SEEJ_60_4_19N 1/4/2017 4:55 PM Page 769

Reviews 769

(140), she argues that the novels point to a generalized withdrawal from organized religion
among the 89ers, one with broad-reaching social consequences: the apostasy of Polands last
communist generation is not a mere disengagement from institutional Catholicism; it is a sym-
bolic act of deliberate rejection of forced collectivist identity (whether communist or patriar-
chal) and a conscious embracement of an individualist outlook (162).
For many members of the Generation of 1989, the new individualism manifested itself in
their lives in a nexus of careerism, materialism, workaholism, failed relationships, isolation, and
self-destructive behavior. Vassileva-Karagyozova attributes these experiences less to the new
capitalist ethos, seeing them more as a result of the familial and societal dysfunction of the
1970s and 80s. This compelling study and its ndings will interest Slavists and Polonists alike,
as well as scholars in gender studies, childhood studies, childrens and Young Adult literature,
comparative literature, and post-Communist studies.

Andrea Lanoux, Connecticut College

Tomasz Rycki. Colonies. Trans. Mira Rosenthal. A bilingual edition. Brookline, MA: Zephyr
Press, 2013. Index. xvi  164 pp. $15.00 (paper).
Tomasz Rycki. Twelve Stations. Trans. Bill Johnston. A bilingual edition. Brookline, MA:
Zephyr Press, 2015. Index. xi  149 pp. $18.00 (paper).

In one of his interviews, Tomasz Rycki, the author of several collections of poetry and one of
the most critically-acclaimed poets in Poland, discusses the origins of writing as follows: Most
likely a human started creating out of the sense of mortality, for fear of nothingness. Writing is
an attempt to enchant time (M. Grzeszczuk, Litery s stawiane przeciwko minutom (The
Letters are Placed Against the Minutes), in Szafa. Kwartalnik Literacko-Artystyczny (Szafa.
Literary and Artistic Quarterly). Web: 31 July 2016. http://archiwum6.kwartalnik.eu/48/htm/
wywiad/grzeszczuk3.html). Though self-evident, this statement reveals a major question ex-
plored in Ryckis work, namely a tenacious investigation into the issue of time. Born in 1970
in Opole, Silesia, Ryckipoet, essayist, academic teacher and translator from Frenchis a
laureate of many prestigious awards, including the Rainer Maria Rilke Award (1998) and the
Kocielski Foundation Award (2004). Translated into German, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and
Lithuanian, among other languages, his work has nally been introduced to the American
reader. The bilingual editions of Twelve Stations (Dwanacie stacji) and Colonies (Kolonie) re-
cently published by Zephyr Press in rst-rate translations by Bill Johnston and Mira Rosenthal
are a perfect opportunity to familiarize oneself with Ryckis unique idiom. Rosenthal metic-
ulously follows the original, placing slightly less emphasis on the formal aspects of the poems,
while Johnstons interpretation masterfully mimics the tone and humor of Ryckis epic poem.
Most Polish critics emphasize the authors distinct poetic voice, rooted in highly rhythmical
and often rhymed verse, which is deeply immersed in the Polish literary tradition, especially in
Romantic and Baroque literature. It should come as no surprise that Rycki is often discussed
as an intellectual heir to the grand gures of Polish poetry, such as Czesaw Miosz and Adam
Zagajewski. The gravitas of this poetic heritage might explain why different critical circles are
at odds when appraising Ryckis signicance in contemporary Polish literature. Another rea-
son might be Ryckis consistent preoccupation with the past tense. In both Twelve Sta-
tions and Colonies, working through history, the personal and national, is clearly visible. Di-
vided into twelve chapters, Twelve Stations tells the story of the Grandsona descendant
of repatriates from Kresy who settled in the so-called recovered territories after the Second
World Warand his mission to organize a family trip to the former Polish lands of the East.
While exposing the mechanisms which govern this deteriorating traditional kinship, Rycki
SEEJ_60_4_19N 1/4/2017 4:55 PM Page 770

