alexandrachciuk-celt

[alexandrachciuk-celt]

Sandra Celt Essays and scholarship

 Mythfits, Gynetic, Di, etc., are not typos; they are intentional.

Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking

Part 1

by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph.D.  All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

A Personal Preface

RELIGION, MYTH, AND ECONOMICS

   Ruminations on Religion

   The Mythfits

   Capitalism with a Human Face

   The Passion of the Passion

   An Idiosyncratic Religion Bibliography

THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL CRITICISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE

   Defusing Culture Shock

   Wit, Witchcraft, and Wisdom: The Conflict Preventers

   USA, Inc.: Change of Policy Needed

   Au Pair Means Everybody Wins

   Anglos and Insects

   The Di is Cast

   The American Dream, Perverted

   A Holistic Approach to Counterterrorism

FORECASTS

   Gynetic Engineering

   Toward an Anthropology of the Future

   The Kom Dynasty (China)

   Goodbye Future!

Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking

by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph.D.  All Rights Reserved.

                  Preface

   Horses do not wear blinders for their own benefit, but for the convenience of owners who want to keep them "focused" (a euphemism for "limited")--although at least the contraptions are mechanical and easily removed.  The blinders worn by people, however, are much more problematic, as they are generally internalized in early childhood, long before the person has been able to develop any kind of critical thinking; like a neurosis, they have to be dismantled cautiously, step by step, as a chick chips away at its eggshell from the inside.  (In savagely repressive societies, any blinder-dismantling must be clandestine so as not to jeopardize physical survival, since overtly disobedient slaves are usually not suffered to live.)  Blinders make us sacrifice the fullness of our human potential for someone else's convenience; paraphrasing Theodore Dreiser, we do not live, but are being lived by an organism which needs millions like us in order to express itself.  Which means that we might as well be ants.

   The purpose of this volume is to help dismantle blinders and build holistic (meaning synthetic and stereoscopic) vision for people who want to stop being prisoners of their culture, be they budding diplomats hoping to avoid ethnocentrism; students groping toward a major in anthropology, comparative literature, or international studies; entrepreneurs wishing to do business in a baffling country; conscientious tourists anxious to get the most from their travels by honing their observation and interpretation skills; retirees eager to expand their horizons; graduate students fishing for a dissertation hypothesis; teachers and journalists curious about the dynamics of culture change; or even social-science experts intrigued about de-specialization's ability to stimulate creative thinking and build bridges between disciplines.

   The value of such vision can be demonstrated by analogy with plane and solid geometry: a two-dimensional triangle has 180 degrees, a three-dimensional one 270. A less theoretical advantage can be gleaned from the following negative example: a German electronics giant sold its fax technology to the Japanese a few decades ago because it did not want to compete with its own telex division.  Evidently nobody possessed the cross-cultural awareness to realize that Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam are virtually the only Asian countries that use the Latin alphabet and can thus send telexes.  Until the advent of fax technology, for instance, Taiwanese businesspeople had to laboriously number-code their ideographic Chinese characters in order to be able to send telexes at all.  The fax divestiture was thus a financial disaster.

   We need holistic thinking to help us in creative management of the future, and should start by letting go of outdated solutions and counterproductive policies.  As I mentioned in "USA, Inc.: Change of Policy Needed" (International Law Review, 1992), corporate thinking is not necessarily appropriate diplomacy.  Americans who believe that we will be as great as we were from 1946 to 1973 if we act the way we did then are confusing cause and effect: actually, we only had the luxury of behaving the way we did because we were great.  "Recalibrating Bilingual Education" (in my separate compendium, "Thought for Food: Adventures in Language and Literary Scholarship") and "Au Pair Means Everybody Wins" show why some bilingual education and the au pair system as presently practiced are counterproductive.  May holistic thinking also help keep diplomacy and economics from falling into the traps of their own ultimately destructive interplay of myopic self-interest.  Examples would be our former knee-jerk anti-Communism (which supported any dictator who made the right noises) and big business' present addiction to cheap labor, which is greatly increasing China's military and economic power and sending the U.S. into financial ruin and a re-feudalized economy.  Doing business with China entails entering into a joint venture, typically with the People's Liberation Army; the Chinese military is thus making money hand over fist, and they are not using it to buy flowers.

    The fullness of human experience can also be limited by the blinders imposed on people by their field of specialization, which makes it easy to overlook interdisciplinary and intercultural connections like the impact of child abuse upon a society's national character.  My ambition is to raise people's consciousness about how any society, language, or discipline, like a work of art, is a consistent pattern which emphasizes those elements which are expedient to it and de-emphasizes (or even sacrifices) the inconvenient ones.  The essays in this book are meant to provide a general introduction to various aspects of the vast field of international studies along the lines of "something for everyone," and thus contain sections as ostensibly disparate as travel impressions, language and literature, intercultural diplomacy, and social criticism.  They are meant to function as ideational hors d'oeuvres; once the intellectual appetite has been whetted in the direction of a particular specialty, it can easily go elsewhere for myriad highly focused monographs of an advanced scholarly nature.

   The essays will probably strike the typical reader as idiosyncratic--enjoyed for their "unique perspective" by some and decried as childish or stupid by those who cannot distinguish between maturity (or reason) and convention.  My viewpoint is probably attributable to having been raised in almost half a dozen societies and languages before I was six (the "magic age" at which the intuitive hemisphere of the brain begins to lateralize to the logical one), which means I soon realized that there is no single correct way to do or say anything any more than there is a single correct way to cook carrots.  (Social scientists say that children are the best linguists and cultural anthropologists in the world.)  In other words, I was not socialized thoroughly enough in any of an overlapping plethora of systems to don any particular society's blinders; even if I wanted to be conventional, I would not know which convention to pick.  As a perennial nowhere-woman, however, I believe I see the world more clearly than it sees itself because I do not identify with any in-group or knee-jerk sectarianism.

   "USA, Inc." and "When Language Is Not Really the Problem" (in Thought for Food) focus on cross-cultural issues encountered in my personal and professional experience and show the enormity of the damage misunderstandings and counterproductive policies can cause.  "The Mythfits" and "Anglos and Insects" hints how society can bamboozle conventional people by selling them their own clichés.  For instance, an astute public-relations company can easily exonerate the authorities for administrative failures by trotting out magic words such as "freedom" and "choice" to sell the concept of charter schools instead of improving the existing system, as if the absence of decent public education were somehow liberating.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe formulated it perfectly: a slave who thinks he's free is the biggest slave of all.

   In addition to the syncretic (synthetic and stereoscopic) view formed by a multilingual environment, my instinct and training as a teacher, translator, and interpreter make me try to bring people together and explain problems so as to prevent or defuse tension.  There is also the possibility that this is partially a "female thing," since the corpus callosum is 40% larger in women than in men; if it contains connective tissue between the hemispheres of the brain, as believed by some researchers, that would explain why men can totally focus on one stimulus and completely tune out everything else, while women are better able to integrate the rational and the intuitive.  This could be part of our phylogenetic substratum: a hunter who cannot concentrate is unlikely to catch game, and a mother who knows nothing but durability calculations for load-bearing reinforced concrete will probably not see her children survive. My syncretic viewpoint is apparently supported by science.

   I further find that some correlations not only fraudulently imply causality, but also have the irrelevant congruence of two measurements of the same phenomenon measuring each other.  For instance, if we take a classroom where the students are allowed to sit wherever they like, and thereupon find that those sitting in the front rows get better grades, I contend that the seating sequence does not cause the grades, nor vice versa; rather, both measure something entirely different, namely the students' motivation, and are thus skewed in the same direction.

   Furthermore, science is not proof, but disproof: it is unscientific to say that something is not possible without testing it, and you need to have a hypothesis (or at least a hunch) before you can test anything.  Borrowing an image from theoretical physics, we can visualize the imagination as ice-crystals ramifying in search of support like morning-glory tendrils, spinning multiple possibilities into tiny nowheres, waiting to be channelled into the realm of a single concrete reality.

   Societal blinders typically cause people to perceive superficial differences rather than underlying similarities or latent connections (and sometimes be lulled into glossing over significant differences because of similarities in style or vocabulary).  "Defusing Culture Shock" and "The Mythfits" include several examples of the unnecessary culture shock thus engendered: why suffering in noble silence can cause you to lose a case in a U.S. court; whether movie stars are entitled to refuse to give autographs; why making eye contact with self-important officials can be misinterpreted as disrespect in Italy; and why smiling in anticipation can deprive you of refreshments in New Guinea.  Other aspects of social criticism and culture change include thoughts on the effects of technology (the electoral-college system in "When Bush Comes to Shove" and sex selection in "Gynetic Engineering"), de-specialized thinking in "A Holistic Approach to Counter-Terrorism," and returning a warped system to the basics ("Au Pair Means Everybody Wins").  

   "The Di is Cast" uncovers the phenomenon of unexpected correspondences: I believe unsupportive personnel practices on the U.S. labor market may have helped Americans identify with Princess Di.  "Wit, Witchcraft, and Wisdom" presents some examples of how dissimilar processes can have similar outcomes in different societies--in this case, functioning as conflict preventers.  In addition, I can see how immigration to Israel caused by economic problems in the former Soviet Union is exacerbating the Arab-Israeli conflict, and further believe there may be a link between third-world hunger and AIDS.  Poverty has driven Africans to hunt and eat primates, causing transmission of a slow virus to which said primates are immune.  Cannibals often suffer from similar lentiviruses, such as the "kuru sickness" of New Guinea, especially if they eat components of the nervous system and the brain.  (Significantly, the British bovines affected by "mad cow disease" had been fed the ground-up spinal columns of other cows.  The whole syndrome may simply be nature's way of weeding out cannibalism.  I am surprised that European government ministers knew so much less than an agro-klutz like me.)  However, when I thought this hypothesis out loud, not even my own husband believed me--until evidence surfaced twelve years later in a documentary film excerpt showing Africans eating apparently raw chimpanzee flesh.  Cf. also Edward Hooper's The River, which attributes AIDS to a polio vaccine that used cells from non-human primates in order to attenuate the live virus.

   Similarly, Americans who disdain the corruption in foreign countries fail to realize that the term deserves to be extended to privileged insiders "working the system" in Washington and to shareholders making exploitative profits from third-world labor.  Cross-culturally speaking, corruption seems to be tolerated as long as everyone gets a cut.  American stockholders did not rebel against exorbitant revenues until CEO's started skimming off too many millions in bonuses for themselves, just as the Iranians did not revolt against the Shah until he purchased military toys instead of sharing the windfall oil monies of the mid-'seventies.  Similarly, American university professors denounce fraternity hazing, but fail to realize that it differs only in style from their own behavior, from the sadism of Ph.D. oral exams to various types of academic abuse.  (Cannibalism exists in only two places in the world: New Guinea and academe.)  Also, the Chinese appear to believe that no one will object to their brutal conquests as long as they are termed "liberation."

   In other words, cultural differences and culture change are often a matter of style rather than substance, divergent viewpoints which can converge like parallax in stereoscopic vision. 

     As elucidated in greater detail in my separate compendium "Thought for Food: Adventures in Language and Literary Scholarship"), for the better part of the 20th century semanticists from Korzybski to Chase to Weinberg have pointed out that the distinctions made by language are often specious--corruption and gain, body and soul, time and space.  In fact, I think my most incisive input is in the field of language because of my early childhood cosmopolitanism and later linguistic training and experience.  The idiosyncratic introduction is followed by essays on subjects such as bilingual education, cross-cultural problems, translation theory, poetics, song lyrics, and literary criticism.

   This leads me to my forecasts.  By no means do I have visions; if I am even a prophet (of sorts) at all, it is merely because I can foresee the logical consequences of what is happening now, such as that it is only a matter of time before a runaway subway crashes into the train in front of it.  Being in the first wave of the postwar baby boom has also trained me to anticipate my needs, as everyone else will soon be wanting whatever I do.  As an example: I wrote "Gynetic Engineering" in the early 'seventies because I knew that amniocentesis and selective abortion would be likely to counter-select daughters, especially in male-supremacist societies, thus interfering with the near-1:1 sex ratio which is largely a product of the randomness of nature.  Not even Ms. Magazine was interested in publishing my article.  A quarter-century later my prediction came true, except that the instrument of choice has become ultrasound rather than amniocentesis.  I predict that China (and probably the Indian subcontinent as well) will become more belligerent in the future because a similar surplus of disgruntled unmarried men is precisely what made the Vikings so dangerous a thousand years ago: the explosive social  combination of primogeniture and polygyny produced a plethora of ruthless marauders who could otherwise never have land, jobs, prospects, or women.

   In studying the science of anthropology--which, like linguistics, provided the theoretical substratum for what I had instinctively known all along--I was particularly struck by two factors: the difference between the hunter-gather and peasant mentalities, and the extent to which a society's economic system and "modal personality" (similar to the "national character") largely correlate with its child-rearing practices--although any causality must certainly have become circular by now.  "Toward an Anthropology of the Future" dissects the differences in mentality (such as between the U.S. and China), shows how these differences affect aspects as surprising as employment practices, academic abuse, and grief, and forecasts some possible repercussions.

    In international business, China can be expected to act less like a friend than a predatory partner who sucks the company dry of know-how and clients.  I am basing my expectation on China's historically having figured as a mercantilistic super-corporation whose CEO's are subject to no regulation or  accountability, except for periodic slave rebellions when abuses become intolerable.  Ask any Tibetan, Vietnamese, or Korean how Chinese officials have been treating conquered peoples for thousands of years--and they are scarcely less beastly to their own, whom they treat as subjects rather than citizens.  (I believe the Chinese supreme ambition of "serving the state" is code for "bullying people.")  China can be expected to become increasingly dangerous as it grows in strength thanks to cheap exports (textiles, footwear), so we will wind up kicking ourselves in the behind with our own shoes, especially since the former Soviet Union no longer represents any kind of military counterweight.  I hope I am wrong, but I believe it is only a matter of time--and time means nothing to these people--before the Chinese become a ghastly economic, ecological, and military threat, especially if we are significantly weakened by Al Qaeda.  See "The Kom Dynasty" for further details, especially the historical continuity of Chinese politics and the Mandate of Heaven theory. 

   Finally, "Goodbye Future" is a glum forecast on the manner in which I expect corporate greed, individual irresponsibility, and external military and financial threat to intersect within a generation or two, drawing a parallel to what happened in Poland several centuries ago because the nobility sold their own commoners down the river for their own selfish gain.  People do not seem to realize that Communism is actually state capitalism and that the logical extreme of private capitalism is a feudal economy. Globalization merely increases the multinationals' hunting-grounds: the recent destructive hedge-fund attacks on the Thai baht can be likened to a modern international fox-hunt, where an entire year's crop falls victim to some aristocratic sport.  Computers may actually have accelerated the latter process in the sense that corporate city-states have now been joined by those in cyber-space.  At any rate, I can hear Adam Smith and Henry Ford chastising us from the grave: "Have you not learnt/ haven't you learned anything from what we taught about enlightened self-interest and broad-based prosperity?"  I wrote "Capitalism with a Human Face" to explain the rudiments of capitalism to my Eastern European friends, whose economic logic was warped by totalitarian illogic.  Communism is in fact a religion (much more so than Buddhism, which is essentially atheistic): God is the Revolution, the Church is the Party, and the apparatchiks are the priests.  No wonder Communists are prone to financial failure: what can a priest possibly learn about economics by sitting around in church all day?  Please see "Ruminations on Religion" for a personal but considered view of the interplay between religion and economics.

   Of course, I hope I am wrong about the sinister forecasts, but dismissing them will not make me so. Let us hope that this collection of essays can help us dismantle or at least partially perforate our blinders, so we can stop viewing factors in isolation, distinguish the basic similarities under the glare of superficial differences, and recognize that much of what we take for granted is artificial or serendipitous and thus unsustainable in the long run.  This will help us plan better for a radically different future and make the systemic changes without which we cannot survive, let alone flourish.

RELIGION, MYTH, AND ECONOMICS

Germi-Nations

      Human beings have a phylogenetic need for community, as our ancestors could hardly have survived unless they stuck together after coming down from the trees; this probably explains the instinctive attraction of communalist philosophies based on this phylogenetic need subsequently hijacked by dictators routinely and with ease.  Hunter-gatherers lived in bands of 25-50 people, practicing infanticide if necessary to prevent overpopulation, whereas agriculturalists could form tribes of 500 or more because of increased food production.

   Just as most of the sciences grew out of an initially amorphous philosophical movement, I believe religion, myth, and economics began to germinate with the advent of agriculture and trade, much like stem cells develop into various organs.  Hunter-gatherer economics and religion are usually small-scale affairs characterized by loose trade networks,  animistic thanksgiving, and shamanic initiation rituals. Agriculture can feed greater numbers of people but is more problematic if famine is to be avoided; it requires much more elaborate management and planning (sowing, harvesting, storage, trade).  I suspect that organized religion grew from the need to predict and influence the future, much as advertising was born from the need to entice people to buy existing mass-produced goods and services; purchases had theretofore involved the ordering and manufacture to the customer's specifications of items that existed only as an idea.

Ruminations on Religion

   Just as I believe language is a prehistoric work of art, I hold religion to be prehistoric science because it attempts to construct a system to make sense of the world in general.  I am too much of an international comparatist to think of religion as being anything but entirely man-made, which is probably why I am partial to Buddhism: it admits to being man-made, a teaching philosophy with no supreme being.  This essay details my personal but considered opinions on the topic; students of comparative religion are as likely to find it simplistic as laics are to find it outrageous, although I of course think it eminently logical.

   According to French anthropologist Emile Durkheim, in any society God is society and embodies the values said society needs to survive.  The Latin etymology, religio, shows that the function of religion is to bind people together.  It is thus not surprising to find a widespread congruence between a society's religion and its economy; we need only remember the ministers of the antebellum South preaching that Africans were innately inferior because they were descended from Noah's disrespectful son Ham.  Probably the most perfect congruence to date has been Communism: God is the Revolution, the Party is the Church, and the apparatchiks are the priests--who can hardly know anything about economics because they spend all their time in church.  Since the system conferred almost total economic control to virtual theologians, it was only a matter of time before it failed--imagine what would have happened if medieval clerics had had the power to determine the price of bread.  Christianity and Communism were both synthesized by penniless Jewish philosophers faced with a society in flux; both started out as love and poetry and wound up as bookkeeping and control.  Another problem of Communism is that it promised a pie on earth, which is eminently disprovable (and has been disproved), whereas Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism promise a pie in the sky or the next time around, which is eminently non-disprovable.

   Anthropologists say that the function of myth (a primary element in nearly every religion) is to justify the supremacy of society; I take this to mean that it betrays the individual almost by definition because it legitimizes the status quo at his or her expense.  In my opinion, the main function of religion is in fact social control, and this would include systems which do not avail themselves of the supernatural, such as Communism and the folk religions of China. 

   An instance of religion making economic sense would be India's reverence for sacred cows, which wander about like scavengers (the Indians call them "brake inspectors") because in order to provide profitable amounts of milk or meat, they would need a lot of grazing space or fodder, something which an overpopulated country can ill afford.  For the same reason, Indian cows produce very few calves, half of which are gelded for use as oxen.  However, no matter how skinny, barren, and milkless a cow may be, she still produces dung, which is the principal fuel of the Indian countryside!  (My Indian friends misunderstood this as an indication of their society's superiority rather than a general vindication of tradition.) 

   In my considered opinion, India's belief in karma, caste, and reincarnation is also economic in origin.  According to anthropologists, the societies most likely to believe in reincarnation are those in which a person's social group is very small (such as tiny hunter-gatherer bands or the restricted circles of caste systems).  Following this logic, you cannot accept the death of someone so close to you and therefore have to endow him or her with another life.  However, this argument fails to convince me, since it implies that the person so close to you now is just a reincarnation of someone else.  In the case of India, I believe reincarnation and the caste system combined to justify the socio-economic inequality inevitably following the Aryan conquest, the resulting primitive concept of "karma" (you deserve what you are now because of what you did in a previous lifetime) being the earliest instance of social Darwinism I know of.  I believe that original sin is the Catholic Church's misinterpretation of karma, brilliant and probably intentional because it gives man a built-in defect which only the Church can cure, while karma is something you make all by yourself, and it can be good.  For instance, in India a Hindu engineer who took care of the fountains at one of the gardens engaged me in conversation and explained to me that I must have done a lot of good for people in my past life because I was now free to travel about.  What a nice explanation! 

   The problem with the caste myth is that the top dogs become abusive when they view this as privilege without responsibility, whereas the underdogs vegetate in unproductive passivity, figuring that they deserve their lot and can do nothing about it except blindly endure.  However, consumerism, universal suffrage, and prosperity have recently started making India's lower classes impatient and resentful of their inferior status, so I would not be surprised to see a caste-based bloodbath erupt in the future (of course I hope I am wrong).  Sexual inequality is a further problem: daughters are viewed as liabilities, not assets, largely because the grooms' families insist on huge dowries despite the fact that the dowry system was officially outlawed in the sixties.  According to a Sixty Minutes segment, some two brides are burned to death every day in Delhi alone when their families cannot come up with additional dowry payments demanded retroactively by their in-laws.  The selective abortion of female fetuses subsequent to USG or amniocentesis also worries me almost as much as for India as it does for China, since societies with an overpopulation of unmarried have-not males tend to be warlike, or at least nasty (cf. the Vikings a thousand years ago).  I expect a dearth of females to accentuate the existing military imperialism of China and inward antagonism of India within a few decades.

   So what happened to prehistoric science's original attempt to make sense of the world?  The great religions all seem to have started out idealistically, as poetry and love, then degenerated into bookkeeping and control (and often intolerance or even violence) when they extended to the society at large and became institutions.  Why?  I have the suspicion that cynical conventionalists want to know what the absolute minimum is that they must perform in order to get credit, and thus nitpick "Exactly what do you mean by (whatever)?"--which explains why we now have all these rules.  I need no scary myth or detailed instructions to deter me from being a bad person; I simply try to be a good one.

   This view also helps me comprehend the principles behind and similarities among the various religions and use India's love of speculation (as distinct from China's love of classification) to formulate a few hypotheses which conventional people will probably  reject.  I reached the conclusion that Jesus must have studied Buddhism and/or Hinduism; after all, Emperor Ashoka sent missionaries as far west as Syria, and Alexander the Great brought back a host of new religious ideas.  (However, Jesus apparently did not have enough time to do a thorough job; being a teacher myself, I can see his disciples clutching at half-remembered phrases they did not quite understand.)  For instance, the arhats flanking a Buddha statue in Kyongju, South Korea, are pronouncing the syllables "ah" and "om," i.e. the first letter of the alphabet and the sound of the universe; this appears to be the origin of the New Testament's "alpha and omega" and makes a lot more sense than having a Jewish carpenter speaking Greek to a bunch of Jewish fishermen.  Both Christianity and Buddhism were casteless, which appealed to the lower classes and probably explains why the orthodox rabbis and brahmins felt their power to be threatened.  Catholicism's "resurrection of the body" sounds suspiciously like a misunderstanding of the principle of reincarnation.  The ancient Judaism which formed the original basis of Christianity had no concept of an afterlife.  Nor of a Trinity, which must surely have come from Hinduism: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer, each in conjunction with his female consort.  Interestingly enough, Shiva is also the god of love, which I eventually decided is not a paradox because love includes change, both evolutionary and revolutionary.  So I would call Shiva the god of change and Vishnu the god of no-change, who operate in timeless oscillation because the Creator has since become otiose (a deity who creates the world and then retires).  I wish geologists would learn from this example: catastrophism and uniformitarianism do not necessarily exclude each other.

   I view Buddhism as a reformation of Hinduism because it provides a method for faster and more systematic improvement of your karma for future lives, to the point where you can eventually reach "Nirvana," a blissful state of eternal enlightened nonexistence ("Buddha" means "enlightened one") which releases you from the tiresome treadmill of suffering and rebirth.  The symbol of this process of perfectibilization is the lotus, a flower which grows in filthy water, overcoming its slimy origins to rise into something beautiful and pure.     The Hinayana or Theravada ("lesser vehicle") school of Buddhism is only interested in personal salvation in the sense of achieving Nirvana, whereas the Mahayana ("greater vehicle") has produced bodhisattvas, saintly figures who are entitled to Nirvana but instead choose to remain behind to help their fellow sentient beings.  I call Jesus the Bodhisattva of the West; in the Gospels, he stated explicitly that he was a Son of Man, not of God, but, like the Buddha, he was deified in spite of himself, especially after Constantine imposed Christianity upon the Roman Empire and made it hierarchical so as to render it more palatable to worshippers of Olympian gods.  According to "Frontline: From Jesus to Christ," originally aired by PBS on April 4 and 8, 1998, the last thing Jesus meant to do was to start a new religion.  He merely wanted people to follow the spirit rather than the letter of the law (if your ox falls into a well on the Sabbath, don't tell me you're not going to try to save him).  His exhortation to not go by the book all the time was of course perceived as a threat to the power of the priests, who had after all written the book.  Jesus wanted to get people to think for themselves; how ironic that the religion based on his teachings has become one of the most unthinkingly dogmatic in the world.  As an example: priests could marry until about a thousand years ago (they still can in the Coptic, Uniate, and Eastern Orthodox rites), but the Catholic Church put a stop to marriage (but not to sexual activity) because too many of them were bequeathing Church property to their children.  Why should all these poor guys suffer now because Rome applied a wrongheaded remedy to their larcenous colleagues a millennium ago?  Besides, the celibacy rule discourages normal men from becoming priests.

   Many Buddhist tenets became reabsorbed into Hinduism around the eighth century (as an example, the Buddha was reclassified as Vishnu's ninth incarnation), whereupon the Muslim invasion delivered the coup de grâce: what was left of Buddhism tended to concentrate in defenseless monasteries, so it was easier to eradicate than the amorphous, disorganized domesticity of Hindu practices, which would have required killing virtually all the people.  Example: a Muslim marauder destroyed Nalanda University a few hundred miles east of Varanasi and killed the thousands of students and Buddhist monks.  Buddhism would probably have become extinct had it not been for all those texts translated by conscientious committees and safely stored in Tibet.

   Having been the object of so much translation activity, the texts of the great religions are also vulnerable to mistranslation.  In particular, translators who work into a foreign language rather than their own (such as the non-native Greek of the New Testament compilers) are perfect paradigms for the mistakes engendered by the non-native mind-set, my favorite example being the virginity of Mary.  In the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, to which the New of course made reference for purposes of legitimacy, Isaiah 7:14 prophesied that an unmarried girl would conceive, using the word "almah"; if he had wanted her to be a virgin (a human female with an intact hymen), he would have said "bethulah."  Two thousand years of human behavior have thus been conditioned by a mistranslation! (Admittedly, however, the problem was intermittent in English: five hundred years ago "virgin" meant "young girl," and what we now refer to as a virgin was called a "maid.")  Other examples: (1) "in the beginning was the Word" which "became flesh" ("logos" means not only "word," but also "principle," as in bio-logy, psycho-logy, so it should have read "The principle came first, and thereupon became embodied"), and (2) St. Jerome's hilarious misunderstanding of the Old Testament's unpointed Hebrew turned "rays" into "horns" (he should have said that Moses' face was shining--rays were emanating from his face--instead of causing the prophet to grow "horns").  Parenthetically, the Christian fundamentalists' controversy between intelligent design and evolution also turns out to be a non-issue based on a mistranslation: Genesis was not composed in English, but in the Ugaritic dialect of Hebrew, wherein the creation verb (barah) does not exclude evolution.

   A holistic and relatively non-reverential approach also enabled me to get past the exotic, outdated begats and verilies of the King James translation and find my own prosaic but satisfying explanation of the Jesus story.  In For Your Own Good and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware (the Hannum couple's translation from the German won the American Translators Association prize around 1986), Swiss psychologist Alice Miller points out that Jesus' earthly parents have not been given enough credit.  Because of the prophecy, they raised him in an atmosphere of respect--the New Testament says they served him--at a time when parents tended to be abusive (spare the rod etc.), which means that he grew up to be rational and to foresee logical consequences instead of flailing captively in counterproductive emotions.  (The Romans are cruel, if you rebel they will cream you. Nobody listened.)  The establishment interpreted his logical teachings as a threat--imagine some hick preacher nowadays travelling to the big city of your choice and disputing the authority of the metro-area cardinal.  The local archdiocese would probably find some way to neutralize his influence, such as having him prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license.  After what I call Jesus' "temple tantrum" with the moneychangers, High Priest Caiaphas evidently decided to make a public example of the case: mess with my economic interests and I'll sic the Romans on you so fast your head will spin.  Unsuccessful in the two Jewish trials he had instigated against Jesus, he finally sent his trumped-up case and his thugs to the Romans because Rome had the death penalty.  Pontius Pilate reminds me of a judge or arbitrator attempting to resolve a dispute between exotic foreigners whose customs are so baffling and animosities so persistent that he finally throws up his hands in desperation (deal with it yourselves, just leave me out of it) because he knows the defendant to be innocent but fears a riot if he lets him go.  I suspect Jesus may actually not have died, since he was only on the cross for three hours and the nails pierced his palms, not his wrists, which was not how trained torturers operated; Pilate may have allowed a sham execution to satisfy the High Priest.

   The Pilate story shows how religion is sometimes superimposed upon a situation which is entirely unrelated, such as Northern Ireland (where the actual bone of contention is the legitimacy of the former British occupation) or the Balkans (where the conflict is a residue of the differences between the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires and the punitive dismemberment which followed World War I).  The Muslims in the former Yugoslavia are largely secular--how radical could they possibly be if their ancestors had only converted to Islam so as to elude taxation and prevent the Turks from kidnapping their little boys to become Janissaries in the infamous devsirme system?  I knew early on that the poor Muslims in the former Yugoslavia were paying for what the Turks had done half a millennium earlier, but nobody believed me until a PBS piece on Srebrenica (which aired January 17, 2000) documented General Radko Mladic saying exactly that.

   Thankfully, unlike 1914, the Russians are no longer so dogmatic that their knee-jerk sectarian solidarity with the Orthodox Serbs can cause a major war; the most they can do is prevent NATO from spanking their little brother.   From what I have seen of Eastern Europe, ethnic hatreds there are often almost tribal because the political borders do not coincide with the linguistic ones.  Once they do, the artificial instability is eliminated--and the people revert to what they were all along, namely intolerant peasants with fascistic tendencies. 

   That said, I contend as follows: Mohamed wanted to unify a bunch of scrappy, superstitious tribesmen and give them laws, but the scrappy, superstitious tribesmen snarled "Who are you to give us laws?" and chased him out of Mecca.  He saw how successful the Jews and Christians were with their divine-origin law, so he invented Islam in a hurry, often using simplified summaries of Biblical stories such as Abraham's sacrifice and Sheba's visit to Solomon; the purpose was to legitimize his legislation (advanced at the time, but pre-medieval in our days), which explains why his theology is so rudimentary that centuries of hadith interpretation had to supply it form.   If he had in fact been divinely inspired, he would have foreseen and prohibited things that did not yet exist, such as sex-change operations, and would have realized that converting a woman by promising she will be served by 72 (meaning "countless") beautiful houris in the afterlife is ridiculous.  This reinforces my suspicion that all religions are entirely man-made.

   People will always find or even manufacture pretexts if they want to hurt each other badly enough, which I fear is part of human nature.  I find that organized religion seems to be too easily used to bond groups into intolerance of other groups, cynically restricting the number of people who must be treated like human beings, and that many clerics are much more interested in cementing their power base than in helping the individual become a better person.  I need no system to try to be a good person or to see the similarities rather than the differences.  Much as the Bahai sect of Islam considers all religions to be expressions of the same basic truth, I interpret Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as attempts to explain that God is not a person, but a principle, namely that of perfectibility.  I view God as a process of such unfathomable majesty that our paltry attempts at understanding it are like an amoeba's trying to comprehend the theory of evolution; since most people are unable to love a process or principle, they need to anthropomorphize it and give it parental attributes. 

   I imagine it must be a tremendously mind-easing and anti-hypertensive comfort to think of yourself as the trusting child of a benevolent, omnipotent parent. I also concede that prayer has a powerful placebo effect and keeps unhappy people too busy to undertake actions which could engender negative consequences.  However, I cannot imagine that the awesome power which produced the star-soup photographed by the Hubble telescope could possibly be interested in micro-managing our dreary little lives, let alone applauding the destruction of the life it created or equating murder with martyrdom.  (A martyr is someone who suffers an injustice inflicted by another, not someone who himself inflicts injustice.)  Proof of the existence of God as perfectibility would include the fact that some abused children grow up to be relatively normal; if God did not exist, there would be no such possibility of improvement, victims would transmit the kicks they got in an immutably mechanical manner.  I believe the Buddhist lotus (purity overcoming and transcending its origin in filthy water) symbolizes such perfectibilization and have written the following haiku in praise of Chenrezig, the Tibetan version of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion:

                    Comforting womblike growls

                        Perfectibilization

                       True respect for life

The Mythfits

    Twice in my lifetime (Reagan and Trump) has the US elected a president who was a fictional character rather than a person:  an entertainer who sold his supporters their own collective projection based on movie  mythology.  A "me and the chimp" actor and a reality-show celebrity who fired fictitious employees can hardly know what they are doing, much less claim brilliant political insight; they have in fact greatly damaged this country, and not only by subjecting it to a three-trillion-dollar bubble of debt which could burst at any moment and lending form and legitimacy to negative impulses.  (I contend that anyone who identifies with a bully must be at least a wannabe bully himself.)  However, I believe that what I call the "mythfit" phenomenon has been developing for at least several decades as a "Tea Party" backlash against liberals.

   In terms of the formation and application of the blinders a society or other group imposes upon its members so as to protect itself from potential threats by unconventional behavior, myth (literally "story" in Greek) plays an absolutely crucial role because it clothes the ideology in a narrative imagery which is easy to understand and remember.  The societal myths people accept are shaped by the past and actually betray the individual almost by definition, since their function is to justify the existing system at his or her expense.  A perfect example is our purported individuality, which is a convention we paradoxically assert by buying mass-produced products--while the labor market in fact requires workers to suppress the personality almost entirely.

   Myth, especially when presented in something as pervasive as television, is an essential factor in promoting the kind of behavior which is good for society.  Our log-cabin economic myth was good for society 150 years ago, when rugged individualists were needed to settle the West; it makes us take responsibility for our failures because there are theoretically so many possibilities for success (it is common knowledge that 90% of new businesses fail within the first year).  Our society wastefully champions not farsighted big-picture planning, but a plethora of myopic solipsisms among which market factors thereupon select for viability.  The truth is that with 330 million lemmings scurrying in as many different directions, some of them are bound to get lucky; the proof is that the resulting variety includes successes every bit as self-absorbed and nonsensical as Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks. 

   Annemarie de Waal Malefijt, in her Hunter College lectures and her book Religion and Culture, said that the function of myth is to explain why things are the way they are and cannot be otherwise. (Myth often becomes consolidated into some form of religion, which I find usually starts out as love and poetry and winds up as bookkeeping and control.)  Our society once needed courageous loners to settle the West and still obsoletely encourages people to overcome impossible obstacles by denying their existence (or at least their subjective validity), a movie-of-the-week attitude which I consider responsible for the death of a child pilot in the recent past.  (Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy even goes so far as to claim that disease does not exist.)  We fail to realize that we are not nearly as omnipotent or as much in control of circumstances as our log-cabin myth wants us to believe--it wants us to assume personal responsibility for everything without questioning the impersonal system in any way.

   Another example of outdated myth: our glorification of pointless conflict is not necessarily the best way of doing things, let alone the only one.  In Brazil and Colombia respectively, virtually no struggle was required to eliminate slavery and institute women's suffrage.  Our myth makes our society reward obsession and even ruthlessness, so our leaders are predictably no more normal than actors who doggedly continue auditioning despite hundreds of rejections.

   The myths of China and Russia betray the individual to an even greater degree than our own, as they are based on the peasant mentality of conformity and fear of risk.  In his film "To Live," for instance, Zhang Yimou shows how the Chinese people blame themselves for tragedies actually caused by governmental stupidity; Russian popular culture glorifies suffering and endurance (which it has raised to the level of an art form) the same way that its American counterpart celebrates the overcoming of obstacles. I visited what was still the Soviet Union in 1991 because my experience with child abuse made me predict that the country would descend into chaos as soon as the people realized they were free.  Gorbachev was still in power; I was struck by how people said they finally had the kind of leader they could mourn when he died, as though mournworthiness were a useful administrative attribute.

   As for China, I have seen several innocent misinterpretations on the part of blindered Americans unfamiliar with Chinese myth.   As an example, some political experts believe Chinese diplomacy is open to change because it is so inconsistent, unfortunately failing to realize that it has an immutably consistent underlying function, namely manufacturing justifications for the military.  (Negotiating diplomacy with a Chinese diplomat is equivalent to negotiating a company's mergers-and-acquisitions policy with its public-relations manager.)  On a less sinister note, "Mulan" has been touted as a feminist movie, whereas it is in fact a traditional female twist on the mythical obligation of filial piety.  Another instance was "The Other Half of the Sky," a documentary of a trip to China made by Shirley MacLaine and friends several decades ago.  When asked what they looked for in a husband, the Chinese women uniformly answered "the correct political attitude," while the Americans valued things like "good looks" or "a sense of humor" and marvelled at the vastly different expectations.  I contend that the distinction is one of style rather than substance: in both countries, the women wanted husbands with attributes which would make them succeed, or at least survive.  The Chinese women were also probably told what to say.

     Societal blinders typically cause people to perceive superficial differences rather than underlying similarities.  For instance, in a 'seventies article on Mishima, Esquire magazine used the fact that the Japanese "hai" means both "yes" and "no" as an example of Oriental inscrutability.  In fact, "hai" means "the preceding is correct" ("right" or "affirmative" would be a better translation), which eliminates the supposed yes-no mystery entirely.  If you ask a Japanese "Don't you drink?" and he answers "Yes," he means "Yes, you are correct, I don't drink."

   Underlying similarities are very useful in analyzing--and possibly managing--the dynamics of social changes such as those imminently needed in the United States.  As pointed out by Carol Ember of the appropriately named Hunter College, Americans think like hunter-gatherers ("we take risks and forage in the supermarket").  When HG's start running out of resources, they move to another location; once there is nowhere left to move, they usually turn on each other in combative inward antagonism, which--unless countered by a transition to the pastoral or peasant mentality--eliminates all but the most brutal members of society,  limiting population numbers and fostering the survival of the nastiest.  The U.S. equivalent: the bubble of artificial postwar prosperity burst with the 1973 Arab oil embargo, initiating a downward spiral characterized by job desperation, road rage, pre-emptive hostility, and an up-yours attitude not present in more genteel decades (which were admittedly more racist and sexist).  Around 1980, there was a crime spree in New York's Times Square area: muggers brazenly robbed passersby, and when they ran out of victims, the bigger muggers attacked the smaller muggers and relieved them of their loot.  I expect such behavior to become more generalized as steady financial erosion renders economically spoiled Americans ever more desperate; college-educated natives now have more trouble finding jobs than non-English-speaking immigrants did before 1973. By means of the national debt, we are already raiding our children's trust fund in order to perpetuate the illusion of a postwar prosperity which was artificial to begin with.

     Speaking of children: David McClelland, in his Achieving Society, postulates that if children are raised by slaves, they become passive adults lacking in motivation; he uses cross-cultural and historical measurements as intriguing as the per-capita ratio of patent applications.  My interpretation: unlike parents, slaves are not interested in imparting useful knowledge to their charges; they just want to keep the young master amused and out of their hair.  If McClelland is correct, the fact that our children are increasingly being raised by TV sets and minimum-wage workers (the modern counterpart of slaves) will have a negative impact upon our future competitiveness. Incredibly, folks with children seem less worried about the future than my childless self.  I am a relatively sloppy housewife, but if the world were my house, I would never let it run such jeopardy.

   According to social scientists, the most violent groups are not those aspiring to power, but those trying to retain or regain it, which probably explains why the political rage of newly unemployed or underemployed white American males has coalesced into hateful violence. Whether by voting or violence, they vent their frustration at being deprived of what they refuse to understand was never a birthright at all, but a historical fluke, and tend to do so in a manner which is at best similar to the thoughtless thumbs watching Roman gladiatorial fights, and at worst militantly reactionary, with bombs being used to mourn the good old days.  I expect an increase in violence in the future until the formerly privileged white males die or become convinced of the need for a systemic change in mentality (the latter being unlikely).

   In the meantime, reactionary "mythfits" like Theodore Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh, and more recently the violent Trump supporters, advocate what is basically a throwback myth, clinging tenaciously to the past rather than modifying their behavior to accommodate the future.  They do not seem to realize that the perfect freedom they so idealize is actually mere license: dangerous to the individual, antithetical to equality, and only possible in isolation.  True freedom requires rules so as not to infringe upon the rights of others: my freedom to swing my fist ends where someone else's nose begins.  For instance, imagine what would happen to our roadways if there were no traffic regulations: bullies would quickly turn the resulting chaos into fascism.  This is hard to explain to Russians because their language has no word exactly corresponding to our "freedom," only volnya (doing whatever you feel like, even at someone else's expense) and svoboda (essentially the absence of restrictions on movement, which makes sense because serfs were legally bound to the land).  A typical Russian is likely to think Americans are not free because they have to obey rules.

   Elements of comparative literature might also help contribute to a useful interdisciplinary approach to understanding and managing social change.  They already proved useful toward the end of World War II, when the U.S. wanted to know how best to treat the about-to-be-vanquished Japanese but could of course not do anthropological field work (an effort ably documented in Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword).  Some of the parallels between the Unabomber and Oklahoma City attacks and the murders in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment are extremely startling, especially to someone who has studied anthropology and understands what the characters' names mean in Russian.   The root for Raskolnikov is "to separate," as in the Greek "krinein"; the protagonist's name can thus be translated as "the critic."  Other characters also have significant names, such as Razumihin (Reasoner) and Marmeladov (the spineless jelly that he is).  To a certain extent, the following considerations may also apply to rabid racists and other fanatics.

   Raskolnikov considers himself so superior to the mass of mankind that the laws of normal government do not apply to him and he is entitled to decide who deserves to live.  McVeigh, Kaczynski, and the violent Trumpists seem to have been moved by a similar sinister messianism which views government and technology as degenerate and evil and advocates a rabidly romantic return to the glory days of old, frighteningly reminiscent of Pol Pot.  They seem not to realize that our government is much less intrusive than that of, say, France, where bed and breakfasts have to be registered with the authorities, who classify the establishments and decide what type of food may be served.  Anyone who wants to make music in the Paris subways first has to audition with the Métro authorities, who determine whether the performer is good enough.  I could even quip that my major beef against the U.S. government is that it does not adequately protect me from terrorists and criminals.

   Mythfits have supported reactionary strongmen in the past: ask any Italian, Spaniard, or German where that got them.  The mythical glory days they idealize are based on an artificial prosperity which is due to factors that are unlikely to return. (A future example: whatever Dr. Kevorkian does or does not do, assisted suicide and euthanasia will become widely accepted once the burdensome postwar babies hit decrepitude.) After World War II, along with the global domination inherited virtually by default, Americans also won the economic lottery: since everyone else was prostrate, we were blessed with almost three decades of an insouciance whose bubble was not burst until the Arab oil embargo of the 'seventies.  Not only was the pie much bigger than it is now; women and minorities were largely excluded, so white men enjoyed such unprecedented prosperity that they could afford to be racist and sexist.  (A historical parallel would be the second half of China's Sung Dynasty, when trade-based riches enabled men to be so dismissive of women's contribution to the labor force that they instituted foot-binding.)  The working class was renamed "lower middle class" (never before had factory workers been middle-class), could afford modest versions of rich men's luxuries (second homes, boats, home-bound wives), and tended not to vote, being pacified by prosperity.  They did not realize that, like the proverbial second chick in nature programs, labor is only able to do well if capital is sated by exceptional abundance, a situation which has ceased to exist: capitalists have since reverted to predatory behavior reminiscent of robber-baron feudalism, such as gutting pension funds, outsourcing jobs so as to increase profits, and giving CEO's millions of dollars in bonuses.  One can almost hear Erich Fromm reminding us that capitalism's ethical contribution is a sense of fairness, or "Adam Smith" and Henry Ford fulminating, "Have you not learnt/haven't you learned anything from what we told you about enlightened self-interest and broad-based prosperity?"

   Too bad McVeigh, Kaczynski, and the violent Trump supporters did not have a Sonia to make them beg forgiveness for having sinned against the earth and to tell them that true justice not only does not, but actually cannot exist.  The reason, although she does not actually explain it: once a society becomes so large and complex that institutions take the place of one-to-one personal relationships, perfect freedom and justice are subsumed into an impersonal system which becomes so necessary that its occasional lack of congruence with reality is excused.  The recent film "Grand Canyon" can easily be viewed as a meditation on the value of institutions in an increasingly impersonal society.

   As long as we fail to realize that our societal myth is a convention like any other, we cannot even contemplate, much less implement, the systemic social changes which will soon be necessary if we want to avoid being destroyed by overpopulation, dwindling resources, global warming, staggering pollution levels, and the competitive infighting which will otherwise almost invariably become exacerbated in the near future.  Contrary to the belief of reactionary mythfits, the Wild West and its myth of absolute individualism and self-reliance are dangerously outdated; it is time for a new myth.

                The biggest slave of all is the one

                 who mistakenly thinks he is free.

                   --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Capitalism with a Human Face

(An Attempt to Help my Eastern European Friends)

   The word "economy" comes from the Greek "oikos" (house) and "nomos" (management).  The word "capital" comes from the Latin "caput," meaning "head," i.e. the first or most important thing; for instance, a country's most important city is called its capital, and capital punishment is the kind that makes you lose your head. In terms of economics, it refers to the investment which must be made before a business can start; Communist societies did not want to use the word "capital," so they substituted the term "means of production."  However, since the capital has to come from somewhere, it becomes obvious that Communism is also a form of capitalism, except that the investment is made by the government instead of by private individuals.  Similarly, the Communists translated Marx's term "Bürger" not as "citizen," which is what it means, but as the insulting "bourgeois."  (The word comes from the German "Burg" = fortress or city; a "Bürger" is thus a resident of a city.)  There are other terminological divergencies between government capitalism and private capitalism; in the latter, for instance, factory workers are considered part of the middle class, and in the United States they became very conservative with the prosperity that followed World War II.   Furthermore, capital is not necessarily money, nor money necessarily capital.  A translator's most important capital is literally inside his or her head--the knowledge needed to produce income.  If I spend $150 on an evening dress, that is not capital (unless my work requires an evening dress), but if I spend the same $150 on a second-hand typewriter which I can use to generate income by doing translations, it is capital. 

   Primitive hunter-gatherer and peasant societies of course had no modern economic systems, mostly because they had almost no need or opportunity for storing, saving, or investing.  In the absence of money or refrigeration, the best place to store extra food is in someone else's belly; that way, that person will give you food in the future.  In what is called a "subsistence ecnomy," relatives are important because they do things for you; for instance, the mother's brother may have the obligation of helping his newlywed nephew build a house.  For such people, relationships are their technology, and their wealth is represented by accumulated gratitude or obligations, not money; in other words, it is a form of power.  (This was the bitter lesson learned by an American who planned to buy Filipino peasants' rice and sell it at a profit; he did not realize that the landlords had godfatherly power relationships with the peasants.)  When a tribe or village is suddenly thrust into a modern economy, the elders typically complain that the young people (who earn most of the money) stop sharing.  Our phylogenetic memory of prehistoric cooperation probably explains the romantic attractiveness of Communism, Christianity, and idealistic groups such as Israeli kibbutzim and hippie communes.

   Once primitive societies make contact with each other, a certain amount of trading and specialization occurs.  For instance, peasants may barter grain in exchange for animals killed by hunters.  Many societies also use specific items for a single purpose, such as valuable shells or feathers to pay the bride-price; however, in order to qualify as proper money, a currency has to be good for everything, not just one thing.  Furthermore, since peasants actively produce food rather than just taking what nature has to offer, their land is able to support several hundred people per square mile (compared to no more than one for hunter-gatherers) which gives the peasants enormous numerical, and thus military, superiority.

   Economic factors greatly influence a society's outlook and religion.  For instance, part of the reason Americans value variety and freedom is that they are good for the economy--ironically, people assert their individuality by buying mass-produced products.  They think like nomad hunter-gatherers, valuing initiative, freedom, and experimentation even though 90% of new businesses fail within the first year; most Asians think more like peasants, valuing conformity, hierarchy, and stability, which makes sense when you realize that rice-farming requires the obedience of many people. In my opinion, India invented the belief in reincarnation and the caste system because the Aryan invaders had to justify their superiority and power over the vanquished natives.

   The decentralized feudal economies of the European Middle Ages needed little money except in the trade-based cities, as the peasants produced most of their own food.  The centralized feudal economies of Asia, especially China, are based on a principle called mercantilism, according to which every country or empire selfishly tries to maximize its income at the expense of everyone else. Europe's Protestant Reformation caused many people to defer immediate gratification and save their money for future pleasure or investment--as contrasted with the Polish aristocrats of the 16th-18th centuries, who spent all their money on imported luxuries instead of investing it in future-oriented business.  The Industrial Revolution further changed many Western economies from land-based to machine-based.  

   In 1776, the Scots philosopher Adam Smith (An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations) suggested that if blind selfishness is replaced by enlightened self-interest, the "invisible hand" of the market regulates the economy in a manner much more fair than any centralized autocracy.  In his book The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm stated that capitalism's major contribution to ethics has been the idea of fairness.  After all, I cannot insist on charging $200 for a pencil if my competition sells the same pencil for 20 cents. 

   We must underscore that self-interest which is myopic or predatory rather than enlightened will ultimately prove destructive.  A few examples: 1) Henry Ford realized that if he paid his workers well, they could afford to buy his cars--in other words, he discovered the value of broad-based prosperity.  Today's company executives, who fire thousands of people and give themselves hundred-million-dollar bonuses, fail to realize that all those firings will eventually hurt the economy as a whole, as people cannot be forced to spend money they do not have.  ("If no one has a job, who's supposed to buy the stuff?")  2) The competition by which the market regulates itself is not always limited to similar products.  For instance, when the telephone company had a monopoly in the U.S. several decades ago, it nevertheless spent millions of dollars a year on advertising.  Before you say that it is stupid to advertise when you have a monopoly, please remember that the phone company was one of the richest in the world--and it didn't get that way by being stupid.  It realized that if a woman only has $40 to spend and uses it to buy a dress, she cannot spend it on long-distance telephone calls.  The phone company was thus in direct competition with the dress company!  3) It is important to see the "big picture."  Several years ago a German company sold its fax division to East Asia, reasoning that they did not want to compete with their own telex division.  It did not occur to them that Chinese, Japanese, the Indian languages, and Korean do not use the Roman alphabet; for these people, telex technology is as useless as fax technology is useful.

   Thus, "market economy" is a better description than "capitalism," since most people do not have capital but do participate in the market.  Even those who buy shares of stock in a corporation often do so as a form of gambling rather than in order to attend shareholder meetings and decide on the company's course of action.  (Let us point out that society needs a few gamblers--they absorb risks the way ball-bearings absorb friction in mechanics.)  Stuart Chase has suggested new words--specuvesting or investulating--to characterize the combination of investment and speculation which drives most so-called capitalists.  It is theoretically possible for shares of stock to rise indefinitely, but in practice the price often drops, which creates the phenomenon known as the "bull" or "bear" market (optimistic/ rising prices vs. pessimistic/ falling prices).  These terms originated around 1848 among the California gold miners and ranchers: to combat boredom, these brutal people would tie a bull and a bear together, goad them to fight, and bet on which animal would win.  They noticed that the bull's strategy was aggressive--to slash from above with his hoofs and horns--while the bear's was defensive--lying down on his back, biting and clawing at the bull's belly from below.    

   Real life has disproved many of the predictions made in the past by economists, probably because the latter failed to take sufficient account of psychological and social factors.  In today's economy, which could be called capitalism without capitalists, most of the exploitation is being done not by the capitalists (the stockholders), but by management (the company executives who fire thousands of people and give themselves obscene bonuses).  Workers sometimes exploit their bosses, as in the case of an employee who gets paid for learning the business, saves up his money, and opens a store in competition with his former boss. 

   However, unconscious market factors are insufficient to regulate every aspect of society; safety, education, and medicine are prime exceptions.  Freedom itself in fact requires a certain amount of rules, otherwise fascism takes over: imagine what would happen if there were no traffic lights and road regulations!  As a further example, it is "penny-wise and pound-foolish" to hire sailors who know no English to navigate an American river, as they do not comprehend crises and thus cause expensive accidents.    There are in fact no "pure" economic systems--they are a matter of degree or continuum.  For instance, central planners require a great deal of knowledge and coordination in order to do a good job, otherwise they are trying to regulate something they do not understand; it is better to avoid planning than to pretend to plan. If a society is characterized by macropathy (centralization without coordination), it falls victim to inept managers and self-important bureaucrats.  Ideally, management wants things done the best way, whereas workers want to do them the easiest way.  It is management's job to make the easiest way identical to the best way, such as using fitted sheets in hotel bedrooms.  If management is cruel, however, it is only logical for the workers to form labor unions in self-defense. Similarly, if price alone, not quality, decides all purchases, customers become the lawful prey of unscrupulous purveyors of shoddy goods and services. 

   We now know that every economic system has its own faults and inconsistencies.  In a commercial society, goods are cheaper because of the efficiency of having every worker make only part of a thing; however, the resulting proliferation of non-essentials and luxuries renders the society vulnerable, since there are so many things people can decline to buy if their incomes are depressed.  A certain amount of stupidity is actually good for the economy, since it gets people to spend money.  As an example, the ideal of feminine beauty needs to be very artificial; if it were natural, women would not buy all those expensive products in order to be beautiful.  If being rich enough to live without working becomes the ideal, that produces the kind of useless snobbery satirized in Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. By the way, the word "snob" is an abbreviation of "sine nobilitatis," without nobility, appended to the names of rich merchants' sons who were allowed into aristocratic British schools when the latter bowed to the pressure of all that money; as these boys treated their peers with such insufferable condescension, the term "s. nob." acquired its negative meaning.

   We have thus seen that economic, social, psychological, and historical factors are much more interdependent than ideologues want us to believe, and that all those economic models bristling with mathematical equations (the subsistence theory, the iron law of wages, etc.) are too artificial to be truly reliable.  I like to point out that the U.S. has a Carl Marks of its own (note the different spelling), and he is a stockbroker!  In fact, it is my opinion that Communism is a religion (God = Revolution, Church = Party) and that within 300 years the difference between private and government capitalism will be considered as inconsequential as the difference between Athens and Sparta--of interest to no one except historians.

The Passion of the Passion

   Since I approach The Passion of the Christ from the viewpoint of comparative literature, not theology, I believe the anti-Semitism controversy is being churned artificially for parochial and sensationalist purposes.  (For instance, claiming anti-Semitism on the grounds that the bad guys had hooked noses.)  I guess it takes an American and a comparatist to say, "Follow the money trail, both past and present" of what is ultimately a nontroversy.  To wit:

   Never having met the man, I do not know whether Mel Gibson is anti-Semitic or not, but his film definitely is not.  (Even Pope John Paul II said he told it like it was.)  He makes it very clear that the group that pressured Pontius Pilate into convicting Jesus was not "the Jews" (as per St. John Ch. 19), but the High Priest's goons, who can hardly be expected to be Scandinavians or Hawaiians.  The four Gospels on which the movie is based were four different versions whose purpose was to convert the Jews (Matthew, Mark, Luke) and the pagans (John).  As a teacher, I can recognize passages which indicate that the writer is clutching at half-remembered phrases because he has not perfectly understood the principle, as when Jesus is telling people to think for themselves rather than obtusely going by the book.  In Matthew, he says that if your sheep falls into a well on the Sabbath, don't tell me you're not going to try to get it out.  In Luke 14:1-6, the animal in question is a donkey or an ox, and another passage defines the work as watering the livestock, not pulling it out of a well.

   Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels because their contents are similar; they were composed in order to evangelize the Jews and are thus respectful of Jewish sensibilities, while John was composed in order to evangelize the pagans and thus did not care that much about hurting Jewish feelings.  My general impression: Matthew is attempting to incorporate into Jewish tradition the Messianism and belief in an afterlife which so often surface to comfort oppressed people; Mark stresses Jesus' role as a healer and expeller of unclean spirits; Luke features angels as messengers and prophets and the fulfillment of prophecies (such as 24:26) and has so many embedded songs that I suspect it may have been meant as a narrated stage performance; and John argues that Jesus' death was a fulfillment of Scriptural prophecies (17:12, 18:11, 19:28, 19:36, 20:9). John appears to telescope the Jewish scapegoat tradition (1:29-37, Jesus as the Lamb of God dying for the sins of the world) with the atavistic human sacrifice of Greece's Dionysian tradition.  To compare: in Mark 13:14-18, the prophecy in question is the destruction of Jerusalem as a result of the abomination of desolation.  Jesus advised the people not to rebel against the occupying power: the Romans are cruel, if you revolt they will cream you.  Nobody listened, and forty years later Jerusalem was obliterated.

   Obviously for the benefit of pagan converts, John explains Jewish funeral customs (19:40) and translates Jewish words such as Bethesda = Sheep-Pool (5:2-3), Messiah = Christ (1:42, 4:25), Rabbuni = my Master  (20:17), and Golgotha = Skullplace (19:17).  He explains the holiday of Passover (6:4), specifies that those Jews who brought Jesus to Roman headquarters remained outside so as to avoid defilement at Passover (18:28), and that Jesus was brought to a Roman court because the Sanhedrin court had no capital punishment (18:32).

     Throughout the Gospels, Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man, never as the Son of God or the King of the Jews; only other people call him the latter, starting with the astrologers at his birth (Matthew 2:2) and ending with the judges in Matthew 27:11 and the INRI plaque on his cross, the Biblical equivalent of a sneering tabloid headline (Matthew 27:37; John 18:33-9, 19:19).  John the Baptist calls him Christ (Matthew 11:2), i.e. the Messiah = Anointed One, perhaps because he baptized him; the only actual reference to anointment I could find in the Gospels was the story of the immoral woman (Luke 7:36 et seq.), later mistakenly identified with Mary Magdalene, who washed his feet with her tears and anointed them with myrrh.  Many other people call him Lord, Messiah, Son of God, God's Messiah, and Christ (Mark 1:10, 9:9-12, 10:33-45, 13:26, 14:20-42; Luke 7:33, 9:22-52, 12:8-10, 13:15, 17:22-30, 18:31, 19:10, 21:36, 22:70; John 1:14-18, 1:42, 3:15 et seq., 5:22 et seq., 8:40 et seq., 14:8, 17:1, 20:28, 20:30-1).

