Warsaw Voice - Agnieszka Osiecka (1936-1997)

Poets Corner
Agnieszka Osiecka (1936-1997)
26 April 1998

Agnieszka Osiecka is regarded as having been the most pragmatic Polish lyricist of modern times. Sadly, she died last year after a long battle with cancer. I have recently been reading a new selection of her lyrical poetry entitled Sentymenty (Sentiments), and I was immediately taken with the unique quality of the poetry, with its piercing insights into the tangles of love and erotica coupled with imaginative scenes from her outer and inner world. As these poems are also song lyrics they have a special internal rhythm that immediately captures the reader's senses.

Osiecka's life symbolized an individuality that forged its own colorful identity during the gray backdrop of the communist era. Her passing has given rise to enormous interest in her life and works. During her lifetime Osiecka wrote well over 2,000 lyrics and enjoyed immense commercial success. She was a sensual woman with an exciting private world. She lived for the most part in Warsaw, but she would often spend time on the Baltic coast. In her final years she was heavily involved with the Atelier Theater of Sopot, writing numerous pieces for them to perform. Shortly before her death she said to her theater friends, "I will always be with you. You'll see me like a cloud floating in the sky."

The following poem contains semi-heroic, semi-comic dimensions, as the poet dreams of experiencing a love which would be so overwhelming that she'd be simply mortally undone by it. In such circumstances death would be a great adventure, to take the love that she carries within herself beyond the grave. Of course, like the ancient bard Orpheus, she would demand special dispensation from God to return to the world of the living, for only then could she boast to her friend of her experience of the other side. The act of dying for love is indeed a noble idea, but in this poem its novelty soon wears off with the realization that, with the passing of life, there can be no return. For all her desire to die of love, greater in the end is her desire to return to the joys andchallenges of life once again.

To Die of Love
Just one time
To die of love.

Just one time,
so I can boast about it
later to a friend
that it occurs,
that it is
...to die.

To lie in a cemetery,
in someone's grave,
beside the letters of the deceased-
their remembrances-and to suffer
divinely with such pathos,
like Tosca or Witos.
To be aloof from problems.

To beg God for one more chance,
for just one more time,
to die of love.

Introduction and translation by Barry Keane