{"id":229,"date":"2017-10-09T05:26:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-09T10:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/?post_type=product&p=229"},"modified":"2020-05-26T14:45:05","modified_gmt":"2020-05-26T19:45:05","slug":"memorials-a-selection","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/shop\/memorials-a-selection\/","title":{"rendered":"Memorials: A Selection"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mieczys\u0142aw Jastrun<\/strong>
\n Translated by\u00a0Dzvinia Orlowsky\u00a0and\u00a0Jeff Friedman<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Introduction by Chard deNiord<\/strong><\/p>\n

ISBN 978-1-935084-60-0
\n 110 pages: $16.00
\n August, 2014<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Other Purchase Options: Small Press Distribution<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cHand\u2014compelled to strike\u2014\u201d Mieczslaw Jastrun writes in his poem “Knife with Red Shaft,” \u201cdo you need an angel?\u201d A lyric poet and essayist, Jastrun survived the terrible years of the Nazi occupation and the Stalinist period in Poland, \u201cendangered every moment,\u201d as Czeslaw Milosz says, \u201cbecause of his Jewish origin.\u201d During his lifetime he published a dozen volumes of poetry, including\u00a0A Human Matter, A Meeting in Time, Protected Hour<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Memorials<\/strong><\/em>. Elegaic in tone, this selection from\u00a0Memorials<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>(published in 1969) presents some of his strongest, most mysterious poems. Never has his sense of mortality been stated more intensely or more precisely, \u201cThe cup extinguishes the drinker.\u201d Jastrun concerned himself most often with metaphysics and morality. \u201cAnd space\/ grows emptier\/ in an empty glass\u2014,\u201d the poet says, \u201cthe world,\/four folded pages.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0However, as a poet who published his poems in resistance periodicals, he couldn\u2019t turn his back on the horrors of the genocide; nor was he able to escape historical necessity and despair in even his most mystical writings. “This wall, this air\u2014\/” Mieczslaw Jastrun writes, “after the shot,\/ emptiness stood there,\/ yet far\/ lips\u2014wall.\u201d\u00a0Memorials<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>introduces in English a powerful selection of poems by one of the most well-respected Polish poets of the 20th century. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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Dzvinia Orlowsky\u00a0and\u00a0Jeff Friedman\u00a0won an NEA Translation Fellowship for their translation.<\/p>\n

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\n

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The poems in this collection of Mieczyslaw Jastrun\u2019s\u00a0Memorials<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>as translated by Dzvinia Orlowsky and Jeff Friedman radiate like milky, incandescent light bulbs. \u2014Poetry International<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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There is great sorrow in these later poems of the remarkable Polish poet and translator, Mieczys\u0142aw Jastrun, whose great mastery of form and metaphysical thought are apparent throughout. The beauty of these spare lines and images both surprise and deepen the mystery of his complete engagement with experience: \u201cChrysanthemums, purple\/ with anger, almost disappeared in shadow,\u201d \u201cthe cup extinguishes the drinker,\u201d \u201cAncient deaths\/linger\/in vineyard branches.\/Are these not stony gorges?\/Is nature dead?\/Don\u2019t eat the bread\/and the water isn\u2019t for drinking.\u201d Experience for Jastrun was a matter of faith as well as intimate revelation, not to mention survival. These are truly extraordinary poems. Hats off to their translators, who have somehow managed to bring forth both his \u201ccold fire\u201d and \u201ctree of sorrow\/ rooted deep in my heart.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2014Philip Schultz<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Reading the poems of Mieczys\u0142aw Jastrun, I am reminded of Sonnet 65 in which William Shakespeare writes:\u00a0How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower?<\/em>\u00a0The poems of Jastrun are testament to how it is indeed possible for a poet to show an amazing strength of art and life and spirit.\u00a0 I am so very grateful to Dzvinia Orlowsky and Jeff Friedman for making these necessary poems with their hard-won beauty available to American readers.\u00a0\u00a0\u2014Stuart Dischell<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Quintilian in\u00a0Institutio Oratoria<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0writes, \u00a0\u201cFor I do not want translation to be mere paraphrase, but a struggle and rivalry over the same meanings.\u201d In a similar vein, Orlowsky and Friedman render Mieczys\u0142aw Jastrun into a new idiom, a third language in order to convey the inexplicable. \u00a0As in the theological definition of translation as an act of miraculous displacement, these translations transform and enthrall the originals. Through these transformations, Jastrun\u2019s poems return as dybbuks to fulfill their mission, to ask crucial questions: \u201cCan we ever fully comprehend mist, arctic lichen, hoary young planets?\u201d \u201cHas the word become flesh?\u201d The mullein and broom, birches and poplars and other \u201cparagraphs of greenery\u201d will lead us through Jastrun\u2019s incantations.\u00a0Memorials<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>is a prayer of outcasts and exiled kings. A prayer which redeems the omnipresent trees into crosses where \u201cevery sound is a form of silence\u201d; \u201cwhere the shade of poplar mutes us like a finger held to the lips.\u201d In these wild, extravagant lines, I feel humanity, I feel faith.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2014Ewa Chrusciel<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Each and every strand in Jastrun\u2019s poetry feels invested with the same dense allusiveness that haunts the poems of the two truly great masters of\u00a0the age, Osip Mandelstam and Paul Celan (both originating from roughly the same corner of mittle Europa as Jastrun), the whole evolving a symbolic vocabulary for the age in the world of objects. Each and every line here contains an image of eternity, infused by the psychic human mechanisms of introjection and projection, inherent in the sacralizing impulse so concisely expressed in Williams\u2019s phrase \u201cno ideas but in things\u201d, matter infused with spirit, or as the poet says: \u201c…bring down the walls\/between yourself and material things.” Unlike the work of the American modernists, this world is a wholly elegiac one, haunted as it is by a much darker history of the spirit: \u201cI can\u2019t see or feel faith\/in these extravagances,\/ only death.\u201d Orlowsky and Friedman have done important work in giving us Jastrun in lyrical English \u2013 a book that ought to be attended.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2014Alex Cigale<\/strong>\u00a0(poet, editor, translator)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mieczys\u0142aw Jastrun
\n9781935084600
\n trans Dzvinia Orlowsky\u00a0and\u00a0Jeff Friedman
\n …a book that ought to be attended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":230,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[17],"product_tag":[283,136,137,135,18,133,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-229","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-dialogos","7":"product_tag-bilingual","8":"product_tag-dzvinia-orlowsky","9":"product_tag-jeff-friedman","10":"product_tag-mieczyslaw-jastrun","11":"product_tag-poetry","12":"product_tag-poland","13":"product_tag-polish","15":"first","16":"instock","17":"taxable","18":"shipping-taxable","19":"purchasable","20":"product-type-simple","21":"berocket_lgv_grid","22":"berocket_lgv_list_grid"},"yoast_head":"\nMemorials: A Selection - 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