   All the Gospels say that the Pharisees and doctors of law tried to trip Jesus up with trick questions, such as asking whether taxes should be paid to Rome; he answered that one should give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's (Matthew 22:17-22, Mark 12:15 et seq., Luke 20:22-6).  However, this appears to have been part of the rabbinical tradition of discourse and debate and does not portray Jesus as a threat to the religious establishment or to Rome.  That seems to have occurred later (Mark 11:15-16), when he had his temper tantrum about the moneychangers in the temple, which my Israeli tour guide explained was due to the graven image on the Roman coins, something prohibited in the temple.  At that point, he became a threat to the economic power of the priests, who managed to adroitly reframe his rant against themselves into a rant against the Roman presence.  The High Priest Caiaphas persuaded a crowd to pressure a reluctant Pontius Pilate, whose wife had begged him not to harm this innocent man (Matthew 27:19-20), into executing Jesus in a very public and gory manner as an example to the other Jews: Mess with my economic interests and I'll sic the Romans on you so fast it'll make your head spin.

     I am sure that even the most ardent Jews will admit that an individual Jew can be a jerk.  Why launch an automatic defense of this power-hungry sadistic priest, as though no co-religionist could possibly do wrong?  According to the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, anti-Semitism was only invented three centuries later, when the Roman Empire turned Christian and the Church tried to humiliate the Jews into conversion.  Crying anti-Semitism where there is none raises the specter of an ugly projection and engenders unnecessary hostility.

   The Gospels in no way imply that the Jewish people were in favor of this gruesome crucifixion.  They liked Jesus (Matthew 21:46), to the point that on occasion he had to preach from a boat so as to avoid being crushed by the multitude on the lakeshore, and Luke 23:48 documents that after the crucifixion, the crowd went home beating their breasts.  John (17:12, 18:11, 19:28, 19:36, and 20:9, among others) and Luke (24:43 et seq.) state that Jesus' purpose was to die for the sins of the world, which leads to the logical conclusion that whoever killed him was therefore a tool of his destiny.  My Buddhist friend probably put it best: blaming the Jewish people for the death of Jesus would be as nonsensical as blaming the American people for the deaths of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy.

Bible Bibliography

Allegro, John.  The Mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed.  New York: Gramercy Publishing, 1956, 1964.  First published as The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reappraisal, by Penguin Books, 1956.

Asimov, Isaac.  Asimov's Guide to the Bible.  New York: Doubleday, 1969, rpt. Avenel 1981.

Aslan, Reza.  No god but God.  New York: Random House, 2011.

Beekman, John, and Callow, John.  Translating the Word of God.  Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1974.

Biblical Archaeology Review magazine.

Boman, Thorlef.  Hebrew Thought Compared to Greek.  Tr. Jules L. Moreau.  Philadelphia: SCM Press, 1960.

Bruce, F.F.  The English Bible History of Translations from the Earliest English Version to the New Bible.  London: Lutterworth Press, 1970.

-, The English Bible: A History of Translations.  New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970.

Cambridge University History of the Bible (3 vols.)  Cambridge Univ. Press, 1963.

Chadwick, Henry.  The Early Church.  Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Press, 1967.

Draper, Robert, "The Bible Hunters."  National Geographic, 12/2018, p. 40 et seq.

Eliade, Mircea.  A History of Religious Ideas.  William B. Trask, tr.  Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978, 1982.

Eusebius Pamphili.  The Ecclesiastical History.  (Also translated as History of the Church.)

Gascogne, Bamber.  The Christians.  ISBN 0-224-013556 and his series on Granada Television copyrigh 1978.  

Graham, Lloyd M.  Deceptions and Myths of the Bible.  New York: Bell Publishing, 1975.

Graves, Robert, and Patai, Raphael.  Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis.  New York: Greenwich House, 1963, 1964, rpt. 1983.

Gregory, C.R., Canon and Text of the New Testament.  1907.

Harrison, G.B.  The Bible for Students of Literature and Art.  Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1964.

Henn, T.R.  The Bible as Literature.  New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970.

Hogarth MacGregor, George.  Jew & Greek: Tutors unto Christ.  London: Nicholson & Watson, 1936. 

Interpreters' Dictionary of the Bible.

Kahle, P.E.  The Cairo Geniza.  1st ed. 1947, 2nd ed. 1959.

-, Der hebräische Text.  Franz Delitzsch, 1962.

Keller, Werner.  The Bible as History.  William Neil, tr.  New York: William Morrow, 1956.  2nd rev. ed. 1981.

Knox, Wilfred Lawrence.  Some Hellenistic Elements in Primitive Christianity.  London: 1944.

Knox, Ronald.  Trials of a Translator.  NY: Sheed & Ward, 1949.

-, On English Translation.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.

Lost Books of the Bible.  New York: Bell Publishing, 1979.

Metzger, Bruce M.  The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restration.  New York: Oxford Unib. Press, 1968.

Moulton, Richard G.  The Literary Study of the Bible.  New York: AMS Press, 1970.  (Rpt. from 1899 Boston.)

Mounin, Georges.  Die Übersetzung.  Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967.

Newman, Aryeh.  Mapping Translation Equivalence.  Leuven, Belgium: Academic Publishing Co., 1980.

Nida, Eugene A.  Toward a Science of Translating.  Leiden: Brill, 1964.

Orlinsky, H.M.  "The Masoretic Text, a Critical Evaluation."  Prolegomenon to the 1966 reissue of C.D Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible, 1897.

Pagels, Elaine.  The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979.

Posner, Gerald.  God's Bankers.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Ricciotti, Giuseppe.  The Life of Christ.  Milwaukee: Brace Publishing Co., 1952.

Ready Reference History of the English Bible.  New York: Amer. Bible Society, 1979.

Rogers, Francis M. The Quest for Eastern Christians.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962.

Savory, Theodore.  The Art of Translation.  Boston: The Writer Inc., 1968.

Silberman, Neil Asher.  Digging for God & Country.  New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982.

Sims, Albert E., and Dent, George.  Who's Who in the Bible.  New York: Philos. Lib., 1982. 

Soares, Theodore G.  The Origins of the Bible.  New York: Harper & Bros., 1941.

Steiner, George.  Language and Silence.  New York: Atheneum, 1967.

Trescott, Jacqueline.  "Translation: A Multilingual Tower of Babble,"  International Herald Tribune,  October 27, 1982.

Unger, Merrill F.  Unger's Bible Handbook.  Chicago: Moody, 1966.

United Bible Societies.  Fauna and Flora of the Bible  and other "helps" for translators, 1972.

Vandervorst, J. Introduction aux textes heubreu et grec de l'ancien Testament.  1935.

VERSION, TRADUCTION, and BIBLE of the 18th-century French Encyclopédie.

Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking

by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph.D.  All rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Part 2: The Dynamics of Social Criticism and  Social Change

Table of Contents

   Defusing Culture Shock 

   Wit, Witchcraft, and Wisdom: The Conflict Preventers

   USA, Inc.: Change of Policy Needed

   Au Pair Means Everybody Wins

   Anglos and Insects

   The Di is Cast

   The American Dream Perverted

   A Holistic Approach to Counterterrorism

                                               Defusing Culture Shock

   A good deal of what is called "culture shock" can actually be defused if the underlying rationale is explained.  For instance:

   Many Americans mistakenly believe that the French are rude; my contention is that this is an almost comical misunderstanding based on a difference in protocol.  In the U.S., if a beaming stranger approaches you in the street with a "Good morning, ma'am, how are you today?", you instinctively recoil, fearing that he wants to sell you something, or worse, so Americans are very direct so as to avoid rejection ("Where's the post office, please?") In France, you will meet with hostility in the absence of such friendly overtures.  The French thus interpret American directness as rudeness and react accordingly.  My experience has been that if the protocol is followed, many Frenchmen will actually go out of their way to help you (within a single week, on two occasions ladies invited us to follow them when my husband and I got lost on vacation).

   Such protocol differences can also affect labor practices.  I once had to interpret for a factory manager who was about to fire a Hispanic worker for insolence but decided to try to find out first what actually happened.  The worker had left early Friday to be with his highly pregnant wife, and when he came in on Monday his colleague told him, "the boss is mad at you and wants to see you."  The worker started working, and the boss was furious--"why didn't he come into my office?"  After interpreting the questions and answers for a while, I asked for and was granted permission to explain that from my experience, a Hispanic worker never goes barging into the boss' office unannounced; he respectfully waits to be called.  The boss was surprised: "I have a cultural problem!"

   Another time, when at a translators' convention in a New York hotel, I asked a group of workers how to get to my conference room and formally thanked them when they gave me the information.  One of them thereupon said to his colleagues in Spanish, "You see? Not even a smile from that one."  I wanted to answer, "In this country it's the employee who needs to smile, not the customer.  Besides, how would you like it if your wife smiled at two dozen strange men?"  But then I bit my tongue--why further antagonize an already hostile roomful of men? 

   In "Fertility Rites and Sorcery in a New Guinea Village," p. 128, author Gillian Gillison documented how, after hours of work, she was "feeling painfully hot and thirsty" but was ignored when sugarcane was passed around.  When she told her daughter how hurt that made her feel, the little girl said, "'Mommy, were you smiling?'  She said yes, of course, in anticipation of the refreshing sugarcane.  'Well, that's why you didn't get any.  Nobody has to give you anything to please you when you are already pleased.  When I want something, I frown and look away.  Then I always get a lot, so I won't be angry.'"  Children are the best cultural anthropologists in the world!

   Similarly, on p. 137 of "Arctic Dreams & Nightmares," which chronicled the extreme odyssey of a Norwegian and a South African crossing the Arctic Ocean, the Norwegian struck the South African "as rigid and sometimes arrogant."  When they had a "gentlemanly tête-à-tête" about the issue, they realized it was a matter of cross-cultural miscommunication: the Norwegian "explained that the Scandinavian culture was one of few words... and that [r]emarks [the South African] had experienced as criticism... [had been] intended as advice."

   My husband told me about an American schoolteacher who knew Spanish but refused to speak it in class because she thought the Hispanic students were laughing at her.  He advised her to consider the possibility that the kids were giggling in delighted surprise, and upon closer observation, she realized that this was true.

   Raised under democracy, Americans often encounter trouble abroad because they exhibit insufficient humility before officious officials.  Divergent interpretations of body language become an issue here: making eye contact is a sign of radiant integrity in the United States ("I have nothing to hide"), but insufferable cheek in a more feudal society, where the reaction tends to be "how dare the likes of you look me in the eye, you're supposed to bow your head humbly." (This actually happened to me in Italy.)

   Conversely, people raised in a dictatorship learn not to protest if treated unfairly so as to avoid being singled out for even more savage mistreatment; they prefer to suffer quietly, at most working surreptitiously around the edges.  However, such noble silence can cause you to lose a case in the U.S. egalitarian court system, where failure to object is interpreted as acceptance, which actually happened to Olga, a Romanian friend of mine.  (Diametrically opposite interpretations of silence!)  Edward Hall (p. 80 ff.) documents how ethnic differences in approach to judicial flexibility and family conections can have destructive results even within a single society.

   Analogous differences can also invade the personal sphere.  Olga, my Romanian friend, once had an argument with my husband as to whether Paul Newman was entitled to refuse a fan his autograph; she said he was not, he said he was.  I listened to the back-and-forth yes-no yapping but said nothing, so she finally asked me for my opinion.  "No offense," I said, "but this is a boring argument because it is political.  You are discussing whether an artist is public property or not.  That would depend on the society--such as whether it is fascist or democratic."

   Another Olga story: she invited a small Romanian contingent to a party I was giving.  When I brought around the hors d'oeuvre, one of the Romanian ladies declined, and Olga had to explain, while laughing, that in Romania the guest is expected to be coy and refuse the food, whereupon the hostess is expected to insist.  "If you want it," she explained in Romanian, "accept it right away.  This is an American hostess; she won't ask you again."

   Shirley MacLaine and friends made a documentary on their trip to China several decades ago called "The Other Half of the Sky."  In one of the scenes, when asked what they looked for in a husband, the Chinese women uniformly answered "the correct political attitude," while the Americans valued things like good looks or a sense of humor and thereupon marvelled at the vastly different expectations.  I contend that the ostensibly divergent husbandly attributes are actually an instance of style rather than substance: in both countries, the women wanted husbands with qualities which would make them succeed, or at least survive.  My Chinese friend Fan added that the women were probably told what to say anyway.

   On a related note: in North America the definition of a friend tends to be "someone who doubles your joys and halves your sorrows."  Since you can openly buy just about everything in this society, friends are usually not needed for strictly utilitarian purposes.  In pre-1989 Poland, however, people would make friends with someone they didn't particularly like, as friendship was defined as helping each other.  For instance, one person "made friends" with a rather obnoxious fellow who worked at a gas station whose cousin worked at a meat-packing plant, which of course entailed buying underground meat at the gas station.  My Chinese friend Fan said that in her country, friendship is defined more along the lines of that Polish example.

   As for international friendship: Latinos in countries south of the border with Mexico often mistakenly believe that U.S. citizens are insulting them: "how come they call only themselves Americans, whereas we [Colombians, Argentines, etc.] are Americans too."  This is a misunderstanding: in English there are seven continents, in Spanish only five (Antarctica doesn't count, and the Americas are considered a single continent, namely America).  The problem is not the torpedoing of two continents, but the difference in classification; no insult whatsoever is intended.

   Other classificatory misunderstandings typically cause people to perceive superficial differences rather than underlying similarities.  For instance, in a 'seventies article on Mishima, Esquire magazine adduced the fact that the Japanese "hai" means both "yes" and "no" as an example of Oriental inscrutability. But  "hai" actually means "the preceding is correct" ("right" or "affirmative" would be a better translation), which eliminates the supposed yes-no mystery entirely.  If you ask a Japanese "Don't you drink?" and he answers "Yes," he means "You are correct, I don't drink."  Make sure you do not phrase your questions in the negative!

   Another classification example: True freedom requires rules.  For instance, imagine what would happen to our roadways if there were no traffic regulations: bullies would quickly turn the resulting chaos into fascism.  This is hard to explain to Russians because their language has no word exactly corresponding to our "freedom," only volnya (doing whatever you feel like, even at someone else's expense) and svoboda (essentially the absence of restrictions on movement, which makes sense because serfs were legally bound to the land).  A typical Russian is thus likely to think Americans are not free because they have to obey rules.

   Lastly, I also have identified some surprising underlying causative factors, such as that unsupportive labor practices in the U.S. helped Americans to identify with Princess Diana, and have explained this hypothesis in "The Di Is Cast." See also "Wit, Witchcraft, and Wisdom" for an analysis of how non-homologous aspects can nevertheless have analogous functions.  

   There are of course many other sources of culture shock, such as technology and the warping of the original intent of a system. Some of these are touched upon in this series of essays, as in "Gynetic Engineering," "When Bush Comes to Shove," and "Au Pair Means Everybody Wins."

                           Bibliography

Del Giudice, Marguerite, "Arctic Dreams & Nightmares."  National Geographic, January 2007, p. 130 ff.

Gillison, Gillian, "Fertility Rites and Sorcery in a New Guinea Village."  National Geographic, July 1977.

Hall, Edward T.  The Silent Language.  New York: Fawcett, 1959.

Snowdon, Sondra.  The Global Edge: How your company can win in the international market place.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

 Wit, Witchcraft, and Wisdom: The Conflict Preventers

    As a young girl, I avidly read books on philosophy because I thought they would help me acquire wisdom.  But then I realized how many philosophers there were, and how they often contradicted each other; they reminded me of soapbox men on Prophets Row, each of them shouting, "Listen to me, I have all the answers," whereas I knew they couldn't all be right, and quite possibly none of them was.  With the onset of maturity came the realization that life is meaningless in and of itself, except for self-preservation (prolonging a meaningless life) and species preservation (creating another meaningless life).  I understood that philosophy basically tries to impart meaning to the meaningless, claiming that "life makes sense if you view it this way," which presupposes that the type of society in which the philosopher is living is a major factor in its structure and purpose.  A rich, carefree nation is likely to be epicurean, whereas a poor and deprived one will probably espouse stoicism.  Taking this knowledge to its logical conclusion: philosophy should therefore be a subcategory of cultural anthropology, which was my almost-major as an undergraduate.

    When working on my terminal degree in comparative literature, especially when adding my personal experience of having been raised in about half a dozen different cultures and languages, I observed with fascination that similar functions could be served by various means in different societies, much as biological functions can be served by analogous as well as homologous organs.  (Multiculturals are probably more creative than others, having learned by the age of two that there is no single correct way to do or say anything any more than there is a single correct way to cook carrots.)  For me, the most interesting phenomenon was that of wit or humor, probably because I associated it with my American teachers, who appeared almost stratospherically serene, logical, humorous, and dignified in a postwar European world full of resentment and deprivation.

    After moving to the States in the late 1960's, I started wondering about the purpose of this humor--what is it for?--especially since so many Americans seemed to be of the opinion that people without a sense of humor would probably go crazy, something I had never heard any European say.  (Although one Colombian did quip that Americans crack jokes even on their deathbeds.)  Then I learned that in a country in which there is so much personal and economic freedom and people are always trying to do better, there is likely to be a chasm of potentially dangerous divergence between ambition and reality, one requiring something to bridge the disappointent gap, such as the humorous pretense that no setback is a big deal.   But isn't it confusing cause and effect to say that if you make fun of something, it can't hurt you?  I suspect it is a way of thinking "reality can't touch me," analogous to the disguised indifference of those Most Serene Highnesses of old.

    Humor can absorb the resulting friction in a manner analogous to ball-bearings in mechanics: the individual takes responsibility for his failure and does not blame the impersonal system. Making fun of a danger further helps take the fear away--how can something so ridiculous possibly hurt you?  I concluded that the function of humor in American society is to prevent the conflict which would normally result from disappointment, insecurity, and fear.

    So how do other societies cope with these issues?  Many groups practice witchcraft: sticking pins in your nemesis' namesake doll makes you feel powerful and fearless while simultaneously preventing overt conflict.  And living in a repressive dictatorship can squelch a sense of humor: with everybody blindly obeying in a strict hierarchy, there is no need for a chasm-bridging mechanism that might even be dangerous to the top dogs.  People existing in such rigid circumstances tend to develop a philosophical attitude of passive obedience which quickly acquires the label of wisdom; prayer can make the downtrodden feel better and keep them too busy to engage in counterproductive violence. The Greeks had a word for it: sophrosyne, meaning proper and measured behavior, knowing one's limitations and one's place, and above all avoiding hubris. Interestingly enough, the downtrodden sometimes develop a wicked sardonic sense of humor which they use to poke fun at the authorities in private.

     It is probably no coincidence that the Germans have become more humorous now that their society is so much more fluid, as exemplified in a German-language newspaper cartoon: A mother mouse is teaching her baby to stay inside the hole if they hear the cat meowing; he obeys.  Later, however, they hear the dog barking, and the mother says, "It's all right, you can go out, 'cause if the dog is there, the cat won't be."  The baby mouse goes out and finds that it's the cat barking.  Last frame: the contented cat cleans his whiskers and remarks, "It pays to know a foreign language."  When I told this joke to people from Tibet and Taiwan, they reacted with an immediate broad grin; the mainland Chinese response was, "I don't understand.  The cat was in a foreign country?"  My Taiwanese friend explained to me that the mainlanders pursue conformity so rabidly that they don't have much of a sense of humor.

    Over the years I collected enough research to fill a master's thesis on this topic in anthropology, one which would probably have met with approval ("the structural-functionalists would eat that right up").  However, after a while I felt I would simply be documenting the obvious, besides which my graduate work was not in anthropology, but in comparative literature.  The current fashion in the latter discipline is to deny (or at least downplay) any interrelationship between social and literary factors because, as adduced in my essay "Recalibrating Literary Criticism," I believe Western literary critics wanted to negate the didactic socialist-realism substratum of Soviet-bloc literature.  

   So instead I did my master's thesis on translation theory and my doctoral dissertation on the Polish poet Bolesław Leśmian, which was probably a wittier, witchier, and wiser decision, not to mention much more productive.

USA, Inc.: Change of Policy Needed (copyright International Law Review, 1992; reprinted by kind permission)

   In a recent Time magazine special on the USA, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes was quoted as saying that what Americans do best is understand themselves; what they do worst is understand others.  This statement could easily apply to any nation or corporation enjoying an artificial hegemony, from the Roman Empire to the major car manufacturer of your choice.  Subsequent to World War II, after all, we inherited economic and political dominance virtually without asking for it, meaning that we had the luxury of writing in English to, say, an Argentine eager to buy our products, and expecting him to answer in English.  And he would.  Ever since the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 hostage situation, however, it has become apparent that the umbrella we are standing under is leaky, and that the only reason we did not get wet before was that it had not been raining.  I am hoping that the members of the Board of USA, Inc. will consider modifying their corporate strategy to include a better understanding of other peoples, not just their resources; one need not he an Arab to resent being treated like raw material.  As a translator with some cross-cultural experience and "insider's insight," may I humbly offer a few suggestions for possible inclusion in such an agenda. 

   Firstly, may I suggest that decision-makers consult a greater variety of people to avoid the danger of listening to nobody except their own clones.  In the "Jeffersons" TV series some fifteen years ago, for instance, Louise wondered why the input of her neighbor, the interpreter Bentley, was ignored at his workplace, namely the United Nations; he answered along the lines of "I don't tell them what to do, I just tell them what they said."  Actually, good translators and interpreters may well have a wealth of cross-cultural information which would help their clients understand others.  For instance, I recently interpreted in a labor situation wherein an Ecuadorian was being punished for not having told his boss that he had to leave early.  The next workday, his co-worker told him, "They're mad at you and want to see you."  His boss could not understand why he did not appear in his office immediately, and took that to signify an admission of guilt or a gesture of defiance.  After interpreting the questions and answers for a while and asking whether I might say something, I was allowed to explain my understanding of the underlying problem.  Namely, a Hispanic worker will never come barging into his boss' office unannounced; he always waits to be called.  Once this cultural problem was perceived, both parties were able to settle their differences amicably.  Similarly, differences in business techniques may be part of the Arab-US problem; we tend to think in terms of take it or leave it, all or nothing, whereas the Arabs consider everything negotiable and nothing definitive.  You must never ask an Arab merchant the price of something out of idle curiosity; he will pursue you for six blocks until he has made the sale, even if the price drops 80%.  

   This is merely one example of an attempt to understand the mentality of other nations.  Others could range from obvious truisms, such as that the Arabs are much better at persistent waiting than the Americans, to recondite hypotheses worth analyzing, such as that a pointedly proper pastoral culture like the Arabs can probably come no closer to Western-style democracy at the moment than Colonel Ghaddafi's quasi-religious socialism.  I suspect that the government of any nation is just the family structure writ large--an authoritarian family, in this case.

   Secondly, I feel that international competition should make us rethink our attitude in terms of cause and effect, not merely intensify the approach we erroneously believe led to our prosperity.  In other words: we were not great because we acted the way we did; we had the luxury of behaving thus because we were great.  But we now have too much competition to expect everyone else to adapt to us, e.g. continue importing our non-metric appliances or answering our correspondence in English.  We need to learn other languages; after all, what would a Detroit mogul do if sent spare-parts bids in German or Japanese?

   I believe language learning is deficient in this country not because the teaching system is defective (it works just fine elsewhere), but because American students are unmotivated in this direction.  (Any attempt to improve language learning by technical means thus strikes me as analogous to performing sex therapy upon a loveless marriage.)  Until recently, the stigma of being an immigrant made people ashamed of speaking a foreign language.  Today's students expect school to be entertaining; they will not learn the hard realities of lost jobs and negative balances of payment until later.  I hope it will not be too late.

   The political corollary thereto: we should also rethink our international policy to reflect the reality that our viewpoint is not the only one, and perhaps not even the decisive one among many.  For instance, those who thought the Iranian hostage crisis was just an isolated incident have been proved abundantly wrong by more recent events.  Instead of treating such items as unpleasantnesses which will go away if ignored long enough (under the assumption that not even the most fanatic of mullahs can remain high on hate forever), we should institute a retrospective analysis.  We need to see what can be learned from such situations and what impact they may have upon a new and improved long-term foreign policy.  For instance, we must understand that according to Muslim convention, it is the men who are expected to be emotional; the women are raised to be hard-headed realists.  One of my Arab friends phrases it very succinctly: women handle the family finances in Arab countries, so a wife is her husband's bank, moderating his impulsiveness with prudent caution.

   Thirdly, we should also address the deficits in the federal budget and the balance of trade in terms of the loss of artificial prosperity.  Phrasing the situation in family terms: after World War II, we won the lottery.  Instead of investing the money in the future, however, we became accustomed to a higher standard of living and expected it to last forever.  In my opinion, the saddest element in this analogy is that the parents have become so spoiled and irresponsible that they now raid their children's trust fund rather than modify their lifestyle.

    Fourthly, I believe it necessary to change the corporate thinking which makes us small and silent stockholders in USA, Inc. (an analogy abundantly applicable to the Savings & Loans debacle, among others).  I believe we should start with the unquestioned acceptance of personnel rotation.  Our State Department, military organizations, and major multinationals tend to transfer employees and their families every few years, which discourages mingling with the natives and learning their language and encourages careerist callowness.  Having grown up among "Army brats" and soldiers abroad, I am distinctly aware that they are impatient to sip an idealized hometown soda for the rest of their lives.  I believe at least part of the My Lai mentality could have been attributed to the same resentful contempt--if it weren't for you (gooks, Krauts, whatever), I could be "home" right now.  How much empathy, linguistic and cultural proficiency, or predictive power can be accumulated by a corporate executive, Army officer, or career diplomat for whom his present stint is merely a stepping-stone to better things?

   One very articulate corporate wife I know has justified such transfer-happiness by pointing out that American parents do not want their daughters marrying locals because that would create too much physical distance between family members.  However, she does not realize two things: (1) she need not be separated from her daughter at all if her husband's company keeps them where they are, and (2) her argument may be an excellent reason for accepting corporate policy, but is unlikely to be a major factor in setting it.

   The major historical precedents for frequent transfers I was able to find were the administrative and military apparatus of ancient Rome, which encouraged standoffishness at all costs, and that of the USSR, whose functionaries could not endure too many years among hostile subjects.  Is either of these an example we want to follow?  We might rather emulate the fabulously successfuly Japanese, who value assimilation to such a degree that newly arrived executives receive specific instructions to do no work at all until the know the lay of the land.  They thus spend a year or two learning to play the guitar, cultivating friendships, and mastering the local language.  Furthermore, they are not transferred elsewhere every few years, so their knowledge makes them valuable and subtle tools instead of cavalier bulldozers.

   The fifth point requires a domestic analogy, namely child abuse.  One of my  friends raises his children in a very authoritarian manner.  That means they go haywire whenever they come to visit me.  I thus have the choice of cleaning up the mess, refusing to invite them, or imposing strict discipline when they visit; none of these alternatives is acceptable to me, since I respect these children and sympathize with their anguishing need for an outlet.  If I were a trained therapist, however, I could encourage them to confront their abusive father, even at the risk of having them turn on me temporarily.

   Something similar seems to have occurred on an international scale beginning with the 1979 hostage situation.  The Iranians, long denied their human rights under the Shah and ignored by the USA, were prime examples of the fact that suffering evidently does not necessarily ennoble people; they violated every major United Nations convention and applauded such violations.1/  Ethnocentrism aside, it is obvious that they interpreted our restraint and food shipments as "weakness"; as in Vietnam, we had the power but were unable to use it.  The Iranians also seemed not to realize that in the West only criminals, insane persons, and children ever behave the way they did; Iraq seems to have learned nothing from the Iranian experience, except that its activities are generating more than just a flurry of U.N. papers.  Nor does our State Department understand how Muslims think (cf. Raphael Patai's book The Arab Mind).  As is the case with my friend's children, unless we are experienced in international therapy, our options will be disagreeable: cleaning up after the Middle East, refusing to deal with it, or imposing iron rule--if we hope that human rights and ethics are somehow contagious, we are sadly attempting to clap with one hand, hamstrung by our own scruples and our insufficient understanding of other cultures.  Any government is just the family writ large, so authoritarian families are unlikely to produce a political democracy.

   As a cororally, I believe the above analogy is also applicable to Eastern Europe, since Communism can be viewed as the macrosocial equivalent of child abuse.  We should not expect the recently liberated East Europeans to be cooperative and grateful--at least not until "therapy" has helped them understand how their spirit was deformed in the past.  Perhaps we can plan our options better by observing what will inevitably happen in the reunited Germany now that the honeymoon is over; any marriage between a self-confident, slightly overbearing city slicker raised by the Americans and a suspicious, resentful country girl raised by the Russians is bound to present some problems.  I am sure we can learn from Germany's mistakes and solutions, just as the EU could learn a good deal from the US federative experience.

   Sixth, I believe we need to formulate a foreign policy more long-term, coherent, and sensible than our present almost blind support for any leader who makes the right noises and allows Americans with a predatory short-term gain mentality preferred access to his markets (creating a resentment which can easily close such markets in the long run).  Why not bring to international relations the same hardheaded, holistic opportunism for which our businessmen are so famous?  The Soviets, for instance, openly practiced the carrot-and-stick policy, demanding concessions in return for aid.  I also think that being fair to those who do not deserve it is fascism in reverse: vulgar bullies take over when ethical thinkers are too predictably nice.  Without a firm and coherent foreign policy, we will simply be encouraging fascist crooks with no respect for human life to benefit from the international equivalent of Miranda.2/

   My seventh opinion is that we should accept more input from social scientists and less from idealogues, as occurred when anthropologists advised US policymakers on how to treat Japan after World War II.3/  For instance, this amateur anthropologist feels that part of the US-USSR problem derived from a difference in mentality: we think like hunter-gatherers (the economy as nature--anything goes, and we take what it has to offer), while the Soviets think like peasants (the economy as a garden, wherein nothing grows unless it has the gardener's specific permission to exist).  We thus strike them as dangerous and unpredictable gamblers, whereas they strike us as armies of dangerously obedient serfs.

   In anthropological terms, I would say that the overall conflict between communism and capitalism is fundamentally a religious war.  (Even the term "propaganda" has religious origins: it was Counter-Reformationese for "propagating the faith.")  The French sociologist Emile Durkheim said that in any society, God IS society--i.e. is coterminous therewith.  Under both the private and state capitalism, God is society is the economy, as poignantly indicated in expressions such as the "high priests" of finance and the "inner sanctum" of boardrooms.  In the final analysis, whether the government controls the economy or the economy controls the government boils down to a chicken-and-egg situation of global proportions.

   Finally, understanding others can also make us understand ourselves better.  Perceiving distinctions between style and substance can help us untangle some of our own inconsistencies, e.g.: although democracy may not be able to legislate love, it can legislate minimum standards of acceptable conduct.  But in order to achieve true fairness, some differentiation must be made between democracy and mere rampant populism.  (Switzerland, Periclean Athens, and the early United States were wrong in assuming they could achieve such a distinction by excluding women, children, racial minorities, slaves, foreigners, and non-propertied adult males from the demos.)  If our own petty sharks misuse beautiful principles such as free speech in the most degrading and mercenary manner conceivable--pornography and sensationalism clearly demonstrate that free commerce, not free speech, is at issue--how can we expect militant fanatics to understand our concept of ethical restraint?

   We have thus come full circle to Carlos Fuentes' comment about Americans' lack of understanding for others: we cannot even understand what we used to be ourselves, in terms of transgenerational fashion in human psychology.  After all, 300 years ago, when puritanical preachers were frothing at the mouth spitting fire and brimstone, the late Ayatollah would have been considered normal, and the hostages would have been perceived as sacrifices for the glory of God rather than the victims of a maniac.

FOOTNOTES

1/ Specifically, Iran violated all of the following: Articles 4 and 7 of the U.N.  Convention on Prevention and Punishment, which impose upon the receiving State the duty to prevent conspiracies and attempts on the lives and personal dignity of foreign officials, and to punish such attempts (instead of applauding them, as the Iranians did); Articles 29 and 40 of the Vienna Diplomatic and Consular Conventions respectively, which dictate abstention towards officials of foreign States, the use of increased protection for them, and the institution of special precautionary measures to avoid common crimes of international significance; the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Diplomatic Convention concerning compulsory settlement of disputes, and the 1955 Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights between the United States and Iran.

2/ This Supreme Court ruling in the United States in effect states that a person's arrest is impermissible unless he is apprised of his right to remain silent, as any answers to questions may be used against him subsequently in court, a technicality which is said to have set many criminals free.

3/ Benedict, Ruth.  The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.  Further, see Patterns of Culture, also published by Houghton Mifflin in 1934.  Both books have been reprinted in paperback.

  Many works on cross-cultural subjects have appeared in the recent past.  A few examples: 

Snowdon, Sondra.  The Global Edge: How Your Company can Win in the International Marketplace.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

Harris, Philip R, and Moran, Robert.  Managing Cultural Difference: High-Performance Strategies and Today's Global Manager.  Houston: Gulf Publishing, 1987.

Au Pair Means Everybody Wins

   The so-called "nanny trials" of the recent past have failed to treat the most important issue, especially as regards press coverage: the young women in question are not nannies at all, but "au pairs," an Anglicized French term which means "evenly matched" (i.e. a virtual barter wherein everybody wins). The original idea was an exchange of daughters so that the girls could learn about a foreign culture in a safe and supervised manner.  The system was instituted so that young students could live with a family, receiving free room and board in exchange for being a mother's helper.  I myself was an au pair in Spain in 1966, giving the children a few hours' worth of German conversation practice a day for my room and board; no money ever changed hands.  Since the mothers were homemakers and there were at least two maids per family, the only work I ever did was wash my own underwear.  (However, even then I heard horror stories of au pairs being exploited by British families who could not afford proper maids.)

   Now that so many mothers are working outside the home, however, the system has become seriously warped by contradictory expectations and truly needs to get back to its own basics.  The USIA and EF agencies prominently feature "information" and "education" in their names and advertisements, which I believe  misrepresents reality and recruits the wrong type of person.  Enticed with prospects of learning about a foreign culture, au pairs instead find themselves baldly touted as child-care on the cheap, often working in isolation with no company except infants and television.  It is clearly exploitative to make an inexperienced teenaged babysitter, and a foreign one at that, responsible for running a household full-time; a certain amount of resentment is thus to be expected.  I am frankly surprised that the parents would want such child-care, especially given what we now know about early childhood development, and that the au pairs hold up as well as they do.

   When helping Joyce Egginton research her Circle of Fire (about the "Swiss nanny" trial), I translated portions of Karl Jaspers' dissertation (Collected Works in Psychopathology, published posthumously in 1963): the future philosopher examined cases of "homesickness criminals" from circa 1795 to the early 20th century.  Most of these were very young girls (many of them pre-pubescent) whose indigent parents had sent them away to earn their keep caring for the children of more well-to-do people.  Suffering from intense and crippling homesickness, the girls literally craved to go home; typically, the employers did not object, but the parents did not want them back.  Reading between the lines, I realized that the girls felt trapped and that the only way they would be allowed (that word kept cropping up) back home would be to change objective reality.  Their feelings were considered worthless, but nobody could argue with a dead baby or a burned-down house.  Most modern au pairs are much more mature, but it is virtually inevitable for a few to be unstable.

   In my opinion, the system needs to be re-evaluated for truth in advertising, with a clear distinction being drawn between au pairs and nannies (trained, well-paid professionals).  The agencies should stop luring recruits under false pretenses, such as equating infant care with cultural adventure.  Alternatives must be examined.  A promising one might be hiring ex-welfare mothers as housekeepers; they need the work and are statistically more likely to have parenting experience, besides which they know the local language, customs, and 911 drill.  After all, people who can afford proper nannies will hardly wish to further their own careers by exploiting young girls.

   I believe au pairs would do and feel a lot better rendering companionship and physical assistance to lucid elderly shut-ins with a standard accent in exchange for room, board, a modest allowance, and English lessons; the au pairs would presumably learn more about the language and country from a senior than from a baby, and the elders would probably feel thrilled to be useful, have an attentive companion, and be able to get around more. However, this solution would probably entail a legislative change, as the present USIA au-pair laws are geared specifically toward child care, according to my Congresswoman. 

Anglos and Insects

   Philip and Belinda Haas' 1995 film "Angels and Insects," based on A.S. Byatt's 1992 novella Morpho Eugenia, draws an analogy between the inexorable, dreamy majesty of blind instinct among insects and the often abusive hedonism of the 19th-century English nobility.  May I point out a similar insectlike blindness on the part of other Anglos, namely present-day Americans, and warn that such attitudes and behavior can have consequences much more destructive than the purely domestic injustices of the Victorian era's luxurious human beehives.  Any tradition can become dangerous if it is blind; this also applies to young traditions such as the modern one of taking postwar prosperity for granted, especially when coupled with the belief that if we act like we did fifty years ago, we will be as great as we were then (which in my opinion confuses cause and effect).

   After World War II, along with the world domination inherited virtually by default, Americans also won the economic lottery: since everyone else was prostrate, we were blessed with almost three decades of an artificial prosperity whose bubble was not burst until the Arab oil embargo of the 'seventies.  Not only was the pie much bigger than it is now; women and minorities were excluded.  White men enjoyed such unprecedented prosperity that they could afford to be dismissive and supercilious to wives whose economic contribution they did not need.  The working class was renamed "lower middle class" (never before had factory workers belonged to the middle class) and was able to afford modest versions of rich man's luxuries (second homes, boats, home-bound wives); it tended not to vote, being pacified by prosperity.  The lower middle class did not realize that, like the proverbial second chick in nature documentaries, it can only thrive while resources are exceptionally plentiful; capitalism tends to favor profit and treat labor as a virtual stepchild.

   This sounds suspiciously analogous to the world of insects.  Imagine you buy a plastic bag of some sort of grain and forget it on the top shelf of the pantry.  A year later, when you find the burst plastic in the corner, nothing is left except a pile of excrement powder and empty exoskeletons: the bag had contained insect eggs which subsequently hatched.  Faced with this unexpected bonanza, the insect population overproliferated, and when they ran out of food, they all died.

   Something similar seems to have started to happen in the U.S. in the past few decades, exacerbated by cheap foreign labor and by the fact that technology makes "electronic immigration" possible.  (Ironically, an Indian in Bangalore can thus work for an American company in Miami, which (s)he would be prohibited from doing if physically in the USA without a work permit.)  Thirty years ago in New York, people who spoke no English could find a job more easily than native-born college graduates can now--which has made Americans increasingly predatory, unethical, and combative since the mid-'seventies ushered in economic desperation among a people spoiled by three decades of artificial prosperity.  (When I was young, the Germans seemed irritable, resentful, and pedantic, while the Americans appeared logical, dignified, and humorous; now it's the Canadians and the Germans who strike me as relaxed and reasonable. I guess it's easy to be nice when you're prosperous.) Employers are dropping people they have used for decades, and outsourcing or hiring cut-rate neophytes so as to maximize profits, taking advantage of this new Third World labor force with no more compunction than a housewife buying her milk from a new grocery store at 7 cents a quart cheaper. (For instance, translations and computer work are already being outsourced to Asia, following the textile, automotive, electronics, and computer programming jobs exported earlier.)  Unless translators are willing to work for rates lower than twenty years ago, when everything cost one-third as much as it does now, they do not work.  

   According to anthropologists, the most violent groups are those who have lost their privileged position and want it back, which probably explains the political rage of newly underemployed or unemployed Americans.  Whether by voting or violence, they vent their frustration at being deprived of what they refuse to understand was not a birthright at all, but a historical fluke, and tend to do so in a manner which is at best similar to the thoughtless thumbs watching Roman gladiatorial fights, and at worst militantly reactionary, with bombs being used to mourn the glory days of old.

    Furthermore, dwindling resources make Americans more prone to conflict, especially the seemingly pointless harassment whose actual purpose is to establish or maintain dominance.  I expect an increase in violence in the future until those formerly privileged  become convinced of the need for a systemic change in mentality (from greater aggressiveness to greater efficiency), an unlikely proposition.  To elucidate: Americans think like hunter-gatherers rather than peasants.  In terms of anthropology, HG's are small bands of 25-50 nomads whose diet is 20% game hunted by the men and 80% vegetation gathered by the women.  Since they only consume what nature has to offer instead of actively producing food, or even storing it to a significant degree, population density is usually limited to about 1 person per square mile. If the group becomes too large for the environment to support, it splits to form independent bands if the food source permits.  HG's value initiative, individuality, and independence because their economy needs experimentation and innovation, so they raise their children to think for themselves and take chances.  (Similarly, Americans are willing to go into business despite the fact that 90% of all new ventures fail within the first year.)  

   Once resources dry up and there is noplace left to migrate, however, HG's turn on each other (infanticide and warfare), thereby eliminating all but the most brutal members of the society.  Thus,  around 1980, there was a mugging spree in the Times Square area; once the criminals ran out of victims to rob, the bigger muggers turned on the smaller ones and relieved them of their loot.  Some historians believe Easter Island became virtually depopulated in a similar fashion once food supplies ran out and there were no more trees for building boats.  I expect analogous destructive infighting once the baby-boomers get blamed for the implosion of Social Security and Medicare, when the actual culprit was the enronization of those funds for purposes of counterproductive warfare.

   Peasants, on the other hand, value conformity and security, view challenge as a threat rather than an opportunity, and discourage independence.  Since they actively produce and store food instead of merely foraging, they are able to support a much greater population density; since they raise their children to be obedient hardware, they usually gain military superiority over the numerically insignificant HG's, which explains why most of the world's people think like peasants.  For instance, China could never afford to be as tolerant as the U.S., where there is room enough for everybody and loners can make a living unassisted.  The transition from a hunter-gatherer to a peasant mentality is lost in the mists of prehistory, but must have been rather traumatic unless it was very gradual.

   Furthermore, societies develop elaborate attitudinal structures to get their members to act a certain way--and ethnocentrically assume there is no other.  (For instance, it is easy for us to quip that the Slavs have raised suffering to an art form--and fail to realize that Americans have raised silliness to an art form.)  Anthropologists say that the function of myth is to explain why things are the way they are and cannot be otherwise, thus justifying society--and betraying the individual almost by definition. Our society, for instance, encourages people to overcome impossible obstacles by denying the latters' existence (or at least their subjective validity), a movie-of-the-week attitude which I consider responsible for the death of a child pilot some years ago.  We fail to realize that we are not nearly as omnipotent or as much in control of circumstances as our log-cabin myth wants us to believe so as to make us assume personal responsibility for everything without questioning the impersonal system in any way.

   Myth makes it easy for an astute demagogue to manipulate people by making the right noises and telling them what they want to hear, as when school-voucher supporters use words like "freedom" and "choice" to exonerate administrative failure and replace a public trust with market values, as though inadequate public education were somehow liberating.  The lower middle class has apparently been so thoroughly bamboozled that since 1980 it has almost consistently voted its self-image of Western-movie independence instead of its self-interest, as though an underdog could become a top dog by association.  The phenomenon I call the fantasy power trip is apparently quite ancient and well-established, from Hindus worshipping Shiva to Englishmen identifying with James Bond to voodoo practitioners trying to achieve some supernatural control.

   Myth usually becomes consolidated into some form of religion, which typically starts out as love and poetry and winds up as bookkeeping and control.  Since its primary function is social control, religion does not always require the supernatural or an anthropomorphized deity, as evidenced by Communism or the popular religions of China.  Even something as secular as the labor movement follows this pattern to a certain degree: the original idealistic "be nice to your workers" quickly became institutionalized into "exactly what do you mean by that?" when CEO's tried to define the absolute minimum of what they would be expected to contribute.

   Speaking of CEO's, the most pervasive insect damage is being perpetrated by political and business leaders who are selling their own people down the river so as to maximize their own power and wealth, like 17th-century Polish noblemen and Cossack elected representatives; the consequences to the latter were loss of national sovereignty and power.  I fear the economic results are likely to bankrupt the US within 25 years: why are we financing our potential enemies, why is Medicare and Social Security money being given to crony contractors instead of universal health care, why don't politicians make outsourcing illegal, and who's supposed to buy the stuff if nobody has a job any more?  Ironically, the same arch-conservatives who formerly boycotted anything made in a Communist country are now outsourcing American jobs to the People's Republic of China just so they can give themselves $300 million in bonuses instead of a mere $200 million; forty years ago that would probably have gotten them lynched for high treason.

   Finally, purely statistical and historical factors may prove much more important than social attitudes, economics, or even legislation.  Before becoming impotent empires some centuries ago, China and the Arabs were so dominant that the Koreans could not even invest a new crown prince without Ming approval; the Chinese have reverted to their former militaristic mercantilism, though I doubt Taiwan will be "liberated" until the PRC is no longer afraid of the U.S.  If China or the Arabs achieve the type of world domination Britain enjoyed in the 19th century, we could have a new insect takeover.  Mao-jacketed blue ants or desert scarabs, anyone?

The Di is Cast  (On the Anniversary of Princess Di's Death)

   Massive outpourings of grief for public figures we do not know  personally, especially on non-events such as anniversaries of their death, usually contain an element of what psychologists call projection: we identify with the person and fill in the blanks with our own yearnings, experiences, and emotions.  I believe this has occurred in the case of Princess Di's death and is more than just a matter of having the gory and grotesque circumstances of her demise remind us of our own vulnerability: people who never even expected to care feel as though they had been kicked in the stomach.

   Many of us know what it is like to be dismissed by snobs or bullies who think us worthless except as a pop-up doll in somebody else's coloring book and reject us for the silliest of non-reasons, whether in the labor force or the dating circuit.  (This applies particularly to the United States, where personnel management is so non-nurturing compared to other countries that it should be called what it really is: shopping!)  We can thus readily identify with the princess, who was too human to be accepted by stuffed shirts.  Like so many aristocrats, she could easily have vegetated in ostentatious ornamentation and sterile splendor; instead, she tried to make herself useful and help those in need.

   As for her sons, many of us feel instinctively that they have been robbed not only of their mother, but also of the most normal person in their environment.  There will thus likely be no more counterweight to an institution which raises its sons to be icons, proud of having no emotions except for feelings of superiority.  What kind of husband can that possibly produce, not to speak of what kind of monarch?

   Ironically, Di is now likely to be cast as the greatest icon of them all: projection is the stuff that saints are made of.

The American Dream Perverted

     If I may paraphrase Lorraine Hansberry: What happens to a dream perverted?  Does it rot, like a raisin in the slime?  I am afraid that the American dream of making oneself a better life is easily perverted because it is inherently ambiguous, encompassing both "equal opportunity for all who work hard" and "I want what I want, screw everyone else."   The latter distorts the abuse of the concept of freedom from "liberty limited by responsibility" to an excuse for bad behavior, or worse.    Sadly, a democracy can be no better than its Demos, just as "love is no better than the lover," to quote Toni Morrison.   American history does not seem to reflect much gentle cooperation or lofty egalitarianism: the mistreatment of blacks, Indians, immigrants, and women was not imposed by some dictator, but by the people themselves.  The leaders chosen are thus embodiments of wishful wanting: righteous types to be supported versus predatory types to be emulated, depending on the personality of the wishers.   It is thus no surprise that such icons of fantasy are often closely aligned with the world of entertainment: twice in my lifetime has a president been elected who was a fictional character rather than a person, from  the professor on Me and the Chimp to the firer of phony employees on a reality show.   We have raised silliness to an art form, just as the Slavic peoples have raised suffering to an art form.

      Borrowing an idea from William Thackeray: I believe the concept that people's faults are simply a logical extension of their virtues (e.g. a generous person can easily become a spendthrift) also applies to nations.  Virtually unlimited economic freedom has perverted the economy into unchecked greed.  Thus, the credit principle made it possible for people to buy cars and homes over time, but also encouraged irresponsibility and deficit spending, thus jeopardizing the finance and insurance industries and ballooning the national debt.  Additionally, intentionally misnaming a type of debt insurance "credit default swaps" so as to avoid regulation as insurance should be re-outlawed as it was for most of the 20th century; these "financial instruments" are just gambling with other people's money, and taxpayers should not be asked to bail out the blithe destructiveness of betting on whether homeowners can meet their mortgage obligations.  This is neither investment nor speculation, but gambling, like an office football pool.

     Ever since the 1980's tax cuts on the wealthy, Republican administrations have been hurting the middle classses, which had theretofore been coddled by an admittedly artificial postwar prosperity.  The Bush-Cheney administration seemed to have behaved in a manner almost reminiscent of a kleptocracy, manipulating truth into propaganda to manufacture pretexts for invasion, allowing cronies to enronize our Social Security and Medicare money (be sure that they will try to blame the retiring boomers instead), advocating what even the senior Bush called "voodoo economics," fostering oil crises in order to impose Arctic oil-drilling, and forcing people into the stock market so CEO's can skim off even more millions in bonuses for themselves.  It  presided over unprecedented losses of American employment (in 1975 anyone who outsourced American jobs to a Communist country would have been lynched for high treason), the major beneficiaries being not the Chinese subcontractors (who only get a tiny fraction of the final price, according to James Mann and Alexandra Harney's 2007 The China Fantasty and The China Price respectively), but the wholesalers, retailers, shareholders, and six-figure-bonus CEO's of the distributing companies. Not to mention the People's Liberation Army, the standard joint-venture partner in China, who are making money hand over fist and are not using it to buy flowers.  Circa 2006, Bill Moyers' NOW television program indicated that the Asian women who hand-stitch athletic shoes get only 17 cents per shoe and have to pay for the needle and thread themselves, so that that production costs for the shoes, which subsequently sell for $80, are thus probably less than the sales tax of a typical state.  

    Like the 17th and 18th-century Polish nobility, the new money-boys have sold their own people down the river for personal gain, ignoring the fact that they are financing their own potential enemies.  The Chinese government is taking credit for all those outsourced jobs, thereby legitimizing its power and encouraging it to be even more imperialistic than before.  As soon as it is no longer afraid of American military power, it will attempt to reassert its dominance over Taiwan and Vietnam, followed by the "liberation" of some of its former Asian satrapies.  It all started with the Reagan tax cuts for the super-rich, who had theretofore had no incentive to be super-greedy because they were paying 90% in taxes; now they were able to outsource American jobs, pocket the salaries of the people they threw out of work, and pay much lower taxes on the "income."

      Some of the laissez-faire administrations even appear oblivious to their own illogic, as when someone whom their interest-rate cuts have deprived of thousands of dollars of income is expected to be grateful for a $300 tax rebate or stimulus.  (Apparently all they remembered from Economics 101 is interest-rate cuts and distributing handouts to the peasantry.)  They also dismissed obvious remedies in the past, such as having the Social Security surplus underwrite the national debt and thereby collect better returns instead of paying high interest rates to commercial banks. 

     President Reagan and the two Bushes seemed to advocate a return to an idealized 'fifties, as though there were something halcyon about the stifling of legitimate conflict by excluding women and minorities from obtaining justice and competing for a share of the postwar pie.  As suggested in my "Toward an Anthropology of the Future" and "The Mythfits," the future can instead be expected to become more violent and contentious than the recent past unless some systemic changes are made.  These will presumably entail a goodly amount of intelligent planning, which requires holistic vision and coordinated information to avoid having people try to legislate what they do not understand--otherwise it is better not to plan than to pretend to plan.  It will also entail changing the attitudes of some people, especially those who tended not to vote until 1980 because they were pacified by prosperity.  Anyone who believes we can revert to our former greatness by reverting to our former behavior is confusing cause and effect: from 1946 to 1973, we had the luxury of acting the way we did because we were great, not vice versa.

     Die-hard holdouts of the Western-movie myth will need to realize that in an overpopulated high-tech world, inadequate rules almost inexorably lead to chaos and then fascism.  (Imagine what would happen to our streets and highways if there were no traffic regulations.)  They will also need to be reminded that the average American has considerably more personal freedom than someone living in, say, France, where opening a B&B requires successfully submitting an application and being told what type of food you may serve, and if you want to play music for spare change in the subway, you have to audition for the authorities, who decide whether you are good enough to play in the Métro.  

      Disorganization and litigiousness are also contributing to the climate of brutality.  The U.S. has only 4% of the world's population but 80% of its lawyers, which means that this bloated group cannot survive without artificial conflict-mongering, and the resulting trend toward legal harassment is taking on some unsavory aspects reminiscent of the Inquisition.  It is my contention that we must find some way to curb the pointless conflict and excessive litigiousness which have become exacerbated by economic desperation among a people spoiled by three decades of artificial prosperity.  Non-confrontational alternatives such as arbitration and divorce mediation should be explored, and punitive damages should be assessed for frivolous lawsuits which terrorize people with non-evidence.  (As an example, drivers who run a stop sign at a corner, sue the corner-house homeowners for damages, and submit irrelevant photographs taken three years after the alleged accident.)  It would also help if legislation were updated and phrased more clearly so as to modernize parameters and minimize ambiguity (lawyers are paid to differ in their interpretation of something as supposedly straightforward as the law).  For instance, if oral sex were legally classified as sex rather than sodomy, tens of millions of dollars could have been saved in the Lewinsky matter.  It would also be a good idea to eliminate the brutal 36-hour shifts for hospital residents, which compromise patient safety and whose only conceivable purpose is weeding out those physicians unfit for combat medicine.  I also believe that professionalizing the jury system would make sense, as a jury of your peers no longer means a bunch of amateurs in today's professionalized world.

     Similarly, politicians should rethink their recent escalation of incendiary language, vicious personal attack, and mindless snarling: the 1946 civil war in Colombia was triggered precisely by inflammatory rhetoric on the part of irresponsible politicians.  I also believe that the campaign question "who [sic] would you rather have a glass of beer with?" did the country a disservice--I don't want a drinking buddy or even a hockey mom, I want a brilliant strategist! 

      To this relatively unbiased observer, Clinton and Obama (whose name means "I will love" in Latin spelled backwards) were more relatively inclusive and kinder to the middle classes.  The Republicans seem to be more to blame for the worrisome escalation of partisanship--they acted like "sore winners" when gaining control of Congress in the early 1990's, and even their fellow party-member Alan Greenspan considers them to be fiscally irresponsible.  (I never voted for the Republicans, but I respected them.  Not any more.)  Also disturbing was the Bush-comes-to-shove comment that Clinton and Gore had been unable to get anything done--how could they, with his own party blocking them every step of the way?  This strikes me as bad faith, like crippling somebody and then jeering at him because he can't dance.  By "getting things done," the reactionaries now seem to mean "steamrolling the opposition,"  trotting out magic words like "freedom" and "choice" to exonerate administrative failure and promote alternative schools, thus essentially replacing a public trust with market factors--as though the absence of decent public education were somehow liberating.  So it figures that the Bush-Cheney administration was a rerun of the Reagan/senior-Bush neo-'fifties years, followed by the Tea Partyists and Trump MAGAts: a skyrocketing national debt and a do-nothing ornamental government which was merely a front for ego and big business. ( Ralph Nader even called Bush Junior a conglomerate masquerading as a person.)  

       In addition, film, television, and social media should acknowledge their social responsibility, especially because of the increased exposure of children whose parents both work outside the home.  In The Achieving Society, David McClelland postulated that children raised by their parents are more realistic and enterprising than children raised by slaves.  I contend that television is a slave (interested in amusing rather than teaching the young master) and further wish to point out that anything a child learns before age six or seven--when learning lateralizes from the intuitive to the logical hemisphere of the brain--is ingested into the basic personality.  (The quarrel between Plato and Aristotle is thus no quarrel at all, just a matter of the viewer's age.)  If you show children violence as entertainment, what can you expect except more Columbines?

      Finally, we must re-examine the intent of the Founding Fathers and adapt it to the present to avoid having the Constitution perverted.  I submit that the supposed remedy to its outdated elements, namely amendments thereto, has also been perverted by myopic greed.  Examples: the First Amendment was intended to protect freedom of speech, not freedom of commerce (the Founding Fathers would have called pornography and strip clubs "trafficking in hussies," not free speech).  The Second Amendment was not meant to allow Saturday Night Specials and machine-guns (which no hunter could possibly need unless attacked by two hundred stags in formation), only muskets for militias because there was no standing army; and the Fifth aimed to outlaw torture (how else do you force someone to incriminate himself?)--which had theretofore been a fairly common method of obtaining confessions--not a way to refuse to tell the truth.  In terms of voting, a systemic change is necessary in order to bring the electoral system into the computer age.  Comedian Jay Leno called the 2000 presidential election debacle "electile dysfunction,"  and who could forget the January 6 attempted coup  by Trump's minions.   Ever since learning at the age of 14 that in 1888 Grover Cleveland won the popular votes but lost the election, I have been advocating a constitutional amendment for the direct election of presidents, especially as a precedent already exists for the direct election of senators.  Presidential elections in which the candidate with FEWER popular votes wins abundantly demonstrate the irony of having the most modern nation on earth hamstrung by a totally outdated electoral system.  Twice in my lifetime have I seen a president elected by fewer popular votes than his rival.  A  constitutional amendment favoring a direct election of presidents by universal popular vote would be a step in the right direction, as it would modernize the system; besides, as we know, contested outcomes entail an increased  risk of political violence, it is only a matter of time.

      The electoral college was invented in an age  when there were no computers, logistics could handle only two parties,  men wore powdered wigs and white stockings, and the roads were so horrible that the electors often needed a month to get to the nation's capital.  No representative democracy had ever been attempted on such a scale before; under the circumstances, the Founding Fathers evidently could think of no better way to safeguard the sovereignty of what amounted to thirteen city-states jealous of their sovereignty (like ancient Athens, only bigger).  Nowadays, however, direct popular election of presidents would be not only feasible, but desirable; computers can count every ballot instantaneously and replace the present wildly outdated system with the true principle of one person, one vote.  In other words, more in line with what the Founding Fathers would have directed if they had been computer-literate efficiency experts.  

       In my opinion, the American dream has been perverted by  selfish greed which can ruin this country without any help whatsoever from Al-Qaeda; it badly needs to be reformulated.

A Holistic Approach to Counterterrorism

   The response to the September 11 attacks has to date been phrased and implemented in terms of a technological challenge.  I believe a big-picture approach would be much more effective and should include emotional, religious, historical, diplomatic, and above all social factors.  I think there will be more deadly attacks and expect them to be spectacular and symbolic--perhaps even numerological, like the end of the Maya calendar in 2012 or repetitions of dates significant to Muslims, such as 711 and 731.

   The feelings first, in the hope that the resulting catharsis can help us think more clearly.  (Superpowers have feelings too!)  In the aftermath of the attacks, I still feel as if I were in mourning even though I don't think I knew anybody who perished--like a limp match that won't strike because the air is too humid.  I hope the spark and the joy come back someday; it's disconcerting to know that you are so hated by people who have never even met you, and horrifying to hear that when the dump trucks unload the WTC debris in Staten Island, human heads come rolling out.  My consolation is that it could have been much worse.  There would have been a lot more victims if the attack had been at a different time or so many had not been able to get away quickly.  Imagine how much good the terrorists could accomplish if they channelled their ingenuity and persistence toward something productive rather than destructive!  I find myself almost missing the Soviets--they may have been dangerous and scary, but at least they were not suicidal murderers.

