereign utterances about the most important things, about Real Existence.
Andrzej Sulikowski
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