Everything I Don't Know

by Jerzy Ficowski, Jennifer Grotz (Translator), Piotr Sommer (Translator)

Overview

"These surprising, clear, and appealing poems are to be enjoyed again and again, marking Ficowski as a poet readers won't want to miss."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"What good luck to finally have in English the writings of the brilliant Jerzy Ficowski, the poet who lived at least seventeen lives, fighting in the Warsaw Uprising, and later traveling for years with the Roma people through the roads of Poland, opposing his government, and watching the authorities ban his poems, a poet who translated from Spanish and Romanian and Yiddish and Roma, but most of all from the tongue of silence … Beautifully translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, these poems also document the tragedy of the Holocaust, with the direct and uncompromising voice with which he reminds us of the great poets such as R—żewicz and Świrszczyńska, while remaining, all the while, himself. Read a piece such as 'I was unable to save / a single life' in a bookstore, and I guarantee you will want to take this book with you, to keep it for the rest of your life."—Ilya Kaminsky

"Thanks to these brilliant, careful, inspired translations, we can now read Jerzy Ficowski, one of Poland's best kept secrets. This book is a marvel in its weird clarity and extraordinary range of styles and subjects, from the perfectly unassuming paradox of the title, all the way through to its final poems about bumblebees and Satie and mother nature, who scratches herself and 'shudders / with a tsunami.' How fortunate we are to have the unassailable evidence that all along, there was yet another genius of 20th century Polish poetry."—Matthew Zapruder

Everything I Don't Know is a sprawling and generous sampling of a life's work, and Ficowski's deft prose documents more than a review could ever hope to fully catalog … Ficowski was a poet of the quotidian, a post-war poet, a lyric poet, a careful observer of both the mundane and those things which are most grave. His work is worth reading, re-reading, canonizing …"— Zoe Contros Kearl, Action Books Micro Reviews

Poetry. Jewish Studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954218994
Publisher:	World Poetry Books
Publication date:	09/14/2021
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jerzy Ficowski was born on September 4, 1924 in Warsaw. During the occupation he was a soldier in the Home Army and took part in the Warsaw Uprising. After the war, he studied journalism, philosophy, and sociology. One of the most original Polish poets of the 20th century, he published fifteen volumes of poetry, beginning with Lead Soldiers in 1948. His wanderings with Polish Roma at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s resulted in the monograph Gypsies on Polish Roads (1965) as well as translations from Romany of the poet Papusza. His interest in Jewish history and culture resulted in an anthology of folk poetry of Polish Jews, Raisins with Almonds (1964). He also translated into Polish poetry from the Romanian, Spanish, and Russian. His life-long fascination with the writings of Bruno Schulz began during the occupation. He later researched and collected materials about Schulz, finding and publishing many of his unknown manuscripts, prints and drawings. Ficowski's pioneering biography and analysis of Schulz's work is Regions of the Great Heresy (1967). In the '70s and '80s Ficowski was banned from printing and published in underground editions. His last volume of poetry, Pantareja, appeared in 2006, a few months before his death.


Jennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, Window Left Open (Graywolf Press),The Needle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Cusp (Mariner Books) as well as translator of two books from the French: Psalms of All My Days (Carnegie Mellon), a selection of Patrice de La Tour du Pin, and Rochester Knockings (Open Letter), a novel by Hubert Haddad. She teaches at the University of Rochester and directs the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences.


Piotr Sommer is a Polish poet, the author of Things to Translate (Bloodaxe Books), Continued (Wesleyan UP), and Overdoing It (Trias Chapbook Series). He has published poetry collections, books of essays on poetry, and poetry translations (Ashbery, Berryman, Cage, Koch, Lowell, O'Hara, Reznikoff, Schubert, Schuyler). He has won prizes and fellowships, and has taught poetry at American universities. He lives outside Warsaw and edits Literatura na Świecie, a magazine of foreign writing in Polish translations.

