To the Letter (2024)
Tomasz Różycki’s To the Letter follows Lieutenant Anielewicz on the hunt for any clues that might lead 21st century human beings out of a sense of despair. With authoritarianism rising across Eastern Europe, the Lieutenant longs for a secret hero. At first, he suspects some hidden mechanism afoot: fruit tutors him in the ways of color, he drifts out to sea to study the grammar of tides, or he gazes at the sun as it thrums away like a timepiece. In one poem, he admits “this is the story of my confusion,” and in the next the Lieutenant is back on the trail. “This lunacy needs a full investigation,” he jibes. He wants to get to the bottom of it all, but he’s often bewitched by letters and the trickery of language. Diacritics on Polish words form a “flock of sooty flecks, clinging to letters” and Lieutenant Anielewicz studies the tails, accents, and strokes that twist this script. While the Lieutenant can’t write a coherent code to solve life’s mysteries or to fill the absence of a country rent by war, his search for patterns throughout art, philosophy, and literature lead not to despair but to an affirmation of the importance of human love. Różycki collects moments of illumination – a cat dashing out of a window and “feral sun” streaking in, a body planting itself in the ground like rhubarb and flowering. He collects and collects, opens a crack, and clutches a shrapnel of epiphany.
There are two poems and translations, plus a review of to the Letter, at The Poetry Foundation.
You can hear Różycki read the poem ‘Metamorfozy’, and Rosenthal read her translation, ‘Metamorphoses’ on YouTube.
There are reviews and other details of the book at the publisher’s website.
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Zielony Balonik book club notes:
Oh dear, these poems were not for me. For a start the title doesn’t make sense. The Polish is ‘letters’ as in abc. English only has one word for letters (abc) and letters (listy) in an envelope with a stamp. So what does ‘to the letter’ mean. ‘The’ is always specific and asks the question ‘which?’ So which letter is meant here? I have no idea.
Pawel Huelle found Różycki’s poems meaningful. I find them bleak and monotonous. The form in English seldom varies and doesn’t draw the reader in. I found no memorable lines, so I turned to the Polish and found that there was a bit more variety in form, assonance and the occasional rhyme, also that in some poems the language sings and is pleasurable on the ear even if the content is gloomy.
Różycki says that his poems are about time. He wants to transform time into letters (litery), and sees them as if they are amber, each one with a small insect submerged inside for ever. ’I am that amber.’ (in conversation with Mira Rosenthal).
That’s quite a big boast.
One thing that really put me off was the so-called Lieutenant Anielewicz, the detective who lines up bodies. Why did he choose that name? It demeans, trivialises and dishonours the real Mordecai Anielewicz who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and either took his own life or was gassed in the bunker on Miła Street on 8th May 1943, age 24. Could he not have chosen some other personage, something like Herbert’s Pan Cogito ?
If I struggled to find pleasure in the originals, it was even worse with the translations. The translator too often deviated from the text, added words which were not in the original and forced the syntax into odd places.
The very first poem gives us an example of this. The English says:
A pair of stupid fools. One sound, two letters.
It was you I chose and oh so selflessly they warned
that you will make me lose it. The perfume
of acacias in bloom is my only excuse.
My quibbles: Surely ‘fools’ are ‘stupid’. The Polish says lunatics. Two letters – I guess mean ty. Where does she get ‘oh so selflessly they warned’ from? Who are they? Lose it? Lose what?
The Polish says:
Para wariatków: jedna głoska, dwie litery.
Wybrałem właśnie ciebie, życzliwi donieśli,
Że można z tobą oszaleć. Pachniały akacje
I tylko tyle mam na usprawiedliiwenie.
The poem is dedicated to Debora Vogel who was murdered in 1942 and the word ‘donieśli’ has a sinister overtone – it often referred to citizens who betrayed Jewish hiding places to the Gestapo.
I could go through the book and find many deviations from the text that make reading puzzling. Several poems begin in English (number 16 for example), How I wish you were here. The Polish says, ‘Szkoda, że cię tu nie ma…’ and plays on this, adding, ’nie było, nie będzie’ which is what shopkeepers said in Polska Ludowa: ’nie ma, nie było i nie będzie’.
Number 28 Wild strawberries. The translator writes so clumsily:
Observing fruit will tutor me in colour
And weight, in time.
The Polish is straight forward: I learn about time by observing fruit…
O czasie się dowiem obserwując owoce
Ich wielkość i kolor.
There were many more infelicities in in the English. In fact, this small collection of poems highlights the enormous problems of translation. For example, the Polish mostly makes it clear when ‘you’ I either masculine or feminine, which doesn’t come across in English.
One quite unnecessary addition I found in number 48, ’Settings’.
