Anna Spólna
Technical University of Radom, Poland
spolna@interia.pl
Boundaries of Creative Freedom in Social Realist Mourning Poetry.
Threnodies On Stalin’s Death Published in Polish Press
Abstract: The doctrine of Socialist Realism challenged poets to define the boundaries of both their creative individuality and servility to the communist regime. Poems written after Stalin’s death and published in Polish press as tributes to his memory are a special case in point, shedding light on modes of negotiating these boundaries. In this paper, I analyse the relations between Socialist Realism in literature, principles of traditional mourning poetry, and the courtly nature of poems commissioned by the mighty patron of enslaved culture – the Communist Party. The central questions I seek to address is how did poets justify to themselves the shifting boundaries of their creative freedom; how did they try to protect the sense of value of their work when they were writing to order; finally, did they manage to preserve the originality of their poetics, modelling the contents of their poetry after the propagandist voice of the Communist ideology? These questions are addressed with reference to the theory of reception aesthetics, research into twentieth-century Classicism, and contemporary intertextual studies.
Keywords: Poland; Communist regime; Social Realism; Polish Literature; Court Poetry; Servilism.
‘nikczemny rytuał pogrzebów’
(the ignominious ritual of funerals)
Zbigniew Herbert, Potęga smaku / Power of Taste, 1981
It was as early as 1944 that Adam Ważyk and Mieczysław Jastrun, writing in Lublin-based Odrodzenie (Renaissance) magazine, juxtaposed literature as a crazy aesthetic play and literature as a question of a writer’s responsibility, total ideological and emotional commitment (Markiewicz 1955). Social Realism, officially declared in Poland in 1949, from challenged writers from the mid-1940s to make a necessary choice: publication required writers to be, in one way or another, servile, whereas philosophical and ethical independence spelled banishment to the margins of literary life and even more severe sanctions. This situation of extreme enslavement lasted until 1956, when Khrushchev officially condemned the cult of personality, and the political breakthrough of the Polish October in that year coincided with a thaw in cultural life.
When searching for causes of this phenomenon of a culture enslaved by Stalinism and the writers’ love affair with Communist authorities, researchers (Jeleński 1953, Kupiecki 1993, Miłosz 1989, Trznadel 1990, Urbankowski 1998) have provided two categories of answers – pointing to a negative (fear of repressions, ban on publication, exclusion from among a privileged elite) or a positive motivation (ranging from fascination with Communism and ideological commitment through an illusory faith in shaping the fates of a nation, to down-to-earth financial requirements and lust for prestige). Writers who chose to work for the regime, even in good faith, greatly contributed to constructing a false image of history, a campaign undertaken in the Polish press, poetic anthologies and volumes of poetry before 1956. By implementing political directives, they not only replaced ethics with ‘party morality’ that obfuscated distinctions between good and evil, but also abandoned the need for artistic fulfilment by creating works which are as perfect as possible (that is, according to the then prevalent, Modernist notion of art, original and springing from self-expression). They rejected culture as a naturally evolving process in favour of its externally controlled substitute.
The massive crop of at least forty (Kupiecki 1993) mourning poems, the so-called ‘phone-order’ verses, published in Polish newspapers and magazines next to official communiqués and remembrances of Stalin, must be seen as the apogee of this poetical servilism and the final test on Social Realist principles. When judging them, one must not forget the context in which they were written and read. The entire system of communist symbolism, leading to the identification of individual and mass and the deification of Stalin – a dehumanised symbol of revolution, the centre of an official cult that, paradoxically, proves deadly – was placed in the joint horizon of a receiver and sender (Jauss 1999), shaped by the totalitarian propaganda. Paul Ricoeur compares the condition of an enslaved social or national awareness to the armament of collective memory by ”authorised”, officially taught and publicly celebrated history’ (Ricoeur 2006, 113). In the peculiar case of writing to worship a dead leader, the extraordinarily powerful institutional pressures coincide with an emotional strain. Funeral poems straddle the border between public, official worship and the private expression of sorrow. Thus, writers are exposed to a double, political and emotional pressure, collectivised and private.
Three poems (see Appendix) stand out from among the mass-produced verses, created by writers recognised as eminent before these publications or afterwards. In the 11th issue of Nowa Kultura (New Culture) magazine of 1953, Julian Tuwim republished a poem Epos (Epic Poetry) of three years earlier, which acquired a secondary funeral stratum of meaning in the context of mourning. Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński’s Umarł Stalin (Stalin Has Died) appeared in the same issue of the magazine. Ten dzień (One of Those Days) by the future Nobel prize winner, then a young Cracow-based poet, Wisława Szymborska, was printed among several other poems on a page of 53rd issue of Życie Literackie (Literary Life).
The Social Realist threnodies I have selected are but a drop in a sea of agit-prop lyrics produced by nearly all poets, with farewells to Stalin a fixture of a universal ritual. The three texts above stand out from the pathetic graphomania, stylistic and conceptual kitsch by a certain degree of individualism, originality, and clarity of concepts. Paradoxically, the worst excesses of Social Realism are ignored while its best products become subjects of analysis. It is the latter, though, that best promoted Communism and added legitimacy to the enslavement of Poland (Urbankowski 1998). Credibility of emotional experience expressed in poetic formulations is the source of a poem’s success, particularly in the case of funeral poetry, conventional yet always emphasising stirrings of the lyrical ‘I’ and expecting similar emotional involvement on the part of the lyrical ‘you’. It was easier to value those expressions of sorrow where propaganda content was artfully interwoven into webs of intriguing images, lofty statements or natural simplicity of everyday language. As a result, they became more effective as tools of Stalinist propaganda.