Table of Contents

My Sides of the World (1957)

Apricot Time 13

Behind the Door the World 14

O Drawer! 15

All Around London 16

Ante-Bird-Scarecrow 18

Amulets and Definitions (1960)

The Empty Places After 23

My Attempted Travels 25

The Migration of the Hangers 26

From the Mythological Encyclopedia 27

i Burners 27

ii Faucet 27

iii Ashtray 28

iv Table 28

v Cone 29

vi Candle 29

Thursday 31

Inside-Out Views 32

Paris! Paris! 33

Entomology 34

Picture Alphabet (1962)

Picture Alphabet 37

Revolt 40

I Dreamt Myself 42

Fish on the Sand 43

Six Etudes 44

i Old Beggar at the Church 44

ii Cemetery Squirrels 44

iii Gordian Bow 45

iv Since Carp 46

v Erotic 46

vi All the Same 47

The Bird Beyond the Bird (1968)

Today a Long Time Ago 51

Life 52

Penetration 53

From Fingerprints 54

My Unsurvivor 55

Apocrypha of the Original Apple 57

Papusza 59

Creator 63

Traduction 64

Tell How It Was 66

The Bird Beyond the Bird 68

A Reading of Ashes (1979)

*** (I was unable to save) 73

The Assumption of Miriam from a Street in Winter, 1942 74

5 VIII 1942 75

The Six-Year Old from the Ghetto Begging on Smolna Street in the Year 1942 77

The Jews Left 79

The Execution of Memory 80

A Gathering of Stones 82

The End of the Rite 84

Illicit (1979)

I'll Tell You a Story 87

Illicit 89

*** (With a temperature of 101.3) 90

Gdansk Train Station, Warsaw 1968 91

The Hour Is Ripe 92

Recipe 94

The Rite 95

How to Spoil the Cannibals' Fun 96

Errata (1981)

Childhood, 1940 101

A Certain Dickens 103

Ringelblum Archive 104

Death of a Unicorn (1981)

Incantation 107

Getting Out of the Mirror 108

*** (in the steep evenings of falling asleep) 110

Don't Be Surprised 111

Tangolia, 1936 112

List of Telephone Subscribers for the Capital City of Warsaw for the Year 1938-39 114

There I'll Get Lost 116

Refuge 117

Slowness 118

*** (Honey lives only) 119

Prayer to the Holy Louse 121

The Gypsy Road 124

Village Landscape 126

The Initial (1994)

The Initial 129

Everything I Don't Know 130

The Road to Zuzela 132

From the Nature Notebook 133

My Belated Guests 137

Memorial 138

The Dot over the I 139

Freedom 140

Paired Inscription 141

Beforetime and Aftertime (2004)

Dear Zbigniew 145

Absent 146

I'm Heading Out 148

*** (rivers suspend their current) 149

Kazakhstan, USSR 150

From "Side Notes" 151

Pantarheia (2006)

By Itself 163

Aequinoctium 164

Wormwood Night 166

Pantarheia 168

Screening Cancelled 170

We 172

Afterword Piotr Sommer 175

Biographical Notes 184

Acknowledgments 186

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/20/2021

The first English-language translation of the work of Polish poet and WWII resistance fighter Ficowski (1924–2006) draws from 11 of the poet's collections dating from 1957 to 2006. Here is an unusual mind capable of masterful metaphors: "Down sits the black-bearded gardener,/ God the Father/ with the planets in his basket,/ and bites into the full fruit" ("Apricot Time"). Some of his images are surrealist, as in "All Around London," which opens "The yellow hands of bananas/ stick out from under the awnings—/ they're checking for rain," and later declares that "the Vistula/ is a dry smudge of blue/ on the map of memory.// Because here there are rains of tears/ that cannot revive anything." The atrocities of the Holocaust linger in these pages and are explored through Ficowski's direct but light touch: "I was unable to save/ a single life// I couldn't stop/ a single bullet// so I circle cemeteries/ that aren't there... I run// to the aid uncalled for/ to the rescue delayed// I want to get there on time/ even if it's already over." These surprising, clear, and appealing poems are to be enjoyed again and again, marking Ficowski as a poet readers won't want to miss. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly