About the Work by Jacob Mikanowski

Origins matter to Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki. One of the leading Polish poets of his generation, his work juxtaposes bare emotional intimacy with a remarkable linguistic precision, and  summons the rustle of centuries. A single poem will intermingle the formal concerns of the Baroque, the emotional tenor of the Romantics and the fractured, alienated self of the present. The result of this melding, however, is neither pastiche nor any kind of postmodern game. Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s work is anchored in a very specific time and place, and galvanized by a restless need to understand the sources and instruments of his own creativity. 

The nine poems I’ve translated here belong to a single cycle, which first appeared in the journal Mały Format in 2021. Tkaczyszyn-Dycki calls the group “a fragment of a play.” It could be considered an addendum to Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s collection Kochanka Norwida (Norwid’s Lover), selections of which I translated for the previous issue of Turkoslavia. It shares many of that book’s concerns, but instead of ranging across the whole of the poet’s life, it narrows the frame to a single afternoon. The action takes place in the summer kitchen of a village home. We are east of Przemyśl, very close to Poland’s border with Soviet Ukraine. The year is sometime in the mid-to-late 1960s. The company consists of the poet, his Ukrainian mother (Hrudnycha), and his Polish grandmother (Hrudniowa). 

This mixed heritage matters a great deal to Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, and forms a major motif of his work. The border between the two languages (Polish and Ukrainian) and faiths (Catholic and Uniate) runs right through his family.  This divide, cutting across East Europe’s borderlands, has been a source of much personal and political strife. Before World War II, Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s Polish grandmother married a Ukrainian man. During the war, the husband was a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and participated in an attack on his grandmother’s village. In a comment to a 2020 collection Gdyby ktoś o mnie pytał (“If someone were to ask about me”), Tkaczyszyn-Dycki wrote that his grandmother was never able to come to terms with this tragedy. For most of her life, she was castigated as the wife of a “rezun,” or killer. Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s mother, who suffered from mental illness, was likewise treated as an outcast in their village community.

This double exclusion complicated childhood and language for Tkaczyszyn-Dycki. His mother and grandmother mostly spoke Ukrainian with each other and, until the age of fifteen, Tkaczyszyn-Dycki himself spoke a mixture of Polish and Ukrainian, pejoratively known as “język chachłacki,” or the chochoł tongue. Despite their status as linguistic outsiders, his mother and grandmother were the ones who charted his course into Polish poetry. His grandmother inspired his early love for the Polish language, and taught him that any experience, any tragedy, could be turned into a story, and therefore into literature. His mother, whose Polish, in the words of poem IX in this cycle, was “thick with Ukrainian weeds” had a rare sense for the sound and texture of language, and a lexophile’s appreciation for singular words. 

The nine poems that make up Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s “fragment of a play” trace the poet’s path through these formative influences. Cutting across multiple languages and registers, the collection presents many challenges for the translator. I have tried to signal the multiplicity of languages at play by leaving Ukrainian words in the original. I also sought to highlight Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s gift for unearthing the odd and unusual in Polish itself. In terms of context, beside the poet’s family background, it helps to know a few things about the history of Polish literature, for instance that Cyprian Norwid was one of the great Romantic poets of the 19th century, and that Zofia Nałkowska was a leading social novelist of the interwar and early postwar years. Beyond these few facts, Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s work should be legible to any reader blessed with empathy and an appreciation for the infinite paths leading from life into poetry and back.

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EUGENIUSZ TKACZYSZYN-DYCKI is one of contemporary Poland’s most celebrated poets. Born in 1962, he is the author of fourteen poetry collections, and the subject of at least four scholarly monographs. He is the recipient of most of Poland's highest awards for literature, including the Gdynia Literary Prize (twice), the Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna Award, the Barbara Sadowska Award, the Polish-German Days of Literature Award, the Paszport Polityki Award, and the Nike Literary Award.

JACOB MIKANOWSKI is a writer, historian and journalist. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on literature and the performance of self in Stalinist Poland. He is the author of Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land (Pantheon, 2023).