On Translating Kacper Bartczak

Across numerous poetry collections, Polish poet, translator, and critic Kacper Bartczak has produced a distinctive poetic style that largely eschews punctuation and builds torque with conjoined phrasal shards and pressurized syntax only for the reader to slip on leaky alliteration or consonance. His recent trio of books—Wiersze organiczne (Organic Poems), Pokarm Suweren (Food Sovereign), and Naworadiowa (Radionaves)—explore on geological and molecular levels the cultural dynamics that have fed contemporary Polish political discourse and reality. For Bartczak, the material substance of our world—minerals, plants, residual tissues, organic and inorganic matter—is haunted by the psychological, feeds the alchemical dangers of a sort of mitochondrial misprision to express its apprehensions, superstitions, and dark energies.

Bartczak creates multivalent poetic organisms with “breath smoother than phosphate” that are fueled by “the synthetic maniac given/under the tongue for thought//life glued into someone’s/dream.” His syllables are sharp enough to slice meat while “synergistic parabolas/are like magnetic flowers” that extend Polish literary talisman Miron Białoszewski’s Copernican “revolution of things” into posthumanist poetic roses capable of “vaporiz[ing] the void.”

His triptych of books invite considerations of both latitudinal and longitudinal relationships between poems: for instance, in what ways do poetic phrases or expressions “migrate” (a term Bartczak deploys with some regularity)? In “Phosphorus,” this is visible in how “terrarium” sheds a consonant to become “errarium” or the Polish original repeats the word “sen,” meaning “dream,” but which I migrated into an alliterative synonym to “reroute the reverie.” The mitosis or mutations proliferate like a game of broken telephone in “The truth of the picture,” when the speaker loosely (mis)reads a tote bag’s message between English and Polish, then drifts across the next stanza to prompt a tangential reflection on Polish poet and translator Bohdan Zadura’s essay “John Ashbery i ja. Poezja spójników?” (“John Ashbery and I: The Poetry of Conjunctions?”).

In this sense, “the enlightenment of conjunctions” Bartczak offers us is less an intersection or conclusion and more a kind of poetic electron (dis)continuously but inquisitively jumping across psychosocial and ontological orbits.