Zuzanna Ginczanka was born in 1917 in Kiev as Zuzanna Polina Gincburg. Soon after the Russian Revolution her parents moved to Rowne, which was then in a newly created Republic of Poland (it is in Ukraine now). Rowne was a town whose majority of inhabitants spoke Yiddish, but Zuzanna's parents were emancipated Jews and spoke Russian at home. Thus she had a choice of a language: either Yiddish of the shtetl, Russian of her parents or Polish of her school friends. Fascinated by Polish poetry, she chose Polish and wanted to become a Polish poet. She started publishing her poems when still at school. During her studies in Warsaw she entered literary circles; one of her friends was Witold Gombrowicz, another Julian Tuwim. She published her works mostly in periodicals, only one book of poems appeared before the war. As a pen-name she used half of her Jewish surname with a Polish ending.
During the war she lived at first in Lvov, later in Cracow. Her life is a perfect example of the tension between the Polish underground state, which tried to protect its Jewish citizens, and some of the anti-Semitic Poles, who co-operated with the Nazi authorities. As a fluent Polish speaker she could pass for a non-Jew (most Yiddish speakers spoke Polish with a strong accent), and her friends, who were involved in resistance, found her a new identity. However, her neighbour in Lvov, one Mrs. Chominowa, reported to the Nazis that a Jewish woman lived next door and they came to arrest her. Zuzanna's Polish friends managed to spirit her away in time and she moved to Cracow. There she was arrested again, this time as a member of the resistance, not as a Jew. She was executed in 1944, not long before Russian troops entered Cracow.
Her most famous poem – NON OMNIS MORIAR – is really impossible to translate, most of all because this is really a paraphrase of a well known Polish poem written by Juliusz Slowacki, one of the great authors of old Polish poetry. It is as if someone took one of Shakespeare's sonnets and paraphrased it. Which is exactly what I have done in the version proposed below.
After the war she was forgotten, not because her poetry was bad (it certainly was not), but because communist censors decided it was undesirable. During the 45 years of communist rule in Poland only two small selections of her poems appeared. She was re-discovered by Izolda Kiec, who in 1990 published a selection of her forgotten poems in "Czas Kultury" magazine, and later a couple of years later prepared three more collections of poems in a book form. All my versions are based on poems from Izolda's selections.
NON OMNIS MORIAR
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments, love is not love
When it does not love the neighbour and all his belongings
Always ready those belongings to remove.
You, Mrs. Chominowa, you are my neighbour
You will inherit my things after I am taken.
I have no worldly heir, you have grassed on me
In order to speed up my journey to heaven.
Soon you’ll be ready to search for that Jewish gold
It must be hidden in quilts and pillows of down.
You’ll rip them open, and the feathers from the pillows
Will stick to your hands and arms, still wet with my blood.
With those hands like wings you will be an angel
And you'll be ready to fly straight to Heaven."
INSTEAD OF A ROSY LETTER
There are too many streets in my not-too-big town
(I count them every morning but I can't find the one).
My little town is too little, not enough streets in it
(Unfortunately not there, the street where we'd meet).
My little town, although little, a thousand streets could contain
Each leading somewhere far, with both sides nicely paved.
Millions of narrow houses along each of those streets,
Each house as full of people as pumpkins full of pips.
Full of your loving could be a different street every day,
The houses for our meeting would organ music play
On a colourful keyboard, each key a different house,
And we would walk along.
Silence would be
In us.
My little town could stand along a single street
A lonely little streetlet as narrow as a stream.
This little narrow streetlet just two houses could have
Like two little bell flowers, each with a smiling face.
We could come out one evening from our houses' doors;
Maybe one happy evening, maybe one happy dawn,
And this could be the meeting, our hearts ringing like bells,
And we would stay together,
Forever
Till our deaths.
Not enough streets in my town, for it is far too small
Too many streets are in it, I'll never count them all.
PROCLAMATION
THE ARGUMENT
Animals with rough tongues can really enjoy the taste
The wolves of love and of hunger know very well the sensation.
Here's the present moment:
Bees drill for it in lilies.
Wasps with their sharp stings reached the bottom of sweetness.