   I fear there will be more attacks; these criminals learn from their mistakes and don't give up.  Since they came back to finish off the World Trade Center after their first unsuccessful attempt, I expect them to attack the Pentagon again and "do it right," followed by proud and crowded icons (Sears Tower, Disney), hospitals, universities, bridges, and the like, and to produce weapons-grade anthrax and plague.  Although we are unlikely to be destroyed completely, we will get a taste of what it felt like to be a North European repeatedly pillaged by the Vikings a millennium ago, or an African whose village was periodically picked off in Muslim and European slave raids between 650 and 1800.  I am less concerned with people my age or older, who have more or less already had a life, than I am with the very young, who may have theirs snuffed out before it has a chance to get started.  Suggestions: monitor Muslim professionals and businesses, especially if they look like unprofitable fronts, belong to "foundations," or have names symbolic of conquering intent, such as the dates of military triumphs.

   Peace does not seem to be an option; President Bush picked a military man to be his first chief diplomat, which I think says it all.  By backing Ariel Sharon as unconditionally as he bashed Saddam Hussein, Bush accomplished a miracle no Muslim leader has ever managed, namely uniting the Muslims.  It might have been better to enlist the aid of the Iranians (let them work off their frozen assets) or get a Palestinian to persuade bin Laden to call off his fatwa (the resulting Nobel Peace Prize would give him or her enough prestige to convince Israel that those deliberately provocative settlements are counterproductive--we are paying for them twice now, once with our taxes and once with our lives).  Suggestions: persuade Israel that its belligerence is breeding super-fanatics the way antibiotics and roach-spray breed super-bugs; cut off foreign aid to Israel and the Muslim countries and use the savings to rebuild; keep out fundamentalists, who de facto want to overthrow the U.S. government because "the Qur'an is our constitution."  Find out what foreign students from Muslim countries are studying and figure out how the knowledge in question can be misused for destructive purposes.  Watch destructive movies such as "Independence Day" for clues regarding future mischief.  Ask the Russians what anti-US shenanigans the KGB was planning during Soviet times.

   Those Muslims who feel that the U.S. is a bully and deserved to be attacked have not read their history: compared to every past empire I know of (Assyrian, Roman, Chinese, Mongol), the United States has been ridiculously mild.  Ask any West German, Japanese, or Filipino what the American occupation was like, and they will tell you it was a good one.  It is true that dominant nations dominate--they do so by nature and by definition.  However, if the Americans were such horrible bullies, outsiders would not have dared to attack them: had September 11 been perpetrated upon the Nazis or the Soviets, all of Mecca, including the Kaaba, would have been pulverized by September 12.

   Geopolitically, what we need now is someone as international, creative, and diplomatic as Frederick II of Sicily's Hohenstauffen dynasty.  Since his parents died when he was a tiny child, he was raised in a succession of households--Byzantine, Arab, maybe also Jewish--and thus learned a variety of languages and cultures at a very early age.  He further appears to have learned to think for himself rather than accept authority blindly; for instance, as an adult he wrote a treatise on birds wherein he contradicted Aristotle from empirical observation.  The Pope considered him so dangerously independent that he excommunicated him, but lifted the excommunication when Frederick reluctantly agreed to participate in the Crusades.  He did this by raising an army of Sicilian Arabs and camping out and chatting with the Muslim commander in Palestine, who was so impressed by Frederick's knowledge of the Arab customs and language that he gave the Christians what they wanted (access to the holy sites) without shedding a drop of blood.  When Frederick came back, though, the Pope was so angry he hadn't killed anyone that he made him fair game for attack by other European potentates!  (Being the most international person I know, I can certainly identify with Frederick--he sounds like a male me.)

   Most Near/Middle Easterners I have come across (including ultra-orthodox Jews and Arab Christians) struck me as rabidly repressive or contemptuously superior even if they were not fanatics.  No matter how hard I try, I find it virtually impossible to enjoy their company because they inhibit me--they are so dismissive and domineering as to think they can impose their arbitrary rules in someone else's country. Examples: 14th-century travel writer Ibn Battuta positively oozes busybody judgmentalism and arrogant ignorance of local customs on each page; several men in Iran told my tour group, "go home, us Muslims are better than you" and "you women ought to be in a chador"; an Iranian exchange student actually frothed at the mouth when snarling that American girls who dated other men in addition to him "should be killed"; a Middle Eastern grocer whom I tried to give a flier announcing an upcoming concert of Persian music reacted as though I were a whore trying to seduce a monk; an Egyptian Christian believed that oral sex was a CIA plot to emasculate Arab men; and a Pakistani immigrant expressed the ambition of turning the United States into a Muslim country, apparently unaware that the people who built this nation in its present form came here precisely to get away from people like him.  I have the distinct feeling that many Muslims in the United States are behaving more like conquerors than like immigrants eager to assimilate.

   Unlike Judaism and unlike Roman Catholicism, Islam has no central authority to decide on issues of faith, dogma, or behavior.  Although not a particular fan of the Vatican, I must admit that the Pope brings his influence to bear against at least some atrocities.  However, Islam stresses an individual's direct and unfettered relationship to God, which means that it enables a fanatic to deify his own projection because no one can prove he is not doing "God's will."  If a particular Muslim believes that anyone who has a white dog should be shot, he can surely find a mullah to support him; if another Muslim believes that it is blasphemy to shout "God is great!" while violating the 32nd Sura and destroying what God created, his opinion is no more and no less valid than the white-dog one.  Perhaps people can work toward creating a central moral authority to counteract fanaticism; at least it would be worth a try. 

   In addition, I believe that the high birth rate and child-rearing practices of many Muslim societies virtually guarantee a steady supply of fresh fanatics, a factor intensified by politics and prosperity.  It is a sentimental mistake to believe that the latter necessarily leads to liberalization; as was the case with the New World gold looted by the Spanish empire, prosperity can enable the continuation of a medieval system which would otherwise be wildly outdated and prohibitively expensive.   More money means more sons with more free time and better technology; a repressive welfare state like Saudi Arabia means more rage.  Muslim fundamentalists preached similar hatred of the French and British a century ago, before the Palestinians ever became an issue; the difference now is oil money and the destructive technology it can buy.  Besides, social scientists have found that the most violent groups are those seeking to recapture past power and glory.

   Middle Eastern girls marry way too immature and uneducated, and since being a wife and mother is the only way to gain respect in their society, they are likely to have many children and to be self-important, repressive, and abusive to them.  A former Palestinian neighbor is probably typical: even through two closed and unattached houses, I often heard her screeching at her tiny kids at the top of her lungs, which must be terrifying to a two-year-old (I do not know whether she beat the children).  She was so arrogant and irresponsible that she would back her Mercedes out of her driveway without looking ("Aren't you afraid you'll cause an accident?" "I don't care!") and thought she was entitled to leaf-blow her sidewalk trash onto other people's property.  A child raised (or lowered) by such parents is likely to have a lot of their garbage fermenting in his soul; since he cannot attack the source (the psyche will not allow it) or escape into drugs or alcohol (Islamic law prohibits intoxicants), he can easily become addicted to his own self-importance and try to destroy anything he cannot control, or at the very least spoil others' enjoyment; the rage then becomes directed vindictively toward something that represents what the abused child cannot have or be.  Having been brought up (or down) in an Eastern European hierarchy of abuse masquerading as a family, I distinctly remember fulminating at the world for not acknowledging that I was the supreme arbiter of all things good and proper, and feeling spoilsport envy of kids whose normal parents gave them freedom and respect.  Therapy cured me of this syndrome, but the members of my birth family remain so toxic that I have withdrawn from them entirely.  Suggestion: have diplomacy include a study of the effects of such medieval child abuse and awareness of the ticking population time-bomb; solicit input from specialists in the psychology of child abuse.  

    I also have the distinct feeling that the recent attacks are payback for the Gulf War of a decade ago, which was fought by reservists, i.e. irresponsible young boys rather than professional soldiers.  When they hit their targets, they let out gleeful yelps at the screen, as though they were playing a video game instead of killing people.  The Arabs were watching and listening, and these people don't forget.  I remember wondering at the time how much those war-whoops would be costing us in the future.

    Another thing that is costing us: Saudi Arabia is actually a family business masquerading as a country; it does not even have a proper army (possibly in order to prevent a military takeover), so outsiders had to do the fighting for them.  This was grist for the mill of fundamentalist extremists, who were incensed by all those infidels on their sacred sand.  Since repressive Arab governments often get rid of dissidents by exiling them (exporting their hooliganism like the Vikings used to do), other countries are then stuck with the results of someone else's rage.  Suggestions: send only Muslim GI's to Saudi Arabia and persuade the Saudis to jail their dissidents, they can surely afford it.

    "The Roots of Rage," a Dateline special which aired on NBC December 7, 2001, shows that the Saudi royals consider the oil to be family property.   They buy off their subjects with money but forbid political dissent and many forms of public entertainment, such as movies and alcohol.  All that thwarted testosterone of course has to go someplace else, namely to the mosques, where rabidly reactionary Wahhabi clerics are allowed to preach vituperative hatred of the West provided they do not topple the family regime.  Something similar has happened in Pakistan, whose authorities encouraged the Taliban in order to create a two-against-one situation with India over Kashmir. ) This means that the most modern nation in the world is thus subject to the deliberately inculcated hatred of medieval welfare trash masquerading as murderous high-tech Savonarolas.

    Suggestions: persuade the Saudis to give their subjects circuses as well as bread; deny visa applications from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; perform retinal scans and fingerprint identification upon applicants to make sure they do not enter from other countries; promote energy efficiency and alternative fuels; switch to natural gas for home heating; find other sources for electricity, such as solar and wind power; make theater patrons check their coats to prevent them from blowing up a beltful of explosives; and buy oil elsewhere than the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia.  Most importantly, we must enlist the aid of moderate Muslims in flagging the destructive plans of militants; with great respect and diplomacy, a normal Muslim might be persuaded that these fanatics are giving his religion a very bad name, and that it would behoove him to do something about it.

    It must be remembered that militant Islam is an expansionist political ideology as well as a religion; why uncritically allow its exponents to enter the country if we went out of our way to exclude the Soviet Communists during the Cold War?  A milder form is using demographics and economics (making lots of babies and lots of money) to do what Islam has not been able to accomplish by military means since 711, i.e. conquer a Western nation.  In my opinion, something must be done to defuse the population time-bomb of excessive fertility (almost everyone except the Muslims is practicing population control), such as finding some activity for Muslim women more interesting than churning out potential suicide bombers.

    Lastly, any large-scale operation abroad should include proper planning and not be based upon any presidential whim or reconstruction contracts.  Contrast Iraq with the end of World War II: when the Americans knew they would be victorious against Japan, they organized a committee of social scientists, comparative-literature specialists, and the like to advise them as to how to treat the country they would be occupying.  Important outcomes included the recommendation that the emperor not be deposed and resulted in the publication of anthropologist Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

    In summary: our response must become more inclusive (no dismissing of input just because it was not generated within a particular agency) and more holistic, incorporating data from anthropology, psychology, history, religion, and the like.  In other words: think less like bureaucrats and more like detectives.

Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking

Part 3: Forecasts (NOT predictions!)

by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph.D.

All rights reserved unless otherwise indicated

Gynetic Engineering (NOT a typo)

The Kom Dynasty

Toward an Anthropology of the Future

Goodbye Future!

Gynetic Engineering

If you are also the kind of person whose idea of a good time is to spend hours in  bookshop browsing, thumbing, and thinking, undeterred by sore toes and late hours, then you may be able to empathize.  Around 1968, while I was raising my own consciousness and living with the man who was later to become my husband, we wandered through a Marboro together and, as usual, separated: he headed for the mechanical-arts section, whereas I gravitated toward the anthro-socio-political areas which were to fascinate me through college and beyond.

One of the books I leafed through and became engrossed in was a hardcover collection of predictions, dire and otherwise, by someone whose name I unfortunately didn’t bother to remember.  Among other assorted goodies, he or she foretold that sometime soon, an underwater volcano would cause Lake Geneva to bubble and froth, and anyone in the water to surface “boiled a livid red.”  Shuddering halfheartedly, I made a semi-serious mental note to avoid Lake Geneva in the future—it isn’t my favorite lake anyway—but some of the other prophesies didn’t seem so easily avoidable.  One in particular disturbed me so much that I thought its fulfillment would make death preferable to life.

The “prophet” had predicted that by the year 2000, women would lose even the semblance of equality they had been working so hard to achieve, and be degraded to subhuman slaves for the benefit of men.  The instrument of such a revolution was to be a demented political leader who hated women (sound familiar?) and who would abolish marriage and make women public property.

Okay, so I don’t believe in occultism as an article of faith, only that it is unscientific to say that such things are not possible, and this particular prediction seemed to be quite eminently possible when the right correlations were abstracted.  I was beginning to learn that many men don’t generally like women (they tolerate us because they need us and use us), although others seem to have become better in the meantime; an almost-major in anthropology subsequently taught me that, cross-culturally speaking, whatever men do has higher status than whatever women do because men have higher status.  Given such imbalance, I decided that the only significant deterrents to the fulfillment of this prediction were convention and logistics, and that both could be changed.

For instance, two of the conventions presently militating against such degradation are the ideal of romantic love and the system of democratic institutions.  But romantic love has long been co-opted by the economy, which knows that it is only good for selling lipstick and engagement rings; and as for our democratic institutions, they are only a few centuries old, and quite demonstrably fragile besides.  Furthermore, democracy has historically not been friendly to women: think of the recent inferior status of Swiss females and of the invisible, disenfranchised women of Periclean Athens.  The abundance of pornography and media violence further demonstrates that free commerce, not free speech, is at issue, and that Marshall McLuhan was absolutely right when he called photography a brothel without walls.

That leaves logistics, specifically the near-fifty-fifty male-female ratio in today’s world which is largely a product of the randomness of nature, as the significant deterrent to the prophet’s prediction—and this variable, too, can be changed.  After all, it has in the meantime become possible to predict or even predetermine the sex of unborn children (by amniocentesis or ultrasound followed by selective abortion, artificial insemination with Y chromosomes, infanticide, or in vitro hatching à la Faust’s Homunculus), and thereupon lead to the conclusion that this could seriously affect the ratio of men to women in generations to come.  When I wrote as much in a 1971 anthropology paper which speculated on whether there would be marriage as we know it in the foreseeable future, my thoughts were discounted as “poor,” which confirmed my nagging suspicion that Cassandras usually get the idiot treatment; the reaction to my 1975 precursor to this essay for a CUNY graduate course on women in dystopian literature further required that I explain that “gynetic” was not a typo. But numerous books and articles on genetic engineering and the “man-child fixation” (Boy or Girl?) showed me that the prophet and I may unfortunately be right.  However, such articles merely expounded on the biological method for achieving the imbalance, without speculating as to what the social consequences could be.  It is important that we contemplate the possibilities with a view to formulating a practical philosophy, for two reasons: (a) the potentialities are staggeringly alarming, and (b) too many feminist ideas are unfortunately prone to self-cancellation.  (For instance: more working wives may depress female wages even further; supporting prostitutes as “sisters” can lower us all to being viewed as such.)

First, let us discount the breathless Cosmopolitan assumption that a dearth of women and a preponderance of men would be an advantage to women because there would be more of those darling men to go around.  It must be remembered that being considered rare and desirable merchandise is not tantamount to dignity; that men do not need to “have” a woman all to themselves; and that cultures in which there are more men than women (contemporary Tokyo, for instance, or the Yanomamo of the Orinoco valley, or imperial China, or the gold-rush shantytowns) do not necessarily consider women equal to men.  As a matter of fact, Margaret Mead pointed out in an anthropology lecture series at the American Museum of Natural History around 1976 that polyandry does not mean matriarchy: rather than one wife’s lording it over four husbands, it means four husbands’ sharing of one captive wife.

Secondly, let us not delude ourselves that such a thing is not possible.  Within a generation or two, a 5% annual surplus of male children can bring about a sizable imbalance, one which our economy would be characteristically quick and flexible to exploit.  The unemployment rate would dwindle to near-nothing, as there would be no women in the work force; former “women’s work” such as cooking, washing, and sewing would be taken over by men and machines (we must remember that many of the jobs presently extant in our country are the result of the mechanization of former housework—any man who complains that women are taking away his job deserves to know that he’s taken away ours, from making baby foods to selling clothes to boarding guests); the cosmetics companies could easily convert to makeup for men; the merchants of sex would only have to compete with each other, rather than with normal women as well; and, with the industrialization of women’s work making wives useless, there would be no reason for men to marry any more.  Even today, with the help of laundries, coffee shops, and massage parlors, a man doesn’t actually need a wife; formerly, he had no way of getting that kind of service unless he married it, nor of achieving the fatherhood status that our culture considered important until very recently.

Thirdly, let us see what such an imbalance would wreak upon sex and reproduction.  While young, the female minority could easily be kept in public harems, known as brothels or massage parlors in more old-fashioned days. (Remember that this is not a pornographic fantasy, but a terrifyingly real possibility.)  When older, these same women would become “breeders,” inseminated artificially and made to bear pre-programmed offspring annually until their eggs became tired, at which point they could easily be eliminated.  (Remember that a predominantly male, predominantly disgruntled electorate would not be terribly concerned about the rights of subhumans.)  Both stages are the local answer to a dearth of females: what would any right-thinking capitalist do if all shoes were made by hand and there weren’t enough shoes to go around?  (After all, even our cattle are separated into dairy and meat cows.) 

Furthermore, if a culture is warlike, it would actually welcome a high proportion of relatively belligerent young males for purposes of military conquest; their needs could be serviced by a relatively small number of women. Think of the Korean “comfort girls,” of the ISIS fanatics, or of contemporary China, whose one-child policy has over the past few decades produced a sex-ratio surplus of thirty million men—that’s the population of Canada! The most frightening example of such systemic violence is probably that of the Vikings a thousand years ago, wherein primogeniture (only the eldest son can inherit so as to prevent parcellization of already marginal cropland) and polygyny (the type of polygamy in which a man marries multiple women) proved such an explosive combination.  Say a typical husband would have four wives who produced a total of 16 children, half of whom were boys.  That would leave seven  sons with no land, no jobs, no prospects, and no women.  Such disgruntled have-nots were virtually guaranteed to form mobs of ruthless marauders which terrorized much of Europe for centuries.

Fourthly, let us contemplate that shutting our eyes to such possibilities is not the answer.  Of course, I hope my prediction is wrong (although it does not seem so thus far), but discounting me as an alarmist will do no good.  Except that I, for one, do not know what to do.  After much soul-searching and agonizing, I long ago decided not to have children—why subject myself to great expense in terms of time, money, and anguish just to raise consumers and cannon fodder for someone else’s benefit in an unjust world?  This is a shame because it is a copout, because I like children and would probably have made a good mother, and because I would have been proud to raise the kind of person I would like to see more of.  Perhaps serious discussion on the part of dedicated theorists could come up with another way out, which is why I formulated this spectral possibility almost half a century ago in the hope that some sensible futurist could refute my horrible theory.  However, please do not discount it as “too far-fetched.”  Eighty years ago, what could have seemed more farfetched than a lunatic legally gassing millions of people simply because he didn’t like the shape of their noses?

                        The Kom Dynasty

Copyright 1990 by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph.D.

  subsequently amended, all rights reserved

                      History and Religion

     In my opinion, Chinese history and religion are largely conditioned by the fact that China was (and still is) an empire whose unity is more artificial than most people realize, since the writing system (see Language & Writing) and the dynastic-cycle method of recording history obscure a lot of underlying diversity.  The result is the macropathy typical of empires--centralization without coordination--which, coupled with the cooperation required for irrigated rice farming and the resulting huge population, would seem to make absolutism almost a foregone conclusion; China could never afford to be as tolerant as a less populous nation where there is room enough for everybody and loners can make a living unassisted.

     One could also predict that managing such an empire would require an army of bureaucrats, which was (and is) of course the case.  During ancient times, any man could theoretically become a scholar, pass the imperial examinations, and enter the civil service, although in practice scholars usually came from wealthy leisured families rather than poor farm groups.  Some people have even commented that the Cultural Revolution was in fact waged over who would control the bureaucracy, which reminds me of Winston Churchill's famous quip that the American Civil War was fought to determine whether United States should be a singular or a plural noun.

     Chinese historiographers classify almost exclusively by dynasties, treating them like self-contained, unchanging wholes; every new dynasty further has the tendency to rewrite history.  The first member of a dynasty, usually a military man who consolidates his predecessors' chaos, is almost deified; the last is always described in the vilest of terms as a total degenerate.  (He is the only one to whom the "Teflon factor" does not apply; all the other emperors' atrocities are usually pinned onto the "unofficial bureaucracy" of wives and eunuchs.)  Oversimplifying grossly, dynasties last about two centuries apiece; they start out centralized and rich, largely because the clean broom sweeps out aristocratic privileges and broadens the tax base, and then gradually decompose as aristocrats regain their hold and buy up peasant land, thereby cutting off funds and forced labor from the central government.  The Chinese view of history as a cycle of dynasties contingent upon the rulers' personal morality is very different from our belief that it is a linear march of ideas and progress.

     A dynasty was only viewed as legitimate as long as it possessed the "mandate of heaven," and the signs of having lost the mandate included peasant rebellions and natural disasters.  Since China's rivers tend to flood periodically because they are so low-gradient that silt buildups cause them to change course, one can easily imagine that floods and famine go hand in hand, causing peasant revolts and leading to a new dynasty.  When an earthquake wrought massive destruction in the Beijing area around 1976, there was serious worry that the Communist government (the Kom Dynasty?!) had lost the mandate of heaven.

     The single most creative era of Chinese thought preceded unification (which occurred around 221 BC) and featured a wealth of philosophy and experimentation.  Confucius and his disciples formulated an idealized hierarchy of human behavior which was expected to regulate and stabilize society; in what was essentially "back-to-basics" jeremiads, he indulged in scholarly fulminations to the effect that everything would be fine if kings acted like kings, sons like sons, and so forth.  (This doctrine, called the rectification of names, typifies what I perceive to be a Chinese attitude: it is the responsibility of the territory to be congruent with the map.)  His followers sometimes arrived at diametrically opposed positions, as in interpreting his statement that all men are alike when they start out: Hsün-Tzu thought man intrinsically evil, Mencius intrinsically good. Although  the Communists revile Confucianism because they associate it with pre-revolutionary "bourgeois feudalism," they have actually swallowed most of its precepts intact, especially the emphasis on hierarchy and unquestioning obedience.

     Taoism (pronounced Dow-ism), mystical and romantic, the other major current in Chinese philosophy, is characterized by personal freedom and a striving for communion with nature, which sometimes degenerated into a search for the herb of immortality even while it gave Chinese cuisine all that variety born of experimentation.  Although officially reviled by imperial Confucianists who saw it as a threat to state control, Taoism has nevertheless become a potent force in Chinese philosophy.  It is typical of its synthesis with the yin-yang theory that "hot" and "cold" foods must be balanced in a dish, such as exemplified by chicken with gingko nuts: chicken is "hot" because the rooster is the first animal to greet the rising sun, whereas gingko nuts are "cold" because the gingko flowers open at night.  To me, that sounds as though one were cooking poetry.

     These two philosophies are not mutually exclusive; it was possible for a Confucianist government official to dabble in Taoist poetry and nature-mysticism as soon as he got home.  Other currents of thought and belief included the 100 Schools, Legalism, Naturalism, Dialecticism, etc., with ancestor worship permeating whatever synthesis resulted at various points in history.  In ancient China's family-oriented society, kinship was important because it established reciprocal obligations; kin could do things for you, which explains what most Westerners would consider an exaggerated emphasis on filial piety.  Dead ancestors are also in a position to intercede with the gods and to get things done for their living descendants.

     The Chinese do not believe in reincarnation nor an afterlife in the Buddhist or Christian meanings; their popular religion is in fact a practical synthesis, very much geared to the here and now and to social control.  Buddhism is used for spiritual hygiene, ancestor worship to gain favor with the gods, Taoism to ensure a long and healthy life, Confucianism to regulate the mechanics of society (which can be quite formidable in a country as populous as China), and the yin-yang school to explain the ceaselessly flowing duality of opposites.  The whole mix is often characterized by a somewhat perplexing emphasis on appearances and a tendency to ignore or trick inconvenient agents.  A good example is the institution of the stove-god (photo available), whose existence the government denies because of official atheism; stove-gods and ancestral burial-mounds can, however, still be found in abundance in the countryside.  A stove-god is a wood-block print with a calendar; he observes the family's goings-on from his perch atop a hearth.  After a year, he is replaced and burned so he can fly to heaven and tell the Jade Emperor about the family's behavior.  Before burning him, however, the family usually smears honey on his lips to prevent him from delivering a bad report!

     Everything changes when it comes to China--in my opinion, because it is digested in Confucian gastric juices.  Buddhism is a perfect example.  The Indians love to speculate, whereas the Chinese love to classify.  India needed a religion to explain human inequality and came up with the concept of reincarnation; China was less interested in explanation than in social control.  In Indian Buddhism, a boddhisattva is someone who has achieved enlightenment and is entitled to Nirvana, but who chooses instead to continue the painful treadmill of rebirths in order to help his fellow man; one of the most famous of these is Avalokitesvara.  The Chinese synthesis, however, transformed him into a woman, namely Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy (photo); the compassionate teacher has become a deity to whom people pray for favors as though (s)he were a Catholic saint.  Or an ancestor.

     In my opinion, Communism is undergoing the same digestive transformation as China's previous imported religions suffered upon absorption into the Confucian synthesis.  (A good example would be Mao's glorification of spontaneity and the peasants, contrasted with Lenin's icy disdain for both.)  Wild policy fluctuations are nothing new in a country in which emperors have varied from the hands-on toughness of Wu Ti (140-87 BC) to pliant weaklings to outright infants manipulated by regents or dowager empresses.  One could even speculate that the Chinese value harmony and order so highly simply because their violent history has had so little of both, or that the main result of Tian An-Men Square will be to accentuate the suspicion with which Chinese peasants have always viewed city-dwellers.  The all-important imperial bureaucracy is still alive and well, its style and substance virtually unchanged; local officials' powers to interpret imperial decisions remain undiminished.  Say some absolute ruler (whether emperor or committee) decrees that no family may have more than one child; the local bureaucrats' interpretations can nevertheless be diametrically opposed, with the proverbial blind eye in one province juxtaposed against atrocities such as third-trimester abortions just a few miles away.  There have also been cultural revolutions before: the massacre of intellectuals and burning of books in 221 BC; Wang Mang's usurpation from 9-23 AD; the mass killing of eunuchs in 189 AD; Empress Wu's intrigues and reign of whim and terror; An Lu-Shan's 755 rebellion; the persecutions of Buddhists and Taoists during the 9th century (let us not forget that monasteries eroded the government's tax base!); Wang An-Shih's reforms circa 1075 and the subsequent anti-reform backlash; the late Sung persecution of Chu Hsi's neo-Confucianists; the eunuch Wei Chung-hsien's brutal purges 1624 et seq.; the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-1800's; the Boxer Rebellion around 1900; and the 1911 revolution.  In fact, I consider the turbulent 20th century to be merely a pimple upon China's violent history, consistent with tradition rather than a departure therefrom.  Plus ça change....

China Today and Tomorrow, from "The Kom Dynasty"

Copyright 1990 by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph.D.

Subsequently amended, all rights reserved

     Having greatly enjoyed my few semesters of Chinese language and culture as an undergraduate, I was very much interested in learning how different modern China is from its ancient predecessor.  Several trips to China, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Macao, plus substantial independent research (see bibliography), led me to believe that the difference is no greater than between one dynasty and its successor; my impression was that whatever changes have been made reinforce tradition rather than breaking with it.

     For instance, modern China claims to be scientific, but does not seem to realize that any ideology is unscientific by nature, since it imposes a manifesto to be obeyed by reality instead of hypothesizing theories to understand reality (and deliberately trying to disprove them). It subsumes everything into a linear historical progression from slavery to feudalism to capitalism ("bourgeoisism") to socialism, distorting the evidence if need be to conform to the design.  This even extends to something as unpolitical as archeology: at the 8000-year-old neolithic Ban Po site discovered in 1953, the mere fact that two female skeletons were buried together is interpreted to mean that it was a matriarchal society, an inference no self-respecting Western archeologist would make on such flimsy data.  The Chinese apparently have no qualms about suppressing inconvenient evidence; for instance, a 1998 Nova program about the mummies of the Taklimakan Desert showed that a specimen had been beheaded so as to conceal the fact that she was an Indo-European.

     Further, I believe that Communism is undergoing a process of synthesis, becoming digested into Confucianism like prior imported religions such as Buddhism. (I guess the resulting amalgam could be called Comfucianism.)  Hierarchy and obedience have most definitely not been eliminated, so I believe that China is still a feudal society no matter what they call it.  Even in a relationship of supposed equality such as friendship, a senior-junior hierarchy tends to establish itself, often including bullying and/or manipulation.  My readings and personal observation lead me to believe that China intends to become the "global top-dog friend" so that it can exercise worldwide the same punitive control it used recently on Disney for making "Seven Years in Tibet."  (American tycoons who export manufacturing jobs to China so as to make even bigger profits are selling their own grandchildren--and their country as a whole--down the river; just a few decades ago they would have been lynched for high treason.  When the Polish nobility acted thus in the 17th and 18th centuries, the result was the total dismemberment of the Polish nation.)  Throughout history, China has behaved like a mercantilistic super-corporation whose CEO's are subject to no accountability or controls, except for periodic slave rebellions when conditions become intolerable.

     China appears to remain a conservative, puritanical, and extremely imperialistic country ruled by often capricious bureaucrats whose ambition of "serving the state" is actually code for "bullying people."  Throughout history, members of the military and the bureaucracy had virtual carte blanche and could be abusive with impunity as long as their sadistic self-importance was not incongruent with the sadistic self-importance of the State. 

     So unquestioning obedience is still considered obligatory, as evidenced by the following experience I had in Beijing.  A tall young immigration official dourly snapped at us to line up in the sequence of our group visa numbers, which of course none of us knew.  I joked to our tour leader that we had been ordered to present ourselves numerically.  The official overheard me; realizing that he was being pompous, he later engaged me in conversation--which went surprisingly well, given the rudimentary nature of my Chinese and his English.  It turned out he had been a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, which meant that he was deprived of an education.  When I asked him what that decade had been like, he said it was a lot of fun--"we travelled around the country for free and borrowed money for our food."  Did they pay it back?  No.  Did he think the Cultural Revolution was a good thing?  No.  Would he do the same thing again?  Yes, because you must always obey your leader even if you have your doubts or know he is wrong, because otherwise you will be killed.  I told him that the French call the Chinese "blue ants" and asked if that assessment was correct; he thought about it a while and said it was.

     The centrifugal tendency of empires to decompose into intrigue and factions and to fragment into natural ethnic groupings continues apace, although somewhat attenuated by more high-tech surveillance.  (Nowadays even the comforting proverb "The mountain is high, and the emperor is far away" has been rendered obsolete by technology.)  The gobbled-up "minorities" (such as Mongols, Uighurs, and Tibetans) are losing their culture at an alarming rate, and their Chinese overlords are more meddlesome and ethnocentric than I would have thought possible.  (Even foreign conqueror-dynasties such as the Yüan and the Ch'ing have, after all, lost their identity to the Chinese.)  The PRC also tends to ignore or deny any evidence in its disfavor, acting genuinely surprised that, say, the Tibetans would revolt after the Chinese had done so much for them.  ("We even let them practice their religion and twirl their prayer-wheels.")  For instance, one of China's favorite Western movies is "The Sound of Music," but no Chinese I met had grasped the parallel between Nazi Germany and the People's Republic of China.

     They appear to believe blindly whatever their leaders tell them, which is of course often distorted or untrue.  Although they were extremely knowledgeable about foreigners' problems, such as teenage suicide and street crime, I was only able to find a single person who realized that the Cultural Revolution was a crime, and a state-sponsored one at that.  Let me stress, however, that the Chinese I spoke to were very nice personally; I am referring here only to the ideology they have swallowed.

     I also found the Chinese--even overseas Chinese--to be extremely imperialistic.  For instance, they keep repeating that Tibet is part of China and has been for 300 years.  The truth is that the Ch'ing (Manchu) Dynasty, which the PRC vilifies so much and which was not even Chinese, had a protectorate relationship with Tibet, dating from 1720, similar to the "patron and priest" relationship which Tibet had enjoyed with the Mongols when the latter conquered China.  After 1790, the Manchus could not even protect Tibet from foreign invasion.  I do not believe I am exaggerating when I say the Chinese would like to claim any piece of earth where any Chinese has ever been, which is why I would not be the least surprised to see them invade any country with which they have ever had a tribute relationship of any kind, including Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, Java, Ceylon, Nepal, and Laos.  (They of course conveniently forget that the Chinese have paid tribute to and been subdued by others.)

     Furthermore, the Teflon factor seems to predate the invention of Teflon by several millennia: with the exception of the last member of any dynasty, every emperor is exonerated for his errors, which are instead pinned onto someone else.  Mao is considered a great man, "you can see that from his mistakes," the fault being shifted onto his widow and Lin Piao. Similarly, Wang An-shih and assorted reformers were pilloried instead of emperor Shen Tsung, whose ideas they were merely putting into practice; also, emperor Kao Tsung shifted the blame for his failures onto chief councillor Chin Gwei.  Chou Yang, considered an antirevisionist champion in 1963, was later purged as a revisionist!  I consider Maoism to be more Chinese than Communist, especially in its glorification of trade and agriculture; for instance, Mao criticized Soviet-style tax collecting as "draining the pond to catch the fish" and fomented "bourgeois" trade, often disobeying the Central Committee to do so.

     Appearances seem to be as important as ever. For instance, tourists must have visible locks on their luggage.  Never mind if they're the flimsy cheap variety that a child could open in ten seconds with a hairpin; the important thing is to have a lock.  Similarly, the questionnaires tourists are asked to fill out at the end of the trip to evaluate the guides and services are opened and read by the guides.  This is highly reminiscent of the imperial position of "censor," whose duty it was to inform the emperor if he was wrong.  As that normally meant forfeiting his life, the censor usually said nothing--his existence was ornamental, to safeguard appearances.

     Diplomacy apparently also continues to be ornamental, or at least subordinate, in the sense that its function is manufacturing justifications for the military.  Talking diplomacy with a Chinese diplomat is equivalent to discussing a conglomerate's mergers-and-acquisitions policy with its public-relations manager.

     The legal system also seems to continue tradition: as before, the main function of the law is to define a crime (with punishment being preordained and automatic) and to safeguard society (raping a woman is punished no more severely than stealing from a factory because the rape is a crime against a mere individual).  An update, as reported by Todd Crowell and David Hsieh in the October 18, 1996 issue of AsiaWeek: the newly issued Chinese Citizens' Handbook now allows citizens to sue companies, with the law specifying the amount of damages in advance.  However, I believe this represents a continuation of rather than a break with legal tradition, as it preordains the multiple to be automatically applied (shades of defining the crime) and concentrates largely upon the misdeeds of private, not governmental, companies.

     In keeping with the Mandate of Heaven theory, wherein every new dynasty rewrites history and appropriates its predecessors' accomplishments, the Kom Dynasty is silently taking credit for whatever the Nationalists did well while simultaneously vilifying them.  Pursuant to the earthquakes around Beijing circa 1976, there was considerable worry that the Communists had lost the Mandate of Heaven.  Oversimplifying grossly, the "mandate of heaven" is only retained as long as the peasants are kept happy enough to be productive.  I expect a major problem in this regard because the PRC is now sacrificing its peasants to industry and trade, much as Great Britain did when repealing the Corn Laws in 1846.

       China consciously decided millennia ago that society is paramount in importance, the individual insignificant; orthodoxy and conformity are valued in and of themselves.  This does not appear to have changed, nor do I expect it to do so in the future, given the societal control required by a huge population and endeavors which must needs be cooperative, such as irrigation.  I even expect modern inventions such as computers to reinforce this trend rather than abrogating it.  The Chinese see no gray area between autocracy and anarchy; they value order, no matter how pathological, over disorder, no matter how creative.  Every dynasty to date has gained power by military violence, and so far each one has been replaced because nobody dared correct the powerful, which invites abuse, corruption, and horrendous mistakes because power does not equal wisdom and nobody is smarter than everybody.  (For millennia, China has only questioned the legitimacy of any dynasty's wielding of absolute power, never the absolute power per se.  As democracy means limits on power, the innocent demands of the students at Tian An-Men Square were revolutionary and therefore dangerous, which explains the viciousness of the government's reaction.)  Also, we must remember that the Chinese languages force hierarchical thinking upon their speakers.  For instance, there is no word for "brother" or "sister" --you must specify whether the sibling in question is older, younger, or a twin. The PRC's professed liberalism has now been shown to be style rather than substance, wanting to have your cake and eat it too, in the manner of a man who orders his mousy wife to join Women's Liberation to make her a less boring conversationalist at parties and is then flabbergasted to have her question his judgment in public.  Deng also seemed to be confusing cause and effect when stating that prosperity comes before freedom; after all, it is freedom which causes prosperity, not vice versa.

     What about the future?  I must confess to one overriding apprehension.  To wit: the one-child policy, which I am afraid will lead to a disproportionate number of men vis-à-vis women in later decades. Due to female infanticide, neglect and abuse of female children, and suicide among daughters-in-law, there have always been more men than women in China, but in the past the problem was solved by economics: poor men either did not marry or had to settle for women too homely or dimwitted to find a better husband.  Now that amniocentesis, ultrasound, and selective abortion are so common and everyone is supposedly equal, however, I expect a preponderance of males will make for ugly social problems and for a dangerous army of malcontents eager to engage in warfare for women and land.  Let us remember that the Vikings were such a threat to Europe a thousand years ago specifically because there was a very high percentage of unmarried have-nots among its male population.

     I fear this will contribute to wide-ranging upheaval in the near future due to China's historically innate militaristic mercantilism and cultural imperialism.  (Lest we forget: Kuan Ti, the Chinese god of war, is also the god of commerce and literature.)  I hope I am wrong, but I think the mainland is poised for invasion within the next generation, by which time the one-child policy will have produced a surplus of disgruntled men who will never be able to marry. Since the PRC has gotten Hong Kong back, there is no reason to be nice any more; I believe Beijing's bullying Seoul into severing official ties with Taipei to be a relatively benign announcement of its intentions.  Besides, the PRC government is making money hand over fist with all its new business ventures, money which can safely be assumed is not being used to buy flowers.  (By purchasing Chinese footwear, we will in effect be kicking ourselves in the behind with our own shoes within a generation.)  However, I think China will first take advantage of the demoralized, bankrupt disintegration of the Russian army in the wake of the Soviet collapse and invade Russia's client state of Mongolia.

     In a typical instance of China's convoluted imperialist logic, it claims that Mongolia is part of it because the Mongols once ruled China as the Yüan Dynasty! The Chinese word for "China," "junggwo," literally means "central kingdom/ middle country," which used to mean "the country surrounded by barbarians," but since China has swallowed the "barbarians" and renamed them "minorities," the concept is veering perilously close to "the navel of the world."  (The Chinese languages are often so telegraphic as to be ambiguous, and whoever is in power can be counted on to impose whatever interpretation is most favorable to him.)  Let me quote from p. 111 of Founders of Living Religions (Philadelphia, Westminster, 1974) by Herbert Stroup of Brooklyn College and the New School for Social Research:  "The Chinese... believed that they inhabited the earthly center of the universe and that as one went out from the middle kingdom, especially from the emperor's palace and its altars, one met with increasingly inferior peoples."  China has in fact never countenanced the possibility of the diplomatic equality of any other nation.  Based on my studies and travels, I believe the Chinese have contempt for foreign people, and they are scarcely less beastly to their own, whom they treat like subjects or slaves rather than citizens.

     Anyone who insists on harboring illusions as to PRC intentions would be well advised to observe how China behaves when it has the upper hand--which it has had throughout East Asia for most of its centuries of history.  During the Ming Dynasty, for instance, the Koreans could not even invest a Crown Prince without the Chinese emperor's approval, and Vietnam was an outright colony ("the pacified South") for centuries.  More recently, PRC bureaucrats who are not even Buddhists think they are entitled to make Tibetan religious decisions.  According to the May 6, 1997 New York Times (p. A7), Tibetan Buddhist monk Chadrel Rinpoche was jailed for "splittism" (= separatism) because he told the Dalai Lama which little boy he considered to be the true reincarnation of the Panchen Lama.  Also, the PRC has restructured the holy center of Lhasa as a Buddhist theme park surrounded by a military cordon sanitaire and even appears to have installed listening devices in sites such as the Potala in order to monitor what outsiders are saying.  Ismail Kadare's The Concert, a fictionalized account of how the PRC effected spitefully punitive destruction when pulling out of Albania, seems to indicate that China treats Westerners no differently if it has the chance, and the PRC's behavior in the wake of the spy-plane incident in the spring of 2001 appears consistent with this supposition.

     Another indication that the Kom Dynasty is continuing tradition rather than breaking with it is the unchanged position of bureaucrats, formerly also known as mandarins or scholars.  This army of officials is still in place, since there is really no other way for centralized rule over an empire made up of such disparate pieces.  In imperial China, in theory any man could become a scholar, pass the examinations, and receive an appointment as a government official, although in practice the literati tended to come from wealthy leisured families rather than poor farm groups.  Terms such as "literature" and "scholar" are actually misnomers, as the studies were clearly meant to produce unquestioning Confucian company-men rather than independent thinkers.  Bureaucrats have always been much more interested in giving orders than in humbly investigating how things work, so the literature in question was not scientific treatises (beneath a mandarin's dignity) nor drama and novels (inferior popular entertainment), but platitudinous poems, historical analects, and conventional commentaries, many of them staggeringly obtuse.  Anthropologists say that the worse the hazing rituals, the greater the in-group loyalty, so it stands to reason that those passing the grueling examinations tended to be, or at least become, unthinkingly conservative. 

     In that regard, it is interesting to compare literary censorship by bureaucrats in China and in the defunct Communist empire in Europe.  The former has existed for over two thousand years, during which people have been killed because some imperial functionary fancied he saw a derogatory pun in something they wrote; Zhang Yimou is actually lucky that only his films are banned in China.  The latter did not last long enough to establish a tradition, besides which it was managed by people who often missed or let slide regime-criticisms couched in the most obvious of allegories (such as Loves of a Blonde), probably because they were too ignorant of literature and/or too lax in their ideology to catch the allusions.

     I am afraid that now that the PRC government has made all that money on joint ventures and gotten Hong Kong back, the Chinese will have no more reason to be nice and will revert to their traditional military imperialism, wherein the first step is always reconquering lost territories.  From my studies of history, the times China was poor and weak (such as the 19th century) were the only ones in which her neighbors have ever been spared that empire's predatory attentions; at virtually all other times, Chinese power can be compared to what the medieval Church would have had in Europe if its economic, cultural, and political control had been total.

        As early as the 6th century BC, Sun-Tzu, in his Art of War, gave ample evidence of the predatory determination that has characterized the Chinese military for millennia: espy an opening, insinuate yourself like an innocent young girl, then wreak havoc like an uncatchable rabbit.  (This gave rise to the Chinese idiom: dung jwo to tu, "maneuver like a loosed rabbit.")  Unfortunately, I think it is only a matter of time (and time means nothing to these people) before a rich and powerful China precipitates not only a geopolitical crisis, but an ecological disaster as well.  As reported in the September 1997 issue of National Geographic ("China's Three Gorges: Before the Flood" by Arthur Zich), journalist Dai Qing received 10 months' imprisonment for criticizing the Three Gorges Dam project; I thus think it reasonable to assume that the PRC government is only willing to listen to those scientists who agree with the mandarin bureaucrats.  Significantly, the word "mandarin" comes from the Portuguese "he who gives orders," and with the exception of the Sung, virtually every dynasty has considered science and technology too prosaic for study by "scholars" (i.e. present and future bureaucrats).  As I reported in the October-December 1981 issue of the International Law Review ("The Influence of Geology upon the Chinese Mandate of Heaven Theory"), the fact that China's rivers are very low-gradient and carry a lot of sediment from the super-fine loess soil makes them change course periodically, causing widespread floods and famine; ecologically thoughtless human activity (e.g. deforestation of the Tibetan plateau) exacerbates this tendency.  I believe undertaking humble dredging efforts to correct that problem would make much more sense than the ambitious Three Gorges water-control-cum-electrical-energy project, which will deprive downstream farmers of rich new soil and could cause untold multiples of horror if the dams or their machinery should become damaged or jammed with sediment, drowning hundreds of millions of people downstream in a lake of stinking sludge half the length of California.  If this happens, the PRC will probably be ousted as having lost the mandate of heaven due to "excessive modernization," although the real reason, ironically enough, will be the excessive feudalism of trying to boss Nature around.  (The 2008 "quake lakes" intensified my apprehensions.)

     Based on China's history, I worry about what will happen if the PRC discovers oil in the Taklimakan Desert, acquires the Spratly islands, or forges a military alliance with fanatical regimes or groups, especially if, say, relatively innocent nationalistic or nuclear noises from Israel or India provide a pretext for the last scenario.  Anthropologists believe that the most violent groups tend to be those trying to recuperate their former power, and the Chinese would obviously relish replaying their past total hegemony, with results I consider totally predictable. We must also remember that prosperity can have socially conservative results simply because outdated behavior becomes affordable and a larger proportion of the population gains access to traditional luxuries, becoming pacified by pleasure.  Examples: riches from gold and oil made it possible for essentially medieval systems like the Spanish empire and Islamic fundamentalism to survive despite being historical anomalies, and the artificial prosperity of the U.S. after World War II and of China during the Sung Dynasty worsened the position of women because men could afford to dismiss their wives' economic contributions.

     Of course, I hope I am wrong, and that the shopgirls who asked me to teach them how to dance are a better barometer of future trends.  (We all had an absolute ball, by the way, as did the Western customers who wandered in to buy cloisonné artwork and paper cutouts and appeared pleasantly surprised to see this impromptu party.)  The one-child policy may actually undermine militarism by raising a more stable future generation (or at least a more pampered one).  However, I remember the Tian An-Men Square massacre, I think about my blue ant the Red Guard immigration official--and I shudder.

Language and Writing in China, from "The Kom Dynasty"

Copyright 1990 by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph.D.

First published in Language International, no. 2.5, 1990. 

     Most people are aware that the Chinese speak tonal languages; for example, "mai" means either "buy" or "sell" depending on which tone is used.  (Put them together, add the "make" prefix, and you have "business.")  Most also realize that they write in so-called characters (ideographic symbols) rather than an alphabetic script; thus, literacy in Chinese requires a prodigious amount of memorization.

     In my opinion, China could not possibly be so united if it had a phonetic rather than an ideographic writing system.  The various Chinese "dialects" are in fact different languages, often mutually unintelligible; the Mandarin word for "eat" is "chrfan," the Fujienese "tsebwo," the Cantonese "hek (sikh)" (I left out the tones to avoid confusion). The written character, however, is the same throughout, since it transmits not the sound, but the idea--somewhat like having a Frenchman and an American recognize the Arabic number "5" even though they pronounce it "sank" and "five" respectively.  It has also long been possible for the Chinese to "communicate by brush" (i.e. in writing) with other cultures that adopted similar writing systems.

     Possibly because they were derived from scapulimancy (divination based on oracle-bone crack-marks), the characters inspire almost superstitious awe among the Chinese.  The Kun Iam temple in Macao, for instance, contains a tree which three generations of monks trained into the shape of the character for "long life," and the Chinese believe that touching this tree brings longevity.  (Similarly, they fear the number four because it sounds like the word for death.)  This reverence can be anything but funny: in Chinese history, people have been killed because some imperial functionary fancied he saw a derogatory pun in something they wrote, and one of the obstacles to female emancipation is the fact that the character for "woman" is composed of the radicals "female" and "whiskbroom."

     Radicals are the building-blocks of the Chinese character, and one must use the correct sequence of brushstrokes in writing because Chinese dictionaries classify radicals by that method.  (Imagine being unable to find the word "theater" in an English dictionary simply because you perversely insist on crossing the "t" before performing the orthodox downward stroke.)*  Radical combinations can often be quite poetic: the character for "good" is a combination of the radicals for "woman" and "child."  In case you're wondering: yes, it is theoretically possible to learn to read Chinese without knowing how to speak it.

     Chinese languages are also so terse as to be telegraphic, which creates an awful lot of ambiguity.  The Mandarin word for China, "junggwo," literally means central kingdom/middle land; it was originally meant to designate "the country surrounded by barbarians" but now seems to be veering perilously close to "the navel of the world," possibly because China has since in fact swallowed the "barbarians," whether they be Mongols or Tibetans.  (As usual, whoever is in power determines how an ambiguity is to be interpreted.)  China has in fact never countenanced the possibility of the diplomatic equality of any other nation.

     China's ethnocentrism is exemplified in its treatment of foreign linguistic material: substituting synonyms to gut alien words like capitalism of their etymology (caput= the first thing, i.e. investment), inserting propaganda content in its place (bourgeois-ism, i.e. an insult), and using the stuffed shell as though it were the original.  (Marx did not write in Chinese; the German word "Bürger," derived from Burg = fortress, has the primary meaning of the enfranchised citizen of a town.)  Private business is not capitalism, but free enterprise (!); never mind that Communism is simply state capitalism.  When the Chinese say "self-criticism," they don't mean our brand of soul-searching, but rather the kind of self-flagellation indulged in by heretics about to be burned at the stake; they also disdain the English word "separatism" in favor of their own invention, "splittism."

     Chinese and English classify according to different systems.  Chinese has trouble distinguishing between liberalism and license, or will and purpose, and the word for yes, "shr," represents not a universal abstraction, but a concrete reference to what precedes it ("right" would be a better translation).  If you ask a Chinese "don't you drink?" and he answers "yes," he means "yes, you are correct, I don't drink."  I interpret these differences to mean that Chinese obedience is to concrete power rather than any abstract principle or ideal.

     Translations into English are done by Chinese, contrary to the professional guideline according to which translators should work into, not from, their mother tongue.  Those published in book form or in the "China Reconstructs" propaganda brochures are of good quality, being cleaned up by "polishers" whose native tongue is English, but unpolished versions often verge on the ludicrous, a prime example being the visually beautiful book distributed free to passengers on the Hong Kong-bound train.  "Don't twist your ankle" becomes "no twisting of ankles," "study to become what you wish to be" turns into "study to be what you wish to seem," and so forth.  Even when correct, words, are often run together and/or hyphenated at the wrong places; my favorite example is the following inscription on the plastic bag holding a Chengdu silk undershirt (slashes indicate the end of a line):  LIGHT&SMOOTH&AIRY/RICHINELASTI  CITYCOMF/ORTABLETOWEAR.

     Lastly, let us mention romanization, which means transliteration into the Latin alphabet of a Chinese sound (such as "chrfan" above).  There have been various romanization systems, which explains why some of the names used in this article have several spellings.  As an example, the Chinese word for "small," which a Pole would pronounce "sial," is romanized "hsiao" in the Wade-Giles system, "syau" according to the Yale method, and "xiao" by the Pinyin transliteration the mainland has recently invented.  (Taiwan pushed for romanization, perhaps to undermine PRC unity, until the PRC adopted it--at which point Taiwan immediately decried it as a bad idea.)  Pinyin romanization is another example of China's foisting upon the outside world of its interpretation of the outside world's own systems, in effect ordering us to pronounce "x" like "sh," "q" like "ch," "zh" like "j," and so forth.  This prompted a beleaguered American librarian confronted with the task of re-indexing all those Chinese texts to write a plaintive letter beginning "xurely you zhest."  However, China seems to be quietly dropping romanization--wisely so, in my opinion, since the character system creates artificial unity by glossing over pronunciation changes in time and place, whereas a phonetic system would be too divisive for an empire.

*  I do not mean to imply above that dictionary-making was the reason the brushstroke orthodoxy sequence was instituted per se; any causality would probably have to operate the other way, as writing presumably precedes dictionary-compilation.  What I mean to express is that you will have a hard time finding a word in a Chinese dictionary unless you use the correct sequence of brushstrokes; similarly, in the United States, you will have trouble obtaining a passport unless you can produce a birth certificate, although the getting of passports is not the reason for having instituted the system of birth certificates in the first place.  My colleague, Alex Gross, summarizes as follows:

     "The reason for using the correct sequence of brushstrokes is not in order to find the character in a Chinese dictionary (though it may be superficially and temporarily helpful in this regard), but to make it possible to write fluent script characters readable by others and to read those that they write.

     "To take the simplest possible character, '+,' 'shr," meaning '10.'  To the Westerner it looks like a plus sign.  In writing a plus sign, Westerners almost inevitably write the vertical stroke first and then the horizontal, to form a +.  The Chinese, in writing 'shr,' do the reverse, starting with the horizontal and ending with the vertical.  This is not at all arbitrary; when one becomes more advanced and writes the cursive script form of this character," the brushstroke drag will produce a right triangle counterclockwise from 3 to 12 o'clock.  "If the Western order were followed," the right triangle from the brushstroke drag would be clockwise from 6 to 9 o'clock. "These are two very different forms for the eye.  Now, multiply this effect by all the other characters requiring anywhere from three to twenty-three strokes, and it becomes obvious why a stroke order is needed."

China Bibliography

     Becker, Jasper.  "China's Growing Pains."  National Geographic. March 2004.

     Benson, Linda, and Svanberg, Ingvar (1998).  China's Last Nomads: The History and Culture of China's Kazaks.  New York: M.E. Sharpe.

     Binnendijk, H., and Montaperto, R., eds. (1998).  Strategic Trends in China.  Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office.

     Bracken, Paul (1999).  Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age.  Harper-Collins.

     Celt, Sandra.  "The Influence of Geology on the Chinese Mandate of Heaven Theory."  Geneva, Switzerland: International Law Review/ Revue de droit international, October-December 1981.

     China: State Control of Religion (1997).  New York: Human Rights Watch.

     Diamond, L., and Plattner, M., eds. (1998)  Democracy in East Asia.  Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.

     Dodwell, Christina.  A Traveller in China (1985). New York: Beaufort Books.

     Edwards, Mike.  "Han Dynasty."  National Geographic, February 2004.

     Elleman, Bruce (1997).  Diplomacy and Deception: The Secret History of Sino-Soviet Diplomatic Relations, 1917-1927.  New York: M.E. Sharpe.

     Giles, Herbert B.  A History of Chinese Literature Cambridge: 1900.  Rpt.

     -, Fables of Identity (1963).  NY: Harcourt, Brace & World.

     Great Wall Across the Yangtze.  PBS program originally aired January 25, 2001.  Stardust: 2000.

     Harney, Alexandra (2008).  The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage.  New York: Penguin.

     Hessler, Peter.  "The Great Wall."  National Geographic, January 2003.

     -, "The New Story of China's Past," National Geographic, July 2003.

     Kadare, Ismail.  The Concert (1994). Tr. Vrioni, Yusuf, and Bray, Barbara.  New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., English translation copyright by Harper Collins.

     Karmel, Solomon (2000).  China and the People's Liberation Army: Great Power or Struggling Developing State?  New York, NY: St. Martin's Press.

     Kent, Ann (2001). China, the United Nations, and Human Rights.  Philadelphia, PA: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.

     Kristof, Nicholas D. and WuDunn, Sheryl (1994). China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power.  NY: Random House.

     -,  Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia (2000). New York: Knopf.

     -, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (1994). New York: Random House.

     Leong, Sow-Theng (1997).  Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History: Hakkas, Pengmin, and Their Neighbors.  Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

     Lilley, J., and Downs, C., eds.  (1998). Crisis in the Taiwan Strait.  Washington, DC: National Defense University Press.

     Mann, James (2007).  The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression.  New York: Vinking Penguin.

     Solomon, Richard H. (1999).  Chinese Negotiating Behavior: Pursuing Interests through Old Friends.  Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1999.

     Stroup, Herbert (1974).  Founders of Living Religions.  Philadelphia: Westminster.

     Tao Jian, compiler (1997).  Bibliography of Research on Chinese Ethnology and Folklore, 1900-94.  3 vols.  Taipei: Center for Chinese Studies.

     Terrill, Ross (1979).  The China Difference.  New York: The Asia Society.

     Timperlake, Edward, and Triplett, William C. II.  Red Dragon Rising: Communist China's Military Threat to America.  Regnery Publishing, Inc.

     Weller, Robert P. (1999).  Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

     Wonders of the Ancient World.  National Geographic Atlas of Archaeology.  Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1994.

     Yuan Ke (1991, 1992, 1993). Dragons and Dynasties.  Tr. Echelin, Kim, and Nie Zhixiong.  New York: Penguin/Foreign Language Press, 1991, 1992, 1993.

     Zich, Arthur.  "China's Three Gorges: Before the Flood."  National Geographic, September 1997.

Toward an Anthropology of the Future

by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, PhD

Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, PhD, is a translator, educator, and researcher.

Copyright 2008 by World Future Society, republished by kind permission.

Social scientists are usually chary of making predictions, probably because their disciplines lack the laboratory controls and objective criteria that allow the hard sciences to extrapolate deductions about future behavior. However, I contend that knowledge of the essential mechanisms of the past can support some considered projections of what can reasonably be expected in the future. For instance, my familiarity with the mind-set of the untreated survivors of child abuse led me to visit Russia as soon as the Soviet dictatorship ended, before the people realized they were free and started going haywire. Anthropologists have also noticed that if a society without a cash economy is suddenly given a chance to earn money, the elders invariably complain that the young people have stopped sharing. As Peter Farb pointed out in Humankind, in the absence of money or refrigeration, the best place to store surplus food is in somebody else’s belly; that way when he catches some game, he will share it with you. Money, however, upsets this delicate balance of sharing.

Probably the most important lesson cultural anthropology taught me was that there was a systemic and pervasive difference in mentality between hunter-gatherers and peasants in subsistence (non-money) economies. Hunter-gatherers value initiative and experimentation, think of challenge as an opportunity even in the face of a ninety percent failure rate, are satisfied with being allowed to use (rather than own) resources or territory, have small families (practicing infanticide if need be), and treat their children affectionately, encouraging them to be independent. Peasants value conformity and obedience, think of challenge as a threat, need outright ownership of their resources and territory, have large families, and treat their children like hardware. For hunter-gatherers, envy is an incentive to go out and get their own whatever, while envious peasants try to take the whatever away from its owner, or at least spoil the pleasure for him or her. Hunter-gather bands typically number twenty-five to fifty people, which makes perfect justice easier to achieve (on an asymptotic basis, of course) because everybody knows each other personally; since most of human prehistory involved living in such groups, one can readily understand the phylogenetic longing for community contained in theoretically egalitarian religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Communism. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is more fun, but also much more wasteful because it is based on selection and consumption of what the environment has to offer, whereas the peasant lifestyle is based on production and planning. On the other hand, peasants have a distinct power advantage because agriculture enables population densities of 400 times as many people in the same amount of space. The intermediate mind-set of pastoralism contains elements of both hunter-gatherer and peasant attitudes and may well be significant in making the transition.

