Polish

Marzanna Kielar

Marzanna Kielar Marzanna Bogumila Kielar was born in 1963 in Goldap, a small town in the North-Eastern corner of Poland. She studied philosophy in Warsaw and lives there now, working as a teacher in a college.
In 1991 she published her first poem in Czas Kultury. Since that time her poems have not only appeared in many Polish periodicals, but have also been translated into many languages: Czech, Slovenian, Macedonian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Swedish, German, French and also English.
Marzanna's poems don't reflect her philosophical studies. On the other hand they do reflect the country she was born in. The area around her home town, German East Prussia before the war, is a country of verdant hills, thousands of lakes and vast forests. Marzanna's poems are full of images and often they are images of a sunny landskape.
Below we present two poems from her book "Materia Prima". Some of the poems below have been translated by Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese and published in America in a collection entitled "Salt Monody". I must say I am not very happy with the translations by Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese, therefore here I propose alternetive versions of these poems.

* * *

1. the silence of dawn cut to the bone, wait until at least wind returns and clouds gather the soot, until some light blows in through cracks; until at least a spoon resting on a saucer flashes or papers and sheets lying in disorder catch light and fire seizes the dry wood of uncovered objects. 2. light torn to strips supports trees, steaming are bowels of waters, it dawns. The sun is only a crack in an iron cauldron of fire.

NAMES OF GOD (A POEM OF EASTER) the oldest of all days (a leafless bough cast into a pit of night, covered with salty whitefrost). In the same sheet stained with blood they covered him with when he was born

HAWK

fabric of water crumpled by cold wind, dark blue, heavy, torn apart; sudden flutter of wings far from shore – the lake glitters in sunshine like a steel blade blood, materia prima. Combs blindly the depth that fills it chokes it

* * * How will you die, O bright day, so attached to yourself, with the sun between the pine-needles, with this bright light in the back mirrors of my car as I am driving into a forest road, with the reddening ball above the darkened, ploughed-over earth beyond the ponds, over the furrow sensitive to the touch of feet. When the wind opens the sky – and there are no footprints in the treetops. O day – with a yellowing nettle on a footpath leading down to the water, with a heedless gnat sitting on my wrist - will I die? So attached to you and to the night, to love. The sky like a log stripped of bark pressed into the turf of hills. Below it a rugged leaves of sorrel are crowded in a wet bunch. My gaze clings to the cloud, its greyness – its upturned burning edge.

FORECAST

Hunting scenes and beggar scenes, love scenes, war panoramas, grouse courting fields, racecourses, fashion houses, menageries, mashine parks glowing cities moored in the docks of night the radiance that is being freed from freezing fumes, tearing itself from the depth when the ceiling of clouds over the sea lifts slightly and the sky. with rugged gulfs and straits, flows around the cumulus clouds – all this will be consumed by fire. It won’t even turn into a script of shards and bones. Waters will evaporate. Froth of clouds and mountains, alternation of deaths and ressurections, all will flee and the wild, joyful soul of the world won’t form inclusions under the sand blown in. Or in bogs, river deltas, swamps, asphalt, amber. Roots, undercut, will die at their posts, pumping life into full blown buds of days. And the earth will disappear in the throat of emptiness like a speckled egg found in a shallow hole in time lined with grass. O fire, who knowest everything what permafrost will be covered by this ash, this bone-deep blackness.

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