Metamorfoza

With the help of an online translator, I have managed to render Adam Zagajewski’s essay, Metamorfoza, into reasonable, readable English—for the most part. Useful as a translator can be, it is not, strictly speaking, a “translator,” but more of a translational tool or aid; so if you go to these sites expecting anything like a pristine fair copy, you don’t truly understand the ridiculously complex—impossible actually—task of converting one language into another. In linguistics, social sciences, the arts and humanities, E never equals mc². There’s always a remainder, it’s usually irrational, and sometimes the most important part of the answer.

In response to the question, “Who are Poles?” Zagajewski speaks to today’s Poles, post-Communist era, or post post-Communist era Poles. He argues that the previous generation of Polish intellectuals—which included the great poets Miłosz, Szymborska, and Herbert, among many other artists and intellectuals, now passing away—represents a higher achievement of Polishness, polskość, than even the great Romantic generations of  the 19^th century—Mickiewicz, Chopin, Siękiewicz. While both generations, in my mind, preserved and advocated a Polishness that made the reinvention of a Polish state possible in the 1920s and in the post-Communist 1990s, respectively, Zagajewski particularly credits this latter restoration with a broader, a more universalist perspective, less “Polsko-centryczną”—“Polish-centered.” (54) And, I think, a more secular one. Thinking of themselves in western or European or in universal terms in earlier times, Poles accorded themselves the status of defender of Christianity, savior, and even messiah. (They were not alone, of course, in wishful self-regard. I’ve studied American exceptionalism at length.) Such self-appointed roles can improve a nation’s self-esteem, even give it a mission, I grant, but it betrays a certain cultural insecurity as well, and Zagajewski will have none of that. Cultural insecurity betrays a second-rate culture, along with a number of lingering traits from earlier forms of polskość, such as anti-Semitism.

The metamorphosed Pole of whom Zagajewski speaks with moderate optimism appeals to me as a more achievable, if less dashing, Polish identity than any prior form—19^th century gentleman exile, Golden Age szlachta, eternal peasant, mythic Sarmatian—in part, because after fifty American years, I’m already Polishly de-centered. As much as my intellect looks elsewhere, here, to Poland, for perspective and points of triangulation, I can never be Polishly ethnocentric. And those old centricities are now eccentricities; I’ll eagerly visit them, but now concede that I likely won’t be able to long inhabit them. As Zagajewski has written elsewhere, “we always seek what’s gone for good.” (Another Beauty, 10)  But, of course.