I also learned that the different mentalities carry over into modern societies with a money economy. For instance, Americans think like hunter-gatherers rather than peasants, foraging in the supermarket rather than growing and storing food for their own consumption. According to its June 2000 issue, National Geographic takes some 29,000 photographs per article, and by my count uses no more than twenty-nine; raised on the planned scarcity of peasant thinking, Eastern European photojournalists would no doubt be horrified at the wastefulness of a 99.9 percent rejection rate.  Consequently, the American labor market is good example of the wasteful hunter-gatherer mentality of selection vs. planning. Compared with European countries and their traditions of apprenticeship, American personnel management is so nonsupportive (probably because of all those immigrants who arrive pretrained) that it should be called what it really is: shopping! As a result, I believe the grief that Americans were surprised to feel for Princess Di is based on their ability to empathize with her situation: Whether at work or in the dating circuit, they know what it feels like to be rejected for the silliest of non-reasons and considered worthless except as a pop-up doll in somebody else’s coloring book.

Hunter-gatherers think of the economy as nature, warts and all, including waste, weeds, disorganization, and bullies—anything goes as it can take care of itself; peasants consider it more of a garden, where everything needs the gardener’s specific permission to exist. The crisis management of peasants tends to favor rationing and controls; bad times bring out the best in peasants, but the worst in hunter-gatherers. (See “The Mythfits” [Chciuk-Celt] for the escalation in violence I consider predictable in the United States unless systemic changes are made.) When hunter-gatherers start running out of resources, they move to another location; once there is nowhere left to move, they usually turn on each other in combative inward antagonism (infanticide, warfare, even cannibalism), which—unless countered by a transition to the pastoral or peasant mentality—eliminates all but the most brutal members of society, limiting population numbers and fostering the survival of the nastiest.

In case you are wondering, the hunter-gatherer mentality is now the exception rather than the rule, statistically speaking. Most of the world’s people think like peasants, and it is a mistake to ignore or confuse these disparate mind-sets. For instance, Americans do not realize that even their imperfect attempt at tolerant multiculturalism is a mere pimple, cosmically speaking, upon a planetful of peasants. If they did, they would not have imposed such an inherently unstable multicultural solution upon the Balkans at Dayton or tried to bring democracy to the autocratic Middle East (in any country, the government is the family structure writ large). Furthermore, economists are wearing blinders of their own if they naïvely expect a mere political shift toward a supposed democracy and market economy to turn eastern Europeans (peasants) into astute and adventurous investors (hunter-gatherers) overnight. As an example: When pop star Michael Jackson offered to invest a million dollars in a children’s amusement park outside Warsaw, the city fathers declined, claiming that such a project would promote prostitution.

It is easy to overlook the differences between these two mentalities, as when hunter-gatherers are lulled into a false sense of security by peasants using ostensible homology to paper over the divergences. As an example: Just as the Catholic Church co-opted pagan gods and rituals when converting the barbarians of Europe, the Communists during the Cold War intentionally obfuscated cross-cultural differences by giving their organizations such reassuringly homologous names that Westerners were fooled into assuming those institutions to be legitimate counterparts of their own.

Another example would be comparing the academic abuse of Slavic countries to that of the United States: From fraternity hazing to PhD orals, the latter is a derivative of the secret men’s clubs of hunter-gatherer societies and stops as soon as the initiate becomes a member; its statistical function is to promote in-group solidarity—anthropologists say that the fiercer the hazing ritual, the greater the subsequent loyalty. (In Blackberry Winter, Margaret Mead said that the demise of white supremacy in the wake of the civil rights movement sounded like African-Americans were being accepted into fraternities. I see a similar pattern in the discrimination suffered by the first generation of groups immigrating to the United States; once they are assimilated, the kicks they got are transmitted to the next crop of immigrants.) In places like Poland and Russia, however, the abuse is permanent because it is a derivative of the peasant mentality: The professors are like the nobles of old (who destroy anyone they cannot capture as a satellite), sacred cows who can do no wrong and can mistreat interlopers with impunity until they die. The only way to circumvent their destructiveness is to accomplish something in spite of them and—this is important—let them take credit for what they tried to prevent. The closest equivalent in the United States: Imagine if Hollywood sycophancy had the same kind of transgenerational permanence as the antebellum South, with often self-indulgent landowners lording it over defenseless slaves. (Speaking of lording, men with power sometimes remind me of alpha males in nature programs: They think all the females in their territory belong to them.) See “The Mythfits,” “Anglos and Insects,” and “The Kom Dynasty” [Chciuk-Celt] for further instances of cross-cultural misunderstandings between hunter-gatherers and peasants and the behavior that can be expected when they are faced with dwindling resources.

Potential Futures for Hunter-Gatherers and Peasants

Assuming the world continues on its present path instead of making the systemic changes I believe to be urgent, let me hazard the following expectations based on the different mentalities of hunter-gatherers and peasants. Something similarly future-oriented and interdisciplinary has been done before, as documented in Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: When the Americans knew they would win World War II against the Japanese, they turned to a highly varied panel of consultants (which included historians, anthropologists, and experts in comparative literature) to advise them how to act as occupiers so as to minimize social damage.

First, since peasant envy tends to make the have-nots try to take away the haves’ goodies, or at least poison their enjoyment thereof, I expect the resentful Russians to behave like spoilers and sabotage others’ efforts just to prove that they are still a force to be reckoned with. In the foreseeable future, I think they will act like the macrosocial equivalent of the untreated survivors of child abuse, so this pathology should be given greater study by diplomats and others active on the international stage (see “Ruminations on Russia” [Chciuk-Celt]). Suffering alone does not ennoble people; if anything, it makes them bitter and abusive. “The Kom Dynasty,” my “Personal Preface” [Chciuk-Celt], and some of the travel articles on East and Southeast Asia document my much grimmer view of what I expect China to do, given its history and the PRC’s one-child policy; at the very least, we should stop outsourcing our jobs, thereby financing its military expansionism, which I expect to become a ghastly threat to future generations.

Second, contrary to economists’ belief that a prosperous economy generally leads to political liberalism, I expect prosperity in Asia to reinforce tradition and fascism. The respective resources that Latin American gold and Middle Eastern oil contributed to the Spanish empire and the Muslim countries basically enabled the artificial survival of medieval systems, because the people could afford physical and mental luxuries that would otherwise be wildly and prohibitively outdated. India’s recent prosperity is actually cementing the caste system, because the newly emergent middle classes can only afford to live like kings on their low wages if they have guaranteed access to cheap, docile labor, an abuse that I fear will culminate in bloodshed. There have been historical precedents for this syndrome: In the postwar United States and in China’s Sung Dynasty, prosperity reinforced conservative sexism because men could afford to dismiss women’s contribution to the labor force. What the PRC can do with its newfound riches is a particularly horrifying prospect, because China’s huge, obedient population and despotic, often ignorant rulership can combine to wreak an ecological havoc that can conceivably culminate in a Waterworld scenario (see the Three Gorges project in “The Kom  Dynasty” [Chciuk-Celt]). We are already starting to see animal populations becoming extinct because Chinese medicine obsoletely prescribes things like tiger bone and rhinoceros horn, whose ingredients can be found much less destructively in calcium pills and keratin supplements.

Third, when hunter-gatherers start running out of resources, they move to another location; once there is nowhere left to move, they turn on each other in combative inward antagonism. This is starting to happen in the United States, where dwindling resources are making the people more aggressive rather than more efficient. Instead of becoming more entrenched in the behavior of the past (“getting back to basics”), we must realize that the wastefulness of the hunter-gatherer mentality needs to give way to some intelligent planning if we are to give our children a sustainable future; otherwise, it is only a matter of time before aggressive dominance establishes a feudal stranglehold or the army of rejects becomes destructive.

Toward a Fair and Sustainable Future

As usual, I hope my predictions are wrong, but I caution that dismissing them will not make them so. I believe we can counter them to a certain extent by encouraging equitable efficiency, discouraging institutionalized brutality, and remembering the intent behind existing laws and principles (the spirit rather than the letter). Unfortunately, legal professionals seem to be going in the opposite direction, probably because simple equity renders them personally less indispensable than do loopholes, technicalities, and procedural formalism.

We could start small, such as by reforming the more destructive elements of bilingual education and by remembering that au pairs are mother’s-helper teenagers, not professional nannies entrusted with household management; if anything, using them for elder care would teach them more about the local culture than they could learn from baby-sitting (“Au Pair Means Everybody Wins” and “Recalibrating Bilingual Education” [Chciuk-Celt]). Similar principles might be useful for reforming other counterproductive institutions and warped interpretations. Thereafter, perhaps business and political leaders can be persuaded to stop remaining deliberately difficult of access in their Versailles cocoons and consider including input from people who are neither their clones nor their cronies.

In terms of brutality: Hospitals should discontinue the savage practice of thirty-six-hour shifts, which compromises patient care and whose only conceivable usefulness would be weeding out doctors unfit for combat medicine. The media should also develop some social responsibility; if violence is consistently shown as entertainment, what can we expect if not more Columbines?

In more formal terms, changes in legislation could also help avoid exacerbating pointless conflict, preemptive hostility, and robber-baron predations—e.g., punitive damages for nuisance legal actions, laws preventing CEOs from giving themselves nine-figure bonuses even in the face of relentlessly mediocre performance, and the direct election of presidents. The electoral college system was instituted when people were wearing powdered wigs and white stockings, the roads were so terrible that it took the electors a month to reach Washington, and representative democracy had never been tried on such a scale before. It is senselessly and dangerously outdated in the computer age, as was shown in the 2000 election (cf. “When Bush Comes to Shove” [Chciuk-Celt]). The relatively recent phenomenon of vicious and counterproductive partisanship should be muzzled: Inflammatory rhetoric on the part of politicians was precisely what triggered Colombia’s civil war in 1946.

I also believe the Bill of Rights should be interpreted more in keeping with what the framers had in mind. For instance, since they called anything related to commercial sex “trafficking in hussies,” they would not have applied First Amendment protection to pornography and nude dancing—which represent free commerce, not free speech. Similarly, since old-fashioned muskets were virtually the only arms available for bearing at the time, the framers would have looked askance at machine guns, which no hunter can reasonably claim to need unless being attacked by two hundred stags in formation. The Fifth Amendment was obviously designed to outlaw torture, which had theretofore been a rather common method of obtaining confessions, not to allow parties to withhold testimony.

In terms of food production, hunter-gatherer food-acquisition methods such as fishing should be at least partially replaced by more efficient production methods, such as fish farming. PBS programs like Bill Moyers’s examination of innovative ecological techniques (“Earth on Edge,” aired in June 2001) show that established methodologies can be seriously destructive and that viable alternatives exist.

Once we have dismantled our blinders enough to see how much of the present is wasteful and counterproductive, we can direct our view toward the future, which we can be fairly sure will be radically different. A more complicated future will require more commonsensical legislation and fewer people who believe they are entitled to flout it, as well as a rethinking of the attitude that money equals invincibility.

The essays in my unpublished Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking contain further suggestions for how we need to reorient our mind-set from past to future so as to weather the systemic social changes we will need to, so as to survive as a society in which the pie is much smaller than before and more people are eating from it. An example from history: If the Johnson administration had included the input of Harvard’s Whiting and Whiting study, specifically the conclusion linking father absence and the sons’ tendency toward violent behavior as a reaction formation to an initial female identification, its welfare program would probably not have unwittingly exacerbated crime by encouraging fatherless households.

If nothing is done, I fear that dwindling resources will cause Americans to turn on each other because, like classic hunter-gatherers, they do not handle deprivation well. I believe the following prefigures such a scenario: Around 1980, there was a mugging spree in New York’s Times Square area, which lasted several hours. When the criminals ran out of passersby to victimize, the bigger muggers turned on the smaller muggers and relieved them of their loot.

A good analogy for planning a fairer and more efficient future would be three swimming pools wide enough for swimming eight abreast, identical except for their management philosophies. The first is a hunter-gatherer laneless free-for-all; this sounds like perfect freedom, but since the swimmers typically go back and forth along the same imaginary track, all that wasted space makes the pool feel crowded if there are more than eight people because of the frustration and social friction involved in having to finagle a new opening for every lap. The second (peasants) is dominated by groups; isolated individuals and minorities must either settle for some corner nobody else wants or wait for the dominant groups to leave. It is impossible to swim a straight line because the group members think the tyranny of the majority entitles them to do anything they want; if there is more than one large group, the best that can be hoped for is partition, with everyone scurrying to grab as much territory as possible before the separation. If this sounds like the Balkans, that is by no means a coincidence.

The third type is divided into four lanes (the first for loafing, the others in a speed-graduated manner) in which swimmers keep moving and stay to the right, as though driving a car; this pool can be used comfortably, and with very little conflict, by at least thirty-two people. The interdisciplinary logic I am advocating can similarly smooth our switch to a more logical system.

The transition between the hunter-gatherer and peasant mentalities is lost in the mists of prehistory, but it must have been rather traumatic unless it was quite gradual. We, however, can do a lot better. Modern humanity is adept at systems design (from industrial engineering to packaging-machinery to computer programs) and has enough knowledge to enable planning for a more efficient and equitable future, one that avoids the brutality with which wasteful hunter-gatherers and fascist peasants have traditionally solved the problem of scarce resources.

References

Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Benedict, Ruth. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. New York: World Publishing Company.

Chciuk-Celt, Alexandra. Dismantling Binders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking. Unpublished. 

Chua, Amy. 2003. World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. New York: Doubleday.

Farb, Peter. 1978. Humankind. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company.

Geertz, Clifford. 2000. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Herrmanns, Mathias. 1949. Die Nomaden von Tibet. Die sozial-wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen der Hirtenkulturen in A Mdo und von Innerasien. Vienna: Herold Verlag.

Malefijt, Annemarie de Waal. 1968. Religion and Culture. New York: The MacMillan Company.

McClelland, David. 1961. The Achieving Society. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company Inc.

Mead, Margaret. Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. 1972.  New York: William Morrow Publishing.

York College. 1996. Understanding Cultural Diversity: An Anthology for Core 101.  City University of New York: Simon & Schuster Custom Publishing.

Zakaria, Fareed. 2003. The Future of Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc.

Goodbye Future!  by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, all rights reserved

Around 1996, the American Anthropologist published a cross-cultural study which found that, statistically speaking, the most violent groups are not t hose that aspire to power, but those which want to retain or regain their former power. History  has taught me that such power is usually based upon a situation which is in large part artificial, and therefore unsustainable in the long run.  Other anthropological studies have found that in cultures which think like hunter-gatherers (that’s us), people react to a scarcity of resources by moving elsewhere and start turning on each other when there is noplace left to go.

I feel that this is happening in the United States now that the working class has lost what it mistakenly thought was its birthright, not a historical fluke.  (Like the proverbial second chick in the nature programs, the working class only does well if resources are exceptionally abundant.)  In the decades after World War II, the pie was a lot bigger and women and minorities were denied full access; the US won the war, had no competition, and enjoyed full employment; employers started providing medical insurance so as to get around the government’s anti-inflationary salary caps, the GI bill was educating veterans and guaranteeing mortgages, the national debt was nowhere near its present level, and, most importantly, the super-rich were paying 90% in taxes, which meant they had no incentive to be super-greedy. The economic golden days of the fifties and sixties have now largely evaporated, and it is the money-boys who have dismantled the system.  People who think a reactionary strongman will re-empower them (Italy, Spain, and Germany thought so, and look where it got them) do not realize that we were not great because of the way we acted, but rather had the luxury of acting thus because we were great.  They are thus sadly confusing cause and effect.

The tax cuts of the Reagan years started changing the situation drastically and swinging the pendulum of artificiality in the other direction.  The money-boys greedy for cheap labor began outsourcing jobs to a Communist country and pocketing the wages and health benefits of the Americans they had thrown out of work (which would have gotten them lynched for high treason just a few decades earlier) now that they could keep more of all that money due to lower taxes.  This also deprived the fiscal authorities of revenues on those lost jobs and the lower taxes on the rich, leading to the trillions of dollars in debt which basically leave Joe Blow holding the bag. (I also suspect that the coronavirus could likely have been contained within Wuhan if that city were not the source of cheap international labor because it housed so many English-language schools.)  In addition, China began reaping the windfall engendered by American greed, using it to invest in poor countries and flex her economic and military muscle; she will soon no longer be too afraid of the US to invade Australia.  The People’s Liberation Army, the chief joint venture partner for foreign investment, is making money hand over fist and is not using it to buy flowers. 

All this makes our money-boys threefold traitors and reminds me of the irresponsible Polish nobility that sold its own people down the river for personal gain in the 17th century, which resulted in Poland’s being dismembered in the 18th by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. We are basically financing our potential enemies, namely China, the drug trade, and religious extremists, and can be financially gutted by them unless we act.

As regards Muslims, I believe those who say “the Koran is our constitution” and practice suicide bombing are much more of a threat than the Soviets ever were; they now also appear to be accomplishing by demographic means (making lots of money and babies) what they failed to do militarily in the eighth and seventeenth centuries, namely conquer and dominate the West.  It is troubling that many Asian immigrants behave like conquerors more than like immigrants; I have heard several say that their ambition is to turn the United States into a Muslim country.

Regarding possible action: for starters, what possessed Congress to let China and the Saudis hold portions of our debt?  (At the very least, legislation should be enacted which would cancel our debt to any nation with whom we are at war; that might make the PRC think twice before invading whatever nation they covet.)  Why do people keep using gas-guzzlers, polluting the environment and giving Middle Eastern oil despots more power?  Why do so many claim that climate change is a matter of opinion, not of science?  Why is the most modern nation on earth hostage to a totally outdated electoral system designed by states jealous of their sovereignty? Why does so much of the electorate support cynical manipulators and clearly certifiable megalomaniacs who are refeudalizing our economy?  Why do voters mistake their civic responsibility for Facebook liking and thereupon refuse to vote, purporting to agonize about whether to manifest their displeasure by voting for a third-party candidate or not at all? And why continue to criminalize the use of soft drugs—which are less dangerous than alcohol—thus wasting resources on hypocritical prohibition?  (Ironically, if the federal government controlled the drug trade, the national debt and a lot of criminal danger could probably be wiped out very quickly.)

The mantra of “better education” is no panacea for our economic woes.  People whose IQ is average or below are unlikely to benefit from academic schooling; besides, all those computer engineers whose jobs were outsourced to India were highly educated, as is yours truly.  We must reestablish manufacturing.  At the very least, I would like to suggest we start with a customs-duty surcharge on goods imported from low-cost countries so as to help pay unemployment benefits. It would not impoverish the shareholders of the outsourcing companies to have to settle for a 3,000% profit instead of 4,000%, or CEO’s to give themselves only $200 million in bonuses rather than $300 million.  According to a labor activist on Bill Moyers’ PBS program, the Southeast Asian women who hand-stitch athletic shoes get paid 17 cents per shoe and have to pay for the needle and thread themselves; the production cost of the shoes is thus probably less than the sales tax on their price in a typical American state.

My final apprehension is not about the 1 per cent’s conscious greed, but by the 99 per cent’s unconscious id; after all, home-grown pathologies such as racism were hardly foisted upon the innocent masses by evil dictators.  For the past few decades, American parents seem to have been raising their children like pampered pets that can do no wrong instead of future responsible citizens.  This may represent the parents’ concern for their children’s self-esteem, their perception that the world is unrelentingly hostile, and/or their guilt over not spending more time with their kids. I also contend that TV commercials and reality-show competitions flatter viewers into thinking they are big shots who know it all and are not subject to correction.  Such children grow up useless and insolent, like micro-sultans or the pre-revolutionary nobility in France: the world is there for their benefit, and everyone must defer to them forever.  They thus make the worst workers, especially since yuppie management gives them unsupervised decision-making power; American business now feels like a department store in which the gift-wrappers are in charge of human resources.  (For instance, the proofreaders and project managers at some translation agencies are straight out of school, know no languages, and have likely never read a contract or seen the inside of a business office before, but they consider themselves more important than the translators.)  It is only a matter of time before many meaningless non-jobs evaporate when  employers realize that pose-striking is only economically productive for rock stars, at which point the young will have no careers (except for summer-type jobs), no social safety net (pensions, Medicare, and Social Security are already disintegrating), and no family (except for the aging parents they have to take care of because they own the house).  When these coddled overgrown teenagers become disgruntled have-nots, I expect them to turn dangerous because of the anthropological tendencies adduced above.  If the Chinese or the Jihadists ever take over, they will find among such spoiled, resentful people a pool of self-important officials almost as arrogant and ignorant as their own.

I hope I am wrong and that the kids will mature into a rational counterweight to all those dangerously emboldened moral rednecks who are digging their own offspring’s graves, but nevertheless believe we must now ratchet down our expectations and modify our behavior, not blindly mouth the glory-day slogans of reality-denying reactionaries. Otherwise, we can only look forward to a future of economic chaos and the undignified or vicious behavior it might well carry in its wake, and which will make the Tea Party look like a tea party.  Trumpism has since proved my point.  I fear that if there is a future, history will state that democracy proved no better a system of government than autocracy because the underdogs are just as selfish and irresponsible as the top dogs.

[alexandrachciuk-celt]

Boleslaw Lesmian et al: Polish poetry Translated by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, PhD

[alexandrachciuk-celt]

Travels with Sandy: The Conscientious Tourist 

Part Three (3) 

Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, PhD 

[alexandrachciuk-celt]

Travels with Sandy: The Conscientious Tourist 

Part Two (2) 

Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, PhD 

[alexandrachciuk-celt]

Travels with Sandy: The Conscientious Tourist

Part One (1) 

Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, PhD 

[alexandrachciuk-celt]

Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking 

Part Four (4) 

Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, PhD 

[alexandrachciuk-celt]

Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking 

Part Three (3) 

Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, PhD 

[alexandrachciuk-celt]

Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking

Part Two (2) 

Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, PhD 

[alexandrachciuk-celt]

Dismantling Blinders: An Invitation to Cross-Cultural Thinking 

Part One (1) 

Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, PhD 

[alexandrachciuk-celt]

Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, tr. , sampler of 20th century Polish poetry

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Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph.D., tr., sampler of 20th-century Polish poetry

Copyright 1984, 1990 unless otherwise indicated

  Mr. Cogito's Ravine (Przepaść Pana Cogito) by Zbigniew Herbert (*1924) At home he's always safe   but just outside the door   when Cogito strolls out   on early-morning walks   he's faced with a ravine it's not a Pascal ravine nor is it Dostoyevsky's --this ravine was made to order for Mr. Cogito   its salient characteristic   is neither boundlessness   nor generating horror it tails him like a shadow and stops before a bakery and reads Cogito's paper over his shoulder in the park   oppressive as eczema   devoted like a dog   too shallow to devour   head arms and legs maybe someday the ravine will grow and mature to serious proportions   if someone only knew   what water it likes to drink   what type of grain to feed it right now Mr. Cogito could gather a few handfuls of sand and bury his ravine could but he does not   so when he   goes back home   he parks his   ravine outside   carefully covered   with an old rag

Four poems by Julian Tuwim)

  Dawn (Świt) Just now something called out right here, close to me; A faraway echo returned rosily.   What was it? Who knows?  'Twasn't fish, 'wasn't fowl,   But three-quarters rosy and one-quarter owl. It whispered and rushed through the rushes just then, And leafed through the leafy leaves in the glen,   It whirred to its wings and then flew off beyond,   And thundered its flamebolts all over the pond.

  Melocherries (Slowisien) Now the sun in whitewood's brightly daying, Honey-gilding white-heat life awhile. Trees aswarm with bees, and through the foliage Comely crack the melocherries wild.   When the moon-hook glistens in the heavens,   Shadows dark replete with low enchantings,   Chirp and tinkle silver in the whitewood,   Nightingalish melosweet caressings.

  Courts of Guelder-Roses" (Kalinowe dwory) Creeping guelder-roses, Minions in the maples, Service-tree severest, Redden as you're able!   Blush, my dear blueberries,   Mulling over mullein,   Forests are a fiasco,   Maidens oh so sullen! Skulking comes a stranger, Darting glancing glozes, Flawless flame the gorgeous Creeping guelder-roses!  Hey!

  Wanda (translated loosely for purposes of explanation) Wanda, lady of legend, Founding princess of Cracow, Forced to marry a German, Drowned herself in the river.   Now the Vistula silver   Flows past moon-written boulders.   Wanda, watery wonder,   Trills while combing her tresses.

  Through the Eyes of a Child (Oczyma dziecka by Stanisława Saloni)   reacting to the 1981 martial law in Poland The grownups are saying   War a word so arrogant and faraway you have to learn it over again it's like a bird shot down in flight from the skyline's very edge lying in your tiny hand and available suddenly to frightened fascinated fingers and to a child's eyes unbribable   dead   really dead Though you don't understand this war, you know By looking at your mother's tear-stained face This word is somehow like a great big rock That someone smashed into your windowpane  Why is everybody   whispering today   like it's a great effort   they give you unexpected hugs   but don't hear your questions A tall wall separates with night the past and future days it's still dark but you can already see the street that's paper-pale someone's drawings in the snow: tanks and uniforms   silence   is war   silence? Soldiers warm their hands at fires and swear under their breath cursing this freezing service some of them have candy in their pockets for the kids mama's lips are stiff she's talking very low my God they're so young   and this whisper makes it   even colder   and somehow   scary   as though she saw their fate   was worse than death You know from leaky coded conversations that they took someone away at night beat them again that someone left didn't come back   Mama   anyone we know   tell me   and is it really dark   in the mines right now Finally the last, frightened, useless question   will the soldiers protect   people   dragged from their homes   by force Mother doesn't answer her eyes are sick with grief you go to bed with a headful of murky knowledge that this army's not to be asked about as though it weren't there outside the window at all as though these tanks were only ghosts   And it was almost Christmas   the rabid winter chaining   the angry turgid river  with piled-up floes of ice At dawn they shot a boy he'd disobeyed an order someone in the staircase reported concisely   Who is us   and who is them   you don't know   and you cry out loud   weeping honestly   for a long time Why how come they killed him he was only the big brother of that little girl in the next yard and not some unknown soldier  You drag your crying-heavy head   children's tears rage cuts to ice   the brave heart of a five-year-old   confronts the enemy   you're through staring   at horror you can't grasp The soldiers talk just like you do you won't see any foreign emblems so you impatiently ask your father daddy is it far to the enemy's castle when do I get to see the Teutonic robber-barons

  Recipe for the Polish Economic Miracle   (anonymous satire on Communist mendacity) Beat well what is missing, add cumin and salt, Then fold in whatever the stores haven't got.   Mix thoroughly, blend it, don't stop till you're bored,   Then sprinkle on stuff that we just can't afford. Then fry it or bake it, or skewer, or cream, And baste it with sauces we can't even dream.   We eat this in Poland, there's plenty, so pass it.   And that is the secret of bread for the masses.

  Prayer for a Propitious Papal Election   (Modlitwa za pomyslny wybor papieza by K.I. Galczynski) "O Morning Star, o Gate of Heaven, Ark--" The litany I thunder, "House of Gold--" For thus Sarbiewski, Vatican patriarch, Would pray of old.   Direct the hearts, Queen of the Polish crown,   Of these electors to yon glorious days   Of future generations, and let down   Thy golden rays. To conclave cardinals give strength anon, And inspiration, that the Pope they choose May steer us firmly through the painful dawn And Satan lose.   O Mary, star of Peter's holy boat,   For Thou alone toil and requital art,   A new and worldwide spring unto this Pope   Do Thou impart. I beg, heart-fathom Queen, may it betide, Obeying words the Holy Spirit spoke, That this new papal oak unfurl beside The Polish oak.

  To My Wife, by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (Do żony) Weep not my death when I depart, exhausted By beauty which my greedy eyes and ears Have netted daily.  I'll sleep, satiated, By life, which is laborious, stormy, huge. The godhead pulsing fire through my members Will fly elsewhere, or maybe dissipate; My voice will turn into a lifeless letter, My briskly beating heart will then subside. No doubt you'll think the fragmentary phrases I leave behind too trivial, too few; However, there were many hours when rapture Would choke the words in my constricted chest. The world was much too gorgeous for my poems To be for you alone.  O darling mine, I gazed upon illimitable spaces, Illimitable feelings summoned me. Yet when the people here, the stars up yonder, Would wring my heart in constant centrifuge, You stayed as permanent and true as water, For you alone have loved me in this world.

In Raspberry Brushwołd (W malinowym chrusniaku, by Bolesław Leśmian) My 1984 PhD dissertation on Lesmian included 68 heavily annotated double versions (verse and literal) of 68 of his poems.  This sample is the verse version alone.

Lost in berry brushwood higher than our heads, We spent many hours under curious stares Picking fruits that just a day ago weren't there, While your fingers blind with berry-juices bled.   Bumblebee came rumbling like a flower-terror,   Sickly leaves went warming rust-nodes in the sun,   Cobwebs sparkled tassel-froth at everyone,   Upside-down and backwards marched some beetle hairy. With murmurs and with fruit the air was redolent, But our whispers only hushed into perfume When from proffered palms raspberries I'd consume; They were drenched and fragrant with your body's scent.   Berries then became a tool of that caress   Which in all the heavens knows no other highs   Than itself, primeval, self-contained, surprised,   Thirsting for an encore, dazzled nonetheless. When did all this happen?  Suddenly you kissed My perspiring forehead, then I grabbed your hands. You replied with silent concentration, and Berry brushwood somehow continued to exist.

Twelve poems by Wisława Szymborska, +2012 Translated by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph.D. All rights reserved

The Joy of Writing, Rehabilitation, The Museum, and Dead People's Letters won the International Poetry Review's 1982 translation contest, judged by Dr. Gregory Rabassa The Monkey, I Am Too Close, Epitaph, Coloratura, The Shadow, and Male Beauty Contest published in a regular issue of said Review in 1981 And the Terrorist Watches and Cat in a Vacant Apartment unpublished as of June 2014

  The Joy of Writing Where does this graphic doe bound through the graphic forest? To drink from graphic brooks perchance, And have her snout cc'd by carbon water? Why does she raise her head and listen so? She's pricking up her ears beneath my fingers, Poised on her four truth-borrowed skinny legs. And silence--this word rustles through the paper And stirs apart The branches caused by writing "forest" words.    Atop blank paper, letters lurk and lie   And wait to pounce; they might be ill-arranged.   Besieging sentences   Affording zero hope of rescue. A generous store of hunters in each inkdrop Waits squinting to take aim, and ready To dash along the pencil's steep incline, Surrounding, cornering the graphic doe.

This isn't life, but paper; they've forgotten That different legislation governs here. I can extend the quickness of a wink forever And subdivide it into small eternities Replete with bullets halted in mid-air. If I so order, nothing comes to pass; No leaf will ever fall unless I will it, Nor periods trample a single blade of grass.   You mean there's such a world   Where I can make an independent fate?   Time I can string with punctuation?   Can I command unceasingness to be? The joy of writing. The power of preserving. The mortal hand's revenge.

  Rehabilitation I take advantage of the oldest law of fancy In bringing back the dead to life this first-time-ever, In keeping ears and eyes peeled for their steps and faces, Although I know the dead are thoroughly departed.

It's time to pick up your own skull And say: Alas, poor Yorick, where's your ignorance, Where is your trust so  blind, where is your innocence, Your somehow-we'll-get-by, your soul in balance Between the proven and the unexamined?

And I believed them to be name-unworthy traitors Because their unknown burial-mounds with weeds are covered And contumelious crows, and scornful sneering snowdrifts --And these, dear Yorick, were false witnesses.

Forever, for the corpses, means While memory--that unstable currency-- Is paid to them.  Each day, it seems, Somebody forfeits his eternity.

I know about forever now: It can be granted and withdrawn. The so-called traitor's not allowed To have his name last when he's gone.

This dealing-with-dead-people might Demands the utmost seriousness, And judgments not pronounced at night, And judges who are not undressed.

The earth is boiling.  They are earth already, And now arise in handfuls, clump by clump, Recuperate their names, stonewalled no longer, And welcome nation-memory applause.

Where is my power over words? They've dropped to teardrop levels now, Inept, inept for resurrecting people. A dead account. magnesium photoflash. Not even half a heartbeat's worth can I revive them! I'm Sisyphus, to Poets' Hell dispatched.

They're coming at us, sharp as diamonds, and-- Along shop-windows shiny in the front, Across the panes of all those cozy homes, And through rose-colored glasses, and on minds And hearts of glass--they're scoring silently.

  The Museum There are plates, but appetite is lacking, And wedding-bands whose love's been unrequited A whole three centuries at least.

And here's a fan, where are the blushes? And swords--but where's the rage? And even at dawn and dusk the lute lies strumless.

For want of an eternity, they have collected Ten thousand ancient things in this museum. A moldy guard is dozing sweetly now, His mustache drooping low across the showcase.

Metal, clay, and this bird-feather Have triumphed quietly in time. The only sound: a giggling Egyptian's pin.

The head has been outlasted by the crown, The hand lost out in playing against the glove, The right foot's been defeated by its shoe.

And as for me, I'm living, if you please! The race against my dress, however, is still on. You can't imagine how this gown is stubborn, Nor its determination to survive me!

  Dead People's Letters We read dead people's letters like some helpless gods (Yet gods withal, we know the later story). We know who never got his money back And whom the widows married in a flash. Our poor departed are so very blinded, So cheated and deceived in clumsy foresight! We see the signs and faces made behind their backs, Our ears catch sounds of shredded wills and testaments. They squat ridiculous, as though on buttered rolls, Go chasing after hats knocked off their heads by windblasts. Their taste was poor: Napoleon, electric and steam power; Their cures (for curable diseases!) murderous, And their pie-on-earth according to John Jacob false... We contemplate their chess-pawns now in silence (Except that they've been moved a bit since then). All they predicted has turned out completely different (Or slightly, i.e. still completely, different). The zealous ones among them try to search our pupils For such signs of perfection as they trust are there.

  The Monkey Banished from Eden ere the people were, Because of her contagious eyes, Her gloomy garden gaze which oft infected The angels with oppressive, unexpected Sorrow.  So she was forced to earth to found Her illustrious tribes. Her humble concurrence was never requested. Alert and enterprising, she still has her charme Tertiary, spell it with an "e."   Revered in ancient Egypt, with a crown   Of fleas in sanctisilvered mane,   She listened, silent, with arch-worried frown   To hear what people hoped to gain   From her.  Deathlessness. Oh.  She'd walk away   And sway her rosy rump to indicate   That she did not forbid nor advocate. Then Europe took away her soul, But left her hands through thoughtlessness; A monkish portrait of a saint Shows hands of simian narrowness: The holy woman must accept Grace like a peanut.   The ships transported her to royal courts   Warm like a newborn, trembling as with age;   They made her scamper on a golden chain   And dressed her up in colors like a page.   Cassandra.  What's so funny. She's edible in China, can create Grimaces boiled or fried upon a plate. Ironic as a diamond set in brass. They say her brain has subtle flavor, But we must view it with disfavor, For it never invented gunpowder.   In fairy tales she's lonely, insecure,   Forever lining mirrors with her scowls   Self-deprecating.  She sets a good example,   Like a knowing poor relation   With whom we're not on speaking terms.

  I Am Too Close I am too close to have him dream of me. I do not hover, nor attempt to hide Beneath the roots of trees.  I am too close. The song of fish in nets is never mine, Nor is the finger which just dropped a ring. I am too close.  A mansion burns alone, Without me crying help!  Too close To have bells tinkle in my hair. Too close to enter as a guest For whom the walls part silently. And never again will I so lightly die, So disembodied and so unaware, As in his dream once.  I'm too close, Too close.  I hear his hissing word And see its snakelike glittering husk, Immobile in his embrace.  He is asleep, More accessible now to her he saw just once, Circus cashier for a one-lion travelling show, Than me, now lying at his side.. For her a valley grows within him, With russet leaves, enclosed by snowy mountains In azure air.  I am too close To drop down from above..  My scream Could only wake him.  Poor me now, Encased within this form; I was a birch once, and I was a lizard Who would emerge and eon-silk Her iridescent skins.  I could Just disappear before astonished eyes, Which is the best of treasures.  I'm too close, Too close to have him dream of me. I slide my arm from under his sleeping head, It is asleep and crawling numb with pins; Atop each pinhead sit the fallen angels, Waiting to be counted.

  Epitaph Here lies the author of some poems buried, Outdated like a comma; Earth, bestow Eternal peace upon this corpse, although It didn't move in circles literary.

So that is why this epitaph contains Just owls and burdock, and a little rhyme. O stranger, pick your electronic brains And ponder Ms. Szymborska's fate sometime.

  Coloratura (loosely translated) She stands beneath the wiglike trees Dispersing songs into the breeze, And spins eternal silver vowels, As fine as spider-threads, from Italy.   She loves mankind and always will,   Communicates by high-C trill;   The mirror in her throat reflects   The quarter-notes that she selects,   The chirping do-re-mi-fa-sol,   The nonsense rhymes of voice control,   Andiamo, al di la, mi chiamano Mimi.   Mane thekel fares, do-re-mi! I hope my ears are wrong!  Beware! A black bassoon--he wouldn't dare!-- A heavy note with raven brow Approaches stealthily and--ow!-- She's at his mercy, cut in two! Basso Profondo, I beg of you...   You want her to shut up, and hide   On freezing backstage Earth?  Abide   In Tartarus-Catarrh?  You'd pack her off   By Trojan Hoarse to  Chronic Cough?   Or to that hell where hapless souls become   Lip-moving fish, disconsolate and glum? Oh , no no no!  Don't change your tune, Lose face before that mad bassoon! On that embodied hairbreadth, Fate Will but a moment hesitate, Inhale but once and echo-climb The ceiling and return, sublime Luminous confetti crystalline, Vox humana.

  The Shadow My shadow follows me like I'm the queen And he my jester.  When I stand up tall, He turns to freakish fuzz upon the wall And hits the ceiling with his stupid bean.   Which even might be painful, in a way,   Within the world of two dimensions.  Or   The clown's unhappy at my court?  He may   Prefer a different role, perhaps he's bored. The queen leans out the window, and the clown Is then expected to complete the fall; Thus they divide their labors up and down, But such division isn't fair at all.   This simpleton accepted everything   I have no strength for--pathos, gestures, crowns,   The ermine robes, the scepter and the ring. I'll shrug my shoulders elegantly oh, I'll toss my head so lightly, o my king! For I'm rehearsing our goodbye, you know. And when we're at the station, king, my clown Will jump onto the tracks, king, and lie down.

  Male Beauty Contest He entered, taut from jaw to toe, His flesh in braids like Christmas dough, Displayed his olive firmaments-- He's got to win, such excellence!   And now he grapples with a bear   (Ferocious, though invisible);   Three jaguars that aren't there   Are felled by saber capable. He'll strike two dozen stomach-poses, Show off his straddle/squatting skills, And when they throw applause and roses, He'll bow on his B-complex pills.

  And the Terrorist Watches The bomb will go off in the bar at one twenty p.m. Right now it's only one sixteen. Some people will still have a chance to go inside, Some to get out.   The terrorist has already crossed the street.   Far enough away to shelter him from harm   And a view just like a movie screen: And a woman in a yellow jacket's going in. And a man in dark glasses is coming out. And boys in blue jeans are talking to each other. One seventeen and four seconds. The shorter boy is lucky, he gets on a motor scooter, And the taller one goes inside.   One seventeen and forty seconds.   And a girl with a green ribbon in her hair is walking along.   Except that this bus abruptly hides her from view.   One eighteen p.m.   The girl is gone.   We'll see when they bring the bodies out   Whether she was so stupid as to go inside. One nineteen p.m. For some reason no one's going in. Instead, this fat bald guy just came out. Fumbling through his pockets like he lost something, And he goes back for his lousy gloves At ten seconds of one twenty.   It's one twenty p.m.   How time drags on.   It must be time by now.   No, not yet.   Yes, now.   And the bomb goes off.

  Cat in a Vacant Apartment Dying on your cat--that's just not done! What can a cat do, after all, Inside a vacant apartment? Claw up along the walls? Graze against the furniture? Ostensibly there's nothing changed, But that is an illusion. Ostensibly nothing's been moved, But nothing's where it should be, And no one lights the lamp at eventide.

The footsteps on the stairwell Are not the right ones, and Wrong is the hand that places Fish in the feeding-bowl.

Something's not getting started At its appointed time. And something fails to happen The way it ought to do. Somebody came today and stayed A while and then left suddenly, Now adamantly stays away.

The closets all have been inspected, All shelves have been checked out. The underside of carpets has been slinked. The prime directive's violated: Sheets of paper scattered everywhere. What else can still be done? Just sleeping and waiting.

Oh, let him please come back And show his face again And learn his lesson well: You just can't treat a cat this way! Then he will be approached Pretend-reluctantly Oh so languidly On most indignant paws-- No bounding and no cooing for a while.

Bonus extra: Pośrod Niesnasków  by the nineteenth-century poet Juliusz Słowacki (1809-1849) angrily predicting the election of a Slavic Pope who would be a real reformer.  My version won the 1978  translation prize of Polish Heritage magazine.

Into the midst of riotous squabblers/ God sounds his gong; Here is the Slavic Pope, your new ruler;/ make way, applaud. This one will not, like Italians before him,/ flee sworded throngs; Our world-disdainer will fight like a tiger,/ fearless like God. Sunshine resplendent shall be his countenance,/ light shining true, That we may follow him into the radiance/ where God resides. Multitudes growing obey all his orders,/ his prayers too: He tells the sun to stand still in the heavens,/ and it abides. Now he approaches, the one who distributes/ global new might, He who can make blood circulate backwards/ inside our veins. Now in our hearts the pulsation starts flowing,/ heavenly light; Power is a spirit, turns thought into action /inside his brain. And we need power in order to carry/ this world of ours; Here comes the Slavic Pope to the rescue, brother of mankind. Angel battalions dust off his throne with/ whisks made of flowers, While he pours lotion onto our bosom,/ Pontiff benign. He will distribute love like a warlord/ passes out arms; His strength sacramental will gather the cosmos/ into his palms. Then will he send glad tidings to flutter/ like Noah's dove: News that the spirit's here and acknowledged,/ shining alone. And we shall see part nicely before him/ the sky above. He'll stand on his throne, illumined, creating/ both world and throne. His voice will transform the nations to brethren./  Burnt offerings Circle the spirits in their march toward/ their final goal. Strength sacramental of hundreds of nations/ will help our king See that the spirits' work overpowers/ death's mournful toll. The wounds of the world shall he cleanse, and banish/ rot, pus, and all-- He will redeem the world and bring to it/ both health and love. He shall sweep clean the insides of churches/ and clear the hall, And then reveal the Lord our Creator/ shining above.

____________________________________________________________

[alexandrachciuk-celt]

Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, double translations of 68 Lesmian poems, 1984 CUNY Grad. dissertation

Mythematics and Extropy I

Selected Polish Poems of Bolesław Leśmian

Translated and annotated by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph.D.

Copyright 1984 by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt

This volume is dedicated to the spirit of openness and generosity found in the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791 on the occasion of its 222nd anniversary

"Leśmian's work here finds the translator and interpreter it needs--we should be grateful for Alexandra Chciuk-Celt's own work and patience with the extreme difficulties of the original, which comes through unscathed, but scathing." Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of English Language and Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate Center, and Former President, Modern Language Association.

"For the English-speaking reader, perhaps the most rewarding gift of translation is the putting of one in touch with authors who write in what are patronizingly called the 'lesser-known' or 'minor' languages.  Thus it is that Alexandra Chciuk-Celt has rewarded us with a good look at Bolesław Leśmian and his original insights, so universal and yet so home-bred that his compeers tried hard to squelch them.  Let us have more of them for our enlightenment."  Gregory Rabassa, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center.

Translator's Introduction to the Verse Versions

  Bolesław Leśmian is a pseudonym for Stanisław Bolesław Lesman (1878?-1937), a provincial lawyer of Jewish descent who was born in Warsaw and studied law in Kiev in the Ukraine in Russia (Poland did not regain independence until President Wilson's Fourteen Points reconstituted the country after World War I subsequent to over a century of partition).  He contributed widely to Polish and Russian literary magazines such as Chimera and Vesy, co-directed experimental Artistic Theaters in Łódź and Warsaw, and became a member of the Polish Academy of Literature in 1933.

  Like many great poets, Leśmian is difficult to periodize.  Michał Głowiński and Rochelle Heller Stone consider him a Symbolist, although his treatment of folklore and negative entities is totally unlike that of, say, Baudelaire; Jacek Trznadel calls him an Existentialist, which makes sense except that it is not a literary term; Marian Pankowski dubs him Baroque with Romanticism in the ascendant; and various other scholars have pointed out affinities to Absurdism, Futurism, and Surrealism.  I shall studiously abstain from adding to polemics and pigeonholing; rather, I would like to quote one of my comparative literature professors to the effect that periodization is arbitrary classification: "There are no periods--period!"  For that reason, I have sought to maintain the various styles of Leśmian's poetry in translation, avoiding enjambment in Baroque poems (although I used it liberally in more modern works, especially those dealing with decomposition), inventing neologisms where necessary, and maintaining rhyme and rhythm throughout simply because Leśmian considered them crucial.

  I find important points of comparison between him and Goethe: both had varied interests but reluctantly studied law at their fathers' behest and made a living as administrative functionaries, although their first love was literature, especially poetry; both performed thorough research into the folklore of their native countries and were fascinated by the study of nature; both dared to experiment in style and substance to the point where neither can be said to have a single particular style of writing; and both helped to sculpt a new awareness of their native tongues when the respective countries were undergoing wide-ranging transformations.

  One important difference springs to mind immediately, however: Goethe's work brought him success, even adulation, during his lifetime, but Leśmian's writings, although published while he was alive--with the exception of the posthumous Dziejba leśna (Forest Chronicle)--were largely ignored; only recently has he became svindicated as Poland's greatest twentieth-century poet.  Part of the reason is historical: the revived Polish nation thirsted for modernism, so the literati in power dutifully affected a futuristic bias which considered rhyme and rhythm hopelessly old-fashioned.  Leśmian's poetry obviously incorporated both (his essays on literature consider rhythm to be the most important element of poetry), and even dealt with "outdated" subject matter such as folk tales.  The literary current antithetical to the avant-garde, humorously referred to as the "barrel-organ" school, insisted on repeating Romantic clichés in which women were treated as maternal and asexual producers of nationalistic heroes, so on can easily imagine how Leśmian's earthy sensuality would have displeased such puritanical souls.

  Leśmian in fact professed no literary trend at all, and therefore had no "movement" to defend him.  Small wonder, then, that his creativity was stonewalled!  His Jewish ancestry, coupled with his naiveté, made him a sitting duck for vituperative bigots (one would think that people with a country to built would have more important things on their minds).  He was considered dangerously retrogressive by the literary group known as "Skamander," and further made the mistake of antagonizing one of its future members, namely Julian Tuwim (before the latter was famous, of course!).  Tuwim left some of his own poems with the respected master, who was so embarrassed at not having read them that he preferred to say, in effect, "Your work is useless, forget it."

  Philosophically, Leśmian's most important influence was Bergsonism, although he was also indebted to Buddhism, Hinduism, and Slavic folk traditions.  He "poetified" Henri Bergson by inventing language to exemplify the importance of intuition and dynamic description; for instance, by causing mists to "girlify" or anthropomorphized animals to "farrify," he allowed the reader to become privy to a process rather than merely witnessing a finished fact.  (Today, of course, it is possible to "-ize" or "-ify" just about anything--I am also grateful to the English language for having accepted words like "see-through," "self-contained," and "high" in the meantime--but in Poland between the wars, this activity was considered so subversive as to cause consternation and rejection.)

  Leśmian was more pessimistic than Bergson, especially late in his life.  He developed near-loathing for the unimaginative malevolence of conventional society and the purveyors of soulless mediocrity, whom he referred to as Their Highness King Rat, the Siamese Twenty (they sign in the plural and destroy creativity in order to safeguard their own lack of vision).  Unlike Bergson, he saw no possibility of reconciliation and decided to escape into a resigned ethical humanism and a creation of negative existences, which Bergson considered illusory at best.  (For Bergson, a thing cannot not exist; it can only be somewhere else.  Leśmian disagreed, which forced me to invent negative words such as nonversation, nexistence, or nokay.) Unfortunately, World War II was to prove Leśmian correct; mercifully, he died two years before it broke out.  An example of Leśmian's increasing pessimism can be gleaned by comparing his treatment of nature in his early "In the Field" to the later "Spring Ox."  The former features a dozing sybaritic ecstasy, the latter a malevolent, decomposing faint.

  Leśmian was hopelessly unrealistic about money, as was his wife Zofia (a painter he met in Paris); thus, the family continually hovered at the brink of financial disaster.  It is true that he landed a few "plum" jobs, especially in the field of real estate, and that he was able to delegate much of his work to underlings so as to have more free time to write.  However, his trusting nature led him to anything the staff laid on his desk, and culminated in financial ruin when one of his employees embezzled hundreds of thousands of złotys originally destined for income tax payments.  Thanks to governmental contacts, he was saved from penal prosecution, but the Tax Man still demanded to be paid.  Leśmian's lifelong girlfriend, Dr. Dora Lebenthal, sold her luxurious apartment and furnishings to raise money; she was frequently seen interrupting her medical practice to wrap food packages for the Leśmian family.

  When robbed, Leśmian manifested his typical sense of humor in adversity by cracking the following joke: A guy comes home and finds his wife being unfaithful on the couch.  He leaves and asks a friend what to do about it.

Friend: Challenge your rival to a duel!

Man:    No, he could kill me.

Friend: So divorce your wife.

Man:    Can't do that either--the property's in her name.

Friend: So--sell the couch!

  After the financial fiasco, the poet became engaged in ever more harebrained schemes to raise money.  In Zdzisław Jastrzębski's Wspomnienia o Bolesławie Leśmianie (Reminiscences about Bolesław Leśmian), Izabela Czajka-Stachowicz relates an episode both hilarious and pathetic: Leśmian called her early one morning, asking her to meet him at a restaurant on urgent business.  After plying her with a liquid (vodka) breakfast, he expounded his plan.  "I know where I can buy a funeral parlor cheap if you'll be my partner--we can get horses with fancy feather ornaments, and you can wear black velvet and play Chopin's funeral march on the piano...."  When Izabela protested that she was tone-deaf and couldn't play the piano, the response was in the order of "No problem, you'll learn."  These tipsy discussions were punctuated by recurrent attempts to liberate the live fish from the aquarium "so they could breathe," and consequently by wet clothing, indignant guests, and frosty maitre d's.  When Izabela's distraught husband finally found her and paid the bill (neither diner, of course, having enough money), he dumped her at Leśmian's house together with the poet so they could continue their conversation!

  However, neither a sense of humor nor a love of art and philosophy (shades of Goethe again) were able to save Leśmian from the results of frustration and embittering adversity: he died of heart failure in 1937, shortly after throwing out of the house a well-built, well-connected man who wanted to dally with Leśmian's daughter but refused to marry her because she was of Jewish descent.

  His creativity is timeless and saturated with what would later be called magical realism: fantastic, fairy-tale grotesqueness; sensual observation of nature in miniature; an in-depth empathy which synthesizes and exalts the best of folklore and the romantic tradition; and finally, a lush erotic bent quite surprising in a man whose unimposing stature led even his friends to describe him as everything from a "desiccated bird" to a "musical cricket."  (Evidently, no one ever told him he was not handsome!)

  His works include: Sad rozstajny (1912); Laka (1920); Napój cienisty (1936); and Dziejba leśna (published posthumously in 1938).  I have translated these titles as "The Crossroads Orchard," "The Meadow," "Sipping Shade," and "Forest Chronicle" respectively.  He also wrote three sets of fairy tales (Klechdy polskie, Klechdy sezamowe, and Przygody Sindbada żeglarza), as well as a corpus of critical and philosophical essays, translated Edgar Allan Poe from Baudelaire's French translation, and wrote several plays which have not been published.

  Leśmian was extremely interested in folklore and mythology; like Patrice de la Tour du Pin, he appeared to believe that any society deprived of myth is condemned to a freezing death.  He aimed at reconstituting the primeval magic of art in timeless legend which broke down the barriers among humans, plans, animals, and inanimate objects, in part by blurring the distinctions between parts of speech and anthropomorphizing non-human creatures such as windmills.  Since his mythopoetic activities included, plus, minus, and zero (in other words, contained the realm of all possibilities in what could be called a mathematically precise "polyverse") and documented the effort expended in metamorphoses (much like thermodynamics measures entropy, the energy used in maintaining a structure), I have decided to call them "mythematics" and "extropy"--hence the enigmatic title.

  Even during partition times before World War I, when Poland did not exist as a political unit, Leśmian eschewed the tendentiousness and coded barbs against the occupying powers which characterized so many of his contemporaries.  (It must, in all fairness, be pointed out that Polish literature would not have been able to survive, let alone outwit the censors, without such "coding.")  The Soviets seemed to like him very much, presumably because he was so apolitical as to publish original poetry in Russian.  Since Polish and Russian are structurally similar, Leśmian is quite well-known in Russian translation, but I know of very few translations into other languages.  Marian Pankowski's French-language dissertation and Rochelle Heller Stone's University of California doctoral work in English contain lined-prose examples; the best-known Russian version is in Stikhi, 1971; and a set of Italian versions was made by Pietro Marchesani et al. for the Rivista di poesia circa 1980.  I therefore believe that an English translation into verse, accompanied by literal versions and annotations as in my 1984 doctoral work at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, is a novel and worthwhile undertaking, especially since Poland is so much in the forefront of international developments at the moment and interest in Polish culture has increased for that reason.

  I attribute the dearth of translations of Poland's  outstanding twentieth-century poet to Leśmian's penchant for linguistic innovation, usually manufactured out of existing words plus suffixes, prefixes, and infixes (he was a "morpheme addict") which indicate, for instance, that an activity has begun but not quite terminated.  As an example, Polish prefix pileups make it possible for a verb to become a fuzzy liquid continuum such s "to try to become reincarnated by not quite make it" (all one word!).  They are so difficult to recreate in other languages, particularly non-Slavic ones, that Leśmian has hardly been translated at all and is barely known outside his native country.  I have attempted to render his innovations by inventing equivalent innovations in English: sometimes they are adverbial expressions, sometimes two words put together.  For instance, in "Departure," Leśmian gives a novel "twist" to the Polish expression "podbite sińcem" (hit-under with bruise, i.e. with a black eye).  He calls it "podkute sińcem," i.e. "horseshoed-under with bruise."  I have rendered this as follows: "with rings of horseshoe bruises underround."  In "Transformations," Leśmian has a porcupine pouting at the vegetation, and of course the poet indulges in quite a bit of linguistic innovation as well.  Since I was at a loss for space (i.e. had been deprived of a few syllables by the need to explain something which was implicit in the original), I took the liberty of creating a linguistic innovation of my own, namely "porcupout," which I believe worked in this particular situation.

  Preliminary attempts to organize the subject matter could include the various states of mind Leśmian deals with; his poetry literally finds equations for emotions.  In "Hunchback," for instance, he appears to be symbolic: we all carry around a hump which jeers at us and becomes fat at our expense.  "Świdryga and Midryga" and "The Girl" are grotesque philosophical ballads based on folk elements; the autobiographical "Paltry" and "Silvron" abound in ironic deprecation of the tragedy of the Faustian personality; "On Resurrection Day" and "Sarcophaboots" wage futile war upon the obstacle known as God; and the "Raspberry Brushwood" cycle of erotica is among the most beautiful love poetry I have ever encountered.  Other poems deal with jealousy, motherhood, sybaritic nature, and the seductiveness of fairy-tale death.

  Such variety can be problematic for a translator trying desperately to empathize with psychological states unfamiliar to her.  In "Confession," for instance, he requests his lady's permission to dally with another; my solidarity with the abandoned wife (or girlfriend) made my work difficult.  (It is easier to translate someone with whom one can identify.)  However, I believe I was able to handle it.  The rhythm generally ended some 60% of the lines with an unaccented syllable (natural in Polish but much more irksome in English), yet by the end of the fifth stanza I was both impatient with the necessity of finding feminine rhymes and resentful of the elegant playfulness of a content I didn't like; therefore, I made the last stanza end with accented syllables, since iambs are associated with masculinity and insistence in English.

  Another similarity to Goethe thus becomes evident.  Both men loved art and philosophy, but above all they were avid lovers of life--and extremely self-indulgent, which would have made them supremely boring except that the selves thy were indulging were so very talented and interesting.  Like Goethe, Leśmian anticipated many later developments: physics (his fluid metamorphoses prefigure transitional states such as liquid crystals), electronics (his dynamic "pay as you go" descriptions are reminiscent of computers, and modem transmission of images between frames sounds suspiciously like Leśmian's contention that reality is found in the crack between the negative and the positive), and cataclysmic despair ("Terror" sounds like the deadened dynamics of a concentration camp, and "Two Humble Humans" like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust).

  I am indebted to Prof. Mary Ann Caws of the City University of New York for her suggestion that every translation be produced in two versions: one an interlinear crib (word for word), which is neither poetry nor English, but which offers valuable insight into the thought-pattern and sentence structure of the original, besides of course being a gloss thereon.  The verse version is hopefully poetic English, which naturally makes it challenging and time-consuming; "rushing" it in any way makes it sound routine, like commercial doggerel.  I am also indebted to Profs. Gregory Rabassa and Daniel Gerould, who together with Prof. Caws formed my dissertation committee on Leśmian.  Persons interested in obtaining the Polish originals and/or the dissertation proper are invited to contact languagelady@juno.com. I am further absurdly grateful for the assistance rendered by another committee, albeit an informal one: my Board of Native Editors (Władysław Chciuk and Regina Gelb), who conscientiously hovered over the original to protect Leśmian from misunderstandings on my part.  (Some of these would have made me look rather foolish.)  In coordinating all their comments and checking them against each other, I had the distinct feeling that I was playing a game of chess with the original!

  My deep appreciation also to Piotr Jaksński, Krystyna Baron, Jan Kowalik, Anna Meyer, and Krystyna Olszer for their biographical assistance, and to Carlos Mogollón for his artwork, which was inspired by the Polish paper cutouts known as wycinanki. For me, translating these poems has been a labor of love, supremely difficult and exhilarating at the same time.  I sincerely hope that my enthusiasm is contagious, and that it will infect English-speaking readers with the same love and pleasure as Leśmian imparted to me.

  Alexandra Chciuk-Celt (pseud. Sandra Celt) is a translator and interpreter from German, Spanish, French, and Polish, who has also trained translators at the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences, Manhattanville College, and New York University's SCE.  She also edited the Chronicle of the American Translators Association, contributed to many language publications, and spoke at poetry-translation conferences for the ATA, the Polish Institute, and Imagine at Harvard University.

Translator's Introduction to the Literal Versions

Copyright 1990 by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph.D.

