Poem for Adults
Wazyk, Adam
2. From the Polish Waste Land "Poem for Adults" is one of the most remarkable, documents of our time; nothing that has yet appeared in print, except Czeslaw Milosz' great book The Captive...
...They cut their finger, they felt pain...
...They lost faith...
...7 I will never believe, my dear, that a lion is a little lamb, I will never believe, my dear, that a little lamb is a lion...
...We make demands on this earth, for the people who are overworked, for keys to open doors, 135 for rooms with windows, for walls which do not rot, for hatred of little documents, for holy human time, for safe homecoming, for a simple distinction between words and deeds...
...For a time he was one of the most ardent defenders of the Polish Communist line in cultural matters...
...8 It is true, when these farthing boredoms howl down the great aims of education, when the vultures of abstraction pick out our brains, when students are enclosed in text books without windows, when language is reduced to thirty incantations, when the lamp of imagination is extinguished, when good people from the moon deny us our taste, then truly oblivion is dangerously near...
...I heard the whistling of jets...
...You are no longer a Holy Cross...
...133 11 Racketeers enticed her to a quiet hell in a retired villa out of town— she escaped, and wandered through the night, drunk...
...It is possible to believe that to emphasize the point Wazyk received encouragement from people high up in the Party hierarchy to write a poem critical of the regime...
...This is a naked poem, before it is clothed with vexation, colors and the smells of this earth...
...from the women's hostels, those lay monasteries, sounds of lust and travail...
...A pioneer army, a gathered mob...
...LOOK OUT...
...Night is coming, hooligans play as hooligans will...
...I heard a clever lecture: 'Without appropriately distributed economic incentives we will not achieve technical progress.' These are the words of a Marxist...
...They shamed the routinists...
...I will never believe, my dear, in a magic spell...
...4 From villages, from little towns, they go in wagons, to build a foundry, to conjure up a town, to dig out a new Eldorado...
...Whatever the explanation for the origin of the "Poem for Adults" and for the prominence it was given in a leading Warsaw weekly, the most important thing about it is the picture of ugliness and despondency which the writer sees in present-day Poland...
...People walk here uncaring in rags, our women soon grow old...
...Nearby the radio plays in the darkness, unearthly dance music...
...2. From the Polish Waste Land "Poem for Adults" is one of the most remarkable, documents of our time...
...Routinist should be taught...
...Under the chestnuts run children, big and small, from the half-demolished frames they take wood for the kitchen...
...LUCJAN BLIT...
...Give me one fragment of old stone: let me find myself back in Warsaw...
...they write in the papers, or they do not write...
...She lay on the pavement till morning...
...a girl knots a scarf...
...131 The great migration builds new industry, unknown to Poland but known to history, is fed on great empty words, lives wildly from day to day in despite of preachers— amid coal fumes is melted in this slow torture into a working class...
...They plunge and whistle in the muddy streets: the great migration, dishevelled ambition, on their necks a little string—the Cross of Czestochowa...
...13 They cursed the routinists...
...It is all very old...
...the girl will shortly give birth...
...They drink sea-water, and cry— Lemonade...
...LOOK OUT...
...We demand these every day...
...I was silent, trembling like a mouse...
...It may be that the thaw which reached Soviet writers some time ago has found in Wazyk a much belated Polish enthusiast...
...14 There are people overworked, there are people from Nowa Huta who have never been to a theatre, there are Polish apples which Polish children cannot reach, there are boys forced to lie, there are girls forced to lie, there are old wives turned away from their homes by their husbands, there are the weary dying of tired hearts, there are people slandered, spat upon, there are people stripped in the streets by common bandits, for whom the authorities still seek a legal definition, there are people who wait for documents, there are people who wait for justice, there are people who wait very long...
...As soon as the Nazis were driven out of Poland, Wazyk helped found a literary weekly Kuznica ("The Smithy") which became an aggressive spokesman for "socialist realism" in literature...
...5 And it happened this way: a brown column of smoke burst from a burning mine, a gallery is cut off...
...The "Poem for Adults" was given the main place on the first page, and half of the second page of the paper—which consists of eight pages...
...from rubbish baskets swinging on ropes boys run like cats on the walls...
...Where are you, the dead...
...I am left with a short note, with these verses of a new grief...
...Only smoke wreathing the air hangs over all...
...Here tawdriness takes hands with compassion: what has grown into stone will endure...
...Today our skies are not empty'—from a political speech It was dawn...
...My wife asked: Where were you...
...Routinist should be enlightened...
...They return quietly home to vomit to vomit...
...He should be educated...
...of the agony below no one will tell...
...The dreamer Fourier beautifully prophesied that the sea would flow with lemonade...
...Here you'll be poisoned for sure, Miss Jadzia'Il make off with your boots, so charming when she yawns so charming when she pours...
...She poisoned herself once—they saved her...
...They turn people into feeding bottles...
...THE ENEMY OFFERS YOU VODKA...
...Float away into darkness, you dissonance) I wanted to find joy in the newness, I wanted to tell of a young street, but not that one...
...But one must admit that the pure despair of the writer at what Communism has brought to the Polish people goes much further than anything published in Soviet Russia after Stalin's death...
...I stand like a mindless post under the lamps in the square, I praise, I wonder, I curse, with cobra, with abracadabra...
...but I believe that a table has only four legs, but I believe that the fifth Ieg is a chimera, 132 and when the chimeras rally, my dear, then one dies slowly of a worn out heart...
...Have I lost the gift of seeing, or the gift of convenient blindness...
...Here you will learn your letters, future poet of Warsaw...
...The worthier the man, the greater the pain...
...What explains the publication of this truly revealing poem...
...12 They ran to us, shouting: A communist does not die...
