In 2018, Julia Fiedorczuk won Poland's most prestigious poetry award, the Wisława Szymborska Prize, for her 2017 collection Psalmy.1 Now an expanded bilingual version of Psalms, translated by Bill Johnston, demonstrates again why Fiedorczuk is one of the most significant Polish poets of her generation. A professor of American studies at the University of Warsaw and an internationally renowned ecocriticism scholar, Fiedorczuk brings to Polish poetry impressive intellectual breadth and a welcoming regard for all species. Intimate but not confessional, attuned to the sacred but never pious, her collection draws inspiration from the biblical Book of Psalms and Czesław Miłosz's radiant translation of it, but moves the genre of songlike prayer into the twenty-first century.Subtly, she pushes back against Romantic ideologies, both English and Polish. In her work, “nature” is no mere backdrop for human spiritual renewal. Her poems favor the fragmented and interrogatory over the tidy closure of the “well-wrought urn.” That she often ends poems with a dash or a colon signals her willingness to make room for silence. And as for Polish Romanticism, specifically the understanding of Poland as the “Christ of Nations,” a phrase often attributed to Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, Fiedorczuk employs metaphors to challenge the notion that historical trauma is essential to Polish identity. While clocks and calendars, even historical epochs, appear in Psalms, they do so against the backdrop of the slow formation of rocks, oceans, and stars. With sonic richness and intellectual rigor, Fiedorczuk draws our attention to the natural world and humanity's desecration of it, to the war in Ukraine and the unspeakable horrors inflicted on children and the mothers who must bear witness to them. Johnston, in his rendering of the poems in English, matches her sound for sound, cadence for cadence, finding innovative solutions for the syntactic and lexical thickets of the originals.To comprehend how Fiedorczuk draws on psalmic tradition while also reinventing it, consider “Psalm I”: some poems can no longer be written.some could not be written till now.nighttime despair because of the children, the drownedchildren, the hanged children, the burnedchildren, the massacred children, the favorite toys of childrenin the plane wreck, because motherhoodis a life sentence, while despair seeks adornmentsand desirable shapes, so as to dress up in them,to be covered up, to be protected;so best be quiet, I'm saying, so I'm saying: noneof your bones will be broken, let's say,“you shall want for nothing,” let's say,“a tree will be planted by the flowing waters”— (p. 8)This poem, which appeared in an earlier version in Fiedorczuk's first English-language collection Oxygen (Zephyr Press, 2017), also translated by Johnston, imports psalmic language into a thematic terrain we do not associate with the biblical psalms or even, particularly, with the Polish poetic tradition and its saintly archetype of the self-sacrificing Matka Polka Polish Mother. That iconic figure mourns the tragic fate of her nation and offers up her sons in the struggle for freedom.Critic Agnieszka Mrozik has referred to this traditional Polish icon as a “bodiless asexual madonna,” her maternity sanitized from the physical anguish of giving birth or the struggles of parenting over decades.2 Fiedorczuk, in her 2017 essay “Strangers in the Country of the Poet,” contends that Polish poetry's renown for its “historical witness” is itself gendered: While the identification of genius with male virility is universal, in the Polish tradition it is combined with an exceptional status of poets as the creators and keepers of national identity or, alternately, as rebels/revolutionaries. . . . Male witnessing is valued more highly than whatever might be reported by women, in keeping with the assumption that the battlefield is more important than the home.”3Fiedorczuk's poem here shifts the lens, incorporating battlefield and home.In its sonnet-like thirteen lines, “Psalm I” pushes its portrayal of motherhood beyond the symbolic. This psalm “could not be written till now” because its litany of the harms that can befall children has somehow felt outside the province of poetry. Like a sonnet, the poem contains a turn, where Fiedorczuk, through metaphor, reveals the seductions of despair—the “adornments / and desirable shapes” that tempt mothers.In this latest translation, Bill Johnston edited the