IX. Kochanka Norwida

moja matka (zamknięta

w Żurawicy, Węgorzewie,

Jarosławiu) zawsze

Musiała do kogoś należeć

kogo sobie zmyśliła wyobraziła

lub kto został jej przedstawiony

we śnie (na podobieństwo

Norwida) ale z kim wadziła się

moja matka i w jakim 

języku przywitał ja ojciec 

niegodziwiec który nigdy

Wcześniej nie słyszał o Norwidzie

***

XXVIII.

dla Alessandra Amenty

na moich oczach wywlekli ja

z wiejskiej izby w jednym tylko

buciku w jednym tylko chodaku

w powietrzu unosiły się kłęby

pierza (niczym w wierszu Zuzanny

Ginczanki) z rozprutej pierzyny

z porwanej poduszki musimy bowiem

pamiętać że matka nie dała się

związać pokazując im zęby

krzycząc moje imię krzycząc zaiste

w nieskończoność jedno imię

zapominając zaś o drugim buciku  

z którym uciekłem na podwórko 

***

XXXII.

w tym domu nigdy nie było

światła (nawet w pokoju

górnym i dolnym) matka bowiem 

poruszała się w zupełnych

ciemnosciach do piwnicy również 

schodziła bez kopciłki 

bo nie od razu mieliśmy elektryczność

w piwnicy i na strychu 

a kiedy już zapanowała jasność

matka i tak (niczym w dobrej

poezji) poruszała się w zupełnych 

ciemnościach chciałbym podobnie

***

XLV. Szmaty

otóż w innej rzeczywistości moja 

matka dokonywała samookaleczeń

zrazu powierzchownych niegroźnych

lecz po kilku dniach ropiejących 

dlatego potrzebowała coraz więcej

prześcieradeł by opatrywać zranienia

wkrótce w całym domu (który nie istniał 

w żadnej postaci) przybyło brudnych

szmat nawet pod mym jasieczkiem 

nauczylem sie z nich robić wiersze 

***

LI. Piosenka o gawronie

to ja byłem tym gawronem 

z wiersza Julii Hartwig

(“Chłopak pakuje głowę skrzeczącego

wniebogłosy gawrona do wody

i powtarza monotonnie: 

-Mów po polsku, mów po polsku,

mów po polsku s…..synie!”)

wiele jest wierszy natchnionych

z którymi się zgadzam ale niewiele 

do których wchodzę jak do domu 

w Wólce Krowickiej i rozrabiam bo poezja

musi być rozróbą musi się podobać

by Jacob Mikanowski

Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki is a poet of borders and borderlands. Starting from a position in many ways—geographically, sexually, and linguistically—on the margins, he has spent decades finding ways to square his private experiences against the weight of the Polish literary canon. In the process, he has become one of the most original and distinctive voices in 21st-century Polish poetry, one whose work speaks in a voice that is at once classical and strikingly contemporary. 

Tkaczyszyn-Dycki was born in 1962, in the village of Wólka Krywicka near Lubaczów,  by the Ukrainian border in southeastern Poland. His father was Polish and his mother was Ukrainian. His family was divided politically as well as linguistically. He had relatives who fought on both sides of the bloody ethnic conflict which roiled the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands during the Second World War. These family tensions persisted long into the postwar years. Growing up, Dycki (as he most often refers to himself in Polish) was closest to his mother who, despite growing up in a Ukrainian-speaking home, never spoke to him in Ukrainian. Frequently institutionalized for schizophrenia, she was nonetheless the determining influence on his young life. 

Dycki’s 2014 collection Kochanka Norwida (Norwid’s Lover), from which this selection of poems is drawn, is in large part an accounting of their complex and often difficult relationship. The title comes from something Dycki’s mother said to him when he was eleven or twelve years old. Noticing a portrait of the 19th-century émigré poet Cyprian Norwid on the cover of one of his school textbooks, she told her son that he was in fact her lover, something Dycki says he desperately wanted to believe, despite its obvious impossibility. 

Norwid’s Lover is also a reckoning with this split inheritance: Polish and Ukrainian, classical and modern. In fifty-nine poems, formally reminiscent of Francois Villon and the Polish (Sarmatian) Baroque, Tkaczyszyn-Dycki traverses the landscape of his memories. As an adult, he endures compulsory military service, cruises public bathrooms, and begins publishing poetry in queer magazines (at first, always under a pseudonym). As a child, he watches as his mother is committed, visits her in various psychiatric hospitals and institutions, runs away from home, and helps his mother escape confinement (if only in his imagination). Along the way, he discovers himself as a poet and as a writer of Polish, a language that is at once totally at his command and distinctly alien. 

The poems I’ve selected here are among those that deal most closely with Dycki’s formation as a poet and his involvement with the history of Polish poetry. They include quotations from Zuzanna Ginczanka’s canonical Holocaust poem “non omnis moriar,” as well a less well-known verse by Julia Hartwig from her 1981 collection Poezje wybrane. Because of his multilingual background and his use of intertextuality, translating Tkaczyszyn-Dycki requires the use of very different registers in small amounts of space. His poems incorporate everything from the morbid grandeur of the Baroque memento mori to humble items such as the kopciłka (XXXII), a dialect term for a type of homemade oil lamp fashioned out of a glass bottle or tin can. A crude object, but as with so much in Dycki’s work, one that gives off light.

Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki is one of contemporary Poland’s most celebrated poets. The author of over a dozen published poetry collections, he is a two-time recipient of the Gdynia Literary Prize, the Nike Literary Award (2009), and the Silesius Poetry Award (2020). 

Jacob Mikanowski received his Ph.D. in Eastern European history from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land (2023).