...Written by a leading Communist poet, it will remain a lasting witness of the despair which Communism brings to those whom it conquers, even to those who were its supporters long before the reality arrived...
...I I jumped by mistake on the wrong bus...
...They are expensive, and yet we must...
...Inserted into the poem was a pen-drawing showing a hand covering a lamp...
...The following issue of Nowa Kultura contained a rhymed answer to the "Poem for Adults...
...Adam Wazyk belongs to the generation of Polish poets that started writing before the war...
...THE ENEMY OFFERS YOU VODKA...
...the houses flaunt themselves like peacocks...
...Here young people buy ices...
...I loved other stones, grey and great ringing with memories...
...This is the knowledge of the law of realism...
...A hundred families mourn, two hundred families...
...The immediate conditions behind the publication of "Poem for Adults" are described in the Translator's Note that follows the poem...
...She was thrown out of the Art School for want of a socialist morality...
...when we do not want to talk frankly about the earth, then we say: The sky is not empty...
...The end of utopia...
...It is called "A Poem for the Young" and is signed by a Joanna Sierpinska, whose name is completely unknown among Polish writers...
...Routinist should be convinced...
...A legion of boys releases doves...
...Was I not here as a child, visiting the chemist...
...I got off at the little square in a working class quarter, with memories shimmering from the grey walls...
...People were hurrying home and I dared not ask where I was...
...I let myself go, like a hero, beneath the compassionate columns...
...It illustrated the line: 'When the lamp of imagination is extinguished.' It is known that the editor of Nowa Kultura, Pawell Hoffmann, has been dismissed from his post...
...10 In the newly painted street of fresh built flats, mortar dust floats in the air, a cloud covers the sky, steamrollers flatten the road, transplanted chestnuts are greening, they rustle in the dusk...
...We are grateful to the English monthly, The Twentieth Century, in which Lucian Blit's excellent translation first appeared, for allowing us to make this profoundly moving work available to the American public...
...Don't go, boy, to Nowa Huta, You will be poisoned on the way, be warned by this ominous poster, in your stomach you have a People's fish: LOOK OUT...
...Let me find myself back in Warsaw...
...When we no longer want to talk about the earth we know then we say: The sky is not empty...
...THE ENEMY OFFERS YOU VODKA...
...I went home, like a man who had gone out to buy medicine, and returned twenty years later...
...With a storehouse of oaths, with a little feather pillow, bestial with vodka, boasting of tarts, a distrusting soul—wrenched from the bonds, half-awake and half-mad, silent in words, singing snatches of song— is suddenly thrust out from mediaeval darkness...
...They crowd each other in barracks, in hostels, in huts...
...Fifteen-year-old little whores go down the planks to the cellars, they have plaster smiles, they smell of mortar...
...The squares, like cobras, hold their beauties high...
...A migrating mass, this inhuman Poland, howling with boredom in December evenings...
...No story will be told of the routinist, but there will be novels about the troubles of the inventor, of the fears which disquiet us all...
...the black tunnel is a coffin...
...Routinist should be shamed...
...Oh, here all are young, their memories hold only ruins...
...It is natural for you to love them...
...Only the memory abides...
...The bus swept down a strange road, through Holy Cross Street...
...It never happened that a man did not die...
...They ran to us, shouting: Under socialism a cut finger does not hurt...
...9 A drowned man was fished out of the Vistula...
...But Wazyk, who is not only a Communist but also a genuine poet, allowed his feelings to get out of hand...
...The back of an old four-story house stood waiting its fate...
...I will never believe in minds kept under glass...
...Routinist is not an enemy...
...2 The squares, like cobras, hold their beauties high...
...And does it not flow...
...Wazyk himself is supposed to be free, but, although this poem appeared in the last week of August, not a word written by this normally prolific writer has been published at least until the beginning of November 1955...
...TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: The above poem was printed in the Warsaw weekly, Nowa Kultura, which is the official organ of the Association of Polish Writers and is the regime's watchdog over the activities of the writers and poets in Poland...
...How difficult it is to fall asleep in the years of your childhood, among the rustling chestnuts...
...She poisoned herself twice—they buried her...
...We demand through the Party...
...Over the ocean in the clouds seethes the apocalypse...
...Much is wasted...
...here the passer-by kneels down...
...Old are the twisters of socialist morality...
...They called in literature to help— a five-year-old snotty-nosed child, who needs educating, who needs to educate others— Is this routinist an enemy...
...The gist of the answer is best characterized by these lines, addressed to Wazyk: I would smash this fat, ruddy, self-satisfied, comfortable snout...
...The duchesses will be rid of their issue—the Vistula flows near by...
...Even your memory fades...
...6 In the railway station Miss Jadzia in the buffet, so charming when she yawns, so charming when she pours...
...nothing that has yet appeared in print, except Czeslaw Milosz' great book The Captive Mind, so fully reveals the despair felt by intellectuals and writers at having to live in the prison-house of totalitarianism...
...The children asked: Where were you...
...people sat as usual returning from work...
...As yet only dross...
...Then the bus stopped at a little square which had been dug up...
...When we no longer want to talk about the earth we know then we say: The sky is not empty...
...Give me one fragment of old stone...
...Where are your antique shops, your bookstalls and students...
...We make demands on this earth, for which we did not throw dice, for which a million perished in battle: for a clear truth, for the bread of freedom, for burning reason, for burning reason...
...They taught the routinists...
...A note was found in his pocket: 'My sleeve is right, my button is wrong, my collar is wrong, but my half-belt is right' They buried him under a willow...
...The saboteur had blood, bones, hands...
...the houses flaunt themselves like peacocks...
...What do I care for these Galluxa puppets painted as if for the coffin...
...when we do not want to talk frankly about the earth, the kneeling man says: the sky is not empty...
Vol. 3 • April 1956 • No. 2