770 Slavic and East European Journal

also mocks the obscurantism of the imperial past-driven Polish mentality. These traits are per-
fectly incarnated in the gure of the Uncle, who, at one point, starts shouting: We should go!
Win back Lww! / We shall go all together! And win back Lww! Drive them out! To Lww! /
bribe the city Council and theyll give Lww back to us, yes! (59).
The trip described in Colonies is rather an imaginary one. The nal destination turns out to
be the subjects childhood spent in the late-Communist/early post-Communist Silesia. The vol-
ume plays on the ambiguity of the phrase kolonie (colonies), which in Polish means both a re-
gion that depends on another dominant state, and a summer camp. This seemingly bizarre asso-
ciation develops into an elaborate metaphor which combines childrens games with colonial
politics and proves to be a unique commentary on Polish/Ukrainian relations. Trying to main-
tain a balance between the innocence of free creation and the cruelty of cold calculation, the
child subject in the poem Electric Eels announces: These are our colonies! Kuba has staked
/ them out with sticks and stones, except for borders, / because they spread across the summer
(21). The imaginary empire is time-bound (lasting only during the holiday time), yet spatially
unlimited (as is creativity). What Rycki seems to emphasize, however, is the way it serves not
only as a harmless play, but as a training ground for the ideological and the emergence of the
political. In both Twelve Stations and Colonies time seems to be disrupted, out of joint, and out
of place, never ACTUALLY on time. Intimate and collective history leaks through empty spaces
still unoccupied by language, shaping a kind of Derridean always-already absent present. This
present is constantly haunted by a ghastly past, which manifests itself in barely tangible forms:
tastes (hardly defrosted zapiekankas (popular street food), or musty French fries marking the
political transition period), sounds (grannies speaking with soft and melodious Eastern accents),
smells (the stench of moldy sandwiches and eggs left in the boys backpack by an overprotec-
tive grandmother), or artifacts (old books belonging to the former owners of the house, the Pe-
ters family). The settingpost-Communist Opole, pathogen of black bile, unhappy tumor, /
swelling in the soul (so far yet so close to fatherland Lithuania, which is like health)is
described as if suspended in some kind of timelessness, where elderly family members still
dont close the front door, still divide historical periods into pre- and post-Pisudski, and cannot
get used to the currency after devaluation. Furthermore, the journey within the text is always
delayed, or interrupted due to the tendency of the subject to digress and to jump from one seem-
ingly meaningless topic, such as motion sickness, to another. This somatic aversion to move-
ment is shown through recurring scenes of the subjects nausea and vomiting, as well as the fact
that the family occupies a house near the railway station to be the rst on the train back to
Lww. This way migration and travel are always within the range of possibilities, albeit usually
unfullled ones.
This haunting past manifests itself not merely on the level of the theme. Similarly to how the
grandma in Twelve Stations turns an empty margarine package into a tomato container, Ry-
cki reuses and renews traditional and worn-out literary genres, such as the digressive poem,
gawda (a traditional form of storytelling practiced by Polish nobility), or sonnet, calling them
up like spirits of the dead. In the seventy-seven sonnets of Colonies, the texts follow a fourteen-
line structure, but the rhyme scheme is implemented much more loosely, almost nonchalantly,
as if the subject were compulsively speaking for fear he might vanish. Additionally, in Twelve
Stations Rycki freely refers to Pan TadeuszAdam Mickiewiczs renowned epic poemas
he recreates the Polish Alexandrine as a metrical line. At the same time both works are an at-
tempt at portraying a group of people of a certain class in a crucial political moment, right be-
fore history will gradually erase them. Moreover, the melancholy attitude of the subject toward
this disappearing world is mediated by the setting. What stands out is the off-color humor de-
rived from the tradition of Sarmatian whimsy and the focus on childlike gags and low, body-
centered jokes, thus positioning Twelve Stations within the genre of the mock-heroic.
Another device used to situate the past within the present is repetition presented through con-
stantly recurring images (such as wandering through train compartments, or nding decompos-
SEEJ_60_4_19N 1/4/2017 4:55 PM Page 771