syntax and diction of his earlier version in Oxygen to replicate more precisely the consonant echoes in the original. “Ornaments” is now “adornments,” and “pleasing” has become “desirable.” These alterations, while subtle, help us hear the allure of despair through the repeated dentals and liquids. They also better set up the complexity of the resolution. There the speaker quotes the biblical prophecy about Christ—“none / of your bones will be broken”—which here has the resonance of a mantra the worried mother must repeat. And the final lines, “you shall want for nothing” and “a tree will be planted by the flowing waters,” echo the language of Psalm 23. But the “life sentence” of motherhood affords no easy solace. Twice the speaker urges, “let's say,” as if invoking this psalmic imagery can forge a path out of worry. The dash that closes the poem, reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's, testifies to the mother's ongoing tussle with fear and despair. It's a psalm for our moment, caught between yearning and doubt.Some of Fiedorczuk's psalms voice anxieties about the fate of our planet by revising scripture. “Psalm III” is addressed to the sun and the earth itself instead of to God: in what language should I speak to you, sunso you'll rise tomorrow for my child, so you'llrise and stimulate the growth of our food, circulation,how should I sing it for my childhow should I sing to you, planet, so you'll forgive mefor giving birth to appetite . . . (p. 13)“Psalm VIII” rewrites the creation story of the Book of Genesis, where Adam is given dominion over all creatures. Johnston's sonically alive translation, with its mournful repetition of O, allows us to hear those biblical allusions in a new, ecologically minded context, one that critiques human mastery over nature: beneath the dome of wind of mowers of dronesare stands of trees graves and nests“the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas”— (p. 23)To the biblical “dome of wind,” Fiedorczuk adds the “mowers” of lawncare and “drones” of warfare. The quote from Genesis that closes the poem makes no mention of dominion—just catalogues the creatures without human overlords. “Psalm XXIX,” addressing an unseen interlocutor during uncontrolled forest fires, blares an “Emergency / warning for Eden, that dreams / we have not yet dreamed will go up in flames” (p. 53).Bill Johnston, who received the National Translation Award in Poetry for his rendering of Adam Mickiewicz's rhyming verse narrative Pan Tadeusz, makes the most of English's vast lexicon to recreate Fiedorczuk's sound play and shifts in tone. Occasionally, I quibbled with some of his choices—such as at the end of “Psalm VI” where some of the syntactic ambiguity of the original got lost or in “Psalm XXV” where he added a couple of extra syllables “(eli)” at the end of a stanza to create a sonic echo for “pixels.’ But I appreciated his deftness at conveying both the musical and intellectual range of the original.Psalms ends with some new poems not included in the Polish text, including the ars poetica “Cold,” which I read as alluding to the war in Ukraine. Fiedorczuk begins simply: “a poet's job is to write, says my friend / just as a baker's job is baking bread” (p. 85). In a way, she's ironizing what it means for a poet to bear witness, while still witnessing. And, later, she likens the writer's mission to a delivery driver “whose job is to deliver pizza” and the engineer who “builds bridges.” These lines made me smile. Fiedorczuk is both mocking the messianic exceptionalism of nineteenth-century bards while also holding up poets as essential workers who bring us human stories that headlines often overlook: you should writeabout the man in the woods whose phone is stillworking so he takes a risk and calls for helpfor a woman who refuses to keep walking but insteadis falling asleep on the diamond-encrusted leaf litterwhen the man says into the receiver cold, she isso cold, perhaps above all at precisely such a time (p. 85)In an afterword to the collection, Bill Johnston recalls asking Fiedorczuk how she came to write these poems. To his surprise, she touched the sides of her throat and said, “They came from here.” She was taking voice lessons from a synagogue cantor despite her mistaken fear she could not sing. So, too, in Psalms, with its fragments, questions, dreams, and silences, the music she makes as a poet is both vulnerable and bravely assured.
Karen Kovacik (Thu,) studied this question.