Seven Prose Poems by Jakub Kornhauser

Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk

Meteorological Poem 

For disguise people dress autumn up in women’s clothes and send it spying in the park. And in the park—like in any park: Sodom and Gomorrah. Hemorrhages and squirrels. And office rats on the catwalk. All the decent inhabitants of this city observe autumn from behind the glass of their faith.

Poem About Trees 

Oak, as everyone knows, is the strongest—the stuff of people, ships, and seas. Next is the glass, the sun and fire. Although things are going downhill, since the windows were left ajar, the church was left unprotected. Oaks were busy guarding those who doze off with their headphones on, having dealt earlier with a whole army of little acornmen. There are some apples left over from the afternoon snack. Except that apple wood is prone to warping, so watch out.

Second Poem About Trees 

One tree, actually, but what a tree it is. Even stacking an entire forest of redwoods on top of each other would not match it. The spruce bark beetle and the chestnut leaf beetle get dropped in the prelims, the rabbit hutch spiders take off, losing numerous slippers. You have to admit: what kind of tree is both a dog and a palace, and if you snap its branch, new ones grow in geometric progress? I think it was standing in some park, but it got bored and left.

Second Poem About Birds 

Generally, we like it when they sit quietly in the atlas and don’t stick their beaks out. Problems start when they get the idea for a walk or some other stride. Then their fleeting nature comes to the fore. They hide behind a hedge and pretend to be who knows what. They argue about just any fruit only to stealthily hoover up the entire bush.

Poem About Countryside 

Though it’s better to say: a small village where everything is closed. The shop of the local cooperative is shuttered, there is a warning strike in the apiary, and the monks sit in the monastery like starlings in a birdhouse and play Thousand Schnapsen. Even the stones on the road are yellow, and has anyone ever seen yellow stones? Exactly, and you still have to spend your entire retirement here, find a place for yourself, dig a hole in an old boat or something.

Second Poem About Children 

They criticize because they think they’re allowed to. They don’t like anything, especially the neighborhood. They would lock their parents, neighbors, and the convenience store lady in a closet with a smelly brush and change into grown-up clothes and introduce a new socialism. Then we would all get lucky! Goose stuffed with mushrooms would land on the table every quarter of an hour. Only coal would hit a snag. You would have to bury it and hope it sprouts something extra, maybe a rhubarb.

Second Poem About Silesia 

Silesia mainly consists of sweets, Soviet surplus planes, and weeds. There are murky watercourses and rotten trees, and tiles as large as durian fruit fall off the roofs. Tombstones grow in cemeteries. Silesian soil can be envied. Stories feed on its juices like on the richest imagination. The map of Silesia is limited to a few cross streets. It ends beyond an estate of familok houses and the ubiquitous angels that stick out from behind the beds.

Wiersz meteorologiczny 

Dla niepoznaki przebiera się tu jesień w kobiece ciuchy i wysyła na przeszpiegi do parku. A w parku – jak to w parku. Sodoma i Gomora. Krwotoki i wiewiórki. I korposzczury na spacerniaku. Wszyscy porządni mieszkańcy tego miasta oglądają jesień zza szyb swojej wiary.

Wiersz o drzewach 

Buk, jak wiadomo, jest najmocniejszy, z niego ludzie, statki i morza. Dalej idą szkło, słońce i ogień. Chociaż atmosfera zdaje się schyłkowa, bo okna niedomknięte, kościoła nikt nie upilnował. Buki były zajęte strzeżeniem tych, co ślęczą na słuchawkach, rozprawiwszy się wcześniej z całą armią ludzików z żołędzi. Zostało jeszcze trochę jabłek z podwieczorku. Z tym że drewno jabłoni jest skłonne do paczenia się, więc uwaga.

Drugi wiersz o drzewach 

Właściwie o jednym drzewie, ale za to jakim. Nawet gdyby postawić cały las sekwoi jedna na drugiej, na nic by się to zdało. Kornik drukarz i szro- tówki kasztanowcowiaczki odpadają w przedbiegach, zyzusie tłuściochy zwiewają, gubiąc liczne pantofelki. Sami przyznacie: co to za drzewo, co jest i psem, i pałacem, a jak mu złamać gałąź, to kolejne odrastają w geo- metrycznym postępie? Chyba stało w jakimś parku, ale znudziło mu się i sobie poszło.

Drugi wiersz o ptakach 

Zasadniczo lubimy, kiedy siedzą spokojnie w atlasie i nie wyściubiają dziobów. Problem zaczyna się, gdy przyjdzie im do główek spacer czy inna przebieżka. Wówczas dochodzi do głosu ich ulotna natura. Chowają się za żywopłotem i udają nie wiadomo kogo. Kłócą się o byle owocek tylko po to, by cichaczem wymieść cały krzew.

Wiersz o wsi 

Choć lepiej powiedzieć: małej wiosce, w której wszystko jest nieczynne. Sklep gminnej spółdzielni zamknięty, w pasiece strajk ostrzegawczy, a mnisi siedzą w klasztorze jak szpaki w budce i grają w tysiąca. Nawet kamienie na drodze są żółte, a czy ktoś w ogóle widział żółte kamienie? No właśnie, a i tak trzeba tu spędzić całą emeryturę, znaleźć sobie jakiś kąt, wydrążyć dziuplę w starej łodzi czy coś.

