Stanislaw Baranczak - WITH ONE BREATH

With one breath, with one bracket of a breath closing a sentence

with one bracket of ribs around the heart

closing like a fist, like a net

around the narrow fish of breath, with one breath

to close all and to close oneself in all with

one thin slice of a flame shaved off from lungs

to torch the walls of prisons and breathe in the fire

behind the bone bars of the chest, into the tower

of the windpipe, with one breath, before you choke

gagged with the thickening air

of the last breath of a man who is shot

and of the hot breath of gun barrels, and clouds

of steaming blood spilled on concrete

the air, which carries your voice

or muffles it, swallower of swords

the side arms, bloodless but bloodily

wounding the throat of brackets, between which

like a heart between ribs, like a fish in the net

flutters a sentence stammered with one breath

until the last breath

Translated by W.F.

Stanislaw Baranczak (pron. Staneeswaf Baranchak) (born 1946)

The leading poet of the so-called “Generation ‘68” (Baranczak himself coined that phrase). 1968 was the year of the hippie “summer of love” and student demonstrations all over the world, but in Poland it was for many people the year of disillusionment. In March that year Polish students demonstrated against the communist censorship and restrictions at universities, while the government sent the riot police against them and imprisoned its leaders. For people like Baranczak (himself a student at the time) this was a shock. From early on the subject of his poetry is the confrontation between ordinary people and an oppressive government.

Baranczak became a lecturer at the University of Poznan, but in 1976 he joined the dissident movement and was sacked from his post. The dissident movement included the uncensored underground publishing movement, which was a new phenomenon, since then poets like Baranczak could write without taking censorship into account. Political allusions (present in Herbert’s early poetry) went out of the window, poets could write openly about the secret police entering a poetry meeting.

Although Baranczak lost his job at the University of Poznan, he was considered one of the world’s best scholars of Slavonic literature and was offered a post to teach this subject at Harvard University in Boston. In 1980 the Polish authorities allowed him t leave the country and Baranczak has lived in Boston ever since.