POST SCRIPTUM English__ Feb 2021

Izolda Kiec about Ginczanka
Aleksander Rafałowski, Portrait of Zuzanna Ginczanka, 1937
(National Museum in Warsaw; free domain)
„and behind
me, a streak
of raw poems
mark my trace”,
ABOUT ZUZANNA GINCZANKA
She has been known as a legend of the
Warsaw bohemia in the interwar period.
As an exotic beauty who brought the
bored capital of Poland to its knees in the
mid-1930s. Men competed for just one
walk in the company of this pretty young
lady and women talked about her with
a sneer. Jan Kott wrote many years after
the war: “She had one eye so black that
the iris seemed to obscure the pupil, and
the other was brown with golden spots.
Everyone admired her poems, in which
something Persian was revealed, just like
her beauty”.
Over the years, she was present almost
exclusively in the memories of Polish
writers and poets, including the most
outstanding ones: Julian Tuwim, who
was considered her promoter, Witold
Gombrowicz, attracted to her mysterious
personality, Józef Łobodowski, who
tried to attribute to himself the merits
of commemorating this contemporary
Shulamite.
Who was she really? A nineteen-year-old
who, in her debut – the only volume of her
poems included this one – Otherness:
Look:
a purple troubadour announces a festival with piped
cries –
merchants distribute scarlet and ointments with
heaped spoons
on stilts of glass sopranos singing ladies sway and
swoon –
dancers jangle torsos and the jewels of their thighs –
– And you bore yourself
traipsing
the same streets
every day,
and in your health is death’s malaise
like a needle in the veins.
Joy flows,
though nowhere near,
in a pink ship of stealth,
down a far-off, alien river
of ultramarine and clay.
They’ll talk about your grief: ‘’flatfooted, sorry,
stunted’’
They’ll talk about your sorrow: ‘’as bland as you
please’’.
No verses of line fabrics,
nor any odes abundant
will remind them
who you were
far beyond the seven seas.
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