The earth - a roasted deer - turns on a spit smelling sweetly.
The sun is that bonfire that heats up its fat sides.
O feast of carnivores!
Ready for hunger as ever
animals with their rough tongues really enjoy the taste.
THE COUNTER-ARGUMENT
People of feeble muscles know after-taste and foretaste.
After-taste - it is old age
Foretaste - prophetic light.
The plums are plump and purple, cherries cheerful and juicy
far behind the window, their texture soft as brain.
(History - spring tide of nations, riots like forest fires
the year forty eight, noisy and memorable.
Prophecy - colonies spring tide will light up on the high seas.
It'll come in forty eight, African forest fires.)
They hide in hides of goats,
in furs of cuddly bears.
They know:
it was
it will be.
Today - empty eye-sockets.
Today the day-time half moon floats in a milky cloud.
Forests grow in the cafés - tables from trees now dead.
THE CONCLUSION
I know the swinging foretaste
and after-taste's endless calm.
I caress with my lips
warm moment when it wakes up.
I can't be anything else but a wiser animal
and nothing else i can be - only a watchful human.
FULLNESS OF AUGUST
O pale-faced mothers of rosy-cheeked children; O fertile, proud, happy mothers
You'll go to gather cherries' juiciness with hands smooth from children's caresses
You'll go to celebrate the hot August weather of hearts as ripe as ears of rye
You'll go to venerate with your bare feet the black and swollen fertile soil
I've seen the lips, like fresh fruit's flesh, of lazy daydreaming peasant girls
In clanging warmth of dreamy gardens nostalgia sleeps in spiders webs
Boughs in the orchards are full of fresh juices that give sudden smell of ripeness
You'll go to gather golden aroma of warm trees' resin into your nostrils
In mellow, windy and sunny middays go and proclaim sacred birth giving
Look at the rye leaves shining in sunlight, our daily bread of joyful summers
You may praise the passing blossom that turns into ripening fruits
Everything passes, nothing ends here, in the transforming warmth of the sun
At night you'll take the willow baskets so you can fill them with endless dreams
Go to celebrate red apple pickings and go to harvest ripeness of dreams
The moon is hanging in pear-tree branches like a golden boat on a Christmas tree
Lips of raspberries won't whisper legends about the hearts that bled at night.
RETURN
Waters that thundered on rocks slowly quiet down
The current has slowed down, broad waves come and calm.
Clouds hanging in the sky are stiff in a cold morning,
The distant balls of planets roll round and round
Bees lick from flowers fragrant liquid honey.
Whence comes this radiance? There! From fresh forests.
A stream of brilliant light flows through leaves and rustles.
A bunch of teenage witches jump high between the trees
They look in the high grass for chicks that fell from nests.
In the wood walks Minerva, the goddess of ripe wisdom.
The wisdom of experience that brings about order.
With her calm eye she glances the waters that don't thunder,
Adjusts a bunch of violets she pinned to her dress
and says:
Throw an embroidered cover over secret things
So that the shape of meaning cannot be worked out.
Make peace with appearances and connect with the world
Not by tiresome reason but by life-giving love.
Hasten your solemn return to the age-old truths
With the sound of brass trumpets and flutter of flags
With bagpipes, drums and flutes. Call evil what is evil
And you'll know what to shun. The marching band approaches.
Return to the warm hugs of tender family love,
To the firm and long handshakes of the strong lasting friendships,
To thoughts pious and humble, to joys that don't disturb,
To never ceasing work so that the job is well done.
No need to try to find fire in your love for you husband,
There are no obvious signs that distinguish such love.
Choose a brave young man, give him your tender promise
And a quick flame from lips will also ignite your heart.
Calm landscapes spread like lakes that flood all precipices.
Their sources are in dreams and I sail on these waters.
I sail back to pick up the things the I had passed before
Or noticed at a wrong time. My flag is rolled up.
I remember the warnings and I see all around
The world full of harmony, of lights, beautiful forms
And of noble restraint. No storm is in sight.
Waters are calm as glass. They won't break. I am calm.
If you would like to read these poems (and some more) on paper,
You can get a printout of my book "POLISH INSPIRATIONS"
