The Greatest Poet You’ll Never Read

Mikołaj Gliński

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Bolesław Leśmian

Culture.pl explains why the greatest Polish poet is one whose poems you’re least likely to read. Is there a solution out there for lovers of world literature?

Poland’s position as a country of poets is firmly established and secure. Its Nobel Prize winners, like Szymborska or Miłosz, and other 20th century giants, including Herbert, Różewicz and Zagajewski, are part of a tradition that goes back centuries.

But perhaps the greatest of them all is the poet you’re least likely to have even heard of. One whose greatness most readers will never be able to actually acknowledge. The reason for this lies in the very heart of his poetry and poetic idiom, and touches on the issues of the very possibility of rendering a perfectly idiomatic work of art into an altogether different language (or at least certain languages).

Bolesław Leśmian – the hero of our story – may just be the ultimate proof of the utmost untranslatability of some of the best poetry out there.

Who is Leśmian’s equivalent in English?

To imagine Leśmian in English, one would have to fancy a poet combining the myth-creating capacities of William Butler Yeats (and like him, be concerned with God’s existence), Edgar Allan Poe’s morbid metaphysical fascination with death and the afterlife, an interest in local folklore and mythology (like Seamus Heaney) with the ardour of a poet ecstatically in love with nature, as well as display a knack for voluptuous erotic poetry. Combine all that with the linguistic inventiveness of Lewis Carroll or James Joyce (the latter as the author of Finnegans Wake rather than Ulysses).

And yet, unlike some of the above-mentioned writers, the work of that poet would hardly be considered difficult. In fact, for Poles, Leśmian remains a poet whose idiom is immediately, almost intuitively accessible, one that does not need commentaries or footnotes, and whose poems are deeply and universally moving. A poet beloved by Polish readers, and – if this phrase doesn’t sound too oxymoronic – even a popular poet.
So why is Leśmian so little known outside of the Polish language? And outside of Poland to just a small circle of academics and translators? Why is his historical reputation limited to an even smaller circle of fellow poets from the past (like Boris Pasternak or Abraham Sutzkever), who sensed the scope and magnitude of his genius, but nonetheless were unable to facilitate his path to more international glory?

A notary who wrote verse

Bolesław Leśmian z córką Wandą w jednej z warszawskich kawiarni, fotografia z książki “Świat utracony. Żydzi polscy. Fotografie z lat 1918-1939”, fot. wyd. Boni Libri

Bolesław Leśmian was born in Warsaw in 1877. He spent most of his youth in Ukraine, where his father worked as a director in a railway department. He went on to study law at the University of Kiev and wrote his first verse in Russian, a language which, according to some scholars, exerted a crucial influence on the future style of his Polish verse.

His debut book of poetry, Sad Rozstajny (Orchard at the Crossroads) was published in 1912 just before WWI and passed largely unnoticed. During his lifetime, Leśmian published only three volumes of poetry and – despite becoming a member of Polish Academy of Literature in 1933 – remained a marginal figure of interwar literary life.

During most of this time, he would function as a minor public official – specifically, a notary – in provincial Polish towns. Married to Zofia Chylińska, Leśmian had two daughters (one of them, Wanda, later became the mother of Gillian Hills, a British actress famous for her performance in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up). Leśmian died in 1937 at the age of 60.

Leśmian’s poetry found little recognition during his lifetime. Due to its peculiar style, it was at best seen as a strange and mannered emanation of the Young Poland movement of the early 20th century – epigonic and outdated.

It was actually only much later, in the 1950s and 1960s, that Leśmian began to find his rightful place in the Polish modernist canon. Deemed now a major metaphysical poet (‘the Dante of non-being’), a great innovator of the Polish language, and even ‘the only artist who presents a universe of infinite dimensions, the world as seen by the mathematics of today’. Recognised as a unique phenomenon of the 20th century, Leśmian was now granted his lot of post-mortem literary fame, and yet his road to wider international recognition remained barred.

Leśmian: the translator’s nightmare

read more: The Greatest Poet You’ll Never Read

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