  If you are also one of those people who has ever had to compose a thesis or a dissertation, flailing about desperately for some square inch of information nobody else has ever written before, then you will probably be able to empathize.  While I was doing my graduate work in comparative literature at the City University Graduate Center in New York, I wanted to do first my thesis, then the dissertation, in the form of a comparison of the social function of humor and witchcraft in the literature of several societies, but most of my professors told me it was too anthropological for the department.  The anthro people liked the idea and even said the structuralists would eat that right up, but I only had an undergraduate minor in the field, so that didn't count.

  My chief professor was Gregory Rabassa, the famous translator of Gabriel García Márquez.  He encouraged me to do both of these massive term papers on a subject I was intimately familiar with because of years of professional and academic experience, namely translation.  My thesis was Thought for Food: Toward a Theory of Translation, and the dissertation became a spinoff on that because it was a scholarly, annotated translation of selections of Bolesław Leśmian's poetry.

  How that came about is interesting.  Around 1978, I heard of a poetry-translation contest sponsored by a West Coast outfit called "Mr. Cogito."  All languages were fair game.  I decided to enter some of the German, French, Spanish, and Italian poems I'd translated for the Musical Heritage Review, but noticed an absence of Polish, which, like a proper show-off, I immediately decided to remedy.  I got Czesław Miłosz's book on Polish literature, didn't like most of the translations, and produced some of my own.  Then a Polish architect friend of mine introduced me to Leśmian, and it was love at first sight.  As a linguist, I loved his neologisms and word-play (whenever I let loose one of my quadrilingual puns, the obligatory groans come in stereo).  As an amateur social scientist, I was deeply sympathetic to his humanistic ethical anxieties.  And as a legal translator, I got a kick out of rendering some of his recondite juridical jargon into English.  But more about that later.  At any rate, in case you're interested: I did not win the Cogito competition, but some of my poetry translations of Juliusz Słowacki and Wisława Szymborska did win first prizes in contests sponsored by Polish Heritage and the International Poetry Review in 1979 and 1982.

  Whenever one of my translation courses reached the poetry session, I always tried to impress upon my students that whatever they have learned about translation goes double for literary and quadruple for poetry translation. Namely: translate only into your mother tongue so that you can innovate with confidence (or at least get a native editor to fix your syntax); perform as much research as you can on the writer and the period in question so you can distinguish what is individual in him or her; attempt to maintain the style and imagery of the original as much as possible unless you are openly doing a variation on a theme; do research on the original in order to attempt to determine the purpose of the work and convey a similar attitude and effect.  I also point out that translation, being an art instead of a science, is subjective and thus vulnerable by definition: no matter what you do, someone will inevitably challenge your interpretation.  If you give a somewhat free rendition (such as transposing a Petrarchan sonnet into Elizabethan, or turning a metaphor into an analogy), the legendary Professor Horrendo will immediately attack your version as "not being the same thing," berating you for committing major crimes such as changing the rhyme scheme from abba to abab or a metaphor into a simile.  If you proceed word-for-word in an interlinear-crib fashion, you will produce a rather sorry composition which is neither poetry nor English, but which has definite merits as a gloss on the original and an indication as to the sentence structure and thought pattern of the original language.

  With all due respect to professors, I have the distinct impression that natives of the language being translated from are the worst possible reviewers of poetry translation.  In my experience, they are forever criticizing that the translation is not the exact same thing, and I disdained to say that the only way you can render "stoi pod peruczką drzewa" exactly would be to say "stoi pod peruczką drzewa," and even that is not the exact same thing because the two utterances are separated by time and the second is a repetitive quote instead of an original statement.  Or what about Stanisław Barańczak’s dictum that his poem on moving to a new apartment could not be translated into English because in Communist Poland one could not get better lodgings without cooperating with the authorities, such as by informing on colleagues to the secret police.  Thirty years later, young Poles are unlikely to know this fact, so not even the exact same thing in the exact same language is the exact same thing.  One also wonders what kind of service to Polish literature is performed by a professor trying to keep it away from non-speakers of Polish.  Of course, this does not stop such people from hosting closed conferences on Polish literature, with nary a non-Pole in sight, at which they interminably and eloquently complain about how the outside world ignores their country's culture.  The literary editor of a Polish-American newspaper even goes so far as to say "the worst enemies of Polish literature are Polish professors abroad."

  Parenthetically: not even the exact same thing in the same language is the exact same thing.  For instance, a Polish poet said his poem about moving day in Poland was untranslatable because under Communism you had to spy on your colleagues in order to get a better apartment.  (Nobody in the audience was tactless enough to ask whom he had informed against, nor to say "What's wrong with a footnote?")  However, any Pole too young to have experienced this would not get the subliminal unpleasant association now that Poland is free.

  Anyway, Prof. Rabassa and another of his colleagues on my dissertation committee, Prof. Mary Ann Caws, easily convinced me that this quarrel between the professors and the poets is both classic and endemic, and that the best way to sail above it was to produce two versions of the same poem.  In addition to a hopefully poetic translation, I thus also made interlinear cribs as mentioned above, which was fine with me because it kept me reasonably (but not totally) safe from the Professor Horrendos with only minimal investment in terms of time.  Of course, it could not explain an allusion, much less paraphrase an entire culture, and sometimes conferred unexpectedly poetic overtones upon something which was just a plain old cliché in the original.  I'll invent an example here: one Pole blocking another's view of a television set is asked, literally, "is your father a glass-maker?", which in English sounds very exotic, like one of Don Quixote's or Johnny Carson's picturesque putdowns, whereas in fact it is just a mock-insult as hackneyed as our "you make a better door than you do a window."  But I was home free and not about to complain.  When publishing my translations of about 68 of Leśmian's poems, I thus also produced these literal versions and annotations as to the genesis, meaning, and reception of the poems, which formed part of my PhD dissertation (1984) on Boleslaw Leśmian.

  By the way, it later occurred tome that the quarrel between the professors and the poets is basically a territorial fight, and basically meaningless as well, because it concerns something which is not objectively verifiable.  If professors admitted that literature can be translated, they'd be out of a job; the same would happen to translators if they admitted it cannot.  In the final analysis, any kind of communication has at best an asymptotic relationship to absolute truth, and no one, least of all professors and translators, has the right to arrogate arbitership of approximations unto himself.

  Lest this should sound too quaintly amusing, let me stress that such professors can often be financially and pedagogically destructive, not just psychologically hurtful.  (Read on for the damage done by Professor Horrendo in reviewing my application for a translation-publication grant for Leśmian from the NEH.)  Their criticism is also often self-contradictory or ridiculous.  For instance, one such person criticized my zeal in searching for the title "Sarcophaboots," but simultaneously pointed out that I had neglected to mention, in "Raspberry Brushwood," that the Polish original implied the berries to be plentiful (something I considered implicit in their taking many hours to pick).  I politely referred him to the literal versions, but what the French call staircase wit (I guess we'll have to call it elevator wit here, this being Otis country) prevented me from adding, "How can I simultaneously be too pedantic enough?  Besides, maybe your Leśmian is a berry bookkeeper; mine is a lover."

  I decided to do the translations before reading Lśmian's poetics (although I dutifully performed the preliminary research I require of my students), figuring I could always fix mistakes easily later on but that it would be hard to revive imagination once it had been intimidated by a dictum.  Happily, reading the Szkice literackie compiled by Prof. Jacek Trznadel led to very few changes in my translations; the major editing was done by my informal Board of Native Editors, Ms. Regina Gelb and Mr. Władysław Chciuk, who very conscientiously hovered over the original in order to protect Leśmian from errors on my part. (Some of these would have made me look rather foolish!)  In coordinating their comments and checking them against each other, I had the distinct feeling that I was playing a game of chess with the original.

  Quite instinctively, I thought the translations should have rhyme and rhythm simply because the original did; if the poet had wanted free verse, he would have written it that way.  Besides, as a colleague of mine, Jean Longland, has written, transposing a sonnet into free verse is like sculpting the Venus de Milo in wet sand.  I also noticed that most, though not all, of Leśmian's poems were in the rhymed 13-syllable form so traditional in Polish.  However, this form does not translate well into English: as Alexander Pope wrote, even alexandrines sound like wounded snakes dragging their slow weight along, besides which English generally ends a line with an accented rather than an unaccented syllable.  I therefore tended to choose the iambic-pentameter form which is equally traditional in English, although I sometimes used twelve or even more syllables per line.  This of course means that I was deprived of up to three syllables in each line, which for a form of expression as dense with meaning as poetry is really quite a sacrifice.

  Later on, in reading the Szkice, especially the five or six poetics essays and the interview with Edward Boyé, I realized that Leśmian considered rhythm to be virtually synonymous with poetry, to the point where he thought a translated poem should be recognizable to a speaker of the original language merely by its rhythm.  He was wrong about this, of course, just as he was wrong to think that poetry was probably written with no thought of printing.  In fact, poetry as a form predates writing--it is oral literature, which explains why early poetry deals with heroic-religious subject matter almost exclusively and is structured in a manner deliberately easy to remember.  (But then again, he was trained in law, not comparative literature, besides which, as Socrates said, it's all right for a painter not to know that a doe has no horns as long as he is able to produce a good likeness.)  Leśmian's love of rhythm was such that he thought placing the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle made an entirely new word; some people even considered his rhythms irritatingly incantational.

  Even though a reading of Leśmian's poetics showed no indication of his theoretical interest in rhyme, his poems all contain it, so I did not feel I was entitled to eliminate it.  I did, however, judge a bit on occasion, such as reversing rhymes, using near-rhymes, or rhyming every other line, as in "Silvron."  As usually happens in poetry translation, I surrounded myself with reference works: a bilingual dictionary, a monolingual English dictionary (to make sure outdated words such as "anon" actually mean what I keep forgetting they mean), a vocabulary of rhymes I found in an ancient Webster's, and a dictionary of synonyms.  You can imagine that the last two are particularly important in terms of locating a different word with the same meaning when constricted by the necessities of rhyme and rhythm.  Dryden called it dancing on a rope with fettered legs; I call it ballet-dancing in a straitjacket.

  In addition to the poetics problems, I also had to contend with difficulties in stylistics, as explained in the introduction to the verse versions. (In "Moon Poem," I went one step further, actually indenting the lines in such a fashion as to produce the visual effect of a new moon.) Several people have asked me why I am so adamant about preserving Leśmian's rhyme, rhythm, and style, especially since I am not pedantic by nature.  My answer is that his juxtaposition of ultra-traditional form and dizzyingly daring content is so magical as to be almost hallucinatory, and that I feel obligated to carry across as much of this magic as possible.

  For Leśmian, creativity can only occur on the individual level, never on the irretrievably ossified societal level; that causes society and the individual to be inexorably opposed.  The miserable crowd cannot tolerate exotic flowers; only loners can possibly approach the mysterious truth.  The creative individual is always craning his neck into the future, but society considers him nothing but firewood for the holy flame of the common good.  Since society is built with the average man in mind, who can think only in terms of statistical repetition, the mediation process made necessary by such an approach builds abstract chains of cause and effect in order to keep the creative act in a mnemonic museum, where it may not be touched directly.  Leśmian believed that creative individuals should be daring, even to the point of danger, instead of hanging onto costly historical skirts, and that society should actively foment abundance, even if weeds are a necessary consequence.  With such an attitude on the part of the poet, the translator simply had to be equally inventive and pessimistic in English, or at least try to.

  Much has been written about the literary, societal, and financial abuse suffered by Leśmian, but no one, to my knowledge, has drawn a conclusion which strikes me as obvious as it is painful: namely, that he was the victim of child abuse.  His father was frequently away on business, which must have given the children's stepmother abundant occasion to the abusive. Leśmian's baby brother, who died young, reportedly spoke only in verse until the age of four; his sister Aleksandra never married so as to nurse her stepmother in her old age; Boleslaw said he repeatedly had to live days of horror as a child; and Leśmian's work is full of the fragmentation and negative existences which psychologists consider to be associated with child abuse and sadism.  Further, a person's or society's attitude to God is usually a projection into the supernatural of child-rearing practices, so I think it highly significant that Leśmian's God is nonsupportive and arbitrary, like Ogilvy's famous committees: critical without being creative.  (We must remember that he was raised a century ago in an authoritarian setting much different from today's American child-rearing standards.)  So all his grotesqueness had to be translated in kind, complete with the concretization of abstractions and the esthetics of ugliness, keeping both the "souci musical" he had in common with the French Symbolists and the folkloristic elements and disturbingly palpable "nexistences" which distinguish him from them.  Example: Baudelaire's "gouffre" or "abîme" is an icy black Hades reminiscent of Rodin's Gates of Hell, whereas Leśmian's "otcłań" is an animate entity which whines, thrashes about in thickets, and talks to the poet.

  Leśmian's literal belief in numinosity (word-magic) was such that a man's name, Oszustowicz (literally translated Fraudman), was actually able to frighten him.  Let us not forget that even today, we feel atavistically chary about poking the eyes out of the photograph of a person we like, and that some people are afraid of the number thirteen, which shows that magical beliefs are still alive and well in the computer age.

  So my translations had to be superstitious, folksy, negative, sarcastic, and hopeless on occasion to do him justice.  Negative existences could not have vague universe-describing Modernist-type purposes, but had to be disturbingly real.  That made him both harder and easier to translate: harder because of my responsibility to holism, but easier because Leśmian is more universal than many poets, especially in his zeal to follow and describe natural processes.  The physical space occupied by absent people or fictional gardens (in "Two Convicts" and "Pan Błyszczński" respectively) reminds us that the Hindu concept of nothingness, as distinct from nothing, was largely responsible for the invention of zero.  Furthermore, some of his legalisms were a true challenge for me.  In "Silvron," for example, he states that midnight is barred by the statute of limitations, przedawnia sę.  Four syllables in Polish, eleven in English; no way can I fit all that in.  I called a Polish jurist friend of mine and asked if prewar Polish law made a distinction between law and equity; he said no.  I therefore felt entitled to use the English equity terms, "is estopped by laches," which only had six syllables and was thus easier to fit into the line.

  Another interesting problem was Trupiegi, which I translated "Sarcophaboots." The title is a Kashub dialect word for bast slippers worn by a corpse being buried, presumably so the shoes he wore while alive can be sold or otherwise recycled; although most Poles do not use the word, they can deduce its significance through etymology, since "trup" means "corpse."  so I tried to invent an English term, a highly interesting endeavor.  I called several funeral homes to learn whether American corpses wear special shoes; all the responses were negative ("the deceased wears the shoes he wore while living").  So since the things did not exist in English, I felt I could call them anything I wanted to.  Sleepers, Funeral Bast, and Cloudhoppers were considered and rejected in favor of Sarcophaboots, which strikes me as analogously evocative and further has a vague connection to Nancy Sinatra's song, "These Boots were Made for Walking."

  Professor Horrendo duly pointed out that I must have been mistaken in choosing Sarcophaboots because the Greek root means "flesh-eating," and that I should have said "dead shoes" instead.  (As though it were my fault that the ancient Greeks thought a sarcophagus ate corpses, or that the professor's English was so poor he did not know what a sarcophagus was.  Prof. Rabassa is absolutely right in stating that the authors who pick translators' nits the most are the ones who know the least English.)  The problem was that he expressed this irrelevant and damaging erudition in, of all places, his "support" of my Leśmian grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities. (You get one guess as to whether my application was successful.)  And then these people wonder why their country's culture is virtually unknown outside its borders!

  I had trouble rendering some items, such as reflexive verbs.  Anglo dreamers take responsibility for whatever they dream ("I dreamt..."), whereas Polish dreaming, grammatically speaking, gives substance to chimeras ("a green cow dreamt herself to me").  Another problem was Leśmian's "funeral-procession" words.  Polish prefix pileups make it possible for a verb to be a fuzzy liquid continuum like "to try to become reincarnated but not quite make it" (all one word!).  However, I hope that the literal versions I produced, coupled with poetic license for translators, may compensate for some of these incomplete equivalencies.  At any rate, I believe Leśmian would have approved.  He himself produced variations on the Tales from the Arabian Nights, rendered Edgar Allan Poe into Polish, and believed that translation was creative and should thus be remunerated on a par with original writing.

  Although I realize that not even a native Pole can always grasp every nuance of Leśmian--who is, after all, a very personal poet--I am still acutely aware that my versions are, at best, individual interpretations.  For me, translating these poems has been a labor of love, supremely difficult and exhilarating at the same time.  I sincerely hope that my enthusiasm is contagious, and that it will infect English-speaking readers with the same love and pleasure as Leśmian imparted to me.

From The Crossroads Orchard ("Orchard at-the-parting of the ways," Sad rozstajny, 1912)

NOTES

  According to Jack Trznadel's postscript to his edition of Leśmian's poetry (Poezje, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1965, hreinafter abbreviated as Trznadel Postscript), p. 495, this collection was published entirely in italics by Jakub Mortkowicz in late 1912.  Leśmian disliked italics and later specifically requested they not be used for his poetry.

  According to Leśmian's letter to Zenon ("Miriam") Przesmycki published on p. 311 of Utwory rozproszone - Listy (Scattered Works - Letters), compiled and edited by Jacek Trznadel and published in 1962 by the Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy in Warsaw (hereinafter abbreviated as UR), the original title of this collection was "Kwiaty widzące," i.e. "Flowers That Can See."

In the Evening

Dusk congeals in the orchard, stonelike chill swept in,

Wayward, lost farawayness has come home again.

Is the wind which has shifted--I can see right through!--

To the trees from the thatches singing in me too?

Moonrise over the forest!

Moonlight peeking through the birches in the dell

Highlights a lonely carriage and a darkened well.

In the wheelspokes bathed in unexpected light,

A ghost that lost its way decides to spend the night

Late in the evening.

Twilight falls and glistens on the dewy grass,

And the pond lies mirrored in the window-glass.

The heather's plucked and wilting, my hands serve as its shroud.

How strange it sounds to hear your name pronounced out loud

Late in the evening!

My shadow, which caressed the golden stalks by day

Now tries to fill my walls and chase the stark away,

With fuzzy moths from nowhere clinging to the pane.

The meadow pond has silvered, our views are not the same.

Moonrise over the forest....

AT-EVENING

1 Dusk itself-thickens about orchard, earth-y blew chill,

2 It seems that farawayness lost is returning...

3 Wind has-shifted-down from thatch to branches of trees--

4 Is it in me so singing?  I see through song,

5 How moon rises over forest!

6 In yard, into-which he-looked from behind dark birches,

7 Dawned-itself well and lonely cart,

8 Between spokes unexpectedly lighted of-wheels,

9 Ghost, way not knowing, for night-lodging himself in-spun.

10 In-evening, late in-evening.

11 Through panes my of-windows, staring in pond,

12 Light falls and glimmers among moist grasses.

13 In my palm picked ends-dying heather.

14 How strange to say own name aloud

15 In evening, late in-evening!

16 Shadow mine, which in day laid himself on golden stand of-grain,

17 At-night thirsts to fill emptiness of-my walls.

18 To panes, from-nowhere appeared, stick fuzzy moths--

19 Pond has-silvered and sees otherwise than we,

20 How moon rises over forest.

NOTES

  1 Polish lacks articles, so any noun can be "this," "a/an," or "the."  "Ziemny wąs translated as "stonelike" ("earth-y herein) because the latter better transmits the effect of coolness.  Marchesani et al. used a similar word in their Italian translation, which is very apropos because Italian tends to associate the earth with heat and dust.  Finally, "earthy" in English has overwhelming secondary connotations inappropriate here.

  4 According to Michał Głowiński, "Słowo i pieśń," in Studia (p. 188), song is used herein as a utensil for familiarization with the world.  Cf. also "Zamyślenie," wherein the protagonist does not sing, but merely looks out the window.

  8 "Bathed in unexpected light" was used to duplicate Leśmian's intended effect of almost cinematic surprise.

  11 The power of perception is herein conferred upon windowpanes.  As in "Etherealness," disparate items acquire sequential validity by means of humanizing observation (Jacek Trznadel, Twórczość Leśmiana, hereinafter TL, p. 345).

  15 Repetition of "Late in the evening" is reminiscent of Goethe's poem "Um Mitternacht" (Reclam pp. 191-2), wherein three rhymed five-line stanzas end with the short, unrhymed line "Um Mitternacht" ("At Midnight").

  16-19 The pond is able to see, and the shadow has desires.  Unfortunately, the rhymed English version ("our views are not the same") was unable to crystallize this attribution and had to settle for an ambiguity which implies that the speaker and his interlocutor have different views.  In "Bolesław Leśmian: Otchłań," pp. 239-241, Michal Głowiński stated that the poet broke down the hierarchy between man and nature; he was fascinated by the possibility that everything observed everything else and that reality was a percept because perceptions cannot be verified.

(Untitled)

If I were to meet you for the first time now,

But in a different orchard, under different trees--

The rustling might be different in these other boughs,

The forest stretching misty into infinity.

Maybe the flowers nestled in the other green

Would thrill our palms to shudder at their tickle-touch--

Different words perhaps would grace this other scene,

An unperceptive mouth would likely talk too much.

The sun might once again enthrall us and coerce

Our souls to flush and flounder in a rose cascade,

If this time I met you were to be the first,

But in a different orchard, in another glade.

1 If I-met you again first time,

2 But in different orchard, different forest--

3 Maybe would otherwise rustle to-us forest

4 Lengthened with-mist on infinity-horizon...

5 Perhaps other flowers amidst greenery furrows

6 Would be-taken-by palms shudder-active--

7 Perhaps would fall from slow-of-understanding lips

8 Some other words--some others...

9  Perhaps also sun enthrall us would

10 To flow-down in-spirit in rose cascade,

11 If I-met you again first time,

12 But in different forest, different orchard....

NOTES

According to Trznadel Postscript p. 497, this poem was originally published under the title "Żal" ("Regret") in Bluszcz, Warsaw 1912.  A handwritten notation in the reprint dedicated to Zuzanna Rabska mentions a 1911 declamation of this poem during a February gathering at the home of Savitri.  The reprint made slight changes in punctuation and sequence of words.

  4 "Bezkres" (lit. "absence-of-bounds"), while not a neologism, is symptomatic of Leśmian's predilection for negative words.

  6 In Leśmian's "Majka" (Klechdy polskie, hereinafter KP, p. 46), Marcin Dziura runs his palm over obediently billowing stalks of wheat.

  7-8 Reverse in the rhymed English for purposes of rhyme.

  8 "Slow-of-understanding lips" became "an unperceptive mouth," one which "would likely talk too much," in an instance of poetic license for translators.

Lips and Eyes

Your hugs are so familiar!  When stars adorn the sky

At dusk, I am reminded of my favorite kiss,

The mute caress which causes your lips to find my eyes--

You always say goodbye and so long to me like this.

Why do you pick that moment, when I must go away,

Before my eyes succumb to woody-grassy charms?

Each time the lake glows dawny at the break of day,

We're forced to disentangle our slumber-heated arms.

A sudden conflagration splatters gold onto

The still-cool windowpanes.  What do you mean to say

By kissing both my eyes like this?  Give me a clue,

Explain, but please don't tear those clever lips away!

I-know so-many of-your caresses!  But when day on dusk

Gleams with-star, I-remember that one--without words,

Which orders you with-lips to-search-for my eyes...

Thus to-me you-say-goodbye normally, before I-return again.

Why exactly in that moment, when to-go-me is-time,

You-caress eyes, before they-look into magic of-forests and meadows?

It-is-always thus: dawn itself awakens from side-of lake

Forcing us to disentangling by-sleep warmed arms-or-hands...

To panes--still chilly--will-hit with-gold

Sudden from heaven to earth of-light gilding and falling--

Lips yours--on my eyes!  What you-want with-this caress

To-say?  Speak--but elver not off-tear lips!

  According to Milosz, p. 405, another poet named Adam Wazyk produced a volume of poetry in 1926 titled "Oczy i usta" (Eyes and Lips).

From The Meadow ("Meadow," Laka, 1920)

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript pp. 507-8, this collection had a press run of 2,200 and was printed on yellowish paper of very poor quality.  The edition was evidently not sold out, as many years later it was still possible to buy copies for pennies.

  A second edition was announced while the poet was still alive, and appeared in 1937 or 1938 (there is some controversy).  The second edition corrected some of the typographical errors of the first, but contained so many new mistakes and uncorrected old ones that Trznadel believes the poet did not proofread the galleys.

  A third edition appeared in London in 1947, which was merely a photographic reproduction of the first edition prefaced by the poet's essay "Traktat o poezji" ("Treatise on Poetry").  This essay was to be Leśmian's acceptance speech for membership to the Polish Academy of Literature and is included in the Szkice literackie (Literary Sketches, hereinafter SL), compiled and edited by Jacek Trznadel (Warsaw 1959).  My translation of the Treatise is included in Mythematics and Extropy II, published in 1991 by Peter Lang.

The Drowner

In a woody glen, among air-current fescue,

Where the forest looks like unexpected lawn,

Lies a stranger's body, expendable, unrescued.

He'd seen the world from cloud to cloud and yet beyond;

In his impatient sorrow, he thirsted suddenly

To take the tourist short-cut into the per-se green.

And then the omniwoodent demon greenery

Caught him in the tree-shade and zephyr-kidnapped him.

He hustled him with hurry and constant everbloom,

Enticed his breathless mouth with laughless mystery,

And juggled fragrant incarnations fraught with doom

To tempt him ever further into that greenery!

Soon he had him chasing otherworldly shores,

Leaking what was human from his breath and soul,

Till he flower-floundered in the ferns and thorns,

In that moundy stillness where the berries toll.

No-dawn vegetation damply dulls the day,

Flurries spin and spiral and then swirl away,

Leaving but that corpse in a century ravine.

Shady as a forest, the drowner in the green.

Drowner

1 In windy furrows of fescue, on forest clearing,

2 Where itself forest similarizes to meadow unexpectedly,

3 Lie remains of-wanderer, expendable some remains.

4 He-wandered through entire world from clouds to clouds,

5 Until suddenly in impatient he thirsted mourning

6 To-visit in-spirit on shortcut greenery herself in himself.

7 Then demon of-greenery omniforesty breeze-with

8 Gathered him, as in way he stood under tree,

9 And tempted never-ending blooming hurry-with,

10 And enticed lips breathless mysterious no-laughness with,

11 And enthralled with-destructionness-of-fragrant not-quite-incarnatedness,

12 And tempted ever further--into this greenery, into this greenery!

13 And he ran along-shores of ever other worlds,

14 Unhumanizing soul and breath among flowers,

15 Until floundered in such berries' belled-apart pitchers,

16 In such dusk of-fern, in such quiet of-mound,

17 In such dawnless growthness, in such daybreakless dull,

18 In such roar last whence stormwinds,

19 That lies here died in hundred springs' abyss,

20 Shadowy, like forest in forest--drowner of-greenery.

NOTES

  1 According to Papierkowski, p. 41, "kostrzewa" is an archaic word for grass, or wheat weeds from the grass family.  He believes the poet used this word to give the forest a primeval feeling with more expressive power than that associated with simple grass or weeds.

  6 See interpretations below of Kantian "Ding an sich."

  7 According to Papierkowski, p. 191, "omniforesty" is a neologism.

  9- The Modernists favored the prefix "bez-" for negative epithets to describe the universe.  However, according to J.M. Rymkiewicz, "Odczłowieczając duszę" in Głowiński's Studia, Leśmian's "no-world" is a very concrete "no-world of thickets," identifying the drowner not with timeless, spaceless, primeval essence of things, but with an inseparable physical-spiritual whole: on order to become one with Nature, the drowner must get rid of his humanity.

  11 "Niedowcielenie" is an aborted incarnation, a neologism also used in "Eliasz."  Similar negative words are also used in "Kocmołuch," "Zielona godzina," "Pururawa i Urwasi," "Dżananda," "Jadwiga," "Kopciuszek," "W chmur odbiciu," "Rok nieistnienia," "Wiersz księżycowy" (translated herein as "Moon Poem"), "Pan Błyszczyński," and "Miłość stroskana."

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 509, "Topielec" was translated into French ("Le Noyé") by Lucien Roquigny, Pologne littéraire, Warsaw, 1927, and into German ("Ertrunkener") by Karl Dedecius, Polnische Poesie, Munich, 1964.

  In his 1939 obituary ("Mowa o Bolesławie Leśmianie," Wiadomości literackie), Kazimierz Wierzyński indicates that for the poet, nature and poetry were the same thing, namely the actual truth of existence, and works like "The Drowner" represent an attempt to retrogress to the point in time and space where there was already an independent nature, but no humanity yet.

  In "Pośmiertna... maska" in Studia, p. 230 ff., Ireneusz Opacki indicates that poems like this one were partially derived from the Romantic tradition, e.g. Mickiewicz's "poetry of the tomb," populated with oxymorons and iconography.  The Romantic lyrical situation wherein the self is separated repeats itself in other Leśmian poems such as "Ballada dziadowska" and the "jastrząb" verse about falcons.

  In his biography of Leśmian (p. 19), Adam Szczerbowski indicated that he considered the "per-se green" to be a synonym of primeval existence, and the wanderer in search of the Kantian "Ding an sich."  J.M. Rymkiewicz ("odczłowieczając..." pp. 201-227 in Studia), adds that the drowner yearns for identity with Sister Nature as a participant, not just an observer; furthermore, throwing off humanity does not mean death, as the demon tempted him simultaneously with existence and nonexistence.

  In his History of Religious Ideas, I, p. 186 ff., Mircea Eliade refers to the Orphic/Pythagorean/Platonic idea of transmigration of souls; drinking from Lethe causes the soul to forget previous wisdom, and philosophy helps it recover this knowledge by "anamnesis."  "Death is therefore the return to a primordial and perfect state, periodically lost during the soul's reincarnation."  In his "Niepochwycien..." (Studia, p. 6 ff., pp. 56-61), Jan Prokop adds that the unchanging rhythm of life is basic to the agrarian myth: not a linear process of unique occurrences, but a cyclical return to primeval undifferentiated magma, an amorphous maternal womb.  The death instinct is thus coupled with eroticism and a desire for losing individual form: the demon tempts like a primeval chaos beckoning with unconscious formlessness.  In "Do śpiewaka" ("To the Singer"), Leśmian calls the human and the divine "two brotherly mists" which are related to each other and formerly did not know the difference.  Since death is not a one-time occurrence, Leśmian's neologisms indicate qualitative changes and transitions, especially in verbs.

  In Kwestia gustu (hereinafter KG,"A Matter of Taste," pp. 159-160). Adam Ważyk states that "The Drowner" is an example of Leśmian's outdated Victorian neurosis which coupled freedom with original sin and death; only one kind of cognition can do this, namely the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  He considers the demon a Biblical demon with female charms, treacherous and paradisiacal, and the meadow a Paradise to which intellectuals long to return.  To him, the poem is thus an allegory of a mythical heaven to which intellectuals long to return.

  Karpowicz (Poezja niemożliwa, The Poetry of the Impossible) proposes several interesting arguments, as follows.  Leśmian chased himself within the partner, i.e. chased the humanness he questioned by the chase.  The tragic thicket of egocentrism thus exhausted him more than the greenery exhausted the drowner (p. 108).  The poem represents an attempt to reach consciousness from inside out, from the inside of the first protein cell: a zero existence safe because of the absence of knowledge, a "faithful ontological dog" attempting to stumble upon its own secret (210-11, 196).  For him, "The Drowner" is "almost anonymous penetration:" Nature opens, and the attacker gets stuck inside, confirming the myth of eternal return, Einstein's rondo of linear movement, which is also a model of hell, like Dante's complicated sociological inferno.  For Karpowicz, the "per-see green" is not the "Ding an sich," but a flight forward into paradoxical thinking which encompasses both being and non-being.  The drowner thus not only penetrates Nature, but also shows her the way to herself (cf. "The Meadow").  However, since penetration of the green changes a man, he is different at the end of the poem; Nature has attacked him with her allegedly defenseless boundlessness, like the water mass of quiet oceans swallowing powerful flotillas (37-49).

  In Samobójstwo... (pp. 23-5), Artur Sandauer indicates that Leśmian breaks down the hierarchy of man and nature; man becomes object, not subject, as Nature observes him!  For instance, the poet elevates animals and things to human status: a bee washes herself "like a cat," something only humans can do; or a man stands with his back "to the forest."

  In Literatura okresu Młodej Polski (hereinafter LMP), Trznadel states that the drowner represents intuitive unity with nature, a nostalgia for a golden paradise in which there was no division between the thing and the concept, before modern civilization became automatized and schematized.  The thinking, perceiving subject is totally submerged and lost (p. 837 ff.).  Since God symbolizes human nostalgia for paradise, the poem also includes the problem of theism by implication.  

  An interesting parallel could be drawn between this opinion and the Zen Buddhist striving for knowledge "upstream of all conceptualization."  In TL, p. 115 ff., Trznadel indicates that death (the end of selfhood) is pessimism for Westerners but optimism for Hindus.  In order to perceive and intuit, the drowner must lose consciousness, i.e. knowledge about his knowledge.  (In "Z rozmyślań o Bergsonie," pp. 37-40 of SL, which I translated as "Ruminations on Bergson" in Mythematics and Extropy II, Leśmian had mentioned that total knowledge would be identification with the life being studied; the intellect can only know what it tests experimentally, i.e. what is dead.)

  Rochelle Heller Stone's synthesis (pp. 116-17) appears quite apropos: the drowner is "an apotheosis of Bergsonism and a poetic extension of Leśmian's philosophical discourse with Kant... alienation from nature... can be overcome only by intuitive cognition, exploration 'in spirit'."  Language with prefixes such as "-bez" allows depiction "in concrete images" of "both existing and nonexisting phenomena."

In the Field

We two are in a quiet meadow-nook.

Atop a leaf, a sapphire dragonfly

Cascades to wavy streams and eddy-glides

As sunward blindly torrifies the brook.

The offshore grasses' graying bladetips meet

Their own reflections in a downward climb;

A snail has vaulted them, obese with heat,

And glued his shell to them with slug and slime.

More fleeting than an arrow's playful curve,

A minnow sometimes silvers swift and hides.

The pristine sand within the brook observe,

And stones with mossy-mobile beards disguised.

Why did your forehead drop onto your hand?

The fragrant grass and underwater sand,

The mirrored surface of the gleaming pool

Are steaming with a radiant, peaceful cool.

The leaves of those few oaks beside the brook,

Which caterpillar gluttons gnawed to net,

Persist transparently and overlook

Their own caught-in-the-nettles silhouette.

Unto my sunward-panting breast I'll press

The magic of that nettle-shadow tree,

My lips will touch that verdure limitless,

That green whose peaceful juice yearns unto me.

My overheated forehead flower-cooled,

I'll eavesdrop on the tiny insect-cries

And watch the sticky wild carnations drool

With shiny tar beneath the dazzling skies.

I'll watch the poppies and the sorrel faint,

Intoxicated with our bodies' scent,

And with your lily hand I'll sweep-acquaint

Us both with unknown grassy-great events.

IN FIELD

1 Two of-us in quiet of-field of-corner,

2 Brook in blindness toward sun itself burns,

3 In leaf, which hit upon crooked current of-waves,

4 Swirlingly swims sapphire dragonfly.

5 Above-shore-ey grass hangingly knocks-at

6 Onto its reflection with-grayed limb,

7 To which snail, bulging from heat,

8 Has-vaulted shell with-its body and saliva.

9 In throw-over gambol fleetinger than arrow

10 Minnow itself sometimes silvers for wink.

11 Under water--look!--throughlights sand white

12 And with-moss mobile bearded stones.

13 Why to-you head to palms fell?

14 That--fragrances grass and that sand under water--

15 That--of-waters beglistened with-streaks of-mirror

16 Steam-with quiet, brilliance and cool.

17 Of-those few oaks above shore leaves,

18 Filled-with-holes and eaten-through-by-animals greedily

19 By caterpillars, endure so transparently

20 Above own shadow, which got-stuck in stinging-nettle.

21 From this here stinging-nettle magic of-oak shadows

22 I-will-gather to breasts, which onto sun pant,

23 With-lips I-will-touch immeasurable greenery,

24 Longing to me with-its juice and with-quiet.

25 To flowers I-will-fasten up-heated forehead,

26 I-will-listen-into myself into gadflies playing and soundeys,

27 And I-will look, how viscous wild-carnations

28 Among crowfeet with-glistening are-dripping tar.

29 And I-will look, how poppies and sorrels

30 Faint, bodies our intoxicated fragrance-with,

31 And I-will sweep with-your white hand,

32 Upon great grass, not known to-us grass.

NOTES

  2 "To burn toward" in Polish also has the meaning "to be in a hurry."

  11 "Piach" is a common augmentative dialect form for "piasek," sand.

  18 Polish has separate words for "to eat" depending on whether the eating entity is human or animal.

  21-4 In a 1912 letter to Miriam (UR p. 312) and in an interview with Edward Boyé (SL p. 498), Leśmian indicated that he yearned for Nature just as much as she for him.  It is really an amorous relationship: in "Wiśnie" (Wild Cherries), a king falls in love with a wild cherry.  (This is not a double-entendre in Polish.)  Similarly, in "Białocha" (UR, p. 166), the protagonist and sleep have been yearning for each other for a long time.

  28 "Skies" were substituted for "crowfeet" in the versified English for purposes of rhyme and rhythm.

Departure

As I departed by that chummy highway,

The pansies' eyes were staring great and golden,

With horseshoe rings of sapphire bruises underround.

In limpid azure milled a butterflyway,

And ripe reseda rusted, to the sun beholden.

I later would recall those earthy eyes profound

When I was on my way, I don't know why or how.

They tailed my reverie and stare-endowed

Whatever's stareable in this world and beyond.

These eyes, what would they see before I would abscond,

Abandoning one hut, into a thousand streets?

Why were they wearing sapphire widow's weeds

While watching my departure through the rust and jade,

Reseda fragrant almost drowned in grassy blades?

Why did they grow more maudlin every time, these eyes?

Why can't you ever leave a thing and say goodbye

Forever, and abandon it to fate somewhere?

Is it against the law to take this road to town?

Why can't you stray too far from yonder golden stare

With horseshoe rings of sapphire bruises underround?

DEPARTURE

1 When I-went away for-or-on ever known road,

2 Looked at me pansies' great, gold eyes,

3 Horseshoed with-sapphire around bruise.

4 There-was flowerbed and row of-butterflies, and sky-blue transparent,

5 And rusting itself in sun of-ripe reseda.

6 And when I-was already on road, myself not knowing when

7 And why--I-remembered those eyes, earth-ily

8 Pursued my reverie and staring-ed into me

9 With everything, with-which oneself can stare into world and further.

10 What saw these eyes, before in a-thousand alleys

11 I-disappeared, one hut throwing behind me?

12 And why with sapphire betimes mourning

13 They-looked in that my departure through green rusty

14 Reseda which fragranced, squashed by grass?

15 And why those eyes were ever more teary?

16 Is-it not allowed nothing never to abandon for ever

17 And leave alone-at-large whence--out of way?

18 Is-it-not allowed to-depart-on well-known road

19 And distance oneself overly from these golden eyes,

20 Horseshoed with-sapphire around bruise?

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 509, this poem was originally published in "Myśl Polska" (Polish Thought), Warsaw, 1918.  Arthur Sandauer (Samobójstwo..., pp. 24-5) indicates that Leśmian elevates things to human status and dehumanizes people; nature watches man, not just vice versa.  (It may be useful to repeat that the original title of "The Crossroads Orchard" was "Seeing Flowers," i.e. flowers that can see.)  Karpowicz (pp. 147-8) adds that the poet's concentration of the weight of the entire world on a single item (here, the pansies' eyes, or the camel's hump in "The Zoo") makes that item an Archimedean support point of "zero action."

  3, 20 The poet gives a novel "twist" to the Polish expression "podbite sińcem," i.e. "hit-under with bruise" (= with a black eye).  He calls it "podkute sińcem," i.e. "horseshoed-under with bruise."  I rendered this as "with ... horseshoe bruises underround."

  7 The "earthiness" of the pansies' eyes was kept here (unlike the changeover into "stonelike" in "In the Evening," supra), because temperature was not an issue in this poem.

The Stable

You kissed the white-skinned maiden, yes, but who

Made her lips coral so that she kissed you?

You let the poplars throw the road their shade,

But who allowed them thus to poplarade?

You hewed that stable half a week, I know,

But who endowed it with that stable role?

I think that stable Maika stabled it,

Part meadow-blades and partly roadside grit.

She entered our pre-world quite long ago

And stared at wheat-fields rustling from below.

BARN

1 You kissed-man girl, but who white of-her body

2 Berosed on lips, so-that you she-kissed?

3 You to-poplars onto road shadow to-throw allowed,

4 But who them so much into heaven poplared-up?

5 You hewed-man barn for four days without little,

6 But who her barned, in-order-that--what she is--she-should-know?

7 Barned her probably that Maika barn-ey,

8 To half-roadside, to-half fieldy.

9 From hundred worlds to pre-world she-came-out herself one

10 And would-look in that grain, which roars from bottom.

NOTES

  According to Stone (p. 274), a puzzle is the "decisive structural feature" of this poem.  The introductory three stanzas are questions, and the fourth an answer.

  In "Niepochwycień złoty," p. 6 ff., Jan Prokop indicates that the poet has created a masterless "pre-world" in contradiction to the orderly, hierarchical human world; the former tempts but also frightens with its formlessness.

  "Majka" is pronounced "Mye-kuh," and may thus be derived from the Hindu root "may," to change, which can refer to magical or demonic transformation, cosmic illusion, demonic alteration of the cosmic order, illusory transformation, divine creativity, and alternation between night and day.  (Mircea Eliade, History of Religious Ideas I, pp. 201-2).  In TL, Trznadel states that this poem is out of the mouth of a stylized "primeval man" reflecting on the world, asking ontological questions (poetry having been the first cosmogony, pp. 260-2).  In Polish folklore, a "Majka" is a naked naiad who tickles passersby until they die laughing, and in the story "Majka" in KP, pp. 45-94, Leśmian tells us about a wheat-field mermaid who entices human men to drowning but is stood up every Sunday by an unwilling lover.  She then visits his house by "goldifying" on the floor each Sunday night.  In "Białocha" (UR 157-8), an ancient, independent barn without a master, ingrown into its surroundings, exists in and of and for itself.  The rain comes, looking like a "three-dayer," but turning into a "week without little."

  The barn barning (or stable stabling) is thus not a mere linguistic tautology, but an existential ontology as well: when the stable is identical with itself, natura naturata becomes natura naturans.  A naiad is thus the prime mover of a humorously tautological vicious circle (Artur Sandauer, Zebrane pisma krytyczne 533-4, Samobójstwo... 33). Karpowicz (15, 263-4) adds that anamnesis becomes pro-creation, as the subject changes object and becomes both creator and created.  The impression of passivity turns out to be mere appearance, as it refers to a process of becoming what was not there before.  (On p. 47 of Sindbad, Uncle Tarabuk composes a tautological poem: "Topola wposród pola," poplar amid fields (the two nouns rhyme in Polish).

Among Dahlias

Wasps among the dahlias buzz.

Are that voice, those footsteps yours?

On such end-of-summer days,

Gardens glisten, sunlight fades.

Sickly doze the worn-out trees;

Lower your eyes and voices, please!

While the drained are draining dew,

Our two shadows rendezvous.

1 Among dahlias--buzzing of-wasps.

2 Yours those steps? Yours that voice?

3 That--end-of-summer, one of those days

4 When sun pales, and garden glistens.

5 That sick halfsleep worn-out trees-of.

6 Avert your eyes, quiet your song.

7 That--drinks dew last toll,

8 That--in-shadow yours shadow rested mine.

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 510, this poem first appeared in Bluszcz, Warsaw 1916, in the jubilee number, i.e. anniversary issue.

  The rhymes are masculine, which is difficult in Polish but easier in English.  I was helped by the English affinity for masculine rhymes, by the space program's "rendezvous" method,

and by the serendipitous fortuity that "drained" means both "drank" and "exhausted" in English.  Speaking of rhymes, the end of line 2 in the non-literal version ("... those footsteps yours") should, for best effect, be read with a New York accent to rhyme with "buzz."

  According to Karpowicz (193-6), the intertwining shadows represent the possibility of the interpenetration desired by the lover (cf. "Paltry," who mixes his shadow with that of the birches).  Leśmian's shadow is what is primeval in man, his "most faithful ontological dog."

First Rain

Firstfly buzzed herself awake right here,

Firstleaves hurried crawling growth along;

Now the Firstrain's droning in my ear,

Lightning-bolt motet and thunder-song.

Who could grasp, or even comprehend,

All the shatter-structures of that sound?

Feral and rambunctious streams descend,

Splashing liquid heads onto the ground.

Now their shrieks die down upon the soil,

Though the driving heaven-chase persists;

Cleaving cloud explosions moil and roil

In a top- and bottomless abyss.

Sunlight in the window streaked with rain

Stirs a golden wheat-field on the floor,

Mirror-multiplies the windowpanes

Undulating on the dusty door.

Someone pushed my garden-gate apart

Till it groaned, collapsing on the lawn.

I don't know who did it, bless his heart,

But I'm grateful in the cool of dawn.

1 First-she with buzzing woke-herself fly,

2 First-they leaves crawled-out-around from trees

3 And rain first drones me to ear

4 Thundered-out in lightnings song.

5 Of-that song out-shatter and off-shatter long

6 Who could comprehend, who could grasp?

7 Run-riot, flung-out streams

8 Crush to grounds splashing-around heads.

9 Already by ground shout theirs is-dying,

10 And on heaven still further chases!

11 Cloud wide-open to allworld itself tears-apart,

12 Not is after her end or bottom!

13 Sun in windowpanes maudlinly be-rained,

14 On floor golden storms-up grain,

15 And reflections of-windows multiplied

16 Sets in dusts of-moving walls.

17 Someone pushed-open gate in my garden,

18 Until with back-yell it tumbled onto green!

19 Don't know, who that--but in morning chill

20 I-bless unknown hand.

NOTES

  3 "Wdudnia" (drones into) is a neologism in Polish according to Papierkowski.

  5 "Rozgruch" is, according to Papierkowski p. 123, a very loud noise, but on p. 84, the same author says that the word is dialect for sudden, noisy news and "zgruch" an invented antithesis.

  8 According to Papierkowski p. 97, "o ziem" is invented dialect, similar to "do dom" (also eliminating the last syllable) and is used for style.  According to Pankowski, pp. 204-6, the liquid heads are an example of Leśmian's contention that images prove nothing is ever simply what it is.  For instance, a girl's corpse's palms are turned up as though to feel for raindrops, and a flying witch's shirt "tails windily, like a snowstorm;" finally, a sleeping women "pastures dreams on rose wide-awakeness."

  16 In the verse version, a door was used instead of a wall for purposes of rhyme.

  18 "Odwrzask," lit. "back-yell," is a Leśmian neologisms according to Papierkowski, p. 122.  It means a loud reverberating noise.  It could conceivably join the procession of animizations of inanimate objects in Leśmian; only an anthropomorphized gate can scream, after all.

The Windmill

Towering over

  the obliging fallow heath,

Dances the windmill,

  creaking wooden petticoats

Towards the world re-

  vealed around, while underneath

Flagellate shadows,

  horned like devils or like goats.

Riveted nomad,

  flailing rigid on the ground,

What do your sudden

  jerky movements signify?

Whom are you greeting

  in your oak-cape wraparound?

Who is your partner

  in this blade charade up high?

What is your credo?

  What's above you in your world?

If you were human,

  what would your complexion be?

What sort of creature's

  hiding in the crusty burl?

What would you look like

  if the lunar ghosts could see?

Windmill

1 Piling up over fallows of liking-him plain,

2 Windmill, on all around uncovered worlds,

3 Creaks with-wooden in dance crinoline,

4 And onto grass, like devil, sweeps shadow horn-y.

5 Wanderer, in one place stuck with-bone-stick,

6 What mean your jerks and sudden throes?

7 To-whom bow-you yourself around with-oak cape?

8 With whom so accurately you-speak in signs and blade-glints?

9 In what believe-you?  Whom see-you above in azure?

10 If-you yourself humanized, how would-you-have cheeks?

11 What that creature itself concealed in your gnarled skin?

12 What are-you, looked-at by spirits from moon?

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript, this poem was published in "Słowo Polskie" (Polish Word), Lwów, 1920 (morning edition, October 25).  Sińce an accurate publication date for the Laka volume is unavailable, it is unclear where "Windmill" first appeared.

  According to Głowński's Zaświat przedstawiony (hereinafter ZP), pp. 170-2 and 181, this is a riddle or question poem.  In contradistinction to folk songs and ballads, however, it starts with the description and goes into the questions.  (For Leśmian, questions are more important, and less enigmatic, than answers.)  The first part looks like a straightforward description; only later do we find oxymorons and questions which introduce new perspectives.  These questions indicate a relationship between the windmill and the traveller, and therefore lead into a metaphor which the reader fills in.  A similar mechanism is used in "The Snow Idol."

  1 "Goats" were added to the verse version for purposes of rhyme, and the entire poem was re-lined in English to convey the impression of jerky, creaky movement: '--'- '-'-'-'

  8 "Smigi" (blade-glints) is neither in the Kościuszko dictionary nor in Papierkowski.  It appears to be a neologism combining "migi" (sign language) and “śmigła" (blades).

  The "you" with which the author addresses the anthropomorphized windmill is the familiar, not the formal, and could be interpreted as a further example of Leśmian's breaking down of the hierarchy among humans, animals, plants, and inanimate objects.

Transformations

That night the dark was muggy, with desire aglow;

Blue-bottle blooms, bedazzled by arid lightning glare,

Alighted on the eyes of a forest-bounding doe,

Who panicked when she saw this foreign floral stare.

They indigoed her head and, travelling by deer,

They watched the world go by with a greedy flower-leer.

The poppy spied himself in endless-field midbloom

And, with a screech that ears could not perceive as sound,

Transmogrified into a rooster purple-plumed,

Then shook his scarlet comb in fearful bloody frown.

He crowed into the darkness, envenomed by his fright;

Real roosters answered his full-throated cry that night.

The barley was consumed with golden-dense desire

And crunch-transformed into a gilded porcupine;

Then suddenly he bristled, festering with ire,

And ran aground and quilled the ill-defended thyme.

He threatened all the flowers, that whining porcupout,

Yet what he saw and felt--nobody will find out.

What sort of stinging-nettle burned my soul, tell me?

Why do I skulk nocturnal, fearful and in doubt?

Why are the flowers staring so suspiciously?

Are they aware of something I don't know about?

What did I do that evening, what did I become?

Why is my head still aching?  Why am I so glum?

1 That night dusk was muggy and of desire steaming,

2 And blue-bottles, lighted by dry lightning,

3 Got-through themselves suddenly to eyes of-this deer,

4 Which ran to forest, scared by unknown to-her pupil.

5 And they, head her bluing, fleeted in dear-fashion,

6 And greedily looked into world in bluebottle-fashion.

7 Poppy, himself himself in midfield discovering boundless,

8 With squawk, which to ear not was any sound,

9 Throughblooded himself to rooster in purple down,

10 And until to blood shook with-scarlet comb.

11 And crowed in dusk, tearing-open beak, with-fear poisoned,

12 Until to-him from-somewhere re-crowed real roosters.

13 And barley, ear with-thirst gilding thick,

14 Bristled suddenly with-anger chafing festers,

15 And to golden himself porcupine crunched with clatter,

16 And ran, pricking on way herbs' scanty barriers,

17 And whined, and to flowers pouted himself and bristled,

18 And nobody never not will-guess, what felt and lived?

19 And I--in what my soul burned stinging-nettle,

20 That I-skulk hidingly and on short-cut-by-ground?

21 And why flowers on me look suspiciously?

22 Do something of me nocturnal against my knowledge know?

23 What-did I-do, that head with-hands grab-I both?

24 What was-I that night, which today already not is?

NOTES

  According to Ewa Bulhak, "Noc spragniona przemian," pp. 25-33, this work is a poetic vision of unity.  A night steaming with desire, containing unexpected correspondences and similarities, indicates an enclosed world governed by its own laws.  Blue-bottle flowers, for instance, are the eyes of female specters in Slavic folklore, and the bloody, noisy effort involved in metamorphoses between states (usually by means of verbs) denotes self-creation devoid of any cause except itself, indicates the poet's longing for immersion into nature, and constitutes an orgiastic Nature Mass.  In Slavic folklore, St. John's Night (Midsummer Night) and Christmas Eve (summer and winter solstice) are associated with miracles: animals talk, and the fabled Fern Flowers (which confers riches upon the finder alone) is available for picking.  Lightning further symbolizes transcendental revelation, poppies and magical antidotes to ghosts, and roosters announce the departure of demons.

  The poem is an example of eternal becoming à la Bergson: X becomes Y by Y-ifying.  The analogy works both ways, since semantic units can be associated with either one or the other of the directions, according to Jan Sławiński, "Semantyka poetycka Leśmiana," in Studia pp. 121-22.  According to Pankowski (188, 213), the laborious sibilants in line 15 (rendered here by crunching and clattering) are reminiscent of childbirth and express a thirst for another form of existence.  He considers this exploration of limits and subsequent annihilation to be an example of Lesmian's "Baroque instability."  N.B. "Don Kichot" (Quixote) suspects the flowers of being magicians.

The Snake

As she was orchard-strolling, her breasts replete with milk,

She was accosted by a thing of reptile ilk.

He choked her with his curving, cutting her in two,

He petted and he poisoned like a spiral screw.

He taught her how to faint into a dual doze,

And while he'd pet her breasts, his head to guide-enclose,

And how to wax ecstatic in death-defying bliss,

And how to throb with pleasure, and thrash about and hiss.

You know my loving-habits, so will you please allow

My countenance to change, becoming regal now.

I'll shower you with treasures from ocean-coffers deep;

That shall become your waking, forever end your sleep.

It isn't necessary to change or shed your skin,

For I am self-contained, not lacking anything.

I like it when your tongue corrects my eyebrow-line

And sucks the excess moisture from these lips of mine,

And how you writhe along my legs, and when your head

Just slithers and collides with the edges of the bed.

Like pitchers full of milk I'll offer you my breasts,

For I desire no changes and want no treasure-chest.

The poison of your snake-saliva is so nice;

Continue, please, to hold me in your caressing vise!

REPTILE

1 She-walked with milk in breasts in green orchard,

2 Until her in alderwood surprised reptile.

3 With-curves choked taking in-half

4 From feet to head caressed and poisoned.

5 He-taught her common to-faint with-sleep,

6 Breast to-pet with in-hands grabbed head,

7 And from pleasure more lasting than death

8 To-hiss and thrash-oneself, and to-throb like he.

9 Now my habits loving you know,

10 Permit, that I-take kingly face.

11 Treasures I-will give-you from undersea floors,

12 Will-begin itself waking--will-finish itself sleep-or-dream!

13 Do-not throw scale, do-not change complexion!

14 Nothing to-me is-not needed and not lacks nothing.

15 I-like, when with-tongue you-even me eyebrows

16 And from lip excess suck-out blood,

17 And when yourself wind along my feet-or-legs,

18 With-animal-head hitting on of-bed edge.

19 Breasts to-you I-tilt like with milk pitcher!

20 Not demand-I treasures, not thirst-I changes.

21 Sweet to-me saliva of-snake contents--

22 Be further reptile and poison, and caress!

NOTES

  According to Porębowicz, Pieśni ludowe... pp. 96-7, this poem was inspired by a Scandinavian ballad, "The Dragon," wherein a princess accepts a monster's love in spite of her disgust and is rewarded by having it turn into a handsome prince by morning.  Adam Szczerbowski's biography of Leśmian (p. 23) indicates that Porębowicz translated the ballad into Polish: the princess' name is Ingelill, and she kisses the dragon through a handkerchief.

  Pankowski (186-7) and Trznadel (TL 156-7), however, indicate that Leśmian transformed the Nordic fairy-tale into something perverse: love is shown as sensual, blind, and destructive, hooking a person with the dark forces of nature.  The woman refuses to let the serpent resume a human face and prefers his reptilian existence.

  Interesting comparisons could be made to "Mak" (Poppy), wherein a satyr-god lies in wait for a girl and squeezes her, and to "Jadwiga," in which an unloved girl is loved to death (= eaten) by a worm.  Her skeleton asks if God has witnessed her agony; the worm counters that there is no God.  This may be the closest Leśmian ever approached Przybyszewski's satanic depravation and decadence.

  Note: "Permit" (line 10) is a literal translation of a very archaic form for "please allow" or "grant" (zwól).  The Polish language uses the same word for feet and legs and for sleep and dream, and double negatives are not considered ungrammatical.

Swidryga and Midryga

Those aren't cantering horses pricking up their ears,

But dancing drunks--Swidryga and Midryga--here.

And beaten barns don't ever groan as much as this

Poor meadow, stomped by feet much worse than just by fists.

A chalky vampire-nymph surprised them in the sun,

So glad to see them and to dance and have some fun.

She peered into their eyes with greedy manger-stare.

"I'll take on both of you in dancing, if you dare!"

"She's mine," Swidryga yelled, "that neck, that breast below!"

Midryga countered with his fist: "Oh, is that so?"

Swidryga took one hand, Midryga grabbed the other;

"You'll have to take us both, you goddamned miser-mother!"

She panted airless breath directly at their mouths

And laughed straight in their faces with no-laugh cacklerouse,

Then briskly teemed in two, dividing evenly,

Becoming sister-girls, both left and right was she.

"There's double-body quite sufficient for you here;

Come now and dance with us in spectral noontime sear.

One single girl's four-handed and she's got four legs.

Your shameless sweetness better glut us to the dregs."

They bristled to the dance as if it were a war,

Tumulted all the flowers, fields were in uproar.

Swidryga and Midryga gamboled with the girls,

Their boot-shafts and their heels inducing dust to swirl.

They trampled herbs and grasses as they curled and twirled,

The butterflies were dazed and flattened as they whirled.

They hollered, "Croak alive, doggone you," at each other,

And danced till they were ready to collapse and smother,

Till they perceived the girl was leaking life away,

She double-died while dancing simultaneously.

"This corpse is hardly lonely.  Let's bury it, I say!

She was a double dancer, and twice she passed away.

"So in the treeful graveyard bearing double palls,

Let's say a two-field prayer for this two-fold doll."

A subterranean rumble from the single vault

In which two biers were placed: a casket somersault.

The coffins, gorged on flesh, decided to carouse

And finish off their gorgy displaying open maws.

Nuts and bolts were ringing as they danced and twirled,

Sashayed, gamboled, coffined, swirled and curled and whirled;

Till Death joined them with her clever lamentations

And the graveyard's guts convulsed in trepidation.

Till the vicious-circle dancing got confused

And the underworld turned merry, loud, and loose.

Swidryga and Midryga were flustered and dismayed,

As if a gale had scattered their brains on windmill-blades.

The murky knowledge in their heads was thus dispersed:

What's left or right on earth, what's second and what's first?

Which coffin holds the right girl?  Which contains the left?

To whom do they belong now, even after death?

The world is just a flicker in their eyes acraze,

They even have forgotten their own given names.

Now all they see is Death's black-awful catacomb:

"Swidryga and Midryga, make yourselves at home.