… It’s a curse from the war:
it scatters us, pulls us apart. A Father there,
a Mother over here, the Neighbor Lady somewhere
about here, a Policeman, a Sister and Brother.
But this space, empty. Isn’t it true this Polish family
once lost a child? But there’s no grave to go and see.
Was he killed? Neglected? Was there an accident?
The Polish makes it clear that we are looking at graves.
Tam jest Ojciec….
A tutaj bęzie pusto. Kiedyś w tej rodzinie
Zgineło dziecko, prawdda, I nie ma mogiły….
There is no mention that a Polish family lost a child. So why does the translator add something not in the original? The implication is that the lost child is Jewish, the thought being developed in the last stanza.
I ticked a few poems that I found meaningful: 48, ’Settings’; 49, ’Euromaidan’; 50, ’An Act of Speech’; 51, ’Lacki Brzeg’; 58, ’Two days’ time’; 65, ’Stone’.
But all too often I wrote, ‘another miserable poem’.
I read the Polish poems aloud and enjoyed the melody of the words, for example the poet is clearly having fun with the letter ‘p’ in number 29:
z pieprzoców, migdałowców,
lecz to tylko płetwal wynurzsa się na moment,
żeby się pożegnać przymknięciem powieki.
Reviews mention references to classical Polish Literature. I detected four or five: wild strawberries from Słowacki’s verse drama Balladyna; glass houses, ‘Szklane domy’ from Żeromski’s novel Przedwiośnie; early spring, the silhouette with ‘hips too narrow’ comes humourously right out of Quo Vadis by Sienkiewicz; 96, ’The Divine Comedy’, refers to Nie-boska Komedia by Krasiński; and I did wonder if the reference to dying for love by motorcycle, curve upon curve downhill, was a reference to Księżyc wschodzi by Iwaszkiewicz where the daft young hero flees from love by trying to ride a horse over a ravine, and inevitably injures himself and the horse.
There were scriptural references too.
The poems are male-focussed, we hear about poor painters, but what about the shivering model with love in her eyes? We know that the poet is mourning a lost love, but we have no clear idea who she is. The landscape is bleak and unattractive. The poems often made no sense. Why keep harking back to old trauma? The poems are often witty but the form tends to monotony. I found nothing in these poems to cheer or to charm.
Jenny Robertson
*
These poems look like unsent letters to someone. They reflect the poet’s imagination and feelings full of longing for people, for freedom and for a life without fear.
The book is divided into three sections: Vacuum Theory, The Third Planet and Summer of Music.
The first poem states that life is short and fragile; one day we live to the fullest, the next one may disappear. It describes two people, lying together in the grass, who probably escaped, they taste freedom and imagine that they can shift the clouds. That despite the dangerous war which is close, they can be happy for a moment, forget about their chains and numbers, and enjoy the fragrance of acacia flowers. It’s a poem full of joy but also fear of what is coming.
The collection creates the story of someone who is lost at war. Who probably travelled with the army to the land of droughts and frost, where living conditions were impossible. The sentence “It’s good that you are not here” shows the difficulty the author must have gone through, his strong character and love he gives this person.
Usually, the readers of books are those who try to reflect understanding of the poetry but they don’t even imagine how authors and poets feel to be noticed by a proper group of people. They want to be understood and safe. Usually, readers celebrate the hard work and success of writers. They live in the imagination, pictures taken from poems but they cannot know the reality, which the poet had to face.
The collection is full of feelings, explanations of times the poet lived in, his dreams and theories. Metaphors and animation make the things realistic. The stanzas of poems are rather regular, with four lines in each.
The poet takes readers on a trip to an Asian bar with red lanterns gyrating around and yellow dust, which twirl after being rinsed. They are a symbol of ancestors and demons hidden in these lanterns, invisible ghosts. Colourful lights of neon make the impression that the whole city is moving, and dancing. Despite all this, Hong Kong seems to be lifeless and empty.
Even a beautiful garden full of strawberries and rhubarb becomes the place of crying for those who were murdered, despite the fact they didn’t want to die. A garden with some beds, which are not graves, but vegetable plots. It is not possible to hide under the rhubarb, nor the strawberry. It is just a metaphor.
The world can become very small, can be hidden in a travel backpack. For a person who travels, distances lose their values. A traveller is able to endure, if necessary, without thinking about the pain of the body.
The poems are written with fantastic retrospection. They have been created in post-war Poland, but for a reader who doesn’t know the history, these poems could describe events from the present. Some of them are picturesque, lifelike and reflect reality, others influence the imagination of the reader and have several meanings. I would recommend the book to all who like thinking and imagining. Some poems need to be read several times, because they give different impressions.
Patrycja Jankowska