Richard Wilcocks writes:
I discovered the poetry of
Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski during the eighties, when I was working for the
British Council at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. The discovery led
to another one – the remarkably powerful interpretations of his work by the charismatic
Polish singer Ewa Demarczyk. She is known as a leading practitioner of sung
poetry, and has given her attention to a number of other poets, not all from
the Polish canon, for example Goethe.
This poem could be
illustrated with many image-collections from Second World War Poland. I chose
the heroic but doomed Warsaw Uprising of 1944 for my slide show, because that
is where Baczynski died. I considered that the pictures projected on to the
wall in the Shire Oak Room of the Heart Centre were necessary because the
romantic and ‘catastrophist’ poems are best understood in a specific context:
many people have just a vague knowledge of what happened in Poland between 1939
and 1945, when it was first of all carved up between Germany and the Soviet
Union, each of which became responsible for appalling atrocities, then when it
came under the complete control of the Nazis, with all the mass-murder which
they brought with them. People outside Poland seem to know more about the
equally heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, but little about the events of
the following year, organised by the Polish Home Army (Armija Krajowa), which
prompted Heinrich Himmler, SS and Gestapo chief, to order that all the city’s
Polish inhabitants should be killed and all the buildings flattened. Poles were
regarded by the Nazis as Untermenschen, subhuman. Slavs were next on the
extermination list after the Jews.
I read poems by one or two
other Polish poets who have written about the War, leaving out quite a few
which had been on my original list for reasons of time, for example the great Tadeusz Różewicz.
As I told the audience at the time, my Polish is not strong, and much of the
hard work on Baczynski was done in collaboration by Anna
Żukowska-Wilcocks. When we translated our selection of poems a couple of
decades ago, we could not find any English versions, but there are now several
websites which feature them, and we have our preferences and
criticisms in relation to these. I did not want to make the English versions
too mellifluous, but to retain stark, staccato qualities, which is difficult
when it is necessary to use definite and indefinite articles in English - not
in Polish. The reading included
some of our translations (like Deszcze) which have been
anthologized (the excellent Poetry of the Second World War edited by
Desmond Graham) and some (like Miserere) which have not. Others
could have been included, for example more of his love poems.
Many of Baczynski’s highly emotive poems cry out for dramatic
performance, and it was a privilege to be able to do that.
Síle Moriarty writes:
I thought the Shire Oak Room at HEART looked lovely for this event. It had already been used for three community events during the day
and now, through the efforts of Centre Manager, Mark and his staff, (ably
assisted by LitFest volunteers), it had been transformed into a beautiful
performance space complete with piano, stage lighting, microphones etc. plus table
decorations (daffodils) and tea lights. It glimmered with light and was a
pleasure to perform in.
Poetry under occupation is often considered to be war
poetry but I am very aware of another type of occupation – the occupation of a
country by an alien language. This has never been more true than of Ireland
where the occupation by English has been so complete that some of the greatest
writers in the English language are in fact Irish: Yeats, Joyce, Wilde, Seamus
Heaney, Eavan Boland to name but a few.
But the Irish language is not completely dead; it
clings on in the Gaelteacht areas, predominantly on the west coast, and as a
subject taught in schools. It also has its own great writers and the poet Nuala
Ní Dhomhnaill is one of them.
Nuala is passionate about the language; she considers
that the loss of the Irish language is ‘... a psychic fault line, a personality
cleavage along the different language lines (which) will return to haunt us’.
She also says that Irish is ‘... the corpse that sits up and
talks back.’
She wanted to write about the loss of the language but
as a poet, not a historian or socio-linguist. She dug into the pre-Christian
roots of Ireland, into is myth and folklore and came up with a metaphor for the
language in the form of merpeople – mermaids and mermen. She wondered what
would happen if they were forced to leave the sea and live on dry land. How
would that affect their collective psyche? Would it warp their society, block
access to their history and lead to strange beliefs and superstitions? Nuala
wrote a collection based on this metaphor called The Fifty Minute Mermaid and it is
from this book that my readings last night were, in the main, selected. When I
was translating her poems (with the invaluable help of Maire Ní Ghrifín, my
Irish language teacher) I became more and more aware of the power of poetry to
express the human condition. As Adrian Phillips writes when reviewing the collection
for the Guardian in 2008 the fifty minutes of the title refers to:
’… the so-called 50-minute hour of psychoanalysis, a modern therapy that
is about our immersion in the past and our distortions of time’.
But the poetry is so much more than that; Adrian Philips again:
‘The naff banality of
psychology, 'a real difficulty of boundaries', is played off against the
extraordinary vision of what this may mean in practice, at its best. If
everything in the language runs into everything else, it both crashes and
blends. What the mermaid has learnt are the hollows of insulation. There is no
romanticising of the past, no obsessive elegising in Ni Dhomhnaill's work. It
is something far more disturbing than innocence or order she wants to recover.’
To be able to read from this extraordinary collection and in such a
great setting was a real pleasure for me. Treasa Ní Drisceól read Ceist Na
Teangan
‘as Gaeilge’ and sang a beautiful version of Fear a Bháta (despite suffering
from the flu) for which I am extremely grateful.
It was an extraordinary night (the poetry of Krzystof Kamil Baczynski, plus
the wonderful performance of Reem Kelani) and I am really pleased that I was
able to contribute to it. But what
pleases me even more is that I heard Gaeigle spoken again (it has happened in
the LitFest before) in Headingley.
Sally Bavage writes:
And so to the final part of
the evening. Reem Kelani came to
Headingley LitFest hotfoot from a rapturous packed performance at the Howard
Assembly Rooms sponsored by Opera North; she gathered her thoughts, soothed her
voice and gave us a tour-de-force performance on our theme of Poetry under
Occupation. Manchester-born Reem
was brought up in Kuwait and in fact qualified and worked as a research marine
biologist before turning to music and poetry. She now spends her time translating and performing literature,
poetry and songs that promote some of the most significant Arabic works.
She dedicated her
set of songs and poems to Abu Bakr Rauf, the young Respect party founder member
who had so unexpectedly collapsed and died on Tuesday 20 March whilst
out campaigning in the Bradford West by-election. Visibly moved, Reem praised
the work of the young father who was Chair of the Bradford Palestine Solidarity
Campaign. Golda Meir, a former
prime minister of Israel once said "There
is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw
them out and took their country. They didn't exist." But as Reem pointed out, she sings
songs and poems developed over centuries by the Palestinian people so how could
they not exist? She works tirelessly to promote Palestinian identity and
culture.
Around half of her songs and poems were Palestinian
in origin, pre-1948 versions, from her first album Sprinting Gazelle (http://www.reemkelani.com/album.asp)
and half from work by Egyptian composer Sayyid Darwish (1892-1923). Her project researching his work has
taken the best part of a decade and, whilst working on what will be an album
hopefully released by the end of 2012, she was in Cairo in January 2011. She was there in Tahrir Square, saw the
explosion of popular feeling against the oppression by a repressive regime and
heard the songs of Darwish dominating the singing by the crowds. The same songs sung in 1919 against the
occupying regime of the British.
Same poet, different century, same hopes for freedom of expression. The power of words again!
What a night we had! Accompanied by
Bruno Heinem on the piano, they moved us to laughter and tears by turns with
her poetry, her passion and his playing.
You couldn’t put it better than ‘The Observer’: “Kelani has a voice of
amazing power and intensity, but it’s always controlled, and there’s a moving
vulnerability there too.” Here was
another observer who was privileged to be part of such a special event.
Below, Richard Wilcocks, Síle Moriarty, Reem Kelani
