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Poet's Corner
Cyprian Norwid, born in a small village outside Warsaw, is perhaps one of the most interesting figures in the canon of Polish writers. He remains a dark and solitary figure on the fringes of the great Polish Romantic movement, as represented by writers like Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki. Norwid came from a humble background, his father being a clerk at the local municipal offices. Cyprian's mother died when he was four and her husband followed her 10 years later. When he came of age he attended art courses in Warsaw and later set off to study art in Italy and Germany. While a student in Florence, he suffered unrequited love for a society woman named Maria Kalergis. The following year in Berlin, he naively lent his passport to a Russian revolutionary, who was later captured on the German border. Norwid, suspected of revolutionary activities, was placed in jail for one month. In jail he suffered an ear ailment which eventually caused him to go almost totally deaf. The consequences of his brush with the Russian embassy were monumental. He could never return to his Russian-occupied homeland.
Like so many Polish political literati at the time, he made his way to Paris, and it was in Paris that Norwid began to write poetry at a prolific rate, obviously inspired by his associations with exiled Polish poets Mickiewicz, Słowacki and Krasiński. But Norwid's precarious financial situation set him apart somewhat from that most elitist of circles, and in 1852 he left the continent for the promise of better things in America and Britain. But his hopes of finding fortune in America floundered, and he was reduced to laboring on a building site. In London he fared little better. Norwid returned to Paris four years later, struggling with poverty till the end of his days. For the last year of his life he was looked after by Catholic nuns in a shelter for the old in the poor Parisian district of Ivry. In the end he died as he had lived, alone.
Norwid's literary corpus includes volumes of poetry, drama and philosophical prose, not to mention an impressive body of paintings, sketches and sculptures. Despite the popularity of his first volume of poetry, with its romantic themes and patriotic zeal, the increasing difficulty of his works isolated him from his contemporaries, until it reached a point where critics, as a matter of course, would treat his poetry with polite disdain.
Norwid's conviction of his own genius remained throughout, and on more than one occasion he took umbrage with the literary critics of the day in his poetry. The poem I have chosen today shows some of his fiery conviction, and the contempt he reserved for his critics.
He who deprecates the darkness of my words,
Has he ever lit a candle on
his own?
His servant brought it for him to the room,
His motives known
only to himself alone.
The wick, ignited by the spark, at once illumines,
The pouring wax
converges at the base,
The brightness of the star slowly supines,
A deep
radiant blue and paleness.
Already you think it's petered out down there,
The heated liquid will
engulf everything,
Sparks and ashes can't offset despair,
You gave faith,
look how its glowing.
Indeed there are resemblances, and my songs, oh sir,
You who begrudge them
their meager moments,
Infuse these coldened days with warm air.
The flame
flickers selflessly benevolent.
Introduction and translation by Barry Keane.
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