'The passenger syndrome'

Note: In early April 2014, Polish writer and painter Grzegorz Wróblewski gave readings from his book Kopenhaga (trans. Piotr Gwiazda, Zephyr Press, 2013) at Columbia University, Cambridge Public Library, Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The following interview took place in Providence on April 7. It was transcribed and translated by Piotr Gwiazda. 

Piotr Gwiazda: What is the relation of Kopenhaga to the rest of your oeuvre? 

Grzegorz Wróblewski: Kopenhaga started to materialize in my head when I was still living in Poland. It is an urban text, a kind of theory of urban life. It is about human beings entangled in various aspects of modern civilization. So it gives you a good sense of my worldview. Of course it is mainly an objectivist record, so I don’t share my political opinions, et cetera. Nevertheless, it shows you what I care about, what I pay attention to. It’s an important text in my oeuvre.

Gwiazda: How long did it take you to write it?

Wróblewski: It took me many years to write Kopenhaga. I wrote most of it after I moved to Copenhagen in 1985. The book came out in Poland in 2000. As you know, our English version also includes some later additions. But the core part of Kopenhaga took me about fifteen years to finish. I wrote things down, kept an eye on the whole, tried to be selective. I wanted the text to be perfect. I wanted it to have formal integrity. I definitely didn’t want it to read like a diary or notebook.

Gwiazda: Would it be appropriate to call Kopenhaga a book of prose poems?

Wróblewski: Yes, because it’s partly poetry and partly prose. Some texts are closer to poetry, others to prose. I myself have used the term “essays” [szkice] to emphasize the mixture of these two elements. But there is no reason to worry about definitions. You can choose any definition you want, as long as you can defend it.

Gwiazda: What did you try to achieve in Kopenhaga?

Wróblewski: In Kopenhaga, I tried to capture the rhythm, the pulse of earthly life. Copenhagen was my testing ground. Although many parts refer to Copenhagen, I wanted to portray archetypal scenarios — the universal human condition. That was my goal, at least.

Gwiazda: Is it also a kind of autobiography?

Wróblewski: Yes, in part. Some passages seem real, but are in fact surreal; they are hallucinations with bits of reality in them. I put everything through the filter of subjectivity. The book gives you a sense of Copenhagen’s topography, the streets, the people. But you can’t read it as a personal transcript. Again, if I had wanted it to be an autobiography, I would have used the form of a journal. Kopenhaga aspires to be something else. It is a conceptual text, in which I explore various aesthetic and theoretical questions.

Gwiazda: Were you ever tempted to explore these questions through the genre of literary criticism?

Wróblewski: I already work in many genres. Besides poetry, I write experimental prose, plays, hybrid texts. I am also a visual artist. So I do many things in terms of genre. I believe that there is an element of criticism in my prose writings. That is where I express my opinions, where I comment on literary, artistic, and other issues. So I have no need to write criticism professionally; I was never tempted to do so. If people want to learn what I think about literature and art, they should simply read my work.

Gwiazda: Is this also true of your painting?

Wróblewski: Yes. But the situation here is slightly more complicated because of the presence of two elements: calligraphic art and acrylic painting. The combination of these elements amounts to my technique.

Gwiazda: Can you comment on the importance of Eastern philosophy in Kopenhaga?

Wróblewski: I’ve always been interested in Eastern philosophy. Buddhism more than Hinduism, especially Zen Buddhism. This is the nihilistic version of Buddhism, which offers no promises. We are all children of the world, mere particles in the universe. I’ve always liked how Zen Buddhism tries to reconcile us to the cosmic nothingness, how it prepares us for death through meditation. This has always been something close to me; I treasure books like Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows and D. T. Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. There is also a certain Japanese aesthetic in my poetry, though transposed onto European sphere of reference. I am fascinated by haiku and other traditionally Japanese forms.

Gwiazda: For whom do you write? For the Polish audience or a larger European or even world audience?

Wróblewski: You must remember that, above all, I am a Polish writer. Even though I live in Copenhagen, I write in Polish, so at least theoretically my first addressee is Polish. Of course it doesn’t always work out that way. For example, my book Nowa Kolonia first appeared in Denmark, in Danish translation, and only much later in Poland. You yourself know my poems that will first appear in their English versions. [Interviewer’s note: Wróblewski’s most recent poems are forthcoming in The Buenos Aires Review.] So the basic answer is this: I write for Polish readers, even though my situation is rather complicated, as I don’t live in Poland; I’m not there physically. Sometimes this leads to surprising developments. For example, my plays are never performed in Polish theaters. (My absence from the Polish stage is a topic for another conversation.)

Do I also write for other readers? It depends. My poems are often translated, not only into English but into other languages as well. So they reach readers in many places. Yet it would be overly optimistic of me to say that I write for a large audience. I hope to have more support from Polish cultural institutions in this regard. I’m convinced that my poetry would reach more people then.

Gwiazda: Would you say that your poetry translates easily?

Wróblewski: Because my poetry is lyrical at a very basic level, I believe it is not very easy to translate. It demands vigilance on the part of the translator. It also demands a particular kind of translator. Not everyone can do it.

Gwiazda: What about future readers? Do you ever think about them when you are writing?

Wróblewski: Well, the earth keeps turning, keeps changing. In poetry, it’s always just one generation at a time. The same goes for poetry criticism. You can consider yourself lucky if your work survives for a few generations. It’s hard to talk about the future. I have no idea whether anyone will read my work in five or ten years. I have my doubts, because I am a Polish writer and there are strange things going on in Poland these days in terms of critical reception, the kinds of poetry that gets official support, etc. I am lucky to have on my side the great poetry critic Anna Kaluża. So maybe I have a chance.

