Polish Writers on Writing (The Writer's World) [Paperback]

Adam Zagajewski (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1595340335 | ISBN-13: 978-1595340337 | Publication Date: March 2, 2007

Featuring 20th-century writers, including Nobel Prize winners Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, as well as celebrated poet Zbigniew Herbert and internationally renowned Bruno Schulz, this collection captures the brilliance and originality of a literary culture rightly considered one of the most important and influential of our time. These writers are branded by the political realities of their country — creating literature out of the brutality of the World War II, under the numbing and inhibiting Communist reign, and finally within a free society, but one freighted with the weight of its history.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Trinity University Press (March 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1595340335
• ISBN-13: 978-1595340337
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #990,662 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #61 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Eastern European

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Illuminating an Unknown Literature, July 26, 2007

By 

William Kowinski (Arcata, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Polish Writers on Writing (The Writer's World) (Paperback)

This is my second attempt to review this book, so I hope this one works. Though my last name is Polish, I have no idea where my father's family came from, though I was told it was his grandfather who came to America to work in western Pennsylvania coal mines, as my grandfather did as well.I know a fair amount about my mother's family in Italy, and I was raised more Italian than anything. Still, I am curious about what might be another part of my heritage, especially as a writer. So I approached this volume on Polish writing with real hunger. I was hungry for information, and for some sense of what in me might be related to Polish writers--and I got it.

In this book, Polish writers write about their writing, the purpose of creating literature, and how this relates to their contemporary culture as well as to Polish literature and culture. There are essays, excerpts of literary works, and also letters--often the most intimate and interesting.

Boleslaw Lesmian (1877-1937) is the first writer in the collection. "But the more we reflect and investigate," he writes, "the more we look more deeply into the essence of the thing and listen to the faint whispers of existence, the more our sense of reality becomes discriminating, the more its field visibly narrows." He reaches for the transcendent. "But beyond the self there exists some tone in the soul: some elemental song without words, waiting for the necessary words to come in a creative hour..."

Some of these writers are rigorously logical, others more poetic. Among the most poetic is Bruno Schulz (whose novel, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass was brought to the attention of English language readers when it was included in Philip Roth's "Writers from the Other Europe" series for Penguin in the early 1980s). A truly remarkable writer, he recalls from his childhood being carried by his father "through the spaces of an overwhelming night, conducting a conversation with the darkness." For him, literature is a door to such realities. "In a work of art the umbilical chord linking it with the totality of our concerns has not yet been severed, the blood of the mystery still circulates..."

For Schultz, literature is our version of the most basic and characteristic human activity. "The most fundamental function of the spirit is inventing fables, creating tales." Julia Hartwig sees no contradiction between communication and the deepest mysteries. Concerning poetry she writes, ..."although Kerouac's slogan, `Write so the whole world understands you" may sound frivolous, it's worth taking to heart. And it's not at all in contradiction with Braque's statement: ` Only one thing is important in art: that which can't be explained.' Because understanding in art is not always an intellectual act."

And of course I glommed onto any tidbits that might tell me about Polish culture and society. Jerzy Stempowski observes that "The nobility did not derive from invaders and nomads but from the same settled population as the serfs." Jozef Czapski narrates fascinating if horrifying experiences in World War II with a sense of national history. In writing about his own poems, Czelaw Milosz ruminates on landscape and character. Milosz is one of many exiles in this book--in his case, he lived many years here in California, which gave him the feeling of being in "some unearthly fields among the lotus eaters." Of the writers here, he's probably the most familiar to me, mostly through his admirable prose (even though he denigrated Arcata, the town where I now live, asking in his book Milosz ABCs, "Should one live there? Perhaps as punishment." But he was writing about a time when smoke from timber mills darkened the sky; we see a lot more sunshine these days.)

In terms of history, though these writers began in Poland, many were forced into exile by the Nazis and the Soviets and their own Communist government. This sense of exile became a preoccupying theme. Editor Zagajewski writes in his preface that in many ways the dilemma of World War II is the focus of this collection. History earlier in the century was also traumatic, and so the marks of history are everywhere on these writers and their literature. History and exile perhaps helped focus a social purpose, which Zbigniew Herbert saw in this way way: "In general, writing is not a medium of expression, of expressing oneself, but an art of empathy--that is, entering into others."

Many of these writers also practiced other arts, such as painting, music and theatre, or were primarily artists in another medium. Throughout this book, I get the impression of a real Polish literary and artistic culture, and community of writers and artists, supporting and of course sniping at each other, and taking very seriously their concerns and stances. They were very aware of western European art and literature (and American), but working through the dangers of xenophobia versus rootlessness, national character and universal principles.

The British playwright Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia, and has long wondered what his life might have been like had his parents not fled during World War II. These thoughts bear fruit in his newest play, "Rock & Roll." My relationship to Polish culture is even more complicated, tenuous and ambiguous. Yet there is something to it, and in this personal sense, this book has been like a missing link, or a key to an as yet vague and tantalizing ancestral home.

This is one of a series of such collections from Trinity University Press, and I've seen two others (Mexico and Ireland.) They're all superior, and as a writer, they all provide inspiration and provoke thoughts and feelings. The Writer's World (as this series by Trinity University Press is called) is a brilliant contribution to literature, which these days needs reminders of its importance in this increasingly frenetic blizzard of addictive technology and commercially encouraged ignorance.