Reviews 771

ing food in a backpack) and certain phrases, such as When I began to write, I didnt
know, which appears in Colonies in various congurations. Nevertheless, all these formal oper-
ations on meaning seem to be in vain, because the textual worlds of both Colonies and Twelve
Stations face the danger of verbal depletion. In one of the reviews of the latter Leszek Szaruga,
a critic for the prestigious literary magazine Zeszyty Literackie (Literary Notebooks) aptly points
out: The lightness of the phrase is misleading, since Rycki is aware of the fact that writing a
national epic is impossible nowadays (LS, Rycki Tomasz. Dwanacie Stacji, Zeszyty Lit-
erackie 2005, vol. 90, p.175). The same logic could be applied to his collection of sonnets.
Though discussing a wide range of themes (childhood in a post-German city; traveling through
provincial Poland, as well as Italy and France; visions of the environmental catastrophe and im-
ages of intimacy with women) the texts repeat the poetics already established by the old masters
(the historically-oriented poems, in many cases, resemble Zagajewskis poetic voice), deep-
seated associations, and conventional imagery. Consequently, such illuminating poems as
Maps, Headwinds, or Electric Eels neighbor with Military Exercises, which almost too
strongly echoes Mioszs notorious A Song on the End of the World. Rycki is at his best
when he is self-referential. The author-subject constantly goes back to reections on the nature
of writing and the complex relation between reality and its representation. From this perspective
Headwinds proves to be one of the crucial texts in the volume: When I began to write, I did-
nt know / each of my words would bit by bit remove / things from the world and in return leave
blank / spaces (23). The conclusion is evident: the more the text takes over, the less there is of
reality. Writing becomes a secret, yet the only possible form of existing. For better or for worse.

Agnieszka Jezyk, University of Illinois at Chicago

Witold Gombrowicz. Trans-Atlantyk: An Alternate Translation. Trans. Danuta Borchardt. New

Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2014. 192 pp. $15.00 (paper).

Gombrowicz himself admitted that Trans-Atlantyk was an exceedingly difcult work to trans-
late: he stated that the short novel is facetious, sclerotic, baroque, absurd and written in an
archaic style, full of idiomatic jokes and inventions (A Kind of Testament, 2007, Dalkey
Archive Press, 111). The work is widely considered to be Gombrowiczs masterpiece, if not the
masterpiece of twentieth-century Polish literature, as it was called when the rst translation
was reviewed in this journal (Slavic and East European Journal, vol.1, Spring, 1997, 182). But
its difculty, in terms of syntax, lexicon, philosophy, and literariness, would give even the most
experienced translator troubles, as it did when it was rst translated, and as it does now.
The story follows a rst-person narrator, also named Witold Gombrowicz, as he arrives in Ar-
gentina just before the outbreak of the Second World War and, just as the author did himself, he
decides not to return to Poland. Gombrowicz, the character, attempts to nd work to fund his
stay, meeting with the Polish diaspora, Argentinian literati, and a host of other characters, in a
narrative that erupts into chaos in the typical style of Gombrowicz. He befriends a wealthy ho-
mosexual Arturo Gonzalo and a traditional Polish gentleman Tomasz Kobrzycki and his son
Ignacy, whom Gonzalo desires. The tension between Gonzalo and the older Kobrzycki becomes
all the more signicant due to the nationalist rhetoric surrounding the outbreak of the war, and
Gombrowiczs support for either Gonzalo or Kobrzycki takes the form of a decision between
allegiance to the older forms of Polish patriotism or separation from his homeland. The book
ends with a literal explosion of laughter instead of any denitive resolution.
The work contains Gombrowiczs ambivalent discussion of nation and his attachment to his
homeland. The style of the novel comes from a traditional Polish form of story-telling, the
gawda, putting it directly into dialogue with a long tradition in Polish literature. He claimed