For each I've got a coffin, and Eternity

Will wink at each of you with different eyes, you'll see."

Swidryga and Midryga both knelt at the abyss

And in their crazed obsession, danced there on their knees.

They toddled on all fours, then belly-flopped around,

Still dancing without method, still nearly tumbling down,

Till they were galed like driftwood into Death's ravine

And into murky coffins headfirst they did careen.

1 Those not horses thus gallop and with-ears prick,

2 But dance two drunks, Swidryga and Midryga.

3 And not groans thus barn under flail-beatings

4 As this meadow, prodded with foot more severely than fist.

5 Surprised them on sun She-ghost pale,

6 Both to-Swidryga and to-Midryga and to-dance happy.

7 She-looked them to eyes greedily like to manger.

8 "Which in dance will outdance me--for-am I one for both?"

9 "Mine-she will-be," said Swidryga, "that breast and that neck!"

10 And Midryga with-fist contradicts: "Mine or nobody's!"

11 That-one grabbed by palm one, and this-one by the-other,

12 "You-must both of-us suffice, miseress--horrible-girl!"

13 And she them straight into lips breathes without breath,

14 And she them straight into eyes laughs without laugh.

15 And she halves herself by even, calves herself swiftly

16 Into two girls, into sisters--into left-one and right-one.

17 "Enough of-body double have-we here on meadow!

18 Dance with us at-noons as-long-as boiling!

19 One girl hands-or-arms has four and four has legs!

20 May inebriate us to end your sweet shamelessness!"

21 They-fierced themselves to dance as though to battle--

22 Brought to flowers breaking, to meadow unpeace.

23 So Swidryga gamboled with right-one, so Midryga with left,

24 That-one with-heel dust swept, and this-one--with shaft.

25 In sashay, in twirl, and again in returning--

26 They-trampled phytanetra gamma moth and wild thyme and timothy-grass!

27 One screamed, "Die alive!", and the other-one "Doggone it!"

28 They-danced until death and up to falling.

29 Till they-felt that girl life in dance loses,

30 And she-died simultaneously in two forms.

31 "Let-us-bury that body not very lonely,

32 Because double in dancing, and in death duplicate.

33 Let-us-bury in cemetery, where after tree--tree,

34 Let-us-pray prayer double-fielded--for right-one and left-one."

35 In two her coffins they-laid, but in one grave--

36 And already roars echo earth-y--are dancing coffins both!

37 Are-dancing, with-body fed, satiated and carousing,

38 Showing often in dance not quite-closed maw.

39 They-dance, they-jump and they-twirl, with-hinges belling in-hinges,

40 In sashay, in twirl and again in return!

41 Until twirls together with them death in clever laments,

42 Until self convulses with-insides terrified cemetor!

43 Until in itself lost erroneous of-dance circle,

44 Until became under ground loud and merry!

45 Until perturbed themselves senses of-Swidryga and of-Midryga,

46 As-though wind them caroused-around on of-windmill blades!

47 And flew-apart itself in their heads that knowledge misty,

48 Where is right side of-world, and where left side?

49 In which coffin left girl, in which right lies?

50 And which of them and to whom after death belongs?

51 Thus them in eyes maddened world itself complete flickers,

52 That not know-they who Swidryga and who of them Midryga?

53 Only shall-they-see abyss of-death black from hugeness:

54 "And be here, people good, as at yourselves in house!

55 One coffin for one, for other--the-other,

56 In one eternity with-right eye, with other with-left winks!"

57 Maddened above abyss they-knelt together

58 And on kneelings danced close, close above its border.

59 They-danced on all-fours, they-danced on-belly,

60 Thus and not thus--and so too--together and not together!

61 Until winded into murk of-both coffins, like two erroneous shavings,

62 They-fell into abyss of-death legs-or-feet to top!

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 512, this poem was published in "Słowo Polskie," Lwów 1920; as in "Windmill," determining whether this publication antedated Laka (Meadow) is problematic.  It has been translated into Russian by S. Gorodetsky (Moscow 1935) and is loosely based on a German folk-song about an innkeeper's daughter (translated by Porębowicz) and a Polish folk song included in Kolberg's Lublin collection (Part II, p. 58, no. 177).  In TL, Trznadel adds that the story line of the innkeeper's daughter is as follows: Three soldiers fight over a girl and cut her into pieces.  R. Zmorski and Z. Gloger also document folk songs in which two people are buried in the same grave.  The poem is thus a variation on Leśmian's beloved "danse macabre" motif, much like Goethe's "Totentanz." Further, I have found similarities to two other folk songs: one deals with two mountaineers fighting over a girl; the narrator advises them to settle for a braid each, since the girl has two braids.  Another song relates the "story" of a dead man named Maciek (Matt), who would get up and dance if the right music were played for him.

  According to Papierkowski p. 86, the name Świdryga comes from a dialect form "Świdrygal," an agile prankster.  In LMP, Trznadel mentions (pp. 841-2) that the grotesque humor testifying to horror, attempting stoicism, and reaching for humanism is an example of Leśmian's folk-poetry motifs.  In TL, the same author indicates that the beginning is the second half of a standard early-Slavic formula: a statement or question plus a negation ("contradicting comparisons"). What follows is a trichotomy: a magical folk form of tripartite repetitions (dance of the specters, coffins, and protagonists) comparable to the complicated, strophic musical structure of a crazed mazurka (211-18).  Karpowicz (p. 230) interprets the last two lines as delicious humor and self-putdown.  In "Niepochwycien" (in Studia), Jan Prokop terms the poem a clouding of an ordered view of the world, with no time for consciousness.

  Leśmian used similar motifs in other poems, particularly ballads.  In "Piła" (The Saw), a saw falls in love with a country-boy and cuts him into pieces; in "Migon and Jawrzon," two rivals, one of them invisible, fight over the shadow of a girl hiding in a beehive, indicating the absurd and irrelevant nature of human endeavor.  In "Róże" (The Roses), a knight's wife kills her rival, who made love to her husband's dream, and buries her in a double coffin: body and dream separately.  In "Two Matthews," the plot is based on a Russian folk-tale about two giants who "walked forward, across, and diagonally" (bragging, repetition, and rivalry), and in "Matysek," the eponymous fiddler magically invokes a dead girl's weeping, then laughter, then dream, although the girl herself does not materialize.  "żananda" aims to kill a god disguised as a peacock but kills is beloved instead, finally not knowing who had killed whom, whose breast had been pierced by an arrow.  Finally, in the fairy-tale of Sindbad the sailor as interpreted by Leśmian (pp. 44-6, 156, and 205-7), Sindbad is punished by the creation of a double, Hindbad, who becomes his rival.  Sindbad is particularly horrified by the thought of a dual death of original and duplicate: who would pray at the horrible grave of two such corpses?  A spell is cast on the doubles, who cannot stop dancing to the rhythm of the magic melody of the music-monster Degial, who wants to kill them both and bury them in a single coffin.

  3 "Bijak" (flail-beating) is dialect for "beater" or "swingle" as per the Kościuszko dictionary.  Papierkowski (p. 68) lists "cech" as a synonym, but that is only marginally applicable, meaning either a medieval guild or an instrument guilds used for grading merchandise.  Papierkowski's voluminous explanations were more confusing than helpful; I knew all along that "bijak" had something to do with "bić," to beat, and Kościuszko was more than adequate for this allegedly recondite word.

  5 Południca refers etymologically to noontime or the southerly direction, but indicates a female ghost.

  12 "Dziewczura" is, according to Papierkowski (147, 156-7), a neologism containing the word "dziewczyna" (girl) plus a derogative suffix.

  25 "Odwrotka" means "in the opposite direction" (a noun plus adjective, according to Papierkowski, p. 154).

  26 "Tymotka" and "błyszczka" are plants, lolium perenne and timothy-grass.  Papierkowski (p. 68) attributes such dialectic forms to stylization attempting to confer a folksy atmosphere.

  27-8 "Do upaści" is also invented dialect for stylistic purposes, whereas "wciórności" is an invented dialect word composed of "ności" (a dialect verb imperative for "to accept") plus "-stki" or "ści" exclamations.

  34 "Obopólny" is a neological composition containing "both" and "field."  Cf. "wszechleśny" (omniforesty) in "The Drowner."  In KP ("Podlasiak," p. 173), Leśmian incorporated this neologism into "obopólna bezdomność" (lit. "both-field no-houseness").

  42 "Cmentach" is pseudo-dialect: cemetery plus the dialect suffix "-ach," which is of course also useful to rhyme with "lamentach."

Deaths

Here come Deaths a-walking, holding hands,

On the sunny side of fortune-chance.

  Whom among us will you pick and lead

  Into graveyard orchards, pray tell me?

Doesn't want the first one, she's too stern;

Stinging-nettles blanket haughty urns.

  Nor the second either, much too gold;

  She can't fathom stillness, she's so bold.

So he chooses the lackluster third,

Who's so still she stills the spryest stir.

  "Who are you, o femiform divine?

  Why does nor earth-being capture mine?

I'm so-sorry for departing birds,

But I'll die no-sorry for the world.

  Who are you?  Where's your home? I'll die for you.

  You're pale as sunlight of a winter-hue."

"My home is at the byways of the world;

I have no name but what my eyes unfurl.

  I have nothing in these eyes but night,

  I knew you'd choose me, and I was right.

Somebody picks a death out of the blue,

But someone else must die the death he drew.

  Though you chose me, didn't know for whom,

  I'll be dear and mindful unto you.

I'm your mother's death; she's in the shack,

Smiling, waiting, knowing you'll come back."

1-2 Walk Deaths on sunny side, holding each other by palms.

3-4 Whom from us will-you-choose group, for in cemetery to tend orchards?

5-6 He-not wanted first, for too stern; grave, when haughty, with-nettles grows.

7-8 He-not wanted second, for too golden, not knows quiet who so self-twinkles.

9-10 He-chose third, for though godpoor, but so quiet that everything bequiets.

11-12 "What-you for one, that please me you with your divine on  earth form?

13-14 Regret me, overregret me of-bird that flies-off, for you will-I-die from nonregret to world.

15-16 Pale-girl you-are, thus as sun in winter--where house your and how to-you name?"

17-18 "House my stands on earth's aside, and for name nothing not have I but eyes.

19-20 Nothing in these eyes not have-I but evening, certain was-I of-your choice.

21-22 One somewhere death himself chooses, but second with-this-death dies.

23-24 Though you-chose not knowing, for whom, always will-I-be remembering and dear.

25-26 I-am death of-your mother, who in hut smiling waits now for you."

NOTES

  Death is feminine in Polish, and Leśmian once wrote that she was quiet and gentle like a girlfriend; one can trust her to come at the right time (UR, p. 39, "O umówionej godzinie," i.e. "At the Appointed Hour").  He wrote this in 1900; by the end of his life he had become more pessimistic.

  According to Karpowicz (pp. 80-93), death is like Rilke's disease: it looks like the person it is feeding on, has the shape of the poet himself.  The poet chooses his own death like a farmhand selecting a girlfriend at a country fair.  Deaths are different, like women: some quiet, some talkative, hence the plural title.  (Death is being everywhere and nowhere, surrounded by collective rather than individual consciousness; therefore, Karpowicz considers it synonymous with God and love.)  In this case, the poet chooses a death which looks like the mother he loves, as it will make death easier for him; but that very similarity betrays and kills his mother.  Stone, on the other hand (p. 191), believes there is no cause-and-effect relation or plot in the poem: Leśmian's "lack of concern for causality allows him to present things in motion and in a state of change without logical order."

  9 "Bogulicha" (godpoor) is an existing dialect word for a pitiable pauper.

  12 "Przeżal" (overregret) and "odlata" instead of "odlatuje" (flies away) are dialect words whose purpose is to intensify the folksy element.

  18-19 Double, triple, and quadruple negatives do not cancel each other out in Polish; rather, they intensify the negation.

NOTES TO THE "RASPBERRY BRUSHWOOD" CYCLE OF EROTICA

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 513 ff., this cycle is linked to the poet's own life: while vacationing at his aunt's house in Ilza, where his family had a porcelain factory, he met Dr. Dora Lebental-Speer, a dermatologist.  The beautifully situated house appears chiselled from the mountain and the fourteenth-century castle ruins, and the ancient garden leads into a castle park; it is here that the presently neglected raspberry brushwood is located.  Although both Catholic and Jewish cemeteries are nearby, Trznadel was unable to find the grave of Dr. Lebental, who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and died in Ilza in 1942 of typhus contracted while caring for ghetto patients.  (N.B.: Another source claimed she committed suicide in Ilza.)

  According to Pankowski (88-92), Polish erotic poetry began with Jan Kochanowski (1537-1594) and soon incorporated Italianate influences, Latin erotica, medieval misogynistic obscenities, and the like.  There were problems with the Church: Cracow's Bishop Szyszkowski put Twardowski's 1617 Cupid's Lessons on the Index; it was reissued in 1628 as the Torch of Divine Love, with Venus becoming the Virgin and Cupid Jesus.

  Early seventeenth-century erotica were mostly crude epigrams (Karmanowski, Daniecki, Naborowski, Potocki, Kochowski, Morsztyn).  Mariolatry and religion nourished sublimated eroticism.  During the eighteenth century, lighthearted Rococo gallantry at the Warsaw court produced erotic poets such as Kniaznin, Trembecki, and Węgierski.

  With the exception of Słowacki and Mickiewicz, very little was produced in the genre during the nineteenth century: for political reasons, women were regarded as matrons guarding the angelic virtues of a brave nation, and the result was excessive religiousness and tearful patriotism removed from any political risk.  The Młoda Polska (Young Poland) movement rebelled against this attitude in erotica which were grave, sometimes macabre, and often mixed with the sacred.  Tetmajer, for instance, introduced everyday familiar language, no offense taken; Pankowski says Leśmian's "Sometimes my blind caprices" is an almost clinical description of the sex act.

  According to Teresa Skubalanka, "U zródel stylu erotyków Leśmiana," pp. 145-9, the Raspberry Brushwood cycle is connected to Mickiewicz's style of love poetry, especially the Odessa sonnets.  It is definitely realistic: lips touch a sweaty brow, bodies lie on cold sheets, and the intimacy appears so nearly exhibitionistic that publication seems not to have been considered.  Comparing the lover to a child (Leśmian called Dora "dziecinko," "child," in his letters) is one of the authentic details which, according to Skubalanka, save Leśmian from the "intolerable affectation" of other erotica written by men during that time, such as Przybyszewski.

  Perhaps the most interesting notes are connected to a poem from this cycle, namely no. 10, which has not been translated herein.  It enumerates the parts of the beloved's body: eyes, breasts, hands, hips, lips, feet, like a rosary or body alphabet.  In his review of "Song of Songs" (SL, p. 440), Leśmian indicated that some analysts liken the attributes of the beloved to a rosary or alphabet (the so-called alphabet songs), but that he himself does not agree with this view.  In his history of Polish literature, Krzyżanowski (p. 18) mentions an anonymous fifteenth-century hymn or carol, "Augustus kiedy królował" ("When Augustus reigned"), in which the stanzas open in alphabetical order.

  Eugeniusz Czaplejewicz, in "Gra miłości I śmierci w liryce Leśmiana" (The Interplay of Love and Death in Leśmian's Lyrics), pp. 229-64, acknowledges that the enumeration device is common in the Polish Baroque, but adds that whereas the Baroque is famous for external portraits, often with humorous punch lines, Leśmian recreates the rhythm of an amorous encounter and the female body.  The lovers are anonymous and secondary: the real hero of the cycle is love itself, magical and blind.  The pronoun "we" (both lovers together) is frequent, and reminiscent of Goethe's love poem to Charlotte von Stein.  We are not even informed of the color of the woman's hair, although Artur Sandauer frequently insisted Dora was dark-haired and that this explained the light girl/ dark girl dichotomy of "Paltry."

  Czaplejewicz believes that the last poem in the cycle ("Has Separation Changed You?") is actually temporally outside the cycle.  Minute physical changes (which only a lover would notice) document the passage of time and the fear of death.  Mortality gives love a deep, transcendental importance, representing a rebellion against fate and enthronement of the body: the lover prays for the immortality of his beloved's body, not of her soul.

  In this cycle, love becomes familiarization with the secrets of existence, a safe vehicle for "temporary," i.e."tamed," death; by the end of the cycle, however, the desire for the memory of past lovemaking interferes with experiencing it in the present.

  Leśmian built the cycle on a folk version of the Song of Songs, wherein the girl shows parts of her body to the "hero" and becomes his wife.  The heroine also behaves like a fairy-tale princess: tests and dangerous labors abound, as do rivals and Hades-like enchanted houses.  Karpowicz (p. 105) believes that some of Leśmian's erotica, particularly "Sometimes my blind caprices," contain an aftertaste of necrophilia, narcissism, and megalomania: the subject wants to love his object to death, as the desire to possess brings love closer to death--ruling totally over another life, depriving love of all defenses.  Love thus opens the door to death, which is another form of immobility.

IN RASPBERRY BRUSHWOOD

Lost in berry brushwood higher than our heads,

We spent many hours under curious stares

Picking fruits that just a day ago weren't there,

While your fingers blind with berry-juices bled.

  Bumblebee came rumbling like a flower-terror,

  Sickly leaves went warming rust-nodes in the sun,

  Cobwebs sparkled tassel-froth at everyone,

  Upside-down and backwards marched some beetle hairy.

With murmurs and with fruit the air was redolent,

But our whispers only hushed into perfume

When from proffered palms raspberries I'd consume;

They were drenched and fragrant with your body's scent.

  Berries then became a tool of that caress

  Which in all the heavens knows no other highs

  Than itself, primeval, self-contained, surprised,

  Thirsting for an encore, dazzled nonetheless.

When did all this happen?  Suddenly you kissed

My perspiring forehead, then I grabbed your hands.

You replied with silent concentration, and

Berry brushwood somehow continued to exist.

1 In raspberry brushwood, under curious look,

2 Lost until heads, for long hours

3 We-tore arrived that night [plentiful] raspberries.

4 Fingers had-you [female] in blindness bleeding-with their juice.

5 Bumblebee nasty roared with-bass, as-though he-frightened flowers,

6 Rusty bumps in sun heated leaf sick,

7 Of-tasselled cobwebs glittered themselves hanglings [a pseudo-dialect augmentative of "wisiorek," something which hangs],

8 And walked backwards on back some beetle hairy.

9 Muggy was-it from raspberries which you, whispering, tore,

10 And whisper ours only then quieted ["nacicha_," to hush, is dialect for "nacichn__"] in their fragrance

11 When-I [male] with-lips gathered from offered me palm [of hand]

12 Fruits, saturated with-fragrance of-your body.

13 And became themselves [reflexive in Polish] raspberries tool of-caress

14 That first-one, that surprised-one, which in all heavens

15 Not knows other drunkennesses aside-from its self,

16 And wants itself always to-repeat for own surprise.  ["Dziwota," surprise, is normally used only in the negative, "nie dziwota."  Le_mian's positivization could be likened to calling a person "couth, kempt, and shevelled."]

17 And not know-I, how it happened, in which wink-of-eye,

18 That-you [female] touched me with-lips sweaty forehead,

19 I-grabbed [male] your palms - you returned-them in concentration,

20 And brushwood of-raspberry continued always around.

NOTES

  Głowiński (ZP, p. 245) calls this erotic cycle "erotic elegies," although the first in particular might be considered an idyll instead.  According to Friedrich Schiller, Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, idylls are unlike satires and elegies because the ideal in the idyll is actually achieved.  Its calm is one of fulfillment, not of inertia; however, it is difficult to bring movement into it.

  According to Artur Sandauer, Samobójstwo..., p. 15, Leśmian's erotic method is imagination, and his space nothingness.  Karpowicz, pp. 221-4, believes the poet tried to determine the existence of nonexistence, to be completely certain that the paradise of the raspberry brushwood is in fact the only paradise for human existence.  The only concrete proof of the purpose of existence is individual freedom, as recreating a simple copy of reality would be senseless.

  Parenthetically, it may be pointed out that an enclosed garden was a symbol of virginity in medieval and Baroque times.

My jealousy is thrashing helpless in the bed:

Who else has kissed your nipples like this, secretly?

Is there a single type of hug, I brood and fret,

That you have never given anyone but me?

Your tears can't cool my anger; I humiliate

The pride of body plus the pomp of feeling so.

You tell me that I'm vile and nasty, then berate

My similarity to other creeps you know.

You slip into the next room naked, and I hear

You erring in your sob-ravine; I know that you're

Reclining, like a tired drowner, on some bier

You improvised to mute the hardness of the floor.

I come to you.  The sobbing stops.  A gravelike calm.

Despair and pain have coiled you to a snakelike band

Which gives no sign of life, till suddenly your palm

Shows that you haven't died by reaching for my hand.

I drag you to my crazy arms from bedsheet floes;

You're drenched in tears, exhausted by the ugly fight,

And I remember that your pleasure-parted toes

Are dear and necessary to my lips.  That's right.

Jealousy my helplessly on bed itself thrashes:

Who kissed your breasts, like I, in hiding?

Is there among your caresses at-least one caress

Which, besides me, not gave-you never and nobody?

Of-rage mine tear yours thus will-not cool.

I-humiliate pride of-body and of-feelings pomp,

And you me answer, that-I-am low and vile,

Similar to thousand awful to-you people.

And you-slip-out naked.  In next room

In your-own yourself after a-while you-ravine sobbing,

And I-know that on put-together haphazardly bedding

You-lie like drowneress on hard floor of-source.

I-run there.  Sobbings quiet.  Still as-though in grave.

Coiled, in form of-snake, from pain and despair

Not give-you sign of-life--but are-dying rather,

Until unexpectedly by palm me pull-you to yourself.

How with-tears drenched, exhausted after battle,

I-drag from maelstroms of-sheets into shoulders maddened,

And of-feet your parted with-caresses fingers

How dear to-my lips and also indispensable.

They're tracking us and lying in wait in hideaways

That we'd unearthed with trouble. Our rage is blazing. Yes,

We're in a rush to savor our bodies in embrace,

Replete with tears ecstatic and with our scented breath.

Defying all the roadblocks, our helpless eyes consume

Each other like two trackless trains in parallel;

And when exhausted eyelids drop their curtain-swoon,

We feel we've left the bed and our embrace as well.

Nobody's ever been as super-pale as we,

Nor seen so much, submerging his homeless hugs galore,

Nobody's ever touched the depths of ecstasy

In such a bed, so guarded by such drapes before.

They-follow us... Steal from paths and byways

With difficulty by us found.  Anger our in sun blazes.

Hurrying to-us to tears of-happiness, to breaths of-our fragrances,

We-want caresses to-try, to-get-to-know our bodies.

So in spite of-obstacles with-pupil helpless

We-devour ourselves reciprocally, as-though two pathlessnesses,

And, when of-lids exhausted curtains fall,

We-feel, that-we came out of-hugs and of-bed.

No-one thus never not would-look, not would-be so pale,

And no-one to bottom of-pleasure with-body thus not arrived-with-difficulty,

And not sank his caresses of-houseless horde

In such bed, under guard of-such alert curtains.

Sometimes my blind caprices I obey, and feel

A yen to have you serve me at my beck and call,

A waitress whose caresses quench my thirstings all,

And you have such imagination and such zeal!

Like rampant sun-rich vegetation are your braids,

They're wafting open-garden perfume at my soul;

I take your head into my hands just like a bowl

And guide your lips to trail my body's shiver-waves.

I watch in jubilation as your mouth is drawn,

In the misty murk, onto my furry chest--

Which I daydream is a roaring lion's breast,

And try to trap the image as you nuzzle on.

Sometimes to-my blind obedient desire

I-thirst in you to-have alert to any-old gesture

Servantess, that with-hugs quenches my thirst

And you are so clever and agile in hug!

When your braid as in sun luxurious greenery

With-breath opened-of gardens my soul envelops,

Head your as-though beaker I-take in my hands

And with-lips in path of-shudder lead on body.

And I-rejoice myself following that lip, as it-intends

To my breast hairy, visible in not-quite-darkness,

In which I-dream breast in woods roaring animal

And try myself, while you-caress, not to-lose it from eyes.

Has separation changed you?  No, you're still the same!

A flower-fugitive has left your head divine,

And now lies at your feet as though upon a shrine;

Before your heart, my own is secretly aflame.

Your soul presumptuous, lost deep in starry storms,

Dares dream itself to be an oft-recurring thing--

Yet what about your body?  Who but me would think

Of saving that believed-in and beloved form?

You're working, words awhisper, allowing your caress

To cloak itself in burning murmurs; mute am I,

Still praying that your body may never, never die

With lips that linger at the well-spring of your breast.

Are-you (female) changed after separation? Oh, no, not-changed!

But some flower from your hairs ran-down to feet's altars,

And although lack of-that runaway not bedirtied your face,

Heart my in secret before your heart is-dying...

Soul your dares to-dream, that, in starry blizzard

Mused-in, it-will last once again and again--

But body?  Who will-think of it in allworld

Besides me, who so in it believe and love, and caress?

And when you, whispering words, from lips born of-toil,

You-give to-caresses exit in this whisper, which blazes,

I, bemuted with-lips at of-breasts your source,

Pray myself for your immortality of-body.

NOTES

  The above two poems are good examples of how the Polish language demands gender specification in some of its verb forms and makes other verb forms reflexive.  (Praying and dreaming, for instance, are reflexive; linguistically speaking, a thing dreams itself to the dreamer, thus giving substance to chimeras.)

  In "Ubóstwo miłości" (The Poverty of Love), UR 29-36, the poet considers the beloved woman immortal because, by continuous metamorphoses, she escapes the love-death linkage usually attributed to the grotesque.

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The Little Cobbler

The moon-hook is receding through the air,

Impaled upon a chimney in the mist;

A lantern tiptoes up the darkness, where

The street dissolves in murky with a twist.

A crippled, crazy little cobbler stares

Into the nightmare maelstrom while he sews

A pair of shoes to fit the Lord up there;

His name is Boundless, if you want to know.

  Blessed be the trade

  Whose creative power

  Such a shoe hath made

  At this silver hour!

O God of clouds, o God of morning dew,

An ample hand-made gift for you have I;

You shall not stub your toes against the blue,

Nor need to wander barefoot in the sky.

My spirits burning starry flares presage,

Sometime within the flood of mist, that God

Will always conscientiously be shod

As soon as Cobbler enters on the stage.

  Blessed be the trade

  Whose creative power

  Such a shoe hath made

  At this silver hour!

O God, you've given me a taste of living

Which is enough to last me for the road;

Forgive me, I'm incapable of giving

You anything but shoes--I'm poor, you know.

But even in the gloom of misery,

I know that life is really nothing but

The act of living, just like stitchery

Is merely stitching--so let's live it up!

  Blessed be the trade

  Whose creative power

  Such a shoe hath made

  At this silver hour!

Little-Shoemaker

1 In fogs distances sickle of-moon,

2 Stuck with-point in crest of-chimney,

3 Lantern itself on fingers-or-toes climbs

4 Into darkness, where already ends itself street.

5 Crazed little-shoemaker, cripple-footed

6 Sews, stared into of-incubus depths,

7 Shoes to size of-foot of-God,

8 What him for name--Uncontained!

9-10 Blessed toil, from whose creative power

11-12 Is-born such shoe within such silver night!

13 God of-clouds, God of-dew,

14 Here-take from my palm gift generous,

15 So-that not walk-you in sky barefoot

16 And feet not wound on blues!

17 May ghosts, burning of-stars torches,

18 Say sometime in of-clouds flood,

19 That there, where onto world shoemaker comes,

20 God beshod usually is dignifiedly!

21-4 Blessed toil... night!

25 You-gave me, God, bite of-existence,

26 Which to-me for entire will-be-enough way--

27 Forgive, that from-within of-misery shadow

28 Nothing to-you, besides shoes, give not can-I.

29 In sewing nothing not there-is, except sewing,

30 So let-us-sew, as-long-as suffices strength!

31 In life nothing not there-is, except life,

32 So let-us-live up-to beyond boundary of-mound-of-burial!

33-6 Blessed toil.... night!

NOTES

  The common folksy nature of the language of this monologue is contrasted with Romantic addresses to God, which were full of pathos.  The surprising tautologies (life nothing but life, etc.) are echoed in other poems ("The Stable," or in the unnamed poem which asks what sails do in the fog: "nothing, except sail").  In TL (pp. 312-14, 338 ff., and 356), Trznadel calls this poem a hymn to activity in spite of quietism and despair in the face of the void.  The cobbler performs an unverifiable act: what counts here is the striving, the human effort.  Human activity is ethically superior to God's: shoes are doubtless greater than any gift God has to offer (cf. "Two Matthews").  Trznadel further considers Leśmian's cripples to represent basic, unadorned humanity irrespective of accidents of birth.

  1 As in "The Spring Ox," what distances is the item, not the perception.

  5 "Kuternoga," cripple-footed, is a neologism.

  8 Religious and Modernist poetry gives God negative attributes.

  14 "Naści," here-take, is an archaic verb of ritual presentation and has been incorporated into dialect forms.

In the Evening

Twilight, yes, it was twilight,

Dying sunset-grove highlight,

  Daytime scorching wore down.

  Dew was sprinkling our brows,

  Canyon steamed dusky brown,

     Guelder-rose boughs.

In the distance, the distance,

Dusky flowerless mist-dance,

  Wind-cooked crewcut terrain.

  Startled drowsified fragrance;

  And on my forehead inflamed

     You warmed your hands.

Darkness, darkness befuddles

Starers if they don't cuddle!

  Those who are lost in the plain

  Won't be united by dreaming,

  Nor by their fear, horror, pain--

     Only by clinging.

In-Evening

1 In-evening was-it, in-evening,

2 When aurora extinguished above forest.

3 Daily evaporated-self sear,

4 Dew to-us fell on heads

5 And with-dusk steamed self ravine,

6 Ravine of guelder-roses.

7 From faraway comes, from faraway

8 That dusk, which of-flowers itself renounces.

9 When, scaring beslept fragrance,

10 Coolness winded above fields cut-down,

11 Against my you heated forehead

12 Palms bechilled.

13 Not is-allowed to look, not-allowed

14 Without caress into darkness around!

15 Lost in expanse of-fields

16 Not will-unite any dream golden,

17 Nor fear, nor horror, nor pain,

18 Nothing--except caress!

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 517, this was first published in "Myśl Polska," Warsaw, 1918.  I believe it also inspired Julian Tuwim's "Słopiewnie," op. 46b, set to music by Szymanowski, a melodious nonsense rhyme I have translated as follows (SR-160 Spectrum-Uni/Pro, Harriman, New York): "Creeping guelder-roses,/ Minions in the maples,/ Service-tree severest,/ Redden as you're able!// Blush, my dear blueberries,/ Mulling over mullein,/ Forests are a fiasco,/ Maidens oh so sullen!// Skulking comes a stranger,/ Darting glancing glozes,/ Flawless flame the gorgeous/ Creeping guelder-roses! Hey!"

  I also consider it an example of Leśmian's waxing pessimism and ethical humanism: he realizes that the only thing making life bearable is a loving relationship with another person.  In "Oczy w niebiosach," closed eyes are exhorted to help each other, much as caresses are considered the redeemers in this poem.

  4-6 In the original, dew falls on the people's heads, and the guelder-roses are a canyonfull, not just boughs.  Rhyme and metrics caused the translator to take poetic license in changing heads and canyons to brows and boughs.

  12 Polish does not distinguish between hands and arms, but has a separate word, "palms," for the inside of a person's hands.

  13-4 Polish double negatives do not cancel each other out.

Late Date

Along the footpath lined in glitter-dew,

We'll follow trails of rustle and of shade;

Beneath the stiff and spiny shrubs exudes

The fragrance of fresh molehills in the glade.

  The silver relics of a yestern rain

  Gleam inside leaves that shrivelled in the chill,

  And somewhere in the derelict terrain

  The rooks are all aflutter and atrill.

Near apple-trees, an incidental pine

Immerses needles in the pale-blue air.

Oh, Spring has quickly fled and left behind

A new, bewildered life that's very scared.

  You keep swaddling deeper in your shawl

  Nesting round your breast.  We should have said

  Long ago the words that now sound small,

  Speechified and empty, late and dead.

We should have braided stubborn hands together

And closed our eyes and marched into the sun!

Today our eyes are open wide, however,

And lips go mute before their work is done.

Rendezvous Belated

1 We-will-go on-trail of-shadow and of-rustle

2 Along path, which lengthwise with-dew glitters.

3 Under bushes of-stiff gooseberry

4 Smell in sun fresh molehills.

5 In withered leaves, cramped-up by coolness,

6 Glisten silver leftovers of-yesterday's downpour,

7 Above abandoned from long-time garden

8 Can be heard rooks' flutters and singings.

9 Next-to apple-tree--fortuitous pine

10 Her needles in pale submerges blue.

11 Oh, how quickly passed-by spring

12 Leaving-behind frightened life!

13 Ever more strongly you-swathe yourself in kerchief,

14 In which breast your as in nest itself hides,

15 Was-necessary for-us to-have-said earlier these words,

16 Which today will-resound--belated and empty!

17 Was-necessary for-us to braid palms stubborn

18 And with closed to in sun eyes!

19 Today these eyes will-remain--open,

20 Today itself lip in half of-way will stop.

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript, p. 517, this poem was originally published in "Myśl Polska," Warsaw, 1918.  The two versions are identical

except for one slight variation in punctuation.

  Intimations of Leśmian's pessimism already abound: frightened regret is beginning to replace the relatively insouciant sensuality of "In the Field" or the "Raspberry Brushwood" cycle.  In his Russian cycle "Moon Intoxication" (UR 83-93, 1907), Leśmian indicated that the lovers' hands tremble as though they belonged to someone else; they feel as if others had also had a date at the same nightly window, but that it is too late for worry now.  Similarly, in "Spowiedź" (Confession, UR p. 106, 1915), Leśmian indicates that he misses his beloved's hands in his dreams.

  4 Molehills are pleasantly fragrant in this poem, which shows a departure from convention, wherein molehills are distasteful.

  10 The pine immerses her branches upward, which sounds like a contradiction in terms that, like many of Leśmian's unexpected images and comparisons, turns out to be quite logical when viewed from the angle of childlike, impressionistic wonder.

  17- See the notes on "Oczy w niebiosach" and the Polish word for palms (as distinct from hands/arms) in "In the Evening," supra.

The Hunchback

In sunshine and Indian summer,

He's dying, expediently--

His total existence was hunchbacked,

And so is his death, verily.

As though solving difficult fables,

Enveloped in fog on the road,

He's dying--he's always done nothing

But drag 'round his hunchbacky load.

He'd dance and he'd beg with his back-hump,

He used it to daydream and brood;

He'd nurse it to sleep on his shoulders,

He gave it his own blood for food.

He's treasuring Death, who is murky,

He's now rubbernecking her way;

His hump is still hunching, however,

Still living it up, fat and gay.

Surviving its camel by seconds

Just fitting its fat to a T,

The hump eyes the butterfly sunlight

The hunchback is too dead to see.

It uses its fat as a weapon

And jeers at the bearer deceased:

"You're stubborn, man, you're worse than useless!

What is the meaning of this?

Did sleep crush your legs, no-neck idler?

You lost both your knees in the fog?

You're taking your hump for a ride here,

Get moving, you bump on a log!

Your stupid bean's stuck in the shadows;

So now we have both lost our way?

And just how much farther exactly

You planning to take me today?"

Hunchback

1-2 Is-dying hunchback rather advantageously: in good-weather and in old-wives' summer.

3-4 Humped life he-had verily, and death has verily humped.

5-6 Is-dying in road, in of-fog swaddling, as-if fairy-tale difficult judging,

7-8 And nothing not did-he in this life, except hump dragged and dragged.

9-10 With-this hump he-begged and danced, with-this hump he-pondered and mused,

11-12 To sleep on back he-nursed it, with-blood own fed and gave-drink.

13-14 And now death to-himself is-gaining, in her murk has-lengthened already his-neck,

15-16 But hump still self humps, corneredly lives and fattens.

17-18 It-survived its-camel by even to-its fatness while,

19-20 Dead-man's darkness looks-at, but it--those in sun butterflies,

21-2 And to deceased dragger says, threatening with-its log:

23-4 "What that your resistance signifies that-you in-across lay down to-me septum?

25-6 Did-you in-fog lose knees?  Did-you with-sleep-or-dream crush your legs-or-feet?

27-8 For what-you me took for ram (= piggyback), in-order-to lose way in halfway?

29-30 Why-did-you with-animal-head stick into shadow?  With difficulty in your shoulders I-myself fit!

31-2 I-am-curious, forever lazy-one, to-where you-will carry me still?"

NOTES

  Leśmian appears to be anthropomorphizing a universal symbol: we all have a hump which jeers at us and becomes fat at our expense.  In a letter to Miriam (UR 239), Leśmian describes Cezary Popławski's life as being "somewhat sprained (people have invented various ways of spraining the various joints of their lives)...."  In the Sindbad stories (176-83), the hero graciously carries a thirsty old man piggyback to water, only to find he is a vicious exploiter who has ridden many a man to death.  Sindbad escapes death by intoxicating him.  The original Tales from the Arabian Nights (hereinafter Tales/ Arabian Nights, Burton 434-6) has Sindbad kill the old man, and a footnote on p. 437 refers to a Koranic story: after a person's death, his evil deeds ride him in the form of an ugly old man.  In TL, p. 178, Trznadel mentions the Eastern topos of a blind man carrying a cripple, a symbol of the symbiosis of body and soul in Eastern philosophy.

  Stone (196-9, 203-4) indicates that such anthropomorphization--even the motives of the hump are depicted, it "wants to assert its autonomous existence"--is more than "a poetic device--it has philosophical connotations."  Another Leśmian poem, "Ręka" (hand or arm, there is no distinction in Polish) "symbolizes all human greed and vices, while growing to enormous proportions and assuming an independent existence."  Karpowicz (50-1, 119, 130) shows that in hoping to surpass its host, the hump is only one step away from being reincarnated as a demon-ghost, that symbol of dualism and suppressed sincerity.

Confession

Don't wound yonder stranger with scornful lip-quiver,

Her charms are quite different from yours, but don't jeer;

My body knows you as the world's only shiver,

But she's got red lips, is a generous giver--

And who could refuse such a gift with a sneer?

My love I confess to you first, but refusing

To tell her, though she waits and dreams about me.

She doesn't know that I would follow her, cruising;

Since meeting her, I simply cannot stop musing

About how my youth-days are numbered indeed.

Her smile is a wave ornamental, ethereal,

Her forehead is glistening with light golden bangs,

Her gaze is attentive and slightly funereal,

The shape of her hands to your own is so near, I'll

Keep thinking, caressing, I'm holding your hands...

Her low incantations can't change me a line,

She can't disengage me from you with her kiss;

I shed short-term sobs at her corals, and I'm

Athirst for a trifle-flirt, just one more time;

So grant me a detour to those other lips.

1 Not wound with-scorn that unknown girl,

2 Her spell is other than your spell.

3 You to-my body shudder in world only,

4 And she lips to-me wants to-give-back raspberries---

5 Whose palm can repudiate that gift?

6 Truly to-you first that love I-confess--

7 She nothing not knows, though waits and dreams.

8 I-would-go thus to her, as in forests and in groves,

9 And since I-know her, always to-me it seems,

10 That counted are spring's my days!

11 Lips has-she with-wave in smile ornamental,

12 With-light hair beglistened has-she forehead,

13 Glances--diligent and slightly mournful,

14 Palms to yours without-meaning-to similar--

15 Caressing, I-will-think, that I-caress your palm...

16 Of-her conjurations whispers not will-change me at-all,

17 Her kiss not will-separate us!

18 Allow me to-go in of-lips these corals,

19 So-I-would sob for moment, so-I-would love inconstantly,

20 Time one more, oh, just this one!

NOTES

  The original alternates between feminine and masculine rhymes, and I tried to keep this alternation until the last stanza, at which time I used masculine rhymes throughout because the initial playfulness had been replaced by outright insistence.  M. Jastrun, in "Pierwsze spotkanie z Leśmianem," Poezja i rzeczywistość, p. 231, points out that the innocence and simplicity of this poem are a sham; it is actually perversely erotic, presenting the rival with all the charms of the poet's art.

  Pankowski (110-15) considers this poem an example of the link between cruelty and erotica in Leśmian, and cites further examples.  In "Pragnienie" (The Wish), the hero wants to live amorally and unconsciously, biting his lover's breasts; in "Róże" (The Roses), a knight makes his wife witness his spectral adultery with sadistic pleasure; and in Sindbad, there are several scenes of cruelty and sadism not present in the Tales/ Arabian Nights, e.g. Amina's punishment by her husband is rendered erotic and sadistic.

  In Samobójstwo..., p. 19, Artur Sandauer indicates that the interlocutor represents Dura (the dark-haired girl from "Paltry") and an imaginary lover (as the nonexistent blonde girl in "Pan Błyszczyński").  He also considers this a reversal of "Migon and Jawrzon," rivals with the sex-roles reversed: in both cases, a real person must compete with a spirit.

The Snow

I recollect the glitter-shifting frost, the snow

That used to trickle down the trunks of trees,

And which would heavify the branches long ago;

I'd feel that it and I were sparkling in the breeze.

And then the white would grow to mounds, and hills would rise,

And bulk was added to the maples' hoary hair;

It tickled chins and noses and it blinded eyes;

It flutter-fell abundant, then halted in mid-air.

I now recall a certain low, ramshackle home,

The multicolor crewel patterns in the place.

Who used to live there?  Question--human being or gnome?

I was a child, and snow could cover boundless space.

In spite of suffer-fear, my palms would touch the glass;

I'd feel a generous track, an excess of some spell,

Then touch my books and furniture so as to pass

The magic on, and then I'd touch my nurse as well.

My heart would stop whenever I took my mark outside

Into the silent white joy-sifting in the sky,

Until the snowflakes stopped--for just sufficient time

To lose track of one's self, for now I can't find mine.

I'm well acquainted with my pain today, and wish

I could return to that ramshackle gate again,

And watch the snowflakes dancing in an ample swish

Before they blanket earth as white as they did then.

And how this silly dreamer would cry while peering in,

Attempting to re-scrape his youth from frosty panes--

How fiercely would I bury my weary face again

Into my childish hands--if they could be regained!

1 I-remember that mobilely glittered-up hoarfrost

2 And of-snow beweighted in branches hangings,

3 And its unceasing from trees to earth running-down,

4 And feeling, that in sun together with snow I-sparkle.

5 And it continuously grew here to mound, there--to pile,

6 And of-trees white tops-of-heads from time to-time added,

7 Blinded eyes and tickled chin and nose,

8 And flew-about--and stuck in void--and rioted, and fell.

9 And I-remember that low, half-fallen-together house,

10 And beyond panes woolen-yarn's many-colored patterns.

11 Who there lived?  Question--whether human, whether gnome?

12 I-was child, Snow with-white covered infinities.

13 I-touched with-palm panes, in-spite-of fear of sufferings,

14 And felt trace abundant, as-though of-spells excess.

15 With-that palm I-touched my furniture and books,

16 And nurse, to her return for fairy-tales' use.

17 Heart died, when-I in-palm would-carry-away this mark

18 Into silence of-snow which, sifting, rejoiced itself in sky.

19 Snow stopped--and passed since-then so-many years

20 As is-necessary, in-order-to trace lose of oneself.

21 How I-would-thirst today, when my pains I-know,

22 To-stand, like formerly, before of-house half-fallen-together gate

23 And see, how snow earth whitens the same,

24 Snow, which flutters and riots, and falls just the-same.

25 With what weeping I-would look--incorrigible dreamer--

26 Into windowpanes, in-order-to my youth dig-back-out in its hoarfrost--

27 With what power I-would snuggle toilsweated face

28 Into those former, which I have-lost, into those childish palms!

NOTES

  The child feels he is glittering along with the snow.  In "Wiedźma" (The Hag, KP 95), the snow "glittered ethereally and elusively" in "starry diamonds."  In "Pośmiertna w głębi jezior maska" (Studia, p. 328), Ireneusz Opacki indicates that reflections in windows are where the former, lost "dead state" can be found, as they are an attempt to eternalize, like reflections of clouds in puddles in "Po deszczu" (After the Rain).

  Papierkowski (125-131) indicates that "nawiesie" and "zron" (hangings and running-down) are neologisms.

  The final stanza can be compared to Leśmian's "Mroźny ranek" (Chilly Morning, 1902), wherein the protagonist presses his forehead to a transparent windowpane and watches a disappearing sled leaving behind its track, i.e. "half its dream."

The Meadow - I

You peered out of the forest one late afternoon

And called me Meadow--you remember, I presume?

  When I heard the name-selection,

  I glanced at my stream-reflection--

Now spot myself within creation thanks to you.

And I took in the weary-wingèd butterflies;

With gold and frankincense and myrrh the bees arrived;

  Then the great Infinity

  Visited my greenery;

She loved it, wouldn't leave, she wanted to abide.

You'll never fathom grief by kissing meadow-blooms,

For grass torn from the ground is painless and perfumed.

  Cornflow'r, bullweed, you can sense

  That there is a difference--

I love your bare feet stepping on the fragile dew.

I'll greenly introduce your wander-reverie;

You balance blooms and balk--one in each hand, you see.

  At the crossroads drop the flowers,

  Let the Brook the balk beshower;

His banks I'll green-infest, that's what he knows of me.

The swimming sun has happened on the ditchy dale,

And furry burdocks sparkle, nettles billow-flail;

  You may love--how very nice!--

  Dragonflies and meadow-mice,

As well as muffled flutters of a startled quail.

Love bumps into your body while ambling in the blooms;

Take care the sun won't make you prematurely swoon!

  And your mouth, though overburdened,

  With this ripe and royal purple,

Will find sufficient drink in Meadow's sweat and dew.

The shadow of your head has wanderred into mine;

You simply cannot grasp my green with human eyes.

  What the eyes can't comprehend

  Rustles through the soul again!

Your soul will often be transformed while you're alive.

Through flowers the earth is steaming sultriness of noon;

A shrivelled moth has stiffened in buttercup cocoon;

  Startled by the sudden May,

  Let us charm each other, hey!

Quiescent now is Love, and May leans toward Moon.

1 Do you-remember, how head you-emerged from forest,

2 in-order-to call me Meadow certain evening?

3-4 Called by name,/ Once I-looked at myself in brook--

5 And since-then I-will recognize self among rest-of infinity.

6 Came to me butterflies, wearied by-flight,

7 Came bees with frankincense and myrrh, and gold,

8-9 Came same Infinity,/ So-as-to look in my green--

10 Looked and to-go not wanted to return-back...

11 Who kissed poppy in wheat--not will-know misery!

12 Grass from earth torn smells, but does-not pain.

13-4 I-love feet your bare,/ That they-stepped on brittle dew,

15 Distinguishing in blindly bullweed from cornflower.

16 May sleep-or-dream yours wandering with-green I-precede,

17 Take flowers in one hand, and in other take balk,

18-9 Lay flowers on crossroads,/ Moisten balk in this brook,

20 Who knows of me, that with-grass bank his I-will haunt.

21 Already sun casually to ditch is-swimming closer,

22 Sparkles itself burdock hairy and abundant stinging-nettle--

23-4 Only think-about, that to-you is allowed/ To-love dragonfly and mouse of-field,

25 And quail, which with deaf flutter herself tears-upward!

26 Walks love about flowers--interferes against your body,

27 Be-mindful, that to-you before time in sun not faints.

28-9 In my dew, in my sweat,/ For sufficiency you-have drink.

30 For lip, overweighted with-purple ripe.

31 Shadow of-your head to my has-erred shadows.

32 I-know, that in eyes not you-hold-out all of this green,

33-4 And what in eye itself not fits,/ That itself in soul rustles!

35 Still soul to-you not-once living will-self transform.

36 Steaming earth through flowers heat of-day breathes-out,

37 Dried-up butterfly stiffened through chalices of-buttercup--

38-9 Let-us-charm selves reciprocally,/ Surprised by-sudden May--

40 May itself leans toward night and love becomes-quiet.

NOTES

  As in "Ballada bezludna" and "Pan Błyszczyński," this poem documents a creation so palpable that divine forces stop to admire it.  The meadow wants to achieve consciousness and selfhood, but only man can do it for her.  Artur Sandauer (Samobójstwo... 39) says that in presenting self-creation and self-liquidation as existential actions, the poet behaves like nature.  As in Buber's "I and Thou," there is a mutual respect here.  In "Słowo i pieśń" in Studia (184-5), Głowiński states that in accordance with symbolism, names virtually call things into existence; naming is a creative act, a form of word magic: the word has access to secret spheres not accessible to reason.  Cf. Genesis, or Mircea Eliade's Mythes, rêves et mystères p. 255, wherein living beings do not begin existing until two brothers name them.

Two Humble Humans

My soul is oft a-sobbing with a song of sorrow smothered

About two humble humans in love with one another.

Their amorous confession first whispered in the garden

Turned out to be the factor that forced their sudden parting.

They pined alone for ages, for other people's reasons;

Time trickled on relentless, immutable the seasons.

When they were wrenched asunder, their fingers touching flora,

They sickened both so badly as none had done before them.

And there beneath the maple, two shadows and two beds;

And there beneath the maple, despairing glances met.

Without embracing ever, sinless they expired,

Without a tear of joy, and without a single smile.

Their ruby lips paled purple in death's all-quenching cold,

Nobody's been that ashen before or since, I'm told.

They longed to linger loving beyond their own demise;

There was no love to love with, for love had also died.

They knelt down at their threshold of overdue despair,

But God was also gone, and no one heard their prayer.

They managed to endure until summer had arrived,

And tried to visit Earth, but the world had not survived.

Two Insignificant-People

1 Often in soul to-me rings son, sobbed-out in sorrow,

2 About those two insignificant-people, who loved themselves in themselves [= loved each other].

3 But in garden whisper first of-amorous confession

4 Became itself for them compulsion of sudden separation.

5 Not saw-they themselves long for someone's will and fault.

6 And time constantly flowed-off--unreturning, unique.

7 And when walked-apart they, palms reaching-out after flower,

8 They-became-ill so very-much, like no-one so-far in world!

9 Under maple--two beds, under maple--two shadows,

10 Under maple last, without-hope glance.

11 Without tear of-happiness on eyes, without one smile.

13 Lips theirs redness extinguished in cold of-death violet,

14 And they-paled so much, as no-one till-then on world!

15 They-wanted still to love beyond their-own [burial] mound,

16 But love died, already love not was.

17 And they-knelt late at of-adversity their threshold,

18 In-order-to themselves to-pray for everything, but not was already God.

19 So with-strength leftover they-survived until to spring, to summer,

20 In-order-to return onto Earth--but not was already world.

NOTES

  According to Szczerbowski's biography, p. 23 ff., this was based on an old folk song reprinted in O. Kolberg's 1857 collection of Polish folklore, p. 148 (Pieśni ludu polskiego, Warsaw): two people fall in love, then sicken when they cannot see each other.  "Under maple" is similar to a folk song documented by Z. Gloger in Starodawne dumy i pieśni, p. 52 (Ancient Dumas and Songs).  I personally think it sounds like an uncomfortably eerie premonition of the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.

  Pankowski (74-5) calls this the "structure of annihilation"   --no matter what man tries to do, it is too late.  A similar situation is present in "Pururawa and Urwasi," wherein love is defined as a series of exclusions and negations culminating in supreme nothingness.  Karpowicz (172, 181, 79-91) states that one by one, the Archimedean support points elude the lover's feet until they reach the point of departure, i.e. zero existence; however, he blames the sequential disappearances upon amorous desire, which wants to possess and thus kills.  Unfortunately, however, death does not kill the longing; it does not abolish the feeling, only the partner, and is thus a state of consciousness known as disappointment.  Eugeniusz Czaplejewicz, in "Gra miłości..." 248-9 (Głowiński, ed., Studia z teorii i historii poezji), indicates that these lovers are losers even after death, consumed by unfulfilled longing: the poem is thus not about love, but about the impossibility of love.  "Niedopita czara" (UR 54) also relates the story of a knight and his lady separated by nasty people but united by death, who now haunt a castle with their belated love, as they did not even have time to kiss.

Two Convicts

Once I saw two convicts listening to their

Execution sentence in bayonet embrace,

Giving crowds of gawkers a vacant eyeless stare,

Like a blind man watching the twilight with his face.

One of them was keeping track of time, it seemed--

Timidly requested his father one last time.

"I haven't got a family!" the other convict screamed.

He had, but didn't want one--for thus he was inclined.

They dreamed about their cottage, where people used to live;

Their bodies it was losing quite irretrievably.

They felt a void the size of their figures fugitive,

Like cages that are emptied of fauna suddenly.

The convict who was staring at his shadow-shred

Desired a drink of water, his lips were sore and dry;

The other interrupted, "I have no thirst, I said!"

He did, but didn't want to--for thus he was inclined.

Two Condemned-Men

I saw two condemned-men, that on their out-of-the-way

Listened-out sentence under of-bayonets guard

And onto crowd collected looked without eyes,

Like blind-man, when dusk he-spies-out with-face.

One of them, counting some passed hours,

For seeing himself with father asked shyly.

And second immediately yelled, "I not have family!"

And had it, but t-have not wanted... Thus to-him it seemed.

They-dreamed now, that hut, formerly inhabited, loses

Their bodies, irrevocably gone-out of its alcove.

They-felt vacuum in measure of-height of-their forms

Like cage, from which suddenly were-scared-out animals.

One of them, stared into tatter of-own shadow,

Greedily water demanded with-lip bepained,

And second immediately called: "I not have thirst!"

And had it, but to-have not wanted... Thus to-him it seemed.

NOTES

  This poem is an example of Leśmian's preoccupation with point of view and with negativity: his descriptions of what does not exist are disturbingly concrete.

  In "Ćmy" (The Moths), the absence of a single mouse cannot be "plugged up" by anything else.  Here, as in the case of Shakespeare's Constance mourning the death of her child, grief fills the space formerly occupied by the living person.

A Soul in Heaven

A kneeling soul arrived in God's own heaven from afar,

Unwilling to look up at new forevers or at stars.

She wouldn't succumb to gladness, radiate her novel face,

Remember anyone, forget a thing or any place...

She opened both her braids and azure-mused it was a waste

That she had spent her life in unbeloved man's embrace;

Without resistance or betrayal, hiding wounds with care,

She'd kissed those lips and eyes she didn't love, that unloved hair.

So will-less she endured and soul-less blossomed for those eyes;

She said they were her Fate, obediently she must comply.

So true and tender was her lovelessness that no one could

Have seen the pain beneath that smiling radiant womanhood.

She realized a-sudden that she couldn't and must not

Continue hiding anything from heaven or from God.

Death quickly stripped her to the truth she'd hidden for so long,

A truth which causes eyes and wombs to flash indignant-wronged.

The soul blazed fearful, thinking that, as soon as she had died,

Her lover would be following to find her in the skies;

He'd reach for her without his earth-despair, and recognize

Her lovelessness for what it was.  The soul was terrified.

Soul in Heavens

Arrived soul in kneelings to heaven in divine foreignness,

Not wanted-she to-look at stars nor at of-eternity primacy.

Not wanted-she to succumb to joy, nor with-new lighten face,

Nor remember nobody, nor forget about nothing.

And she-opened braids and she-thought in blue,

That in unloved hugs she-wasted her life,

Without betrayal and without opposition, carefully hiding her wound,

She-caressed lips unloved and eyes unloved.

And she-lasted for them without-will, and bloomed for them without-soul,

And she-called them--fate, and she-was to-fates obedient.

And not loved-she so tenderly, and not loved-she so truly,

That nobody in her light smile not hit with-thought to pains.

But now suddenly she-understood that before God and heaven

Already nothing not allowed to-hide and nothing to-hide is necessary.

Death in her denudes quickly truth so long shut-up:

With-that truth flash themselves eyes, with-that truth flashes itself loin!

And soul with-fear blazed, that soon after her funeral

Will-come in track after her lover, to find her in heaven.

He-will-stretch to her arms/shoulders, of-earthy rid despair,

And will-look in eyes and former her unloving will-see.

NOTES

  I believe the poet is criticizing the Victorian ideal of female masochism which I still find applicable to many Eastern European women today.  The soul loves not her lover, but her own narcissistic projection, thereby submitting to something which has no real existence.  She endows it with superstitious powers, enjoys her self-imposed suffering, and probably spends a lot of time before a mirror monitoring the brave smile required for the sake of appearances.  Heaven strips her of all these punitively sanctimonious defenses, however, and thereby becomes Hell for her.

Today's the anniversary of the day we met,

So we're reverting to the way we used to pet--

Early former hugs beneath the cloak of night,

We shall soon be closing all the shutters tight.

Former words from early loving-days, although

Now they never pass our lips--but even so,

Each is dozing shyly in its cradle-dream,

Not quite trusting us--nor even itself, it seems.

But all suspiciousness of reason let's suppress

And start anew with every word and each caress.

Today in of-our meeting anniversary

We-will-close tightly shutters,

In-order-to repeat within nightly darkness

Former our, very-first caresses.

Former words from days of-first loving,

Although each-one today to-lips itself forbids,

Each-one with-sleep-or-dream itself shy rocks,

Of-us unsure and unsure of-self.

But, repressing untrustingness of-reason

We-will repeat all from beginning.

From Sipping Shade (Drink shadowy/shady, Napój cienisty, 1936)

NOTES

  Although "cienisty" literally means shadowy or shady, it was decided to circumvent the adjective and reverse it with the noun in order to avoid the overwhelming secondary associations with the criminal underworld.  Leśmian was, rather, referring to the relaxed coolness of death.

  According to Jan Kott and Jan Parandowski, the original title of this volume was "Strange and Funny Posthumous Customs."  Leśmian thought we knew more about life after death than about real life, which cannot be apprehended, while we at least have imaginings about the next one.  This information was found in Trznadel, TL, p. 285.

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 519 ff., Leśmian had planned to publish this third volume of his poetry in 1934.  In an interview with Edward Boyé (SL, p. 502), the poet indicated that this would not be a continuation of The Meadow: rather than tour the universe from the floral greenery side, he was planning to enter it by way of sorrow.

  The volume was published by J. Mortkowicz and his "Pod Znakiem Poetów" publishing house; 1200 numbered copies were produced.

First Tryst

To ruined gates, to our post-graveyard date we came.

Step carefully, my dear; in passing, kiss this vine.

And is it you?  Already changed, but still the same?

Go check, my eyes are failing... give some sort of sign!

There are no signs!  They nothing-scattered long ago!

And no assurances--no one believes in us!

The cries have stopped and laughter hushed in darkness, so

Time built a lair amid the corner-cobweb dust.

Defer to moths and buds! Be chary of appearance,

The realest being this haystack here!--Why do you weep?

For all those people at the mercy of existence,

Our pain is just a shiver of a moonbeam sweep.

First tryst beyond grave!  Demolished gate.

Step intently!... Kiss that on way bush.

Is that--you?--Already changed, but still--the same?