Gwiazda: Some poets imagine that they write for their predecessors. Do you?

Wróblewski: It’s always a form of conversation with the past. These are authors who showed you how to write, what to do. They broke new ground, changed the rules. They were precursors for many schools and kinds of contemporary poetry. You don’t write for them, because in most cases they no longer exist. But, in a sense, you believe that you carry on their work or at least offer an alternative to it. You can have a dialogue with them. You can imagine that, since they were not able to finish their projects, you continue their efforts in their name. It’s a complex matter. But this is not something to be obsessed about. I don’t think about it much.

Gwiazda: However, in Kopenhaga you seem to make such connections with at least two Polish poets.

Wróblewski: I mention Julian Tuwim, a great city poet, and Tadeusz Różewicz. Różewicz is also a great poet, but unfortunately he quickly lapsed into mannerism. He was original for ten or twenty years, then began to imitate himself, became monotonous. Yet I still respect him as a genuine innovator. [Interviewer’s note: Różewicz died on April 24, 2014.]

Gwiazda: Are there any other Polish poets that influenced you?

Wróblewski: If you look at the Polish poetic history, you will surely find poets with whom you feel you have something in common, even though you write differently. Every epoch has its great makers. The Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski can be as useful as the nineteenth-century Romantics. As for modern poetry, take Andrzej Bursa, active in the 1950s, who has been translated into English but is not as well known in the West as Zbigniew Herbert or Czesław Miłosz. In my view, he is more interesting than those two.

Gwiazda: Even though he wrote so little?

Wróblewski: Definitely. Whether you write ten or one thousand poems, what matters is what you write and how. Some of Bursa’s work is pure genius. I also like the work of Miron Białoszewski, especially his poems about Falenica (a Warsaw suburb) with their portrayals of existential boredom.

Gwiazda: It seems to me that generally you are more interested in poems than poets.

Wróblewski: Yes, because ultimately everything is transient, seasonal. I can think of no artists who had a strong phase for longer than five or ten years. In fact, we remember artists mainly for their individual creations. Since we happen to be in the United States, let’s talk about American poets. Take William Carlos Williams, one of the world’s most interesting but also uneven poets, the author of marvelous objectivist poems but also of many inconsequential and unnecessary ones. He was certainly a great artist — and a very important model for me. But he was also very uneven. I own his Collected Poems, but I can’t read many of his poems because I find them intellectually and formally uninteresting.

Gwiazda: Ultimately, then, do you write for yourself?

Wróblewski: In a sense, yes. It is always an opportunity for inner dialogue, a kind of artistic and personal challenge. I can’t imagine an artist — whether a writer, painter, or film director — who doesn’t create partly for his or her own satisfaction.

Of course, there are different ways of going about your work as a poet. You can imitate other poets or you can aspire to originality. So you master your individual style, try to avoid worn-out metaphors, but that in itself can be dangerous. Writers who want to be original at all costs end up producing banal contrivances. Sometimes being an imitator is more interesting artistically, because at least you don’t waste your time. And yet that also is a blind alley. I myself don’t write this kind of classicist poetry. I have always tried to be different formally. For example, when I was writing Nowa Kolonia, I faced all kinds of formal challenges that took me months to solve, because I needed to balance formal considerations with thematic ones. All poets face their own struggles.

Gwiazda: What is your take on contemporary politics in Poland and the rest of Europe?

Wróblewski: I’m not an optimist anymore. I was born in 1962, so I’ve had a lot of time to observe. I had hoped for big changes in Poland. Today I am completely astonished when I look at the state of political affairs in Poland. I see something similar in Denmark. The return of nationalistic sentiments, for example. It’s not a pretty situation.

Gwiazda: Do you consider your poetry political?

Wróblewski: Yes, definitely, since it is poetry about the world. I don’t live on a desert island, even though I sometimes feel isolated from other people. Because my poetry is also about the life of the mind, and the state of one’s mind is a political matter, my poetry is both very hermetic and very social. It comprises these two elements. One doesn’t negate the other. On the contrary, by being isolated, you can see certain things more clearly. Because you can see more clearly, your poems are stronger in the political sense.

Gwiazda: Do you therefore view yourself as a kind of intellectual or moral authority?

Wróblewski: No, because I ultimately don’t know who reads my work. Sometimes I feel like I’m just here for the ride: you know, the passenger syndrome. Ultimately I have no idea what my role is as a poet. When I give readings, I meet and talk with different people, but I don’t know what I represent to them. Besides, I’m not in a position to offer advice. Especially advice on how to survive. I really don’t have any.

Gwiazda: You said you don’t live on a desert island. So where do you live?

Wróblewski: In one sense, I live in Copenhagen. That is where my official address is since 1985. But I also live in a particular section of the city, Amager. This matters a lot. If I lived in another neighborhood, I would be a different writer. Location has a huge impact on the writer’s work.

But more generally, I live on planet Earth. Wherever I go, I see the same phenomena, the same absurdities. We are all humans, we exist to satisfy our physical and mental needs, often through illusions, self-deceptions, religions, other substitutes. It’s such a sad condition: going to work, earning money, watching TV, reading the newspaper, worrying about politics — nothing makes sense, to be honest. I think of the earth as a kind of insane asylum. You have to be an idiot to survive. If you are not an idiot, then the only choice is suicide. It’s the most obvious choice, intellectually.

Or maybe what makes sense is the possibility of human contact, a friendship, a meeting of the minds, perhaps through literature. Through literature you send signals to other people. Maybe someone in the universe who feels the same way as you do will receive them. This wouldn’t be a victory, but at least it would give you the strange satisfaction that you are not alone.