Stanislaw Baranczak - NOBODY WARNED ME

Nobody warned me that freedom may also mean something like

sitting at the police station with a roughbook of my own poems

hidden (how clever it was) under my underwear

while five civilians with higher education

and still higher salary waste their time

analysing some rubbish taken from my pockets

tram tickets, a laundry receipt, a ditry

handkerchief and a mysterious (that's a good one) loose page:

„carrots

can of peas

tomato paste

potatoes”

and nobody warned me that captivity

may also mean something like

sitting at the police station with a roughbook of my own poems

hidden (how grotesque!) under my underwear

while five civilians with higher education

and even lower IQ are allowed

to touch the entrails torn out of my life

tram tickets, a laundry receipt, a dirty

handkerchief and even (no, I can't stand this one) this page:

„carrots

can of peas

tomato paste

potatoes”

and nobody warned me that the whole globe

is the space between these two opposite poles

between which really there is no space at all

Translated by W.F.

 Only recently I learned that on 26 December the great Polish poet Stanislaw Baranczak had passed away.

I knew him quite well when I lived in Poland. The country was under the Communist regime and we were both dissidents, I was a student and he was an university lecturer who lost his position because of his activities. He didn't stop giving lectures, the students organised meetings in private houses and Stanislaw carried on teaching in the underground. At that time he was already a famous poet. I thought I might be a poet, too. One day I took what I thought were poems and asked Baranczak what he thought of them. He told me to leave them with him and come again a week later. When I did, he gave me the following advice:

“When you write a poem, read it again two weeks later and cross out all words that are not necessary.”

I went home and applied this procedure to my poems and they disappeared.This is how I did not become a poet. I am very grateful to Baranczak for this advice.

It didn't stop me translating somebody else's poems, though. Baranczak himself was a fantastic translator and what he wrote on the art of translation had huge influence on me. When I settled in England and was surrounded by all those books in English I translated some poems into Polish to feel what they are like when read in the mother tongue. Years passed, at one point I realised that I had lived in England more than a half of my life. Then I started translating the other way, from Polish into English. Naturally I translated the poems that had influenced me when I was younger. Of course poems by Baranczak are in that number. I have never published them anywhere.

Except, of course, here.

I decided to add a couple of Stanislaw's poems.

You will find another one here (posted just a few days before his death).
Stanislaw Baranczak - WITH ONE BREATH