Make-certain!... Sight to-me weakens... Give with-palm sign!

Not are signs! From long-ago already into nothing selves dispelled!

Not are no certainties! Nobody not believes in us!

Became-silent laughs in darknesses and weepings stopped,

In cobwebs around corners nested itself--time...

Go-down from path--to-moths and to-flowers! Distance-yourself to-illusions!

Probably most-real is that--of-hay stack...

Why weep-you? --For people, given-up to-existence,

Pain ours--barely is shiver of-moon's trail.

NOTES

  In ZP (pp. 187-8), M. Głowiński indicates that Leśmian is able to reify time: here, it builds nests in the cobwebs in the corners.

  In KG (pp. 168-9), Adam Ważyk points out that in accordance with the "Schauerromantik" tradition, non-living beings can speak and exist, but the tradition becomes grim when the context is erotic.  Apparitions love, eat, drink, but are imprisoned in a tunnel of mirrors, trying to become something other than reflection.  In "Za grobem" (Beyond the Grave), the poet indicates that one wishes to become something else in the otherworld.

The Secret

Nobody saw us, except for those moths

Fleeing across in their fluffiness;

And we're ecstatic together, because

Nobody knows of our sweet caress.

Your younger sister is harvesting heath,

Tailing our whispers from far away,

Lowering her voice when the three of us speak--

And when she hushes, she drops her gaze.

Then she goes garden-fleeting about,

Forward and sideways in song-abyss!

And it's so sweet that she too found out

Our little secret, our hidden kiss.

Nobody us not saw--unless these moths,

Which fluffify in through-flight.

And thus to-us is-sweet, that only--we

Know of our caress.

Younger your sister, tearing-off heath(er),

Followed whisper our far-away...

And, speaking with us, silences voice--

And saying-nothing--lowers eyelids.

And around garden flits lengthwise and widthwise,

Ravine-lost in own song!

And to-us sweet, that she also

Knows of that, of which nobody not-knows....

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript, this poem was first published in "Tydzień Polski" (The Polish Weekly), Warsaw, April 15, 1922, as part of an erotic cycle.  The original printing had no title and indicated slight differences in punctuation.

  In "Pośmiertna..." in Studia (p. 309 ff), Ireneusz Opacki indicates that this is a public secret, the title is therefore probably humorous.  But nobody is hurt.  This is the real world, with real people familiarizing themselves with it.

  Karpowicz (p. 44) indicates that, as in the Raspberry Brushwood cycle, being "lost" does not indicate loss of existence, but delicious hidden luring: the object is.

  Julian Tuwim was apparently inspired by this poem to write a similar erotic, "Do ciebie o mnie" (To You About Me):

"...twój cień w krzewie się zazielenił...

i zniknęłaś--w swoim śpiewie...."

"...your shadow greened within the shrub...

And you disappeared--into your song...."

Nocturnal Tryst

On a pre-arranged and fully darkened evening

Came to me aquiet that alluring form.

Secretly it came, in splendid un-bereaving,

And that body's name with your name did conform.

On the way it glanced at Future and at Mirror,

Then lay down beside me on the chilly sheet

So I could regretless hug and kiss and thrill her,

Wearying and wearing out that body sweet.

Clinging to my chest with sacrificial fragrance,

Cleverly compliant, cuddling brazenly,

On the verge of sobbing in the murky joyance,

Fainting from the surfeit of near-demise was she.

Nothing in that body, only sin and spell,

Scent involuntary, voluntary speed,

And the thrill that drowns in roaring bloodstream swell,

Which to understand each other bodies need.

On-Prearranged Night

1 On-prearranged night, on-darkened-night,

2 Came to me quietly that enticing body.

3 It-came secretly--in lovely/ miraculous no-mourning,

4 Was to-it for name the same as to-you...

5 It-looked on way into future and into mirror--

6 On sheet cold net-to-me itself laid--

7 For me itself laid, so-that it I-could kiss

8 And exhaust--and use-up--and not regret!

9 Clung me to chest--sacrificially fragrant,

10 Cleverly shameless and--obedientizing...

11 In darknesses--in joys--on border of-sobbing

12 Fainted from excess of-not-quite-dying.

13 And nothing in it not was, but spell and sin,

14 But unknowing fragrance--and-knowing hurry--

15 And but that shiver, which perishes in of-blood roar--

16 And without it body--body not understands.

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript pp. 522-3, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), Warsaw, 1936.  Shortly thereafter, Feliks Zahora-Ibiański responded in "Myśl Polska" (Polish Thought), in a characteristically fascist, anti-Semitic manner, taking exception to the "perversely ambiguous" nature of the poem, which did not indicate whether the "body" in question was a boy or a girl; Slimy spiritual impotents should be sent to sanatoriums, Asiatic dirt should be extirpated, "for Europe will not wait for us."  I tried to maintain the mysterious ambiguity as long as possible, but finally was forced by rhyme and rhythm to disclose the monumental secret: Leśmian was heterosexual.

  Pankowski (95-6) believes that the impersonal verb (sic!) is what saves this poem from being an "almost clinical description of the sex act" such as "Sometimes my blind caprices...."  He thereupon compares it to the ballad "Asoka," whose eroticism is allegedly rendered mystical and more interesting by non-performance of the sex act.

  2-3, 10 "Przychętne" (enticing) is dialect for cuddle-happy, and "bezżałoba" (lack of mourning) is a neologism, as is "poszłuszniejąc" (obedientizing).

  12 "Niedoumieranie" is an asymptotic, neologistic inability to execute the act of dying, rendered laborious by the multiple prefixes.  In Sindbad, p. 122 ff., two women die by being exponentially themselves: Armina dies when turning white again, and Sermina dies in flame shape while fighting for Sindbad's life.

While you're fainting away with my kisses in bed,

I would like to possess you forever.  Instead,

  You can see me no longer, your eyes have gone blind

  With ecstatic delirium, you're not even mine!

You abscond in a flash to your solitude-highs.

Oh, your body's obedient, all right--but no eyes!

  You abscond in a flash to an unknown abyss

  That I loved you because of--yet I don't know this!

1 While you-part-faint on bed, kissed (female) by me,

2 I-want you to-have forever, but in vain, in vain!

3 Now you precisely--not mine, already not see me at-all,

4 Eyes with-fog to-you are-overtaken, go-blind in joy and frenzy!

5 You-lose yourself suddenly in your own darkness,

6 I-have your body obedient, but body--without eyes!

7 You-lose yourself suddenly in unknown ravine,

8 Where-I not have-been not sung, although I-loved you for it!...

NOTES

  According to Ireneusz Opacki, "Pośmiertna... maska" in Studia, pp. 285-7, this looks like an orgiastic poem by a Modernist erotomaniac, but it is not erotic in the least.  Rather, it is tragic because it points out that even in a situation considered an almost absolute union of two people, the love act serves to separate them and make them lonely.  Although the situation is an erotic act, the subject feels an unpleasant shock because reality is different from what he wishes to possess.  Thus, the topic of the poem is not eroticism, but confrontation with reality and the disappointment which is exclusively the consequence of the disagreement between accepted concepts and the true state of affairs.  In other words, the theme is epistemological: the process of knowing (no pun in Polish) and its result.

  Karpowicz (p. 102, pp. 171-3) indicates that the subject panics when the beloved woman flees into her own kind of egotism when her erotic desires are satisfied; he is afraid of the separatism of her happiness.  The bliss of love is, i.e. is not possessed; it is perfect and unrepeatable, independent of and not subject to her partner.  The desire becomes independent and blind and destroys the object of love; we could just as easily imagine blood without the heart conferring circulatory powers.  In "Piła" (The Saw), according to Pankowski (105-6), a young man consents to be loved by a saw because girls sob, as though sad, while making love; this is a tender, lyrical, almost serene description of amorous dismemberment of the man.

  1 "Domdlewać" means to be in the process of fainting and concentrates on the process, not the result.  Some Polish verb forms, as this one, indicate the gender of the actor; here, the fainter is female.

  5 "Zapodziewać się," to lose oneself, is used in a different manner here than in the dual disappearance in "Raspberry Brushwood," wherein the subjects lurked happily instead of being "lost" to each other; they were only "lost" to the world.

  7-8 The subject loved his object because of the ravine, i.e. wished her to achieve satisfaction.  However, he is bewildered when he realizes that her orgasmic joy excludes him, even if only momentarily.

In the Dark

Bodies know to whom they pertain

While they lie there in twofold shade!

Lips and hands become satisfied,

Night's reluctant to pass on by.

Earth abides with a shaky feeling,

Treetops rustle, but meta-treely!

And above the woods, far away,

God makes Cosmos and North-wind stray.

North-wind says to the Cosmos: "I'm

Not returning to Woods this time!"

Stars are shining at murky trees,

Seagulls white overfly the sea.

One gull sees heaven from afar,

And the other--the fate of stars.

While they jabber, the third gull harks:

Two forms blazing within the dark.

And the murk which inspinuates

Finds in flesh nothing but embrace.

In Darkness

1 Know bodies, to whom belong,

2 When in darkness next-to themselves lie!

3 Lip--to-lip, and palm to-palm favors--

4 Night above them and unwillingly passes-over.

5 World itself eternalizes, but so uncertainly!

6 Trees rustle, but meta-treely!

7 And above woods, above faraway woods

8 God moves with-wind and with-endless-space.

9 And says wind to endless-space:

10 A"Already not return-I this night to woods!"

11 Woods itself murks, and stars into-it shine,

12 And above sea white seagulls fly.

13 One says: "I-saw of-stars fates!"

14 Second says: "I-saw heavens!"

15 And that third is-silent, for she-did-see

16 Two in darkness blazing bodies...

17 Murk, which in-spun itself in their compressible hugs

18 Nothing not found in bodies aside-from caress!

NOTES

  According to Karpowicz, p. 103, this poem, like the Raspberry Brushwood erotic cycle, shows how love ignores not only the world all around, but the partners themselves as well.

  1-3 Polish has no articles.

  2 "Self/selves" in Polish is reflexive or mutual depending on context.  Here, the bodies are lying next to each other.

  3 Polish makes no distinction between "hand" and "arm," but does have a separate word for the inside of the hand, i.e. "palm."

  5 "Trwalić się" is a novelty, "to duration itself," and contains a hidden reference to Bergson's duration.  What the poet means is that the world survives, but shakily.

  6 "Meta-treely" is one of Leśmian's neologisms.

  11 "To murk oneself" means to become darkened.  Herein, I darkened the trees rather than the forest for purposes of rhyme.

  17 "In-spun," as in "In the Evening" of the "Crossroads Orchard" book, contains a suggestion of insinuation, of having nestled into something almost illegally.  Thus, "inspinuates" in the verse version; one evocative neologisms deserves another.

  18 The bodies themselves are not important; what counts is the relationship between them.  Thus, in the verse version, the murk finds nothing but embrace within the flesh.

Belated Confession

I love the buzz your merriness inflamed,

The paths your eyes discovered, yes, and how

Your charm revealed in laughter is the same--

How could I not have loved you until now!

  Today when gardens rustle and doors creak,

  I bolt to find a no-hope void despair--

  And I recall your steps, your voice, your cheek,

  Then dream in turn about your lips and hair.

I hear the teeming clouds and sunsets weep.

The world is kneeling, begging, and you keep

Receding farther--stay where you withdrew,

And pray for all those who did not love you!

Confession Tardy

I-like with-your merriment kindled clatter--

And with-your eyes picked path--

And charm in laughter shown--that same always charm!

That-I you till-now not loved--understand not can-I!

Today, when garden rustles or creak doors

Jump-up I, to ascertain void without-hope,

And remember your steps--and voice your--and eyebrows--

And about lips, and palms to-daydream sequentially.

I-hear weep of-overflowing clouds and auroras!

Everything--kneels and begs!... And you--ever farther!

O, not return, not return--only palms fold

Into prayer for all-those, who you not loved!

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 523, this poem was originally published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), March 29, 1936, with only a slight variation in line 3: "always new charm" instead of "that same always charm!"

 In "Pośmiertna...maska" in Studia, pp. 275-6, Ireneusz Opacki indicates that the protagonist fell in love with the image after the original left; this is a romance with his own imagination or, as Sandauer stated, with "nonexistence," as the protagonist specifically asks his beloved not to return.

  In "Gra miłości i śmierci" (Interplay of Love and Death) in Głowiński, ed., Studia, pp. 260-3, Eugeniusz Czaplejewicz classifies "Belated Confession" among Leśmian's pessimistic later poems.  Death has become a one-way abyss, not a temporary, interesting trip to Hades and back.  There are no more illusions; everything was a dream.  The addressee no longer exists; she is merely a depersonalized grammatical construct, like a rhetorical question fading into futurelessness.

  Comparisons can be made to "Ubóstwo" (Poverty), wherein the poet acknowledges that in loving his family, he loved phantoms, and to "Samotność" (Loneliness), which is a soliloquy at an abyss with no hope of being heard by anyone.  Also, in "Niedopita czara" (1902), UR 61, we read: "Gdy księżyc blaskiem w okna me zapuka--/ Zrywam sie ze snu niespokojny, blady/ dłoń nieposzłuszna piersi twojej szuka,/ Na ustach czuję pocałunków ślady."  (When the moon knocks at my window with a gleam,/ I bolt from sleep, pale and uneasy./ My disobedient hand searches for your breast,/ I feel traces of kisses on my lips."

It's time to cherish homeless orchard voids,

The sky-sick birds, the crippled trees, the fence

Which lost, in rotten times, so many boards

Its shadow looks like see-through ladder-steps.

  It's time to love dead neighbor's garden close,

  The evening on the other side of streams,

  The dark that secret-nourishes our souls

  With good before they're sleep-prepared by dreams.

It's time to gather crumbs of final sweat

From startled space's humble golden lights;

Into your fog-thin hands I lay my head--

We mustn't, mustn't cry with both our mights!

1 Already time to-love in orchard voids homeless,

2 Birds with-sky sickened and trees defective,

3 And fence, which so-many boards in bad lost hours,

4 That on grass shadow throws of-transparent ladder.

5 Already time to-love evening from that side of-river

6 And of-dead neighbor garden not-far-away,

7 And darkness, which before soul dreams to sleep prepare,

8 Nourishes us in secret with-goodness clandestine.

9 Already time scrape-up crumbs of-last sweat-or-toil

10 In poor goldennesses of-scared room-or-peace,

11 And forehead to-lay in your hands, emaciated by-fogs--

12 And not to-cry--not to-cry with-mutual forces!

NOTES

  It is interesting to compare this poem to "In the Field," which dozes benevolently in ecstatic optimism: caterpillar-gnawed leaves are lovely lace, and overheated foreheads are cooled by flowers.  Here, a ruined fence is a prosaic gap-toothed latter, and the protagonist entrusts his forehead to his spectral partner's foggy hands.  As already mentioned, Leśmian's pessimism increased with age.  In "Ubóstwo" (Poverty), he invites God to hit him hard: "I am a human being and can stand anything."  The earlier "Niedopita czara" (1902), UR 54; cf. also 56, 63) contains a palm (hand) emaciated by death; love must be sorrowful, and hugs are similar to longing.

  1-4 In contradistinction to the idyllic "In the Field," nature here is defective and sick.

  7-8 Polish uses the same word for sleep and dream; the context is important.  Here, the dreams prepare the soul for sleep.

  10 "Pokój" can mean either "room" (as in a house) or "peace," and there is no guiding context here.  According to the translator's motto, "If in doubt, be as vague as possible," I opted for "space."  Thus, the verse version states "startled space's humble golden lights."

  12 This is an example of Leśmian's obsession with the negative: the protagonists expend great energy performing the absence of action.

In the Night

A faceless thing supine sleeps firmly in the stars;

It doesn't want to waken in the sparkle-swirl.

You're trembling for me in your river-house afar;

I'll surely come tomorrow--today I'm mourning, girl.

  An orphaned beggar birch-tree shadow hurries through

  Eternity, while crosses try from hills to dive!

  Henceforth I've got no one to say my prayers to--

  Last night the gods all simultaneously died.

I'll never trust forevers, never sob at night,

Nor raise my hands to heaven when all prayer's dead!

To lift your arms to me you suddenly decide,

Although you know there's nothing else above my head!

  Nothing but a vacuum, where the sun decants

  Magic, thus fulfilling distant fog-desires;

  Nothing but a void where butterflies now dance,

  Trees and flowers, river-house, and butterflies.

At-night

1 Something without face and on back sleeps in stars unshakenly,

2 Sleeps and not wants to wake in these of-sparks turmoils.

3 You-live in house above river and fear yourself for me.

4 I-will-come tomorrow for sure!  Today grieve myself must-I.

5 Hurries into otherworld in beg shadow of-birch orphaned.

6 Cross wants into ravine itself to-throw from hill above road!

7 All at once gods died-out this night

8 And from-now already myself not have to-pray to whom!

9 Not will-I-trust measurelessnesses! Not sob-will-I in night dark!

10 Arms-or-hands not will-I-lift to heaven after of-prayer death!

11 And you to me in this moment you-stretch your palms,

12 Although you-know, that besides those palms nothing not is above me!

13 There-is only that vacuum, into which spell transpours

14 Sun, so-that fulfill of-fogs will faraway...

15 That vacuum--those flowers--butterflies and trees--

16 Trees--flowers---butterflies--and that house above river...

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 524, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), Warsaw, July 5, 1933.  The texts are identical except for one slight punctuation change.

  3-4 "To be afraid" and "to grieve" are reflexive in Polish.

  5 "In beg" means it is begging its way from one place to another.

  8 "To pray" is also a reflexive verb in Polish.

  10 Polish makes no distinction between hands and arms, but the context of prayerful supplication would dictate the lifting of hands.

  14- The original verse translation had "distant fog-requests" to rhyme with "river-house address" in line 16.  However, since "request" is not "will" or "desire," and since "river-house address" sounds too much like a New York black book for a philanderer, "desires" was used to substitute for "requests," and "butterflies conveniently repeated as a near-rhyme.  The only deficiency in accuracy was thus that "a house on the river" became a "river-house."

The Girl

Twelve brothers who believed in dreams surveyed a daydream-sided wall;

A voice was weeping from beyond, a plaintive, wasted, girlish call.

And with that voice they fell in love, and speculated on the Girl;

The earth sank into reverie the moment that they blessed the world.

They fastened to her sorrow-song and guesses the contour of her lips;

Her voice was perishing with grief: "She's sobbing, therefore she exists!"

They grabbed some hammers, and to pound the wall they noisily began;

The blinded night could not make out which thing was hammer, which was man.

"Let's pulverize this icy stone ere Death rust-drags the Girl away!"

That's what eleven pounding brothers heard the twelfth, while pounding, say.

Their toil, however, was in vain, in vain their arms' cooperation!

They squandered all their bodies recklessly on futile dream-temptation!

Their chests collapsed, their faces paled, and bones went rotting in the brothers.

Eternal night they share; they died within a day of one another.

But--oh, my God!--the dead men's shadows wouldn't let the hammers go!

It's just another time, that's all, a different-sounding hammer-blow!

A forward thump, a backward ring, a thund'ring upward hammer-raid;

The blinded night could not make out which thing was hammer, which was shade.

"Let's pulverize this icy stone ere Death rust-drags the Girl away!"

That's what eleven pounding shadows heard the twelfth, while pounding, say.

But suddenly the shadows weakened, shade cannot resist the rough,

And they became extinct again, nobody ever dies enough!

No, not enough, and never how the dier wishes it to be!

The contents gone, the tracks erased--the story's finished now, you see!

But--oh, my God!--the hammers brave would not submit to grief inane!

They hit the wall all by themselves and thundered their own bronze refrain!

They thundered in both murk and glare, adrip with human sweat. "But what,"

The blinded night was wondering, "What is a hammer when it's not?"

"Let's pulverize this icy stone ere Death rust-drags the Girl away!"

That's what eleven pounding hammers heard the twelfth, while pounding, say.

The wall collapsed, a thousand echoes shook the valleys and the hills,

But behind it--not a soul!  No girl, nobody, nothing, nil!

There were no lips, no eyes beyond, nobody's flower-laden fate--

There was a voice and nothing more--a voice with neither shape nor weight!

Regret and tears and murk, that's all, perdition and unconsciousness!

Why isn't there another world?  Why is our bad one such a mess?

The hammers strong lay in a row to represent a job well-done,

But dreams kept lying openly while wonders atrophied to scum.

A sudden silence horrible, the sky was voided through and through!

Why are you jeering at this void?  The void has never jeered at you!

Girl

Twelve brothers, believing in dreams, inspected all from of-dream side,

And beyond wall wept voice, girlish voice ravine-lost.

And they-fell-in-love-with of-voice sound, and eager guess about Girl,

And guessed shape of-lips by that, how song from sadness perishes...

They-said of her: "Sobs, thus is!"--And nothing else not said-they,

And crossed entire world--and world got-lost-in-thought at that moment...

They-grabbed hammers in hard palm and began in walls banging with noise!

And not knew blind night, who is human, and who hammer?

"O, faster let-us-crush cold boulder, before death Girl with-rust drags!"--

Thus, banging in wall, twelfth brother to eleven others speaks.

But in-vain was their toil, in-vain of-shoulders link and attempt!

They-surrendered bodies their to waste to-that dream, which them tempted!

Break themselves breasts, creaks bone, rot palms, faces pale...

And all in one died-off day, and night eternal had one!

But shadows of-dead-men--God my--not let-go hammers from palms!

And only another flows time--and only hammer differently rings!

And rings forward! And rings backward!  And higher at each of-thunder return!

And not knew blind night, who there is shadow, and who hammer?

"O, faster let-us-crush cold boulder, before death Girl with-rust drags!"--

Thus, banging in wall, twelfth shadow to eleven others speaks.

But to-shadows lacked suddenly power, and shadow itself to-murks not resists!

And died-off one-more time, for never enough oneself not dies...

And never enough, and never thus, how that thirsts he, who perishes!...

And disappeared content--and perished trace--and novel of them is finished!

But brave hammers--God my!--to-insipid not surrendered themselves grief!

And alone by themselves hit in wall, roared bronze themselves in them!

Roared in murk, roared in glare and dripped with-human sweat!

And not knew blind night, what normally-is hammer, when not is hammer?  [Polish verbs have no imperfect tense.  Rather, the imperfect (repeated or customary action) is rendered with a different verb entirely, a so-called "imperfective."  Here, the night is wondering what hammers usually tend to be when they are not being hammers.]

"O, faster let-us-crush cold boulder, before death Girl with-rust drags!"--

Thus, banging in wall, twelfth hammer to eleven others speaks.

And fell wall, with-thousands-of echoes, shaking hills and valleys!

But beyond wall--nothing and nothing!  No living soul, no Girl!

Nobody's eyes or lips!  And nobody's in flowers fate!

For that was voice and only--voice--and nothing was besides voice!

Nothing--only weeping and sadness, and murk, and unknowing, and loss!

Such is world! Not-good world!  Why another is not world?

Before devious openly dreams, before wasted into nothing miracles

Powerful hammers lay in line for sign of-fulfilled properly toils.

And was horror of-sudden silences! And was void in whole sky!

And you of this void why jeer, when that void not jeers of you?

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 524, this poem was originally published in "Wiadomości Literackie" (Literary News), Warsaw, December 3, 1933 without any dedication.  The texts are identical except for a few punctuation changes.  A German translation ("Das Mädchen") by Karl Dedecius was published in the collection Polnische Poesie, p. 21, Heidelberg, 1960.

  Kazimierz Wyka, in "Dwa utwory" (Two Works), p. 217 of Prokop & Sławiński Liryka polska, calls this poem a "philosophical ballad," partly because of the last line.  Eugeniusz Czaplejewicz, in "Adresat ballad Leśmiana" (The Addressee of Leśmian's Ballads) in Studia pp. 352-68, indicates that the poet has adopted and adapted the folk tradition of a narrator and audience.  Here, the addressee is an individual, and an intellectual one at that: one who things about infinity and void.  The relatively few folk elements are stylized into graceful aphorisms (no one ever dies enough) or philosophical travesties (she sobs, therefore she exists).  The ballad is thus an educated conversation with a refined but silent intellectual; the author treats the narrator and the addressee at arm's length, like a stage director, poking fun in irony.  Since the situation is constructed, it is a fiction by definition; the only thing the addressee "says" is a gesture at the end, which the narrator negates.

  Karpowicz (45-6, 57-8, 208-9) indicates that "The Girl" appears cold and stark, like the inside of a Gothic cathedral; like the girl who never appeared in "Ballada bezludna," she is an attempt to reach the zero of zeroes, the "ontological Ultima Thule."  It represents the desire to know the source of primeval phenomena, an ownerless no-man's promised land.  The wall hides nothing and is therefore reminiscent of the Kafka story about a guard whose sole purpose is keeping a single person away; if it were not for the ending of the poem, it could be a hymn or paean to work.  The irony is that the girl is a projection of the twelves' desires ("they have no imagination"), and of course the number twelve has fairy-tale and cabbalistic significance.

  In TL pp. 32-4 and 179-81, Trznadel states his belief that this poem is an allegory; he compares it to the Roman de la rose mur aux images), except that the rose actually exists, whereas in "The Girl" it is the search itself which is the object, not the nonexistent girl.  (He considers Leśmian's poetry in general to be a "one-shot allegory.")  This particular poem is partially based on a Romanian song, Master Manole, which ends with a girl buried alive in a wall as a sacrifice; however, Leśmian's begins where Manole leaves off, and what is sacrificed is everything but the girl.

  Sandauer (Samobójstwo... 37-8) compares the banging to a sawfish's sawing: unconscious compulsion, an existential action allowing the actor to complete his essence; in fact, the action survives the actors in a form of tragic atheism, and the shadows and hammers carry on.  Unlike Czaplejewicz, who considers the invisible addressee an intellectual, Sandauer believes the question at the end is posed to those who have never considered metaphysical matters or attempted to seek their purpose.  He also believes "The Girl" to be a polemic of two generations, the twelve brothers being Leśmian's fellow students from the time preceding World War I.

  Stone (pp. 285-7, 143-4, 271) indicates that "The Girl" is a seventeen-foot syllabic verse (8+9, with a caesura after the eighth syllable).  The caesura is masculine, which is unusual in Polish: the eight-foot iambs emphasize the feverish action of demolition.  The "illusory cognition ends in catastrophe... [this is] an unfulfilled myth."  The brothers represent twelve "poet-apostles" who believe, like Descartes, that "where there is action there is existence."  The philosophical problem is posed indirectly through the plot structure: "the poet uses the ballad as a vehicle to express his perseverance in trying to break down the barrier of the mystery of life.  The superhuman efforts expended in finding out what life is all about... [lead into] ironic tragedy. Everything in the plot turns out to be catastrophic...."  As in other ballads, repetition with a change of protagonists makes the poem very dramatic.

  There are similarities to other Lesmian poems, particularly other ballads. Like "Pururawa and Urwasi" and "Two Humble Humans," "The Girl" presents a series of exclusions and negations adding up to supreme nothingness.  The dialectics of human hope is exhausted and destroyed: man stops at the void of absurdity and finds that he has no adversary.  It is for this reason that Pankowski (75-6) calls "The Girl" a tragedy of Everyman multiplied by twelve.

  In "Matysek," a fiddler plays out/wins [a pun in Polish] the weeping of a dead girl, who never materializes.  Other poems repeat Leśmian's favorite image of multiple death as the supreme horror (nobody ever dies enough):

  "Jam--nie Osjan!" (I'm not Ossian!): man cannot die completely but agonizes in semi-consciousness.  God can neither die completely nor become completely incarnate.

  "Do Siostry" (To My Sister) joins "The Girl" in its fantastic medieval "dance of death" motif and baroque macabre hyperbole: decomposition of form, both physical and poetic, grotesquely mirrors the chaos of inadequacy and implies that poetry and its forms cannot be a clean reflection of some essence of existence.  This mythology of forms revolting against themselves is related to elements of folk paradox and nonsense rhymes (Trznadel LMP p. 851).

  "Ubóstwo" (Poverty): the poet remembers the loss of his beloved family, but since his memory is fading, they die again within the recollection process, intensifying the tragedy (Stone 283).

  "Śmierć wtóra" (Repeated Death): lovers unite with the remembrances of lips.

  "Po śmierci" (After Death): dying once is not enough.

Moon Poem

Oh, to crawl into the lunar cool,

Entering that silver soaked in gold,

And to know Death's wonder scrutable,

And inscrutable no-yearning cold!

  There was laughter, there was magic once,

  Throngs of gods in lunacy of dreams,

  There were two or three, there will be none--

  No more future gods, or so it seems.

     Impetus of heights they left behind,

     And expanse of distance without cause,

     And this surplus silence goldenshine,

     And this residue of silver froth.

  I would like to meet you there someday,

  Gaze at your complexion and your hair!

  What is missing on the moon? I say:

  Neither of our bodies, dear, is there.

Night is breathing through our blood, which flows

Through a virgin furrow underground.

Now our bodies are asleep, and know

Nothing of what's going on around.

Poem Of-Moon

1 Into of-moon to-penetrate cool,

2 Enter into that silver through-and-through golden,

3 Into not-intricate of-death miracle,

4 And into intricate no-yearning!

5 Was there once charm and laughter,

6 Crowds of-gods in of-dreams madness,

7 There-were two and there-were three,

8 But none already not will-be!

9 Remained after them--impetus of-heights,

10 And that distance without reason,

11 And that golden surplus of-silences,

12 And those silver froths...

13 There I-would you to-meet want!

14 There to look at-your cheek!

15 Exactly two of-our bodies

16 Lack to-me now on moon!

17 Night breathes with-our blood,

18 Blood in-underground flows balk...

19 Our bodies now sleep--

20 Our bodies nothing not-know...

NOTES

  For a comparison, see the "Noc" (Night) poem in Leśmian's Russian-language cycle, "Moon Intoxication" (UR 83-93, 1907), which is ethereal erotica containing dreams of sailing the moon in a boat.  Interesting information on lunar mythology is contained in Mircea Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, I, 22-3: "Time-factored" notations of the lunar cycle are documented as early as the Upper Paleolithic and some 15,000 years before agriculture was discovered; these were later incorporated into a symbolic system including woman, water, vegetation, and fertility-death-rebirth.

  I have lined the verse translation to resemble a new moon.

  2 This is an example of Leśmian's contradictions: silver gold.

  3-4 "Zawiły" and its negative mean "intricate" and its negative, and create the effect of a neologism, as though one called a person "couth, kempt, and shevelled."  I therefore opted for "inscrutable" and, of course, "scrutable."

  4 "Beztesknota" is the absence of yearning or longing: no-yearning.  On pp. 168-72 of "Słowotwórstwo na usługach filozofji" (Linguistic Innovation in the Service of Philosophy) in Studia, Ewa Olkuśnik documents over a dozen such neologisms in this and other poems.

  9 The Faustian personality seems to be a divine legacy of humans.

  10 Cf. Leśmian's essays on poetics in SL, wherein the principle of cause and effect is attacked.

The Snow Idol

Somebody made him from this snow

At empty edge of woods before;

The only witness was a crow.

His name is whiteness, nothing more.

  He made him don a silly hat

  And thrust a beg-stick in his side,

  Then looked into his eyes and spat,

  And jeered, "You want to be alive?"

He lived on drab and clumsy, and

When trails of terror led me there,

I was allowed to understand

He's god--he's worshipped everywhere.

  The birds believed in him, the trees

  Were spellbound, winds clung to his chest,

  He tempted me with what's in me,

  The private nescience in my breast.

Through silences of blinding chill,

The lord of snowbound distant cause

Stared at the flatlands and the hills

And dreamt them higher, without flaws.

  And when he used Sun's afterglow

  To brighten Void--fallacious sign!--

  I comprehended all, and so

  I re-believed in him that time!

Idol-or-snowman of snow

1 There--at of-same woods end

2 Where crow--only of-void witness,

3 Someone him built from this snow,

4 Which him to name: whiteness and nothing.

5 On head ridiculous put hat (= czapula, a pseudo-dialect invention),

6 And in side begging stuck stick--

7 And in eyes looked him not-affectionately,

8 And said in jeer: "Want--then live!"

9 And lived clumsy, like unspecial,

10 And when-I to-him came in-track of-frights,

11 Already in-him believed all birds,

12 So I-understood, that that--god...

13 He-charmed trees' eyes with-glitter,

14 With-chest, to which winds adhere--

15 And tempted me nescience-with of that,

16 What was in me--only me...

17 Lord of-snowed in distance cause

18 Through blindness of-chilly silences

19 Looked into gullies and flat,

20 Which to-him themselves dreamt up and up!

21 And when afterglow took from sun

22 And into void glared--false signal--

23 I-understood all up to end

24 And believed once again!

NOTES

  This poem indicates an attitude similar to Goethe: although neither Leśmian nor Goethe were particularly devout, they came to understand that the unenlightened common man needs religion.  As Max Weber stated, man cannot grasp the holy and needs to anthropomorphize it.  The title is a good indication: "Bałwan" is both a snowman and an idol ("bałwochwalczy" means idolatrous); thus, the pun itself shows God to be man's construct.

  Trznadel (TL p. 187) considers this poem an ironic view of the fetishist mythologizing of reality by humans: God is an ambiguous creation.  Stone (279-80) defines it as the philosophical problem of theodicy.  "Here the animated snowman symbolizes divinity identifiable with creative power and the poet himself."

  4 The Modernists loved to give God negative attributes such as "endless."

  5-8 This stanza appears to echo the mocking of Christ.

  9 The word "bylejaki" is used here (it was taken by Sandauer to describe Leśmian's poetry): it means haphazard, willy-nilly, unspecial.

  17 Cf. Leśmian's attack upon cause and effect in Szkice literackie.

Paltry

Here's Paltry erring agile in shady chaos-being.

One eye is colored sky and the other hazel; he

Can't see the world the same, for each eye sees differently--

Which of these worlds is eyewash, which is he really seeing?

He hides two souls within him: one roams the heavens far,

The other's rotting, grounded.  He loves two girls besides:

The blonde one weaves a shroud for a valley that has died,

The dark one's color-learning eternal sleep by heart.

So which one does he love, then? Deep water! This won't work!

And cliffs! And exhortations! No help from anywhere!

In craven convolution, the gardens flee to murk!

In hands excess existence--in eyes, dust of night air!

The fog on girlish lips is a warm-up drink for dreams--

The flowers see each other--deaths crowd each other out--

He's had a taste of heaven, and with a golden spout

He pours his shadow into the shade of rustling trees.

Little-Insignificance

In shady of-existences disorder Little-Insignificance roams himself vivaciously.

One has eye blue, and second--of-beer, so rather

Not sees world the same, but with-each eye--differently--

And not knows, which of these worlds is actual--by-default?

Two souls hides in his breast: one around heaven self roams,

Second--on earth wastes.  Two at time loves girls:

That black-one--sleep eternal by heart colorfully learns;

That light-one--shroud airy weaves for deceased valley.

Which of them loves really?--Bad paths! Deep waters!--

Cliffs! Calls! And from-nowhere no assistance!

And knotted from fear, in murk flee gardens!--

And in palms--excess of-being, and in eyes--crumbs of-night!

And fog on lips of-girl, of-ruddy musings warm-up drink--

And flowers reciprocally themselves see--and deaths reciprocally suppress themselves--

Little-Insignificance consumed bite of-heaven and mixes with-golden mixing-stick

Shadow own with shadow of-birches several.  And birches dream themselves and rustle...

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 525, this poem was first published in Skamander, Warsaw, April 1935.  The texts are identical.  On pp. 182-5 of TL, the same author indicated that Leśmian based this autobiographical, autoironic poem on the folk superstition concerning apparently human creatures which have a tendency to disappear during storms and drag clouds in their wake. The suffix "-ek" is an affectionate diminutive with folksy tendencies; Leśmian used similar suffixes, such as -iska and -ala, in poems such as "Do śpiewaka" (To the Singer) and "Bajdala" (the closest translation of which would be "Klutz."  (Papierkowski 134, 66-70.)  Artur Sandauer (Samobójstwo... p. 19) believes the two girls are the dark-haired Dora and an imaginary blonde such as the nonexistent girl in "Pan Błyszczyński."  In "Dwa krzyże" (Two Crosses, 1908), the poet said that two girls loved him: "jedna weselem, a druga bólem" one with joy/wedding (a possible pun), and the other with pain.  A similar pun is present here in line 4: "zaocznie" means both "by default" (in legal terminology) and "para-eye-ly," which I rendered as "eyewash."

  Both Stone (138-9) and Trznadel (TL 182-5, 352) say this poem represents the absurdity, paltriness, and futility of human endeavor in the midst of banal necessity; Anatol Stern ("Powroty..." in Wspomnienia 333-5) adds that the poet was a tiny, modest, mousy gentleman with a worried face who was very easy to overlook.

Silvron

The night ensued and thirsted for a change

Of murk to shivers in the half-dream dew.

The Oak idolatrous believes in Thyme,

In Father Thyme's effect on heavens blue.

  The grassy lights are dimming in a row,   

  Their death affecting forests full of game,

  And midnight is estopped by laches while

  The fence glows starry with the future's flame.

     Where is the path, and where the pathlessness?

     And where do life and pain go after death?

     Why does the moon blaze on if there is naught?

     You mean there is no God and there's no breath?

The moon is a largescent village where

My brother Silvron scrapes the silence which

Outgrows itself by means of sleep and dreams--

The right to silver-be do not abridge!

  Oh, what a silly no-kay connoisseur

  Of mist and wine!--We've got a poet, see!

  Attendance-dancing on the badlands dreams

  And on Forever's bustling melody!

     He catches silver mice in nets of rhyme,

     And silver weeds, and silver apple-trees!

     And onto lunar plains or proto-plains

     He throws confetti silence, silver peace...

"The murk can hear us, Death!" he says, "Do not

Guffaw at heaven, don't be silly, please!"

And onto lunar toil or proto-toil

He throws confetti silence, azure peace...

  "I breathe the fog," he says, "I'm he who knows

  That God is tears and storms without surcease!"

  And onto lunar bronze or proto-bronze

  He throws confetti silence, golden peace...

     Cerulean rivulations swell and teem,

     It's full of valleys, hills, and puddles there,

     As empty as a stage without a cast,

     A no-hope void in Space's floodlight glare.

So Silvron whispers into the expanse

Inane, "Murk doth not live by light alone!

We're all of us unhappy, so why should

We go on silvering?  That is an unknown...

  Ere Death transforms into a blade of murk

  The contour of my soul, the concept of

  My tears, may brittleness of golden void

  Suffuse my eyes with stardust from above!"

     And while he speaks, the Void has bared her fangs

     Aglitter with her viciousness sincere--

     Another God is dying presently,

     Another star is due to disappear.

Silverishness

1  Closed-in night, thirsted for-changes

2  Of-murk to shudders in half-dream of-dew.

3  Oak idolatrously believes in Thyme,

4  In influence of-Thyme--upon heavens.

5  Lights on grass die in-windrow--

6  Death of-lights moves of-forests game-forests.

7  Midnight prescribes [= statute of limitations] itself under fence,

8  And fence--with-future of-stars silvers.

9  Where is without-pathness?  And where--path?

10 Where--breath after life?  Pain--after demise?

11 Thus not is breath and not is God?

12 And not is nothing--and moon blazes?

13 Moon that-is--village large-escent,

14 Where silence scrapes brother mine--Silverishness,

15 Who himself with-own sleep-or-dream outgrows.

16 So to-him existence in silver--do not prohibit!

17 That--incorrigible Existence-or

18 Poet!--Knower of-fog and of-wine.

19 Courting sleep-or-dreams--of wilds,

20 Of-eternity melodious bustling.

21 In net of-rhymes fishes silver mice,

22 And silver weed, and silver apple-tree--

23 And throws tatters of-silver silence

24 On moon's plain or proto-plain...

25 "Death"!--he-says.--  "Murk us hears!

26 Not laugh yourself in sky and not clown-around!

27 And throws tatters of-cerulean silence

28 On moon's toil or proto-toil...

29 "I-am he--he says--who with-fog pants

30 And knows, that God that--tear and snowstorm!"

31 And throws tatters of-golden silence

32 On moon's copper or proto-copper...

33 It is full there of valleys, hills, puddles,

34 Cerulean Vistulations and Dniestrations

35 And ostensibly stage without actors

36 Despairing empty in light of-infinite-spaces.

37 And whispers Silverishness into distance insignificant:

38 "Not with-only light murk itself feeds--

39 All-we are unhappy,

40 But what for to-silver?--Not known...

41 Before death into blade of-murk transsubstantiates

42 Idea of-my tears--and outline of-spirit--

43 May to-me with-stars dustify eyes

44 Of-nothing golden dustification!"

45 And while thus says--nothingness precisely

46 With-fangs glitters--bad and honest--

47 And another one star extinguishes--

48 And another one God dies.

  According to Jacek Trznadel's postscript to Leśmian's poetry, p. 525, this poem was originally published in Skamander, Warsaw, March-April 1936.  (Line 20 thereof read "of-God with butterfly--confusion.")  "W chmur odbiciu" (In a Cloud Reflection) was printed in the same issue.

  According to Karpowicz, pp. 5-35, Leśmian was passionately interested in the "proto-cause" which precedes the first cause, much like a wave precedes the water it pushes.  He wished to arrive at "zero existence" so as to be able to create from the point preceding matter and name, thus using psychology to conquer physics.  He was also very interested in transitional forms (such as liquid crystals in physics) and antitheses because he felt that nothingness exerts a pressure on matter equal to the pressure matter exerts on nothingness, the resulting tension being the genesis of creation.  Since, according to Karpowicz' interpretation of Leśmian, the past and future are separated only by an observer, who cannot control either, the theory of relativity has become polarized, and time becomes eternal, mythical, and sacred.

  Balcerzan, in Oprócz głosu, pp. 29-44 (Warsaw, PIW, 1971), indicates that in this poem the absence of actors does not interfere with the drama in the least: the tension of conflict is created among the parts of the landscape.  The existence of matter is a fact, the existence of spirit only an illusion, so God becomes problematic; if the reason and order of the world cannot be grasped by earthly experience, the poet "installs" his observer on a higher plane, on the moon.  (Let us not forget that the Polish word for "sky" also means "heaven.")

  According to Balcerzan, this poem documents pre-biological creation: the only "actors" are chemical elements, resulting in a dialogue between positive and negative in which universal nonexistence does not interfere with the moon's blazing.  The end result of all this absurdity is absurdist laughter, which alone can reconcile the unreconciled.

  Title:  "Srebroń" is a noun formation from "srebro," silver, but since both noun and adjective are identical in English, a change had to be made.

  7 To become prescribed by the statute of limitations: legal terminology for to become too outdated for filing suit.  The explanation was much too voluminous for one short line, so I found a legal synonym in equity: estopped by laches.  Polish jurisprudence did not distinguish between law and equity, so either synonym can be used.

  13 "Ogromniasty" is pseudo-dialect: "Huge" with an unexpected folksy suffix.

  17 The protagonist is being called improper, wrong, not okay.  In order to do justice to the poet's neologisms, the translator has borrowed Brezhnev's famous negation, "no-kay."

  18 Kajetan Papierkowski calls "Istnieniowiec" a neologism; it also contains an allusion to Existentialism (Trznadel considers Leśmian to be one).  However, such a philosophical term in English would belie the crude folksiness of the Polish word.

  21 In Sindbad, pp. 87-8, Leśmian has magic silver flying creatures bringing Sindbad silver apparel in the moonlight so as to appear before the flaming Princess Sermina, who has the power to command whatever dream she wants.

  24ff "Pra-" is a prefix for "very ancient, primeval," and "błoń" is an archaism for "błonie," meadow or plain (Papierkowski 123).  According to Giergielewicz, Rym i wiersz, p. 119, the repetitions are crucial here: depriving this poem of the similar sounds elicited by combining the same prefix with different monosyllables would be depriving it of its basic structural agent and main catalyst of ambience.  Rhyme is a good quiet servant with a dash of magic: the more unexpected, the more effective.

  35 The Vistula and the Dniestr are rivers.  (Cf. Papierkowski 134.)

  38 An allusion to "Man does not live by bread alone."

  40 According to Pankowski (76-81) and Trznadel TL, pp. 351-2), human existence is questioned as senseless, absurd, and unhappy, and rhetorical questions about its purpose are answered in the same stanza.  The absence of justification makes the questions come full circle.  The poem closes with death and nothingness; existence and silvering are interchangeable, and the absurdity of both is brought out.

  44 "Rozsypucha," dustification, is a pseudo-neologism for brittle sand.

  48 According to Sandauer, Samobójstwo... p. 32, Silv

ron is the personification of creative powers of natura naturans within the object, somewhat like the Roman harvest-god Consus.  What, Sandauer interjects, did this god do the rest of the year?

Urszula Kochanowska

I went to heaven's wilderness when I was dead;

God looked at me a long time, then He stroked my head.

"Come closer, Urszula!  You look alive to me!

I'd like you to be happy--say what you want," said He.

I whispered, "God almighty, if you could just make

The lovely heavens just like home in Blackwood Lake!"

I hushed, alarmed, and raised my eyes to see if He

Might possibly be angry to hear that wish from me.

God beckoned with a smile; there suddenly appeared

--o praised be God!--a home just like my own so dear.

Same household goods, same flowers, down to every blade!

In spite of my delight, my eyes were sore afraid!

"Here are your goods, your flowerpots," He said.  "In sum,

I'd like to be here when your yearning parents come.

And after I have tucked the stars to sleep at night,

I'll visit you from time to time, if that's all right."

He left, I went to work with bustle and ado,

I swept and washed the floor, and set the table too;

I put my pinkest dress on, and sat down as before,

To conquer sleep eternal, and watch, and wait some more.

The early splash of dawn moved golden on the wall;

I heard somebody knock, and footsteps in the hall.

I ran up to the door and saw, to my dismay--

My heart was breaking--it was only God, not they!

When after death to heavens' I-arrived wilds,

God long looked at me and petted on head.

"Near yourself to me, Urszula!  You-view like live....

I-will-do for you, what you-want, so-that you-be happy!"

"Do so, God--I-whispered--that in of-sky Thine lovely

Everything to-be the same, as there--in Blackforest!"

And hushed alarmed, and eyes raise,

To examine, if is angry, that Him for something ask?

Smiled himself and beckoned--and then from Divine grace

Arose house--cup in cup like ours--blackforestish.

And furnishings, and earthen-pots of-bloomed green

So similar, that eyes scared from merriness!

And said: "Here are--furnishings, and here--earthenpots.

Only to-see, how come homesick parents!

And I, when stars to sleep will-lay in heaven,

Not-once to door will-knock, to visit you!"

And went-away, and I immediately bustle myself, as can,

So set to table, sweep floor--

And in dress pinkest body beclothed,

And sleep eternal chase--and vigilate--and wait...

Already dawn first dash-with goldens self on wall,

When just-then one-hears steps and to door knocking...

So I-tear myself and run!  Wind around heaven rings!

Heart in chest dies--No!  That--God, not they!

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 528, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), Warsaw, December 24, 1932, and appears to have been inspired by a poetry convention dedicated to the Baroque poet Jan Kochanowski.  According to Miłosz p. 75, Kochanowski wrote his "Treny" (Laments or Threnodies) when his little daughter Urszula died at the age of three; although he disregarded Scaliger's precept that only important personages may be mourned in verse, he nevertheless adhered to strictly conventional form.  For instance, Jan Kochanowski's Polish works (Dzieła polskie, Vol. II, pp. 59-75) contain 19 threnodies for Urszula plus an epitaph for her sister Hanna, who followed shortly; they are 13-syllable distychs almost entirely lacking enjambments.  (A rare example of enjambment is on p. 9 of the same volume: the reason is that the poem has no end and no beginning, referring to a serpentine constellation which bites its own tail.)  Threnody no. xviii, pp. 70-1, is in modified "lira" form (11,7, 7, 11); the heptasyllables and hendecasyllables rhyme with each other, producing the effect of a child enclosed within her father's arms.

  As Stone (277) and Karpowicz (137) indicate, this is naive conventional dialogue appropriate for children, imitating Kochanowski's form; in terms of theodicy, however, God is rendered useless at best.

People

Some poor and simple people walked on by,

No future and no destiny, and I--

  I saw them and I heard them go!

They walked unnecessary, unaware--

You see them and forget that they were there.

  I saw them and I heard them go!

They walked the humble edge of shadow-sighs,

And their existence went unrecognized.

  I saw them and I heard them go!

They sang some sort of grievance workaday,

Their deaths were commonplace, the same old way.

  I saw them and I heard them go!

I see and hear them no more at this time--

I like the silence that they left behind.

  I saw it and I heard it too!

Walked here, people poor, simple--

Without fate, without future.

  I-saw them, I-heard them!

They-walked unnecessary, unconscious--

Who them sees--he forgets.

  I-saw them, I-heard them!

They-walked of-humble by-edge of shadow--

And nobody not ascertained their being.

  I-saw them, I-heard them!

They-sang complaint just any-old-kind

And died just any-old way...

  I-saw them, I-heard them!

Already them not see-I and not hear-I--

I-like lasting after them silence.

I-saw it, I-heard it.

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 531, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), Warsaw, December 9, 1934.  The texts are virtually identical except for a small change in punctuation.  Pankowski (76-81) considers the people's trek similar to the lemmings' "absurd migration."  Human existence is questioned as senseless and unhappy, and nature is the only consolation.  (However, as we have seen, it is losing its consoling power for Leśmian as time goes by.)

  This poem may echo line 39 of "Silvron"--we are all unhappy--except that these "unconscious" and "workaday" people do not even have art and creativity to console themselves.

  The "any-old-kind" nature of lines 10-11 (bylejaki) uses the same word Sandauer applied to Leśmian's poetry in general.  It can mean anything from willy-nilly/ haphazard to workaday/ nothing-special to sloppy/ perfunctory.

Childhood Memories

I recollect--I can't remember everything--

The grass-infinity beyond--I'm calling out.

The thyme is fragrant, and the sun's asleep in hay--

I'm happy with the sound of my own airborne shout.

  What other reminiscences from bygone years?

  A garden full of faces and familiar leaves--

  My glade-end laughter--it's so hard to stifle it!--

  A populated, leafy, crowded world naive.

My head's embroiled in sky-high rustling as I run,

Inhaling breath of heaven, treetops in my eyes!

My footsteps thunder on the levee--they are heard

So far away--so dandy far away--oh, my!

  I hurry home through meadows, up along the stars

  That seem to like the uproar of my running feet...

  My body's dawdling in the corners everywhere,

  The room is overfull with springtime and with heat.

Alert and boundless life with all its might! My lips

Are touching windowpanes--a glassy nowhere trip!

From Years-of-Childhood

I-remember--everything remember not I-am-able:

Grass... After grass--allworld... And I-someone call.

Pleases me myself own in air calling--

And fragrances wild-thyme--and sun sleeps--in hay.

And more? What me more from years past itself dreams?

Garden, where many leaves familiar and faces--

Just leaves and faces!--Leafy and peopley!

Laughter my--at end of-glade. Laughter stifle so difficult!

I-run, head confusing in roars, in under-clouds!

Breath of-sky have--in chest!--Of-trees tops--in eyes!

Steps my already thunder along dike--above river.

Hear them so far! So miraculously far-away!

And now--run back to house--through grass--

And on stairs, while like of-running feet clamor...

And room, overfilled with-spring and with-heat,

And that my in corners dragged-around body--

Touch of-pane--with lips... Trip--into nothing, into glassification--

And that alert no-boundary from all powers--existence!

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), Warsaw, July 5, 1936.  (With the exception of one punctuation change, the texts are identical.)  In TL pp. 349-51, the same author indicates that childhood herein is presented as a paradise lost; the pessimistic and tragic fate of humanity finds no justification, and any attempts to explain unhappiness and destructiveness lead to absurdity and the confusion of cause and effect (cf. "Sen," "Kęska," "Zły jar," etc.).  In LMP, Trznadel says, Leśmian escapes into the subjective individual time of primeval myth and fairy-tale, presenting an elegy of happiness dating from the days before confrontation with defeat.  According to Głowiński ZP, p. 244 ff, elegies present the real world as a crystallization of the function of recollection because of the distance separating act from remembrance.

  Stone (282-3) compares this elegy to "Ubóstwo," wherein the beloved family does a second time in memory.  "The concreteness of the recollections makes the poem extremely vivid, heightening the longing for the minutiae associated with childhood.... the images and actions of the past... are juxtaposed haphazardly--as though related by a child."  In a 1901 fragment "Ze wspomnień dzieciństwa" (From Childhood Memories, UR 46-8), Leśmian indicated that he was fascinated by magic and reflection: his own room in the mirror did not reproduce the sound of his foot-stamping in the real world.  The sun painting dogs on the wall is an echo of a Romantic commonplace of "repetition" in water or mirrors, the "nature painting" of contemplation.

Sunday

Beyond the town there's bleakness, Sunday, and despair!

The barren sky just barely gives the earth her share.

Two castaways, their faces pale with love and stress,

Found shelter in the ditch for their no-roof caress.

He wrapped a busy hand ingratiatingly,

In shopworn cheeky charm, around her breast, while she

--Her eyes adawn in ditchy murk--not virtue shed;

She yielded to necessity-despair instead.

Incompetent with lust, ridiculous with haste,

Routinely they prepared a sinful-brisk embrace.

As if it were a bush, he nibble-crawled her hair,

Just whispered one endearment when his feet were bare.

Before she freed her byway body from his hug,

She only kissed him once, and that was through the fog.

It's hard, with hungry bellies aglow in stony beds,

To scrape the wasted hugs for some leftover shred.

And even drunken dreams are fraught with splinter-snakes:

You've got to kiss your way into the numb despair,

And shivers must have access to sore bones and skin.

Their love was therefore hostile, spiteful and chagrined.

The shadow fenced the rest of all existence out;

They owed their shared existence to its grace, no doubt.

So they consumed their ecstasy without a sound,

No feast in sight--but it was Sunday all around!

1 Beyond city in lonely-place--despair and Sunday!

2 Empty sky hardly to-earth itself imparts.

3 Two wretches pale from love and fear

4 Search in ditch shelter for caresses without roof.

5 He her breasts, with-used-up boldly charm,

6 Collects industrious palm-of ingratiating bread-bun.

7 And she in dusks of-ditch with-pupils dawns,

8 Surrendering, instead-of virtue--necessity and no-hope.

9 Incompetent from desire, ridiculous from hurry

10 Adroitified themselves lazily to alert sin.

11 To her hair with-lips crawled-in, as-if to bush,

12 Once only affectionate little-word whispered in barefoot.

13 And she, before crawled-out from arms with-side-of-body,

14 Once herself only to him with-fog kissed-up.

15 Hard for-them, in hard bed hungry incandescing bellies,

16 Scrape of-consumed caresses ruined fluffs!

17 Even in dreams of-inebriation stick splits and knots;

18 Is-necessary oneself to-kiss-up to hushed suffering.

19 Is-necessary to-shivers give access to hurtified bones--

20 Therefore loved themselves hostilely--in spite-of love.

21 Existified for themselves from grace of-that shadow,

22 Which them in ditch from rest fenced-out of-existence.

23 Silently delight consumed--in far from merriness-or-wedding [the Polish word means both]

24 That only, that was around Sunday!

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 533, this poem was first published in "Kultura," Warsaw, April 3, 1932.

  1 Sunday, etymologically broken down, means "no-actionness," i.e. the day on which no work is done.

  5 According to Papierkowski (163, 171), "śmiałkować" is a neologism meaning "to behave boldly."  Hence, cheeky.

  7 "Dnieje," "she-dayifies," is a neologism when used for a person; normally, nothing can "dayify" or dawn except a day.

  13 "Ubocze" is a neologism for "bok," side, which, according to Papierkowski p. 131, has the purpose of making the language strange.

  14 "Przycałować" is, according to Papierkowski p. 159, a neologism; it means to stick onto while kissing, or kiss in something's direction.  The same applies to line 18, "docałować," except that here the prefix indicates that the distance has been covered in full.

  19 "Zbolały," lit. hurt/ sore, is not a neologism in Polish.  Neither are "existify" in line 20 or "adroitify" in line 10.

  22 "Wygrodzić" means to separate, both in the sense of establishing parameters and of physically fencing off access.

Volatile sunset's fire-glowing smile

(Goldify longer!) starts to decline.

One more pink cloud on the mountainous crest

Quenches its edges like all the rest.

And one more day we have all lived through

(Goldify longer!) shade-rendezvous.

Flamey smile of-unlasting auroras

(O, gold yourself longer!)--is-dying already.

And still another of rosy clouds

With-edge is-extinguishing on back of-mountains.

And still another lived-through day

(O, gild yourself longer!)--goes-off into shadow.

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 535, this poem was first published in "Literatura i sztuka" (Literature and Art), as a supplement to the "Nowa Gazeta" newspaper, June 11, 1911.  The original title was "Mimochodem," which means "in passing" or "by the way," i.e. something like "an incidental poem."

  A 1902 poem by Leśmian (UR, p. 65) reads, in part: "That blue-gray star which is acquainted with the lake/ Is pinkified by the not-quite-extinguished shudders of the aurora."

  Ireneusz Opacki, in "Pośmiertna w głębi jezior maska" (Death Mask in the Depths of the Lake) in SL pp. 311-37, considers this poem an example of the rapid and unrepeatable manner in which things pass.

  This tiny poem, like a sunset on fast-forward, probably captures the fleeting dynamics of changing light in a manner most Impressionist painters would envy.

Why all these faces, and these candles all around?

There's nothing bad can happen to my body now.

They're standing--all but me, I'm lying on my bier.

A hypocrite is grief, but death must be sincere.

Those fascinating garland-leaves have caught my eye--

Eternal, personal, and festive here I lie.

The lull has passed, Death in my head is roaring, and

I realize it's important not to understand.

It's hard to grow familiar with the grave--but then,

Nobody wants to be what he has never been!

What for so-many candles above me, so-many faces?

To-body mine nothing already bad itself not will-happen.

All stand, and I single (male) alone lie--

Regret not-sincere, and to-die necessary sincere.

I-lie just, stared-into in of-garland leaves,

Festively--eternally--personally.

Death, who hushed, again begins in head to-roar,

But I-understand, that not is-necessary nothing to-understand. [Polish double negatives do not cancel each other out.]

So to-me difficult familiarize self with burial-mound,

So self not wants to-be something different, than self was!

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 538, this poem was first published in "Kultura" in Warsaw, February 28, 1932, together with "Sarcophaboots."  The Poznań library contains a manuscript, probably from the "Kultura" editorial archives.

  Głowiński (ZP pp. 259-60) states that Leśmian's "fantastic empiricism" treats death as an immediate experience; this is funeral poetry without distance.