Drugi wiersz o dzieciach 

Krytykują, bo uznają, że im wolno. Nic im się nie podoba, a najbardziej nie podoba im się okolica. Zamknęłyby rodziców, sąsiadów i panią z żabki w komórce ze śmierdzącą szczotą, a same poprzebierały się w dorosłe ubrania i wprowadziły nowy socjalizm. Wtedy by się nam wszystkim dopiero szczęściło! Gęsina z grzybami wjeżdżałaby na stół co kwadrans. Tylko z węglem szkopuł. Trzeba by go było zakopać i liczyć, że wyrośnie coś ekstra, rabarbar może.

Drugi wiersz o Śląsku 

Śląsk składa się głównie ze słodyczy, radzieckich samolotów z demobilu i chwastów. Są tu mętne cieki wodne i cherlawe drzewa, a z domów spadają dachówki wielkie jak owoce durianu. Na cmentarzach rosną nagrobki. Gleby można Śląskowi pozazdrościć. Opowieści karmią się jej sokami niczym najbogatszą wyobraźnią. Mapa Śląska ogranicza się do kilku ulic na krzyż. Kończy się za osiedlem familoków i wszędobylskimi aniołami, które wystają zza łóżek.

Translator’s Note

Looking, Seeing, Believing: On the Poetry of Jakub Kornhauser

In 2016 Jakub Kornhauser received the Wisława Szymborska Award, one of Poland’s most prestigious poetry prizes, for his 2015 volume of prose poems called Drożdżownia (trans. The Yeast Factory). The collection showcases Kornhauser’s talent at moving skillfully between the micro and the macro, that is, between the texture of details and the expansiveness of vistas. The pieces are engaging, in no small part, because of Kornhauser’s ability to deftly shift between the two extremes, in the process creating for us a slightly oneiric and surrealist reading experience while likewise signaling that we are dealing with a poet with an insatiable hunger for existence.

Drożdżownia has also been hailed for its cover, which features a detailed image of a large woodpecker clinging to a branch. The choice of image isn’t arbitrary. For one, it represents the poet’s actual experience of seeing and hearing the bird inside the titular yeast factory long after its machines fell silent, and the building became yet another abandoned structure on the city’s outskirts (in this case the city of Kraków). Secondly, it speaks to Kornhauser’s wish to be rooted in a particular place. Indeed, Kornhauser, an avid cyclist, also happens to be a renown travel writer. But restless as he is, he travels not to flee from himself or from his surroundings, but rather to burrow into things, be it in another district or another town or region. In Poland, people like him are dubbed “local patriots.”

Moreover, the idea of searching for and acknowledging what’s there but remains hidden is very dear to Jakub Kornhauser. With his keen eye and sense of wonder, he elevates the natural world—birds, trees, mountains, and streams—in moments bordering on ecstatic, as any committed naturalist might, but he also does it to highlight its peripheric status. (It’s a cliché to say that in Los Angeles, where I live, a place notorious for its urban sprawl, the signs of nature are all around us, but that’s the case. The ocean, with its amazing fauna and flora, is a short drive (or bike ride) away. Yesterday I saw a family of raccoons out for a walk on my street. Nature can pop up at any time.)

Kornhauser sees things others might overlook, and what seems to interest him is not just delineating or categorizing the ensuing mixture of nature and human, but rather exploring it in all its variegated glory. These seven prose poems—from his 2021 Krwotoki i wiewiórki (trans. Hemorrhages and Squirrels)—are exquisite testimonies to what happens when one detail or idea or sentiment isn’t privileged over another. Instead, they are woven together, as inseparable—an autumn chill and the jackets we put on to shield ourselves against it; or the gnarled branches of an oak tree and our desire to scale it. In one of these poems the birds argue about what fruit to eat, or about who gets how many, just like we do.

This intermingling and layering also comes through in the collection’s intertextual genesis, as all the poems in Krwotoki i wiewiórki feature props (things, places, animals, people) lifted from the work of two of the major Polish poets from the “New Wave” generation, Adam Zagajewski (1945–2021) and Julian Kornhauser (b. 1946). Both poets grew up in Gliwice, in Upper Silesia. Julian, Jakub’s father, was in fact born there. This region was, and in some ways still is, a cauldron of competing ethnicities and loyalties dating back to the Polish partitions when this region came under the sway of Prussia, and as evidenced by the presence of the word “familok” in the final poem in this group. Historically, the word—a Polonized version of the German word “Familien-Block”—denoted a two-story tenement of unplastered red brick built by the owners of a mine or a steel plant to house their workers. Recently, however, it’s been used as stand-in for poverty and urban decay in that part of Poland (not unlike the word “projects” in this country).

But, it’s equally true, as Kornhauser writes, that “Silesian soil can be envied. Stories feed on its juices like on the richest imagination.” Indeed, the worst thing that can happen is for the poet, and the rest of us, to look away—or not even bother to look at all.—Piotr Florczyk, Los Angeles, California

Jakub Kornhauser is a poet, essayist, translator, editor, literary scholar, and co-founder of the Center for Avant-Garde Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He has published five volumes of prose poetry, including Drożdżownia (trans. The Yeast Factory), which won the 2016 Wisława Szymborska Award, a best-selling collection of bicycle essays, Premie górskie najwyższej kategorii (trans. Mountain Climbs Hors Categorie), several monographs on the European avant-gardes, as well as translations of books by Henri Michaux, Gherasim Luca, Gellu Naum and Miroljub Todorović. He lives in Kraków, Poland.

Piotr Florczyk is a poet, translator, and scholar. His work has earned him several awards, including the 2017 Harold Morton Translation Award. His most recent books are Swimming Pool (an Object Lessons title) and Landless Boys, a translation of selected poems by Polish writer Jerzy Jarniewicz. He teaches global literary studies at the University of Washington-Seattle, and lives with his family in Los Angeles. More info at: www.piotrflorczyk.com 

Published July 15 2024