Five Poems

Grzegorz Wróblewski

YOU CAN’T EXPAND ON THIS POEM, YOU CAN ONLY COPY IT FROM THE SCREEN

Poetry contest topic:
The power of the rosary.



TENDENCY

Everyone has converted.
95 percent of Soviet cosmonauts
have converted.

Former secret agents have converted.
Hawks—though they’re no saints—
have converted.

Everything alive has converted.
Only I have not converted.



YOUNG AND OLD IN THE PARK

The boys are eating sweets, while the old men
are chewing on wheat rolls.

Those old men look like babies,
the boys say.

In their old age those youngsters will lose
their teeth, the old men laugh.



LETTER FROM POZNAŃ

A new Polish reality show will feature
opposite-sex couples only
a family means a man and a woman
a man and a woman!

a man and a woman…

(The reality show must safeguard
law and public morality)
gay marriage is against the constitution
opposite-sex couples only

A family is a union of a man
and a woman

which explains
50,000 vacancies
in the transportation sector



            †

Everyone has a cross to bear.
The lemur too.

translated from the Polish by Piotr Gwiazda

Read the original in Polish

The Polish versions of these poems appear in Grzegorz Wróblewski’s recent collections Choroba Morgellonów (Poznań, 2018) and Implanty (Łódź, 2018). These are thus relatively recent poems, conspicuously marked by Poland’s shift to the right in the past decade. With their dry yet biting subtlety, they protest the mixture of reactionary nationalism and social conservatism propagated by Poland’s current government. Even the least directly confrontational among them, “Young and Old in the Park,” can be read as an allegory of the ideological polarization in Polish society. Still, as these poems “jump species” (the references to hawks and lemurs), we suspect the critique here is meant to extend beyond the current situation in Poland. Moreover, the dismay, exasperation, and sarcasm of Wróblewski’s commentary is countered by his subversive humor: what Sharon Mesmer calls his “melancholic hilarity.” Through keen observation and clever appropriation, Wróblewski shows the grip of ideology, both secular and religious, on human attitudes and language.

These five poems will be included in a volume of Wróblewski’s new and selected poems in English translation, currently in preparation.

Grzegorz Wróblewski was born in Poland in 1962 and has lived in Denmark since 1985. He is one of Poland’s major contemporary writers. He has published over a dozen volumes of poetry, prose, and drama in Poland, as well as several books in Denmark and other countries. As a visual artist, he has exhibited his paintings in various galleries in Denmark, Germany, England, and Poland. English translations of his poetry appear in Our Flying Objects (trans. Joel Leonard Katz, Rod Mengham, Malcolm Sinclair, Adam Zdrodowski, Equipage, 2007), A Marzipan Factory (trans. Adam Zdrodowski, Otoliths, 2010), Kopenhaga (trans. Piotr Gwiazda, Zephyr Press, 2013), Let’s Go Back to the Mainland (trans. Agnieszka Pokojska, Červená Barva Press, 2014), and Zero Visibility (trans. Piotr Gwiazda, Phoneme Media, 2017).

Piotr Gwiazda was born in Poland in 1973 and has lived in the United States since 1991. He is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and the translator of Grzegorz Wróblewski’s Kopenhaga (Zephyr Press, 2013) and Zero Visibility (Phoneme Media, 2017). He is also the author of three books of poems, Aspects of Strangers (Moria Books, 2015), Messages (Pond Road Press, 2012), and Gagarin Street (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2005), and has published two books of literary criticism: US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979–2012 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). For more information about his work, visit: http://piotrgwiazda.net/.