THE POLKA: What’s Riveting in Polish Literature with Anna Blasiak. MAŁGORZATA POŁUDNIAK and her human landscapes

We live in a world of migration. That often means that lines get blurred when it comes to our creative languages. There are more and more immigrant writers who switch to writing in a language that is not their first. Małgorzata (a.k.a. Margo) Południak is not one of them. She moved to Ireland from Poland in 2012, but continued writing in Polish. Coincidentally, 2012 was the year of the publication of her first book in Poland. So far she has six poetry collections under her belt, including the latest, Pierwszy Milion Nocy (The First Million Nights), published last year by FONT. Apart from writing, she is also a very, VERY talented visual artist: photographer and painter, but also graphic designer, typographer and book designer (also, and perhaps especially, of her own books, creating a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk). I often wonder whether this wonderful explosion of her talent into visual art is, at least in part – as obviously there was always a huge potential there – a consequence of living surrounded by a language that she does not create in (although, increasingly, she translates or co-translates her own texts into English, so that might change in the future). On the other hand, we could also say that she uses language like paint on canvas; in fact she paints with words, so perhaps that visual sensitivity came first?

Małgorzata’s poetry, like her art, is carefully crafted, seemingly quiet and observant. She has a knack for focusing on the everyday and finding, picking up those key moments when something shifts, even though little may have happened. She can also switch skilfully between dream and reality and between different time planes. And she never distracts attention away from the detail. Her backdrop for all this are the landscapes and often seascapes of Ireland, sometimes, especially in the latest collection, also urban views, with their noise, clutter and decay. Those urban elements seem to tire the poet, she feels much more at home in nature, which she captures so beautifully in her poetry, and in her art. Nature seems to be the only consistently positive feature of her creative output, while human beings, encounters with them, are invariably laced with disappointment, sometimes pain. That would explain the withdrawn approach of the poet, of course.

Mullaghmore 

For me this place is more than a dream, 
in which I slip out of dark shades of blue, in perfection 
of sacrifice I move over to the living. Above the peat bog 
I adjust the August good morning to the matter. 
I mellow above my eyebrows. Swarms of bugs hunt as before. 

Can we go on like this? Walk around in their lives, hesitate. 
Our bodies could lie under the trees. Still, we get up 
and, without fear, we lend colour to the hills, we sink in the ocean, 
come up, get sharp. The same force that bends the branches 
in flight. Pursued by the mind, abducted by the current, 
no one wants us

in the insect paradise. That's how we'll grow old, absorbing the smell,
fragments of roundabouts, blocks, garden walls. 
Even the pretzel seller calmly kneads the dough, and you 
buzz over my ear, setting the retina in my eye on fire. 

Until it finally rains. They will fish us out together 
from the ponds, with frogs, fragrant flowers. We will not have wasted
our chance.

Translated by Małgorzata Południak and Anna Blasiak

Południak is an astute witness of life, if somewhat disillusioned with the world and human beings. There is something quietly disturbing in her poetry, a sense of relativity, of incompatibility. There is also the temptation, the strong pull of darkness. But if we read deeply, there is in her verse a cleansing element, something to bring us strength. What we choose to read though is always a choice, the choice of the individual reader.

by Anna Blasiak

The graphic with the self-portrait and the photo within the text by Małgorzata Południak

Anna Blasiak is a poet, writer, translator and Managing Editor of the European Literature Network, author of Deliverance / Rozpętanie, Café by Wren’s St James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime / Kawiarnia przy St James’s Wrena w porze lunchu and Lili. Lili Stern-Pohlmann in conversation with Anna Blasiak.

Read previous posts in The Polka series:

THE POLKA: What’s Riveting in Polish LIterature by Anna Blasiak. MAŁGORZATA LEBDA has it all

THE POLKA: What’s Riveting in Polish LIterature by Anna Blasiak. KA KLAKLA, red anguish of the language contortionist

THE POLKA: What’s Riveting in Polish LIterature by Anna Blasiak. ZYTA RUDZKA and shoes for the coffin

THE POLKA: What’s Riveting in Polish LIterature by Anna Blasiak. RADOSŁAW WIŚNIEWSKI and his Psalm to Saint Sabina

THE POLKA: What’s Riveting in Polish LIterature by Anna Blasiak. JOANNA BATOR and her bears