Landless Boys: Poems

Jerzy Jarniewicz is a prominent Polish poet, literary critic, and translator. He has published eighteen books of poetry. His first collection of poems, Korytarze Corridors, appeared in 1984. He received the Nike Literary Award in 2021 for one of his latest books, entitled Mondo Cane. In the past, he was nominated for his two collections of poetry, Na dzień dzisiejszy i chwilę obecną (2012) For today and the present moment and Woda na Marsie (2015) Water on Mars, by the Wrocław Silesius Poetry Award, which he received for his book of poetry entitled Puste noce (2017) Empty nights. Translated into numerous languages, his poems have been included in such anthologies as The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (1999) and Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (2003).Jarniewicz is also the author of sixteen volumes of essays, including Gościnność słowa. Szkice o przekładzie literackim (2012) Openness of words: Sketches on literary translation and the collection Tłumacz między innymi. Szkice o przekładach, językach i literaturze (2018) Translator among other things: Sketches on translations, languages, and literature nominated for the Nike Literary Award. He studied English literature and language as well as philosophy at the University of Łódź and Oxford University. In 1999, he received a scholarship from the United States government, and he participated in the International Writers Program in Iowa, while in 2006 he was a writer-in-residence at Farmleigh House in Dublin. Consequently, in most of his books on literary criticism, the author discusses British, Irish, American, and Canadian poetry and prose. He published, among other titles, The Uses of the Commonplace in Contemporary British Poetry (1994), The Bottomless Centre: The Uses of History in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (2002), Ekphrasis in the Poetry of Derek Mahon (2013), and In the Shadow of Foreign Tongues: Essays on Irish Poets (2014).Additionally, Jerzy Jarniewicz is a translator. And according to him, anyone who translates poetry is already a poet, whether he writes his own poems or not. He believes that translating requires the same creativity and linguistic invention as writing your own poems. Subsequently, he rendered into the Polish language the works of numerous authors, among them Raymond Carver, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Joyce, Ann Quin, Adrienne Rich, Denise Riley, Philip Roth, and Edmund White. Moreover, he edited and co-edited such anthologies of poetry as Six Irish Women Poets (2012), Poets from the Isles (2015), and 100 Poems Written in English (2018). He is also the editor of the prestigious literary magazine Literatura na Świecie Literature in the world, and a contributor to Gazeta Wyborcza, Tygodnik Powszechny, and Tygiel Kultury.Jarniewicz's bilingual book of poetry, Landless Boys, includes the most representative poems taken from his Wybór wiersza (2012) Selected poems, Sankcje. Wybór wierszy i wypowiedzi (2018) Sanctions: Selected poems and accounts, Water on Mars, Puste Noce (2017) Empty nights, and Mondo Cane (2012), as stated by Piotr Florczyk, the outstanding translator of this collection, in his acknowledgments. The title of the book, which comes from the author's poem “Landless Boys,” as well as its cover, showing a depiction of rooted and at the same time uprooted feet, designed by Marc Vincenz, evokes numerous associations, among them an image of nomads, travelers, and free people. What comes to mind especially is Cyprian Kamil Norwid's poem “Pielgrzym” Pilgrim in which the author is concerned with the traveler's possessions that include only a simple camel-hide tent standing for his modest desert home, and a piece of land under the wanderer's foot. As a matter of fact, the poem “Landless Boys” is about a loss, namely, the repossession of land by a bank; ironically, however, the lyrical subjects—the “he” and “we” of the poem—regain their autonomy to act freely, as they wish. Along these lines, Jarniewicz is a poet who strives for a condensed and clear finale, usually using a brilliant paradox.The poet seems to take special care to ensure that the stories about certain events and relationships containing an element of erotic tension are set as precisely as possible in a specific place and time. The pages of his Landless Boys are covered with images of sexual cravings (“Daily Census,” “Pretty Woman,” “Evening Will Be Warm with Returns Possible,” “Souvenir Shop,” “Find Three Small Dimples,” “An Email with an Attachment,” “This World Is a Fairy Tale”) and acts (“Simple Poem about Love,” “A Neogothic of Yellow Brick,” “Here Comes the Rain, Here Come the Cats and Dogs,” “Angels Are Visiting One of the City's Districts”) presented in a complete context by showing how the external, concrete, and tangible world can creep into the very center of an intimate situation in different ways. The concreteness of erotic situations, their possibility and dependence on external forces, is often the subject of these poems. The poet frequently uses certain events to talk about his intimate experiences. The sense of history means a sense of the concreteness of the external world, which intertwines with the intimate situation and forces on the poem creating a particular mood that it is difficult to describe.At times, the author puts on a mask. There is no single subject in his poems. There are many subjects as there are many sides of the poet. They resemble the author in some respects, sometimes complementing him, and sometimes becoming his antithesis. As a result, some of his poems illustrate his unfulfilled ideas, others are closer to self-creation. What is ultimately said is the result of a dialogue between the possibilities of language and the author's imagination and biography.Jarniewicz is a good storyteller. Some of his poems read like miniature tales filled with violence and brutality, for instance, “From the Bug River Area” about his great-grandfather who was a violinist and played wearing white gloves until his hands were chopped off. Another poem, “The Last One to Leave Shuts a Door,” tells a story about jealousy and love that recalls Lot's wife, a biblical personage, and other figures from the Arabian tales, among them Scheherazade, while “This World Is a Fairy Tale” evokes accounts of love conquests from the past. The poem “Thermidor” recalls the French Revolution and at the same time tells a story of a lyrical subject/Christ figure who “had to exit / the poems and get fresh air and take a walk / on water, and when he walked, he walked and saw / gulls belonging to no one / and shoals of one's fish” (p. 73).Several of Jarniewicz's poems call to mind images of everyday aggression that we read about in newspapers and watch on the news. There are stupidity, manipulation, and cruelty. All this makes the lyrical subject turn away from this sort of world and take another path, somewhere completely different, by discovering the bond that connects him with other people. It is important for the poet to know that people share the same fate. For the author, these bonds are often fleeting, unstable, or they bring more pain than fulfillment. However, they are still the most essential thing. They may not give any comfort, but they are meaningful. It seems that these essentials include, above all, the issue of difficult or impossible communication with the world and other peopleA very significant thread for Jarniewicz, which constantly returns in his writing, is reflection on the relationship between the subject, language, and non-linguistic reality. He often resolves this relational triangle by using erotic metaphors. As a result, his poetry, focused on philosophical problems, history, the dialectic of presence and absence created by writing, inexpressibility, conditions of understanding, and the fiction of childhood, turns out to be an excellent combination of ironic accuracy and melancholic regret, characterized by demonstrative vagueness, persistent sensuality, and restraint of language.Translated splendidly by Florczyk, Jarniewicz's Landless Boys: Poems retains the poet's complexities, which convey multiple meanings and intentions. This volume constitutes a significant addition to the underrepresented Polish contemporary poetry and is delivered in a bilingual Polish English publication.