  In "Lustro i trumna" (Mirror and Coffin), p. 85, Jan Zieliński draws parallels to "Pogrzeb Dun Żuana" (Don Juan's Funeral) and "Do siostry" (To My Sister), which feature coffin claustrophobia and participation in one's own funeral; since the corpse is condemned to rot, time in the coffin is a transition, although it is a transition to nowhere.  According to Zielinski, Leśmian was obsessed with "self-love" and death as a valuable essence and macabre feast.  In mirrors and in coffins, the subject strips and loves himself.  In "Dziewczyna przed zwierciadłem" (Girl Before a Mirror), death is the punishment for the pride of self-contained love.

Etherealness

An empty-pitcher fly-buzz on the shelf,

The eye-sweep of a vanished bird outside,

Hand-silhouettes on lawns--all ownerless,

It's barely greened and trusts that it's alive!

It proudly indigoes at Quiet's feet

And purples cocky, challenging the haze!

But it's so paltry that it's less than blue,

Just background.  Lilac lines on white-cloud sprays.

Beyondness in a sparrow's eyes.  Wells purr.

Flesh meets the grass.  The woods I mistify!

You glade your lips.  The windmill-levee dawns.

Wide-open sky.  The clover-bees' demise.

A dead girl's ribbon on familiar sod,

Unstable sun-jerks blade in rainment tears,

Re-undulating faith, converted twice,

The jasmine's calling for forever here.

Man walks the earth, and dwindles faraway.

He carries body-thicket easily;

Within that airy copse he often trips,

And prays, and peers at universe and bees.

Airiness

1 Sound of-fly in empty jug, which stands on shelf,

2 Trail in eyes after disappeared behind window swallow.

3 Shadow of-hand-or-arm--on lawn... And all--of-nobody,

4 Hardly itself greenifies--already trusts, that lives!

5 And how proudly itself blues at of-silence foot!

6 How cockily to fight with fog itself bepurples!

7 And is of-it so not-much, that less than blue...

8 Nothing, besides background. White cloud with lily through-line.

9 Distance of-world in eyes of-sparrow.  Meeting of-grasses with body.

10 Murmurs in well. I--in woods. With-fog you-were?--I would!

11 Lips yours--in glade.  Dawn under dike in windmill.

12 Sky--in gate in wide-open... Death of-bees in clover.

13 Ribbon of-died girl on known sod.

14 Sun, which falteringly jumping, blades itself in tears of-rainness.

15 Faith waves for existence after second conversion

16 And calling for eternity in jasmines beyond fence.

17 Walk on earth of-human, who on horizon,

18 Smallifying, easily airy thicket of-body carries

19 And in that thicket himself prays, and embroils each moment,

20 And looks-out from this thicket on world and on butterfly.

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 537, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), Warsaw, July 31, 1932.  In his TL pp. 343-4, the same author indicates that nature is not a fairy-tale here, as in The Meadow; occurrences are one-time and non-transferable. The meaning is not in the intellectual construction of the poem, but in the cracks between items: disparate things acquire dynamism and general applicability through compressed sequences of diachronic observations reminiscent of "In the Evening" in The Crossroads Orchard.

  6 "Napurpurzać się," to bepurple oneself, according to Papierkowski p. 171, is an example of a repeated verb derived from an unrepeated one.

  13 Cf. "Matysek," wherein the hero "plays out/ wins" (a pun) the weeping of a dead girl who never materializes.

  14 "To blade itself" is derived from "blade," i.e. something small; according to Papierkowski 163, such dynamization of nouns is unusual in Polish (but not in English!--Tr.).  This one is reminiscent of Goethe's "türmende Ferne" in "Auf dem See."  "Deszczarnia" (Papierkowski 130) is a neologism having something to do with rain, but it is never defined; thus, I translated it "rainment" in the verse version.

  17 "Widnokres" is a juxtapositional neologism for "horizon"  (Papierkowski p. 159), literally "scope of seeing."

The Zoo

Flamingo slender rosifies above the pond,

And hushes mirror-quiet beauty silken-winged.

The distance concentrates its perishable deeds

Therein--no matter what, it's always distancing.

  Like furniture divine that's covered with a rag,

  A nearby camel has turned flaxen in the sun.

  The world requires support for its confusion, and

  Decides to use his humpy silence to lean on.

The sun can never quite unglisten from his eyes.

They stare at me beneath the blotchy blanket blare

That's thickifying with a tiger-carrionness

Composed of murk that's only birches' shade elsewhere.

  My flower-barking dog head-nestles unto me--

  He wants to be correct and crowdless in my world,

  With begging eyes before my face personifies--

  I enter Creature-mist and cloudy All-thing swirl.

Bestiary

1 Flamingo, pinkifying, slimming self above water

2 Of-winged silk with-hushified beauty.

3 Same distance thus in it concentrates its disappearant deeds,

4 That--if flies, if stands--always distances.

5 Camel in sun flaxified from here steps seven

6 Like furniture of-God, covered with-ruined plaid-blanket,

7 World, which searches-for support for its turmoil,

8 Takes-advantage of humped silence of-this furniture.

9 Eyes, from which itself sun never enough not glistens-out,

10 Look at me from spottily shouted-apart felt,

11 In which murk itself with-tigerish thickens carcassness,

12 That same murk, which in garden was only--of-birches shadow.

13 Dog my, flower aroundbarking, with-animal-head himself cuddles toward me--

14 To exist in my world accurately and without-crowdly--

15 And with-eyes after request in face to-me himself personifies,

16 And I enter--into Fog of-animals and into Cloudswirl of-all-things.

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 537, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), August 14, 1932, along with the "Moths" from Sipping Shade.  However, only the first two strophes were published, as the space for the rest of the poem was evidently needed for an announcement regarding the Women's Commercial School.  ("The fate of poetry," Trznadel concludes laconically.)  In TL p. 119, the same author indicates that the animals try to achieve consciousness and self-contemplation while the human tries to return to identity with nature as a perceptual or epistemological act of intuition.  Karpowicz (113-17, 136, 289) says that in the experiment known as life, everything is fleeting, unrepeatable, precious, pivotal, and dignified.  A camel becomes an Archimedean support point for the muddled world: God is thus dependent on a camel, much as John Donne (in a funeral sermon for Sir William Cokayne December 12, 1626) neglected God for a fly-buzz distracting him.

  3 As in "Spring Ox" and "The Cobbler," the distance itself distances, i.e. is not a function of perception; similarly, the flamingo in line 1 "slimmifies."

  9 "To glisten to the end," i.e. al the way out; to complete that action.

  10 "Spottily" and "shouted-apart" are neologisms according to Papierkowski pp. 178, 195, formed from verbs or adverbs plus suffixes.

  14 "To exist for a while" in a manner lacking crowds (Papierkowski 157, 193).

  15 The dog becomes human and the human reverses the process.  Even the word for the dog's eyes is the word used for human eyes (oczy), not for animal eyes (ślepie).

On Resurrection Day

On Judgment Day, God's might will meet

With unexpected opposition;

That night not everything will go

According to His supposition.

There are some throats whose cry has died

And hushed, irrevocably buried.

Some blood has never been spilled twice,

Some bloodshed has been solitary.

For some decay, its own demise

Was horrifyingly sufficient!

Some buried bones are proud, and won't

Revive without some opposition!

So what if heaven's trumpet calls

To daze the world with Death defeated?

Not every laugh can be revived,

Not every sob can be repeated!

At Time Of-Resurrection

At time of-resurrection God's power

Will-meet upon opposition of-sudden occurrences,

Not everything will-be itself in that night

According-to heavenly imaginations.

Are such throats, whose call

Silenced in burial-mound--unreturnably.

There-is such blood--spilled blood,

Which not spilled anyone--twice.

There-is such rot, which already enough

Experienced horror in its dying!

There-is so proud in earth bone

Which will object--to resurrection!

And so-what, that trumpet in heaven plays,

In-order-to with-new being--world to intoxicate?

Not every laugh itself to-wake allows!

Not every tear itself allows to-repeat!

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), April 11, 1936, the Easter issue; Trznadel considers it significant that the editors chose this particular day to print the poem.  In LMP, the same author explains that the ethical superiority of man to God evident in this poem is reminiscent of Heine's paganism in "Adam der Erste" (Adam the First), and also of "Eliasz" and "Two Matthews" by Leśmian. Eliasz retreats into the no-world in order to determine the possibility of a consciousness other than existence; the Matthews find the herb of immortality and give it to "Crygod" in their compassion instead.  This poem is also reminiscent of the untitled poem beginning with "Today's the anniversary of the day we met" (actions are ephemeral and passing, and the lyrical hero wants to resurrect the past) and of "Wyruszyła dusza w drogę" (A soul began its journey), wherein God maliciously deprives the dead soul of everything so it will have no choice but to love Him.  Cf. also "Matysek."

Reminiscence

Those narrow paths my childish feet would touch--

What happened to them, and where are they now?

They convolute the way tears convolute

When into naught the eyes have hurled them down.

The freshness and the damp would waken me

At dawn, the sun would paint my walls with gold--

Some golden dogs, and golden violins,

A golden seacoast--golden canyon-holes....

Whoever peers conjuredly enough

Into the light must wind up seeing there

(Made visible by hush) a camel gold,

A sunny bandit with a flashing stare.

The table was a desert while I ate,

A daydream camel-riding rogue was I;

My father read his news in rustle-peace,

As though he knew the humps would pass him by.

A jug embroidered triple rainbow-light

On dad's mustache--a cornice--napkin-edge--

A buzzing wasp became embroiled in drapes--

The buzzing seemed to come from sunny threads.

The mirror-floor would glisten sleepy loot--

The palm-tree frond whose lighter underside,

Like greenery spilled by a passerby,

Would dull, diluted shadow, rarefied.

The armchair would relax and flaxify,

Lethargically digesting velvet hush;

While sugar frolicked with an azure spark,

A loaf of bread would pinkify and blush.

The clock would shake a spreading note into

The parlor from its springing coils up high;

Amid the sunny dozing furniture,

The people lived along and didn't die.

But something happened then.  It wasn't good.

That clock struck timid in our future towns;

The people started dying when their souls

Against their cocky bodies ran aground.

Memory

1 Those little-paths, which with-foot childish

2 I-touched... What with them?  Where they?

3 So they circle, like tears themselves circle,

4 From eyes into nothing hurled!

5 Woke me in-morning dampness fresh,

6 And sun painted to-me on wall

7 Golden dogs--golden seashores,

8 Golden violins--golden abysses...

9 Who sufficiently exorcisingly looks

10 Into light, bevisualized with-silence,

11 Must at end see sunny camel

12 And bandit sunny with sparky glance.

13 At breakfast I-would-look at table like into desert,

14 Dreaming, that on camel I-ride... Bandit am-I...

15 And father, as-though knowing, that camel him will-pass,

16 Read daily-newspaper with calm and rustle...

17 Carafe belighted with-embroidery of-threefold rainbow

18 Mustache of-father--and cornices of-cupboard--and edge of-napkin white,

19 Wasp in curtains embroiledly buzzes,

20 As-though same curtains with-threads in sun buzzed...

21 Floor mirrored, glistening with-sleepy acquisition,

22 Of-palm leaf with lighter somewhat bottom,

23 But so, that dulled in dilution shallow,

24 As-though green someone spilled casually...

25 Armchair, digesting silence velvet,

26 Heavified comfortablized and flaxened...

27 Sugar frisked with-spark blue,

28 Loaf of-bread--pinkified.

29 Clock shook-out from springed coils

30 Lengthening-itself note into depths of-parlor.

31 In furnished half-sleep of sunny rooms

32 Everyone continued and not died.

33 And then something itself happened...--Bad, that something itself happened...

34 That same clock in other cities struck more-shyly...35 And soul itself faltered against inconsiderate body--

36 And sequentially to-die they-began....

NOTES

  Pietrkiewicz (Leśmian and Czechowicz p. 339) indicates that Leśmian's sun never just shines in vague splendor: it brings out the veins in leaves, it paints golden dogs and violins on the wall, or lazily lies on its back in grass.  Sandauer (Samobójstwo 30-1) says that the "zero action" resulting from stop-motion dynamics typical of fragmented memory results in a "formal action" of neutrality which gives freedom to fantasy; two complicated imaginative operations cancel each other out and have no effect on reality at all.

The Night

Such foreign, otherworldly night has never been!

It came in from outside--we must survive it--yes--

Dead items are a-weeping--minor point--today

Eternity can't deaden every kind of death.

There's nothing new beyond the grave, except for how

The spirits flock to life-chaff at this lonely gate.

It's all the same--the repetitious nature of

Disasters lingers on--trees groan beneath its weight.

A small white apparition silkened from the clouds

And cobweb-wondered if he'd spoiled somebody's dreams?

From Moon-Tarpeian Rock a newborn god' been hurled

Into the traitor's chasm.  I still hear the screams.

1 Such night not was! That night--not-hereish!

2 Came from other world and necessary it to-survive...

3 Already weep things dead... But for that--lesser!

4 Not every death today can-be with-eternity defeated...

5 Nothing new beyond grave!  Nothing--except this gate

6 Where themselves spirits fly toward of-existence chaff!

7 And whatever itself happens--happens itself the same--

8 Of-bad occurrences repetitiousness weighs even on-trees!

9 On spidery from clouds thread came-down dream-corpselet white,

10 Stood in window and looks, to-whom to-sleep bothered?

11 Scream I-hear!--from Tarpeian on moon cliff

12 Into ravine god was-thrown, who was born!

NOTES

  Accordingly to Trznadel Postscript p. 538, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), Warsaw, April 23, 1933.  The texts are identical.

  As in "Silvron" and "On Resurrection Day," Leśmian is giving expression to his pessimistic contention that life is completely pointless and that death offers no respite or consolation.  With the wisdom of historical hindsight, one might even speculate that the poet was predicting the deadening horrors to come.

  9 Śnitrupek is a neologism, according to Papierkowski p. 150: it is composed of the word for "sleep" and "dream" (the Polish is ambiguous) plus the word for "corpse" and a diminutive suffix.

  11-2 The Tarpeian Rock was on the Capitoline Hill in ancient Rome; condemned criminals were hurled to their death from atop it.  Leśmian, however, feels that gods, not criminals, are being killed.  His fearful disgust of contemporary populism was also expressed in "Pejzaż współczesny" (Contemporary Landscape, first published in Poznań's Dwutygodnik literacki (Literary Bi-Weekly) in June of 1932, which satirically depicts soulless mechanization in terms so acerbic as to be worthy of Georg Grosz.

Terror

Starved straggler, search for sleepy sustenance in murk!

Each shadow, every mist may be of use to you...

What is the sense of tears if weeping can't be heard?

Infinity means naught if God is not in view.

 O come you all, o come in craven disarray!

 Be you so plentiful-uncountable that I

 May lose my spirit in the cluster of our dreams,

 And not distinguish you from shadows if I try.

I want to glimpse the street, and see a lot of hands--

And lots and lots of faces passing single file.

For nothing more shall happen, it's the end today--

And there have been no secrets for a good long while!

 We've got to plan our steps and not procrastinate,

 Confer on everything, and cluster in a heap...

 We shall possess no more, and never wait again--

 Right now we must go groping in the sadness deep....

In Terror

Go into murk for sleepy food, famished homeless-wanderer!

Shadow each and fog each may to-you itself be-useful...

But what means tear in eye, if not hearable weeping?

And what means that infinity when God not seeable?

O all, all come in terror and no-order!

May you be so many so uncountable,

That-I myself with-spirit lose in our dreams' group

And that-I not may differentiate, where you, and where shadows?

Faces from-everywhere appeared, as many-as-possible faces!

And palms--and that seeable in see-through street!...

All today itself will-end, nothing itself already not will-happen--

And not is already from long-time no secret!

Necessary to-go oneself in-group, must not delay...

And talk about everything... And enterprise steps...

And from-now-on nothing already not have, and for nothing to-wait--

And as soon-as-possible--in blindness to go into sadness deep....

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 538, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), Warsaw, February 4, 1934.  This poem is a perfect example of the ethical humanism of the later Leśmian: death is an inescapable nothingness, and only human relationships can offer some consolation.  Nature is no longer mentioned.  The collective despair appears to be an eerie prefiguration of the deadened dynamics of a concentration camp.

  In "Oda do młodości" (Ode to Youth), Mickiewicz wrote "Chórem w światy spójrzyjcie, zatrwóżcie się chórem!" (Look into the worlds in chorus form, and become terrified in chorus form as well, i.e. in unison).  There is also a possibility that the title refers to the legal term "in terrorem," i.e. a testator's provision that his heirs will not inherit unless complete harmony as to his will prevails among them.

Sarcophaboots

When paupers die, and death sows millet-bait

To lure them barefoot into coffin crates,

The families so enjoy despair forlorn

They buy them shoes (forever's full of thorns)

Composed of bast (I say sarcophaboots)--

They squander their last dime on pedi-loot.

When Klutz is dolled up in this tinsel cheap,

He knows he's really poor, and starts to weep:

This poet tried to hide from misery

In carefree song, and judge eternity.

When burgled, I don't even give a hoot--

You can't rob me of my sarcophaboots!

It doesn't matter whom I got them from--

A lover, or some sly and vicious scum--

I'll swagger-strut around the great beyond,

And go to God, and really carry on;

Repeatedly I'll walk the clouds, and so

Make sure H notices my pedi-show!

Offended by my pride bizarre, then God

May spurn me as a nothing, poorly shod;

If so, I'll stomp all over Him before

My spirit crumbles.  That's what boots are for!

Cadaverisms

When wretch dies, and death her millet

Pours him for lure, so into coffin walks barefoot,

Family of its sacrificial despair takes-advantage,

To him show for forever, for overly is thorny...

And, small-coin wasting last for feet of-clumsy-one,

Acquires shoes of base, so known cadaverisms.

And when him already dresses-up in these frills beggarly,

Then [he] finally sees that [he is] wretch--and weeps!

I--poet, who from misery wanted self to-elude,

To sing without care and eternity to-decide,

When me at-night robbed, jeer from earthly waste,

For I know, that there--in otherworld I-have my cadaverisms!

Gift of-lover or of-enemies sly handout?

All one! In cadaverisms I-will run to God!

And will self proudly stroll in otherworld,

Just there and in return along of-clouds back,

And time again, and not-one, to third time,

Not sparing eyes of-God of-my feet display!

And if God, with-odd offended haughtiness [mine],

Will-scorn me like nothing shod overly badly,

I--angry, before self spirit mine with dust identifies,

Will stamp my feet at Him with these cadaverisms!

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 539, this poem was first published in "Kultura," Warsaw, February 23, 1932.  Leśmian's letter to Kazimierz Wierzyński concerning the Adamowicz fraud cause some parts of this poem to appear autobiographical: the poet says that his deputy had caused him 20,000 złotys in tax debts and that the sequestrator had tried to vandalize the poet's apartment and library.  According to Głowiński ZP p. 261, Leśmian's "death poems" represent a triumph of nature over culture; man-made artifacts occupy a modest position.  Here, however, this does not seem to be the case.

  The word "trupiegi," according to Papierkowski p. 86, is a Kashub dialect word for a corpse's shoes.  Trznadel (TL p. 189) confirms this finding but points out that the word sounds like a neologism.  In a peasant setting, a naive bumpkin is able to threaten God; in "Na krańcach" in Eseje wybrane p. 59, Jastrun calls the poem "a row with a great colleague."

  Finding a translation for the title was a highly interesting endeavor.  I called several funeral parlors to inquire whether the deceased receive any special shoes to wear in the coffin; all the responses were negative.  American corpses wear the same shoes they wore while living, while Polish peasant corpses are given flimsy rattan slippers, presumably so the shoes they wore while living can be sold or otherwise recycled.

  So since the things do not exist in English, I felt I could call them anything I wanted.  Sleepers, Cloudhoppers, and Funeral Bast were considered and discounted in favor of Sarcophaboots, which is less enigmatic and also has a vague connection to Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Were Made for Walking."  The Greek etymology of "sarcophagus" is "to devour flesh," and sarcophagi were by no means reserved for royalty or even the nobility, as seen by such prosaic funerary sites as the Roman Termessos in Turkey, where many sarcophagi had oiled leather gaskets for easy addition of new corpses.  Incidentally, the red shoes in "Jan Tajemnik" are also a pivotal factor in that story, and Elija's defiance in "Eliasz" sounds very similar to the protagonist herein.  Partially for that reason, in the verse version I translated the last line (literally I'll stamp my foot at Him) as "I'll stomp all over Him," as spiteful American children in the "terrible two's" tend to shout "I'm gonna stomp all over you" when stamping their feet.

  According to Stone (141-3, 286), God is indicted as uncaring; the bast shoes symbolize poverty and suffering.  She feels the poem is based on a Russian folk-tale about łapti (bast shoes) and the traditional confrontation with the tsar (here, God): ritual defiance and challenge.  The irreverence shown God is reminiscent of "Urszula Kochanowska" and "A Soul in Heaven"; "The soul... does not delight in reaching heaven, on the contrary, it blasphemes before God, desiring His death."  Similarly, in "Białocha" (UR 168-75), a peasant dreams a king is spoiling her in his palace, granting her very whim, letting her ride in gold carriages eating cracklings, ordering his soon to look like her boyfriend.  Białocha is as disappointed to find this is only a dream (caused by a stranger fondling her in a deserted barn) as Urszula is to find that the person visiting her is only God, not her parents.  In "Ubóstwo" (Poverty) in Sipping Shade, the poet invites God to fight with him ("I'm human, I can stand anything"), and in a 1900 letter to Przesmycki (UR 238), Leśmian wrote: "I feel such strength and power within me that I could hurl at God these very words: "I am strong!"

  According to Miłosz pp. 222-3, Part II of Mickiewicz's Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) contains the protagonist's defiant harangue against God, known as the "Great Improvisation."  Since God, not the protagonist, is indifferent to human suffering, the latter is morally superior and, encouraged by "evil spirits, he is ready to insult God: 'You are not the father of the world but a...' He is saved from pronouncing 'czar' by the intervention of good spirits."  Cf. also Faust's "Weltfluch."

  Pankowski (65-6) indicates that Leśmian's denial of the existence of God is "in form only," as God's presence makes the defiance more exciting; the above mentioned invitation in "Ubóstwo" is reminiscent of Jacob and the angel.

  In TL pp. 350-4, Trznadel indicates that human life is purposeless and deprived by consciousness of any possible comfort.  Death becomes tragic, not part of the rhythm of life: nothing is left except ethics and defiance.

  Karpowicz (113-5, 61-76) states that every moment is precious,

destructible, and unrepeatable for Leśmian.  Life is an experiment, a rebellion, and a challenge against destruction; anything can be perfect in view of the inherent imperfection of all existences.  Karpowicz's analysis of the relationship between God and man is fascinating:

  Leśmian's God is dependent on human imagination and desires.  If God is unacceptable, you war against him; if acceptable, you have a human relationship with him.  But declaring war, whether on God or on distance, confirms the existence of the adversary.  Man wants to rule without the delimitation of death and is irritated by God's desire to maintain superiority; a conflict is thus inevitable (God as a sublimation of evolution).  Such a God, of course, rules out love and joy of the soul, but hate may be a higher form of love, as it is separated from the wish to possess the beloved person.

  As man's thinking-partner and his projection of his own cryptic desire for immortality and human pride, God cannot be killed--that would be suicide.  So the poet attempts not to humanize God, but to deify man (otherwise bragging with sarcophaboots would be impossible); however, the attempt betrays unease and is ultimately unsuccessful.

  In my opinion, Leśmian's attitude to God and society (ambivalent at best, negative at worst) is a projection into the supernatural of the child-rearing practices in his circles.  (Anthropologists say that this defines religion.)  Polish parents are often like Ogilvy's committees, critical without being creative; they tend to be demanding but unsupportive, and are hence perceived as negative.

The Passerby

Lily demise on the wilderness road,

Nothing except boundless grass everywhere!

So to the boundlessness, nobody else,

I called, "Redeem me, I'm in great despair!"

  Then came a passerby, I don't know why,

  But with his fingers he gave me a sign.

  Maybe he though I was calling to him,

  Maybe misheard me, or tried to reply.

Silence. It seemed like the world had gone down--

Edge of the sun-ball was lingering still--

He comprehended some item and said,

Beckoning to this great silence distilled:

  "Homeless and breadless and strengthless am I!

  Sobbing without a tomorrow--like you.

  I am the one who's defeated--the same

  Frustrated victim that nobody knew!

"And now my death stakes her tent in ravines,

Enemies burned down my house to the ground.

Dreams will be crushed by no other than God

When the penultimate hour resounds.

  "Yet I have confidence in one more dream,

  Trusting that it will come true just in time!

  I will share with you whatever the dawn

  Rosifies somehow in this dream of mine!"

Then to the end of his lifetime did he

Promise to help me in my distress;

And then he reached out his hands unto me,

Thereby redeeming--redeeming me, yes!

Demise of-lilies in wilderness above road,

And nothing--and boundlessness of-grasses!

To of-grass boundlessness and to nobody

I-called: "Redeem me, redeem!"

And walked passerby... Not know-I, why

With-palm to-me gave sign.

Maybe thought, that it to him,

To him called-I thus!

And was silence, as-though world passed--

Lasted still of-sun edge--

And he on silence with-eyes beckoned,

Understood something and spoke:

"Not have-I either bread, or strength, or home!

Like you--without tomorrow sob.

That--I, unknown from defeat to-nobody!

That--I! That same, that same!

Death in my ravines tent unfolds,

Cottage--burned enemy.

When penultimate strikes hour,

Dreams destroys God, same God!

But I-trust still to-one dream,

That itself will-fulfill in time!

Whatever aurora in this dream rosifies,

I-will-divide between us!

And vowed faith to-my sorrow

For all of-life days!

And palms, palms gave me both

And redeemed, redeemed me!

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 539, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), May 3, 1933. [May 3 is Constitution Day in Poland.--Tr.] In TL p. 363, the same author states that only ethical humanism can furnish redemption of a purposeless existence.  Being saved by another person is the only chance, and the anonymous redeemer is usually a passerby.

  Pankowski (77-9) adds that since God is "omnirotten," cruel, and impotent, solidarity with other people can help.  In "Cmentarz" (The Graveyard), this solidarity extends beyond the grave: a passerby recites the prayers requested on an epitaph.

The Spring Ox

First heat of spring is sparkling on the lawn,

It's fogging windows, misting steaming ponds.

Flies circle, resolute but purposeless;

Two dragonflies unite in one caress.

One cricket-leg salutes, the other won't;

Some beetle choked a tiny flower's throat.

A single ox in killer-heat remains,

A horny hill in desolate terrain.

He's sick.  His lungs and ribs are overworked,

His dizzy head's beset by maelstrom murk...

The earth was always underhoof--but now

He's lost it, tripped, and total-tumbled down!

Too big for pity, too obese to doze--

In Spring he fainted; that's the name they chose.

I knew him!! Milky fragrance in his snout,

Warm breath with herbal sweetness oozing out.

He loved to lap the water with his tongue

And hear its belly-sloshing sloppy song,

And dustify in golden gleaming sand

With muddy leggings.  I don't understand

Just how he'd patter out each day at dawn,

Horizon-watching madlife carry on,

And everyplace he'd stick in nowhere dreams,

No-home in stables, farring in the fields.

His worried eyes would never disagree,

Espying barely human fog in me...

Believed in God, not knowing He was God;

He'd stop to spin more nescience in the sod.

No fraternizing with his body's pain--

He lived without and hurtless, self-contained

Until his bones unworthy jeered at him:

He couldn't stand a spellbound joyless Spring,

Lay blinded by the sun, with nightmares of

Demises.  Stubborn martyrdom I love,

And stoop to kiss his head in dreamy murk;

He's like a rock whose suffering is work.

He's lying there.  Flies settled on his back.

He's belly-flopping into void.  A crack

Between his whitened lips, a broken weight

Emerges, licking death like sugared bait.

The field is silent with a living sear

That's woven from a thousand lives, but here

The day has stopped.  Time loosely twirls away,

Nearby abyss abuzz, an empty box.

A secret stiffened toil looms over it:

The hush collected in a fainted ox.

Ox of-Spring

1 First heat of-Spring, glistening self on grasses,

2 Blinds panes in huts and water in ponds.

3 Flies with-motion purposeful--but without purpose circle.

4 In one bindweed amorous two dragonflies themselves tie.

5 Cricket lifted leg--at attention, and other--into sleep lengthens...

6 Throat of-flower small choked bumblebee large--

7 Only ox, which in-this Spring gas drinks murderous--

8 Like horny mound in emptiness of-field protrudes!

9 Bad to-him!  Oversuffered ribs, overworked lungs!

10 Field in animal-eyes circles... Murk to animal-head itself throws...

11 Never till-then not lost ground under hoof...

12 Lost now and fell!... Fell--with-whole existence!

13 Too large--for pity, for sleep--overly bellied...

14 And as fainted in Spring--calls self Of-Spring.

15 For I-knew him!  Had in snout--fragrance of-milky warmth,

16 In whose breath besource of-herbs sweet exusions.

17 Liked to-listen, how water, with-lip sucked alertly,

18 To bottom of-belly to-him falls--melodious and not-carefully...

19 Liked to-pack dustily in sand, more-glistening than gold,

20 Pattering hoofs with attachments of-mud.

21 Not know-I, how itself it happened--but already at dawn

22 He-would-come with horizons into crazy living-togetherness...

23 Where self he-appeared--there always stuck in of-sleep-or-dreams no-locationness,

24 And without-housed in stable--and distanced in field...

25 With-eyes, which self worry, although world not contradict,

26 Looked into me like into distance--into fog barely human...

27 Believed in God, not knowing, that that--God... On furrow

28 He-stopped, to continuation further spin of-that ignorance.

29 And not brothered self with body, which died-away in woe--

30 Lived self in self--beyond it... And it--let it hurt...

31 And jeered at-him suddenly unworthy bones:

32 Not stood-he Spring--without happiness-or-luck, charm--without joy...

33 Blinded him sun.  Dreamed-to-him self demises...

34 Forehead I-lower and kiss animal-head, with-sleep-or-dream mixed,

35 Hard like rock, which suffers with difficulty--not at once...

36 I-love resistance martyrish--hey!--of such rock!...

37 And he lies and lies... Flies back besat.

38 With-belly into nothing self flops, and lips paled--

39 Animal-tongue from them self into world came-out and to side sprained

40 Death licks like sugar given for bait...

41 Day stopped nearby... Time with-looseness self wanders...

42 Ravine nearby sounds with-wasp like empty chest.

43 Silence stands over field--alive and hot,

44 But above that silence, from existences woven thousands,

45 Towers with-silence of-stiffened drudgery

46 Silence--brought-together in body of-fainted ox.

Notes

  According to Karpowicz (113-8), in the experiment known as life, everything is fleeting, unrepeatable, precious, pivotal, and dignified: in "The Zoo," "The Moths," and "Two Convicts," a camel-hump, a mouse, and a single person become irreplaceable, which means that the gap they leave behind cannot be plugged.  The dying ox is also phenomenal, unique, and unrepeatable, with the most important of silences (death) nestling within and above him.

  Kamieńska, "Metafizyczny wół" (Od Leśmiana), says that almost every poem by Leśmian is like the bone of a paleontological animal: one can read and reconstruct the entire poetic organism, the entire system of poetic truth, from a single fragment.  His nature is dense and real, and the form a calm 13-syllable rhythmical "epic" form reminiscent of Pan Tadeusz.  (Since I used iambic pentameter in the English, each line lost three syllables.)   Although it sounds like a miniature epic combined with folk gawęda style--I did not translate the peasantish "hey!"--it is actually a philosophical treatise: motionless lying is a laborious activity, and the hero is an animal, equal to man, and a solidarity between man and animal is established.  She also indicates that a poem is a time-fragment stored in rhythm, and that this poem pants like an ox out of breath: we circle him with our thoughts like flies.

  I found that nature herein became malevolent and destructive, especially when compared to the idyllic "In the Field" in the earlier Laka; no more lazy sybaritic doze here, but rather a loss of control, passing out.  I therefore used enjambments, particularly at the end, to indicate incipient decomposition; since Leśmian rarely used enjambments in his mature poetry, this is very much an exception.

  Title: According to Papierkowski 102, a "wiosnowaty" or "zwiosnowaty" ox is a term straight from dialect, found by Leśmian in a dictionary.  According to Kamieńska, supra, it indicates an animal fainting during springtime work.

  3 A tautological negation: with-purpose, but purpose-less.  Since manner and teleology are contrasted, the verse translation attempted the same.

  16 "Wypoty" is a neologism, according to Papierkowski 124.  It seems to mean exhalation or sweat; "exusions" is vague enough to hold both.

  20 Papierkowski p. 140 says a "przytwierdka" is something that stuck to a hoof.

  23-4 "Bezokole" means "lack of location," a place not enclosed by a circle (Papierkowski 117).  Thus: no-home, farring, etc.

  24-6 The ox "distances," i.e. is a perceiver, not perceived; the same applies to his observation of the poet ("espying barely human fog in me").  Furthermore, the word for human, not animal, eyes is used for the ox's eyes.

  27 I capitalized "He" for God in the translation to distinguish from he, the ox.

  33 Deaths in the plural dreamed themselves to him.  (Cf. "Deaths.")

To My Sister

All cares simultaneously left you alone;

You slept in your coffin your hush-sleep divine.

You're tiny in death, like a doll made of wax...

I love this poor wax--paltry, bruised, and resigned!

All corpses are lonely in Nothing's black hole,

And here I, your brother, go buying a dress

So you can have something to wear in that world--

This baggy and quite inexpensive finesse.

In every death lurks a sleep-covered crime--

The criminal's not even here!

And everyone's guilty of everyone's dying--

I'm sure, for it seems very clear.

I'm pointing my finger at culprits I know,

And no one's defending himself--

It's this guy--and that one--and this girl--although

I know it was also myself...

Collective and silent, our guilt in the room--

"That's fate!"  Is that all we can say?

Both living and dead should be spared evil too--

Let's raise up our voices and pray!

I'm still apprehensive I got the wrong news--

You're hungry and sick in your bed--

You'll come here some evening, crawl out of your tomb,

And whisper, "I need to be fed!"

And what can I say if that happens?  May God

Speak for me, for naught must be said...

The world for some nourishment searching you plod--

Oh, sister!  There is no such bread!

I'll never forget where they carried your bier:

A boring and ramshackle van.

The horror contained both grotesqueness and jeers,

Inhuman necessity, and

I fretted that you would be buried alive

In vicious lethargic repose;

Someone who pushed into the wagon contrived

To calm my erroneous woes.

I waited.  The train was to take you to town.

At noon it was sunny and hot.

The coffin--it shuddered when wheels creaked around

And started their ironshod trot!

I stared at the tracks, feeling lonely, forlorn,

Alone in the sunshine--oh, girl,

The world was diminished by your tiny form--

A shrunken and atrophied world.

A flimsy idea, like a spidery strand,

Suggested itself to my grief:

Perhaps there is no one so dear that you can't

Continue alone when they leave!

Time spent with a corpse is an emptiness day,

The one you're bewailing has flown.

The eyes--their expression--the lips will decay--

Death treasures not faces, but bones!

I know you'll devoutly and darkly decay,

And carry a posthumous cross;

I don't even dare to look in on your grave,

This underground Calvary loss!

The corpses are brought to their senses, deprived

Of blood and illusion and drink;

Your dregs have no name, therefore God passed them by--

Not knowing it's so--you I think.

O God, please stop flying to spots we can't see,

And cuddle us close with a sob!

Forever mistreated manure may we be,

Yet we still believe in you, God!

1 You-slept in coffin sleep own, so quietly, in divine-manner,

2 Not know-I, if of-all at once liberated worries?

3 In death so smallified as-though doll of wax...

4 I-love that poor, that sore wax!

5 Corpse is always alone! One to one with abyss!

6 And exactly I--your brother--

7 Dress to-you acquired too big and cheap,

8 Dress--for the-other world!

9 In each death lurks crime, which with-sleep-or-dream itself covers,

10 Although criminal lacks...

11 All guilty are of-death of-each person!

12 Oh, yes! For certain--yes!

13 Guilty-ones point-to I-can!... And nobody self not defends!...

14 And that--and that--and that!...

15 And I myself! I--most-of-all, although I-know, that also they!

16 And I--and they again.

17 Guilt of-all around--not-speaking, collective,

18 And we say: fate!

19 May from evil God living-ones and dead-ones keep!

20 Let-us-pray ourself for this in voice (= out loud)!

21 So I-fear myself, that you-are still hungry and sick,

22 That bad I-will-receive news--

23 And that you-will-come from-beyond grave some evening

24 And whisper, "Give me to-eat!"

25 And what then will-I-reply! Nothing to-say not is-necessary!

26 May speak for me--God!

27 Sister! Already in whole world not is that bread,

28 Which could have you nourished!

29 Coffin your rested in heavy-duty wagon,

30 I-remember boring wagon,

31 And was absurdity and jeering in that horror!

32 And was inhuman necessity!

33 I-feared myself, that You alive we-will-surrender to (burial-) mound

34 In bad, lethargic sleep.

35 And someone barged-into wagon, and spoke, that myself I-err,

36 And pacified me.

37 I-waited, until wagon moves, to drag You to town...

38 In heat of-sun creaked wagon.

39 Shuddered coffin, and was hour twelfth.

40 Iron thundered hoofbeat!...

41 And alone suddenly in this sun I-had-to remain.

42 I-looked tracks in trail...

43 World itself shrunk for always by your small form

44 And smallened whole world!

45 And thought flimsy to my in-spun itself mourning,

46 As-though spidery thread,

47 Thought, that not is on world so dear person,

48 Without whom not can-one live!

49 Night, near dead-ones spent, calls itself--empty!

50 Lacks he, for whom you-sob...

51 Will-decay eyes--and expression of-those eyes--and lips.

52 Death looks into bone, not into face!

53 I-know, that you-will-decay piously and that among dark

54 After-death you-drag cross,

55 But not dare-I to underground peek Golgotha,

56 To ascertain, how there you-sleep?

57 Corpse sobers--deprived of blood and inebriation!

58 Already of-illusions--not an-iota!

59 And maybe God passes-by your precipitation without name

60 And now knows, that that--You?

61 God, flying-off into strange for us parts,

62 Halt flight your--

63 And hug with weeping to chest that eternally mistreated,

64 Believing in You manure!

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript pp. 540-1, this poem was first published in "Wiadomości Literackie" (Literary News), Warsaw, December 24, 1933.  It is probably autobiographical: Leśmian's sister Aleksandra died of tuberculosis June 20, 1921, and lies buried in the same Powązkowski Cemetery in Warsaw which was to house her brother's remains as well.  Her epitaph reads "she lived 34 years," and at some unknown time, her name (Lesman) was changed to "Leśmian" on the epitaph, as evidenced by the narrow space between the m-i-a letters.  According to Literatury pozytywizmu i Mlodej Polski (The Literatures of Positivism and Young Poland), vol. G-L, p. 623, B. Pasternak translated this poem into Russian.

  In LMP 851, Trznadel mentions that this poem represents Leśmian's fascination with the fantastic medieval "dance of death" motif and the Baroque macabre: decomposition of form and a feeling of chaos is what grotesqueness is for, since it also decomposes the certainty that poetry and its forms are clean reflections of some essence of existence.  Repeated death is one of the poet's favorite hyperboles for the horror of death.  (In "Cmentarz," the epitaph of a dead ship which trusted it would only die once reads as follows: "The corpse is not happy!")

  Głowiński ZP pp. 257-8 says "To My Sister" is the closest thing to an ode Leśmian ever wrote (an elegy only concerns itself with the "hero" of the poem).  Leśmian's idea of death is an irreversible process without hope or consolation; as we have seen in "On Resurrection Day," there is no hope of an afterlife either.

  Pankowski (67-9, 76-81) says that in the face of such despair, dignity and solidarity with earth and humanity is the only thing left.  The poet blames God for the responsibility of people's death; God is responsible for the drama without being its playwright.  On pp. 207-9, he indicates that the occasional surprising vulgarity or intellectualism constitute an anti-poetic explanation of a phenomenon.  "Gnój," manure, in the very last line--in fact, the last word in the poem in Polish is so vulgar as to be sacrilegious, a repugnant evocation of the human condition.

  Other poems echo some of these motifs.  In "To My Sister," the corpse continues to do things (e.g. decay devoutly).  In "Don Kichot," Don Quixote dies a second time after receiving a kiss from the Virgin; in "Ballada o dumnym rycerzu" (Ballad of the Proud Knight), corpses are said to have such power that they can experience a good deal in the grave.  ("A wszak ci w trupach taka moc bywa,/ Że trup i w grobie wiele przeżywa!")  In "Jadwiga," a girl's live skeleton dances in rebelliousness against God's cruelty; in "Marcin Swoboda," God opens an abyss for the puddle (which used to be the protagonist before he was squashed) to fall into.  "Pantera," the Panther, was expressly created for killing by what Pankowski (69) calls the "omnipresent jaguar."  In "Majka" (Klechdy polskie, p. 82), Leśmian puts the following words into a character's mouth: "A łatwo się tęsknocie zdarzyć po śmierci, bo lubi bezpowrotność i nie znosi odszkodowania."  (Longing can easily happen after death, as it loves unrepeatability and cannot stand amends.)  Leśmian's "Don Żuan" (Don Juan), like the Sister's brother, is afraid of live burial.

  5 Abysses are now perceived as malignant and negative; death is no longer an interesting possibility or a consolation.

  11-7 Ethical humanism and responsibility are evident here; guilt is collective, and "fate" has become a lame excuse.

  43-4 As in "Two Convicts," the space of a single body is subtracted from the world, which is thus impoverished.

  45 As in "In the Evening" and "In the Dark," "wsnuć sie" is a neologism (Papierkowski 162) denoting that something insinuates itself into something else like a thread.  Here, "spidery strand" suggested itself.

  49 I am grateful to the Sixties for the freedom to call such a stretch of time an "emptiness day."

  59 "Zgreź" is dialect for a thick precipitate on the bottom of a dishful of liquid; the word "dregs" was used in the verse version.

  61 God appears here in the guise of a corporate-executive father frequently travelling on business (as was the case with Leśmian's father), whose children feel deprived by his absences and apparently receive insufficient love even when he is at home.  The last word, "manure" (almost as explosive as John Donne's "For God's sake hold thy tongue and let me love"), is what irritated Polish parents often call their children.

Loneliness

The wind knows how to hush, the murk

Is rocking murk beyond the wall.

The world cannot be seen or heard,

But I can see and hear somehow.

  Somebody's weeping in the depths

  And reaches for me in despair!

  I cannot recognize the voice,

  But suffering--yes, I've been there.

I hear the begging, calling oaths

And run into the murky street.

Then I can't understand myself--

There's nothing here for me to see!

  The birch is glooming limp with mist.

  An empty dream!... I go on home.

  Nobody'll ever offer help.

  There'll be no meeting.  We're alone.

Wind knows, how must hush...

Beyond window--murk itself cradles/rocks.

Not seeable world, not hearable,

But I something see and hear...

Someone with weeping toward me from bottom of-fate

Despairing lifts hand-or-arm!

Not I-know foreign to-me voice,

But know well that suffering!

Conjures, begs, and calls,

So into murk I-run-out onto way

And nothing not seeing around,

Understand myself not can-I!

In birch fog glooms itself limp.

Dream empty!... I-return to home...

No! Nobody self with nobody will not meet!

Nobody not will-help nobody!

TNOES

  According to Trznadel Postscript, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), Warsaw, February 12, 1933.  A German translation has been produced by Karl Dedecius: "Einsamkeit," Mickiewicz-Blätter, Heidelberg 1958, rpt. Polnische Poesie, under the title "Der Wind."

  Zdzisław Łapiński, in "Metafizyka Leśmiana" (Studia pp. 46-7), indicates that the poet alienates parts of the body from each other; for example, eyes look at something all by themselves.

  Significantly, Leśmian's translation of Poe's "Telltale Heart" is titled "The Eye" (Oko).

  According to Eugeniusz Czaplejewicz, "Gra miłości i śmierci w liryce Leśmiana" in Studia z teorii i historii poezji, pp. 2520264, this poem is a soliloquy at the abyss with no hope of ever being heard.  In his pessimistic later poems, Leśmian presented death as a one-way abyss, not a temporary interesting trip to Hades and back.

  Here, not even human relationships can offer consolation; the multiple negatives in lines 15-16 (not ungrammatical in Polish) serve to underscore the desolation of nothingness.

From Forest Chronicle (Actionness Foresty), Dziejba Leśna (1938)

NOTES

  According to Papierkowski (pp. 39, 151), the word "dziejba" is not in any dictionary; Parandowski says it was invented by Lelewel as a folksy analogy to words like "liczba" (number, host of), "służba" (all the servants combined), etc.  "Dziejać" is ancient Polish for "dziać," to happen or do; the modern word pluralized also means "history" (dzieje = a compilation of things which have happened).

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 543 ff., this collection of poems was published posthumously by Alfred Tom in 1938, which presents several problems.  Some of the poems were reprints, some had intentionally been left out of previous collections by the author himself (why?), some appear to have been unfinished and had no title.  Whether Leśmian collaborated in correcting the galley proofs is also an unknown.

  Alfred Tom, rather than interpreting the material, classified it loosely by subject matter, which means that many historically disparate poems are lumped together arbitrarily.  (Especially in the case of manuscript works or poems published in newspapers, it was not unusual for two decades to pass before "final" publication in Leśmian's case.)  The poet himself had planned to publish such a collection under this title, and Alfred Tom claimed to have followed his "general" wishes; however, precisely what Leśmian had envisaged is nearly impossible to determine now.

  Dziejba leśna appeared in late 1938 and was registered in the administrative listing of publications (no. 38, November 27-December 3).  The publisher, as usual, was J. Mortkowicz/Pod Znakiem Poetów, and 1200 numbered copies were produced.

The Injustice

Close the window--the garden's too tuneful,

And for sleep or for death close your eyes.

This injustice we've suffered is ending!

We can rest now--and life passes by.

New day dawning on whiteness of cirrus

Won't be frightened our bodies are gone--

May the agony that we have suffered

Leave some trace in the fog to go on.

We can't ransom the ruin of horror,

Toil of tears, empty time that's no more;

Death destroys every trace of those traumas

Which did hurt us so badly before!

Wrong

1 Close window... In garden--overly melodious.

2 Eyes for sleep or for death blink-shut.

3 Wrong our ends itself for sure!

4 Life-passes... Allowed-is to-rest already.

5 Day itself new on of-clouds whiteness

6 Not will-fear, that bodies ours lack...

7 But that all, what-we suffered,

8 May in fog have some small sign!

9 For with-what of-horror redeem extermination,

10 Of-tears effort and that empty time,

11 When death will-destroy even wounds these traces,

12 Wounds, which once so pained us!

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 547, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), Warsaw, April 18, 1937.  The texts are identical.

  1 Polish has no articles, so "the" or "a/an" are lacking in the literal version.

  2 The eye-closing referred to is the process of narrowing one's eyes progressively.

  3 Although the verb "to end" is reflexive in Polish, it does not denote that the item is contributing to its own ending.

  5 In his childhood, Leśmian once had to survive a day of horror, and the day knew it.

  6 Cf. "To My Sister" and "Two Convicts," wherein the space formerly occupied by a missing body has positive value.

What did I do?  You're suddenly paling.

What did I whisper?  You just read my thoughts.

You gaze in silence down at the pathway--

I cannot love you--can't love you--cannot!

Over our heads the branches are rustling,

Sunset has blown out the rekindled flame;

Branches are swishing, branches are swishing--

Neither the eyes nor the lips are the same.

I am the one who strolls in the valley;

Some other girl is with me--God knows who--

You follow me, no longer believing

In any charms that you might have had.  You

Totter and reel, a wandering shadow,

Squalid, insensible to your own pain--

With your own braids you're sweeping before us,

Cleaning the path for us with your own braids!

1 What-did I-do, that-you suddenly paled?

2 What-did I-whisper, that-you everything guessed-out?

3 How in-silence you-gaze at roadway!

To-love you I cannot, I cannot!

Evening of-sun blows-off inflamingness.

6 Not those lips and eyes already not those...

7 Trees swish and swish above us

8 With-branches, with-branches, with-branches!

9 That-one to-you I-am, who walks by-valley

10 With another--to-God known--girl,

11 And you go in track after me without faith

12 In of-tears power and in of-eyes your charms--

13 You-go staggeringly like shadow, which self wanders--

14 Bewretched, for pain your not-sensitive--

15 Dusty way you-sweep before us

16 With-braids, with-braids, with-braids!

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 547, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), Warsaw, October 11, 1936.  The texts are identical.

  1-2 Polish pronouns are usually "folded into" the verbs, hence the hyphens.  (They are occasionally added for emphasis, however.)  The same applies to lines 9 and 13.

  11- The poet appears to be marvelling at the self-abnegating devotion, bereft of all self-respect, indicated by his abandoned wife (or girlfriend).

Your Portrait

I have your childhood portrait here--that unformed smile

Foreshadowing the dovelike hugs you give today--

Those are the feet my lips now warm when chill sets in,

But here they're skipping rope in billowed garden play.

  Wedged into shoulders like a boat between its oars,

  A slippery and elusive berry is your breast.

  Your heart was unfamiliar with itself back then;

  I sense it, though: a chick's warm head within its nest.

The metamorphoses of sisters split apart

I see, and drink the spell of similarity--

Possessed by lust, which sister do I own today?

And do I love one girl, or are there two for me?

Your portrait from years-of childhood... That smile not-whole,

Which today me promises hug dovey--

Also feet-or-legs, which I-warm with-lips, when they-chill--

But jumping in garden through rope billowed.

Breast--berry elusive and not to be-grabbed,

In running wedged in shoulders, like boat between oars,

Heart can-be-felt in it like in nest warm head of-chick:

Long self not knew, before into fullness it-grew!

On two sisters in separation--I look in turns

And with-spell of resemblance in silence myself give-drink--

Which today I-possess, by-desire obsessed?

One I-love girl, or of-girls two?

NOTES

  According to Głowiński ZP, this poem is an erotic elegy containing an amorous confession "mined out of the past.  It appears simultaneously to exist and not to exist; for this reason it is probably expressed in negative formulae."

  Ireneusz Opacki ("Pośmiertna w głębi jezior maska" in Studia o Leśmianie pp. 328-9), on the other hand, considers this a picture attempting to eternalize or recreate the former state.  He believes the question concerning the identity of the two forms presented--e.g. the unfinished smile in a state of becoming--is an allusion to Bergsonism.

  Janusz Sławiński, in "Semantyka poetycka Leśmiana," pp. 101-5 in the same Studia, indicates that this is an example of the poet's predilection for paradoxical descriptions: the contrast is reconciled, the meanings contain one another.  The point of departure is the beloved, both present and past, with temporal distance allowing juxtaposition of the two "states" into synchronic projection, sisterly parallelism alternating within the lyrical present.  Both variations on the second person unite on the content-plane of the "I" which creates the basis for the juxtaposition.  (Note that in line 10, the poet is serving himself this "drink"!)  The subjective point of view (erotic fascination with the little girl intimating the grown woman within whom the memories of the child are still there) creates a tension in terms of viewpoint.

  I consider this stereoscopic reconciliation similar to many of the poems of Goethe, especially those dealing with unity in diversity.

Happiness

There's something silver happening in the distant clouds.

The wind is knocking like it brought a letter.  Why?

And we've been waiting for each other much too long!

Some raging storm!  You see the tumult in the sky?

Remember former hurry, intermingled breath?

Your soul is starry and extravagant, my dear.

Why do we hide from brilliance in the murky shade?

Why are we still so sad if happiness is here?

Why does the bliss look for material in the dark,

Absolving nothingness and smudging boundary-lines?

Except for my alarm and for your tears, it can

Contain infinity within its non-confines.

Happiness-or-good-luck

1 Something silver happens self in of-clouds farness.

2 Wind to-door knocks, as-though he-brought letter.

4 We-have long for ourselves waited (= for each other).

4 What movement in heavens!  You-hear of-storm whistle?

5 You have soul starry and out-throwing (= wasteful).

6 Do you-remember hurry of-mixed breaths?

7 Happiness-or-good-luck came.  Why to-us so sad,

8 That before its luster we-escape into shadow?

9 Why it in murk seeks contents

10 And absolves nothingness, and loses boundary?

11 Its boundlessness all in self will-fit

12 Except-for my fear, except-for your tears....

NOTES

  Title: the word "szczęście" in Polish (just like the German "Glück") means both happiness and good luck.  In this poem, the content appears to favor the former, although the alleged happiness is so tinged with regret and nostalgia that it sounds like a pessimistic bruise being squeezed.

  1 "To happen" is reflexive in Polish.

  2 "The wind" is of masculine gender in Polish.

  5 Cf. "Has separation changed you..." in the Raspberry Brushwood cycle in "The Meadow," wherein the lover prays for the immortality of his beloved's body and expresses skepticism as to the survival of the "presumptuous" soul "lost in starry storms."

  8 The implication is that the lovers are shying away from happiness the way people accustomed to darkness shy away from light.

  9 The "bliss" is looking for "meaning, content, material," i.e. raw material for its form.

  11-2 These two lines were reversed in the verse version for purposes of rhyme.

The Tango

Nasturtium fire in feline eyes,

Alert and body-careful haze,

A nowhere-sailing golden boat,

A lilac shore--and my dismay.

  Let's glide in tandem, like two ships,

  Not looking at the gleaming floor--

  We know the flower-truth and are

  Uneasy of our own accord.

     A sullen dusk in windowpanes,

     A multi-storied light cascade--

     A foot immersed in notes to come,

     A musical and ceaseless wade.

  Conspiracy of dance and sound:

  They mistify to mistify!

  Unconscious tango purple starts

  Reluctantly to bluify...

The final sound has second-guessed

The foot in search of cozy fog...

Unused and free, it wants to die--

And dies in music-dialogue.

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript, this poem was first published posthumously in "Epoka," Warsaw, May 3, 1938, together with a few other posthumous Leśmian poems.

  According to Ireneusz Opacki ("Pośmiertna... maska," Studia pp. 311-27), this poem indicates how things pass quickly, unrepeatably. Janusz Sławiński ("Semantyka poetycka Leśmiana," pp. 111-12), in the same book, mentions that the "-ifications" of color refer to the point at which the characteristic separates from the object and returns to nonexistence.  (My impression is that it recreates an artistic sine curve, like Indian ragas in which notes lap around a constant like honeyed waves.)

  In "Na Stepie," an 1897 work in UR p. 12, Leśmian says that the night is bluifying, and in "Spowiedź" (The Confession), a 1915 work on p. 111 of the same collection, blood also bluifies.

  The "underworlds" in line 6 of course have nothing to do with crime, but with the unseen spaces beneath the dancers.  That is why I opted for "Not looking at the gleaming floor" in the verse version.

Forests dream of woods,

  And of rains;

Revelations of

  Bygone Mays.

And they pass on by,

  Twice, it seems...

I don't recognize

  My own dreams.

Dreams itself to-forests--forest,/ Dream themselves rains.

Reveal themselves time in time/ Disappeared Mays.

And they-pass again,/ And once again...

And I my-own dreams/ Not recognize.

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 549, this poem was first published in "Bluszcz," Warsaw, December 9, 1933.  the texts are virtually identical except for punctuation variations and a capitalization of the month of May (which is unnecessary in Polish).

  Karpowicz (pp. 197-205) indicates that for Leśmian, dream and reality are a cognitive unit and can be used to confirm each other.  A poet's only worthy endeavor, according to Leśmian's introduction to this translation of Poe, vol. 1, pp. xxviii, cited in Karpowicz p. 202, is seeing his own dream and conquering for that dream the miraculous right to be.  For Leśmian, dreaming is a partner in penetration into simultaneity and the dazzling epiphany of the essence of things.  It must be repeated that "to dream" is reflexive in Polish, which confers grammatical and therefore symbolic existence upon the items being dreamed ("dreaming themselves").

***

Dusky stairwell.  Empty house.

No one helps a body now!

Snow has dustified your trail,

Sorry's blown away in hail.

  Now we must believe in snow,

  Make a snow-job of our own--

  Shade ourselves in shadow-hull,

  Hushify in silence-lull.

Murk on stairs.  Emptiness in house./ Not will-help nobody to-nobody.

Traces yours snow dusted-over,/ Regret itself in snow whirled.

One-must now in snow dream/ And with-this snow self besnow--

And beshadow self with-this shadow,/ And be-silent with this-silence.

NOTES

  Pankowski (75-81) mentioned Leśmian's solidarity with man and earth and nature in combat against God (To My Sister, The Horse, Asoka, Two Humble Humans, People).  Here, however, even that is lacking: complete nihilistic pessimism is the result.  Trznadel, in LMP p. 349, indicates that this poem contains a deepened and immediate sensuality which is less vital and more humanistic than Leśmian's other poetry.  Its classic simplicity is elegiac in tone.

  As to the translations: Polish multiple negatives reinforce each other instead of cancelling each other out ("not will-help nobody...").  "Besnowing" means "we must cover ourselves in snow."  My interpretation is that "we need another illusion," which is why "snow-job" in the verse version is probably not too much of a liberty.  Regarding silence: "to be silent" is a verb in Polish, much like "callarse," "se taire," or "schweigen" in Spanish, French, and German respectively.  A negative activity thus has a positive verb to denote it.

The Funeral

I hear the raindrop-patter densify on leaves;

The carting of my corpse to Outworld wearies me!

The wheels continue turning, though they don't know the way!

There's nothing left for me but endless murky gray.

O God, why did you force our souls to beg for sleep?

Why did you make our lives so difficult to keep?

And why did you create me from such shoddy stuff

That in this foreign dark, one night can whisk me off?

You poisoned me with venom that affects you not,

Immortified yourself upon my burial-plot.

Why does this carting of my corpse so weary me

And raindrop-patter densify on living leaves?

I-hear, how rain on leaves ever more-densely plashes.

How-much me fatigues of-remains my into otherworlds out-carrying

On wheels, which themselves turn, although not know way!...

For me now only--murk and of-murks expanses!

God, why gave-you soul, which sleep must beg--

And life, which can-be so easy to-take-away?

And why-you me from such create defectuousness,

That me in this foreign darkness any-old night kidnaps?

Why you-immortalize at my funeral?

Why-did-you kill me with poison, which not poisons you?

Why-does fatigue me of-remains into otherworlds out-carrying,

And rain on living leaves ever more-densely plashes?

NOTES

  According to Trznadel Postscript p. 549, this poem was first published in "Gazeta Polska" (Polish News), Warsaw, November 8, 1936.  The texts are identical.

  According to Karpowicz (82-3), Leśmian's heroes easily cross the threshold of death and are reborn on the other side, living on in "intensified self-reflection," observing their own funeral or their own remains, becoming their own doubles.  In "Don Żuan," for instance, the protagonist anticipates his second funeral, when he will die for himself.

  According to Papierkowski (138, 153-4), "marliwo" (defectuousness) is a neologism for very poor material and is an analogy to "paliwo," firewood.  In making a noun into an adjective, it reifies a description.

  The reproach to God could, in my opinion, be interpreted as ambivalent love for a parent who appears to feed on his own child and expects unconditional authority without being willing to take on responsibility.