Die Traumdeutung

Polish artist Miroslaw Balka invoked a pair of heavy-duty canonical sources for a recent pair of London installations at White Cube and at the Freud Museum.

Source One – Albrecht Durer's drawing of 1514 (below) called Melencolia I.  And there (among heaped-up animals, implements and emblems crowding the left half of the picture) is the object that interests Miroslaw Balka – a carved stone geometrical artifact in the shape of a truncated triangular trapezohedron.

Source Two – the original German-language title page (below) of Die Traumdeutung by Sigmund Freud, first published in 1900, translated into English in 1913 as The Interpretation of Dreams.

Miroslaw Balka fabricated multiple three-dimensional models inspired by Durer's dreamy fantasy, inspired by Freud's primal assertions. At White Cube the geometrical Object was made of polished concrete. The artist also created a low empty plinth from polished concrete.

At the Freud Museum (below) the Object was rendered in plywood. Many empty plywood crates were also fabricated. A wide variety of symbolic interpretations have been offered for these crates.

The trapezohedron in polished concrete and the trapezohedron in plywood are useful, we are told, for invoking the tragic persecutions inflicted on Sigmund Freud's sisters.

The sisters were left behind when their brother and his large household of relatives and servants fled Vienna in 1938. Of the five Freud sisters, four were rounded up and murdered in Nazi camps.

Szymborska

Under a Certain Little Star

  
by Wislawa Szymborska
translated by Joanna Trzeciak

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. 
My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken. 
Don't be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own. 
May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker. 
My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second. 
My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first. 
Forgive me, far-off wars, for carrying my flowers home. 
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. 
My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss. 
My apologies to those in train stations for sleeping soundly at five in the morning. 
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing sometimes. 
Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing in with a spoonful of water. 
And you, O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage, 
staring, motionless, always at the same spot, 
absolve me even if you happen to be stuffed. 
My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs. 
My apologies to large questions for small answers. 
Truth, do not pay me too much attention. 
Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me. 
Bear with me, O mystery of being, for pulling threads from your veil. 
Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom. 
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere. 
My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman. 
I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me, 
since I am my own obstacle. 
Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, 
and then labor to make them light. 

                                        *           *            *

Jessica Greenbaum wrote an essay in Poetry about favorite poems, naming half a dozen of her own, including Under One Small Star by Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012). Later in the essay Greenbaum provided a link to a different translation (by Joanna Trzeciak) with the slightly different title Under a Certain Little Star. That is the version I reproduce here, with extra thanks to Jessica Greenbaum for introducing me to this astonishing poem.

photo © Andrzej Banaś

Frantic in Polish

Polish movie poster to publicize the 1988 release of Roman Polanski's Frantic. The Blue Parrot is the Parisian den of vice where Harrison Ford seeks information about his wife's whereabouts and finds a slinky, gorgeous girl instead (any half-alert viewer knows immediately that this exotic creature is doomed to die before the end of the picture in order to protect the innocence of the American protagonists). The blue-parrot logo on key-rings and matchbooks and T-shirts and jewelry becomes a recurring motif – another Hitchcock mannerism commemorated. As far as I know, only the Poles chose to use the Parrot in their publicity.  

You Don't Do That To Kafka

You don't do that to Kafka / Tadeusz Rozewicz

Kafka's monument stands in Prague

of course it didn't stand up on its own
it was raised without being asked
whether it wants to stand there
and in what incarnation

the sculptor wrapped his work
tightly in babble
wagging his tongue
until the monument was left
speechless

as you can see
the monument consists
of an empty sportcoat
and baggy pants
this brass bag
is filled with the ghost
of the evil father

on his shoulders sits
an adult Franz––elegantly
dressed––in a fedora
and tightly creased
bronze pants

the son sits on the shoulders
of his giant Father
the evil Father

despite his tongue
very quick tongue
and moves straight out of a circus show
the sculptor
couldn't turn
a weak monument
into a work of art

in a Jewish cemetery in Prague
I saw
a stone monument
with Father and Mother lies
the famous
Son of whom they knew
so little . . . 

From my Czech
translator Vlasta who met
Ottla's daughter Vera
I know that
the silk merchant Hermann K.
the son of a butcher was a good
and caring patriarch
a good husband
who loved his son
laughed at Max Brod
and read the prose of Raabe

Franz Kafka earned the right
not to have monuments made to him
not to have T-shirts
undershirts teacups
hankies undies
plates with the image of his face on the bottom
he earned the right not to
have Kafka cafés
not to have
souvenir shops

Kafka's monument stands
in Prague
it was raised without being asked

"and who were we to ask?"

the Spirit! Ladies and gentlemen,
you should ask Kafka's spirit
(and cup your ears)
Kafka's Spirit says: please
do not praise me do not raise me
and since I'm already standing here please
do not unveil me!

I want to stay veiled

do not bring to light
my women my tears
my parents my sisters
burnt manuscripts
my wounds
do not comment on my
life death trial
do not turn this into a circus
do not draw out of me
every secret
do not pull me
into a coffee shop
do not look me in the mouth
I'm not your horse
(a beast of burden
for various charitable foundations)
don't tell me
that I loved
second rate
actors that I was
a timid fiancé
do not turn me into
an exemplary bureaucrat
an impotent an athlete
a Zionist a vegetarian
and an admirer of
the prose of Max Brod

amen

Joanna Trzeciak translated the poetry of Tadeusz Rozewicz from Polish into English. To mark the author's 90th brithday, Norton produced this hefty collection, SOBBING SUPERPOWER.  

Prague's Kafka Memorial by Jaroslav Róna was unveiled in 2003 by the locally powerful Franz Kafka Society.

Conquest

In 1937 Greta Garbo played a Polish noblewoman who bears the love child of Charles Boyer's Napoleon. For my money, Conquest is the best film she ever made, mainly because Boyer gave her someone sufficiently strong to play against, in contrast to the drippy male leads chosen for most of the Great One's vehicles.




Image source is here.

Stencils II

This photo of a remarkably tidy wall covered with Polish stencils is by a Polish photographer named Adam Gut, whose work I admire very much and it can be seen here.