The poetry of the Social Realist period followed general party guidelines, therefore, its contents were so similar and formal solutions so clichéd. As the value of a poem was determined by its author’s ideological commitment, the style and content of verses at the turn of 1940s and 1950s became universally standardised. Schematicity guaranteed safety against charges of formalism, while the imitation of Soviet models (e.g. widespread ‘Mayakovsky pose’) replaced creative pursuits. Means of artistic expression were to be accessible, comprehensible to a simple reader (Julian Przyboś’s school of avant-garde poetry was tolerated though marginalised and labelled ‘aestheticism’). The aralysis of the Polish poetic criticism after 1948 reflected the overall impasse of an enslaved literary life. Linguistic wealth or (more commonly) poverty of expression were as a rule ignored by reviewers. Critics were themselves afraid of being charged with formalism (Tubielewicz – Mattson 1997). It was as early as 1954 that Henryk Markiewicz, an eminent historian and literary theorist as well as a follower of Marxist conceptions of literary research, admitted that the then poetry criticism was skilful at evaluating the ideology of poems but discussed poetic form only to criticise its incompatibility with ideas (Markiewicz 1955). Authors of mourning poetry whose ‘correct’ message was beyond doubt enjoyed significant freedom in respect of structure and style. Few strove for a certain degree of poetic distinctiveness, however.
In 1953, the thirty-year-old Wisława Szymborska, eight years after her press debut and a year after the publication of her first volume Dlatego żyjemy (This Is Why We Live), was only entering the path to fame. Gałczyński, a typical ‘courtly poet’, known for his capacity of adjusting to the requirements of sponsors already before the war, was brutally attacked after 1948 for his betrayals of Social Realist poetics: at a meeting of the Polish Writers’ Society (ZLP) in 1950, he was instructed to ‘wring the neck of that unruly canary nestling in his poetry’ (Zawodniak 1998) He wrote the poem under analysis several years before his death. Tuwim, a leading proponent of Skamander poetic grouping, rightly famous for his mastery of the language before the war, was sickly and about to pass away. Besides, he chose internal exile after returning from wartime emigration: he wrote close to nothing, focused on editorial (authorship of a number of anthologies) and translation (mainly from Russian) activities.
Ideology integrates and, by symbolical means, constitutes collective identity yet its other, concomitant function is to legitimise a political order or a power (Gaertz 1973). The three poems cited above fulfil the principal requirements of ‘committed’ or indeed propaganda texts. Two years before the Szczecin Convention of the Polish Writers’ Union in 1949 – where Realist Socialism was declared as the sole creative method to prevail in Poland – Bolesław Bierut, first secretary of the Polish Communist Party, stated in a speech delivered at the opening of the Breslau radio station: ‘An artist who shapes the spiritual domain of national life is obliged to feel the pulse of the masses, their longings and needs, to use their affections and experiences as the creative inspiration for his own efforts, whose main underlying objective is to raise the life of these masses to a more noble level.’ (Markiewicz 1955, 19 – this postulate is more than fulfilled in Gałczyński’s verse). Bierut went on to demand presentation of the popular masses as creators of history (just the role outlined by Tuwim) and informing artistic work with ‘an active affirmation of Socialism building’ to ‘convey optimistic trust’. Szymborska, in particular, clearly highlights overcoming despair as an expression of Party maturity, although the lyrical situation of mourning the dead – comploratio (Michałowska 1974) – is in stark contrast with the programmatic optimism of Social Realism.
Each of the three works cited above is based on a distinct concept. Tuwim poses as a prophet who foretells everlasting fame to the Soviet nation. The title – a strong paratextual signal – discloses the author’s intention to uplift the subject matter (Genette 1996). In this way, a laudatory (and, secondarily, plaintive) text becomes part of the epic tradition, reaching back as far as pre-literary times. Tuwim places particular emphasis on Russian Bylinas, but also – in a nearer context – such Social Realist tributes as Broniewski’s Słowo o Stalinie (Tale of Stalin), for which the poet was awarded the 1st Degree State Literary Prize.
Szymborska’s One of Those Days is intended as a record of an artistic and ideological breakthrough – from refusal to admit the hard truth of Stalin’s death to the acceptance of duties it placed on a Socialist writer. Gałczyński overdoes the style: exaggerating despair of the nature worldwide at the news of the revolutionary leader’s demise, he verges on the absurd. Were it not for the context, the poem could be seen as mocking the conventions of the Social Realist threnody.
In their agit-prop funereal verses, poets stressed continuity of the victorious progress of the revolution in line with the logic of history, the lifting of Stalin to the pantheon of immortal Communist leaders, the sense of unity in joint sorrow. The poems I have selected, however, reveal a certain gap between declarations, imagery, and structure of poetic expression.
None of them were addressed to Stalin. In fact, Szymborska is silent about his death, present in an artful retardation of the scene of announcing the bad news. ‘Stalin has died’, Gałczyński repeats three times, but the worldwide mourning he upfronts is out of proportion. Even given the panegyric note associated with the laudatory nature of courtly funeral poetry, the hyperbolic sorrow felt by the personified rivers of the entire globe is beyond measure and becomes amusing. Tuwim’s Epic Poetry is an example of using the mock-Classic form (a singing syllabic-tonal, 10-syllable-long, trochaic and amphibrach, slightly irregular verse), the title, and the solemn tone to ennoble the Communist revolution, its legislators and supporters. The poem, in fact servilist, seems a noble gesture of anointing Stalin as a hero of folk tales and legends. Tuwim refers to an old courtly tradition: although a panegyrist serves his protector with his pen, their relation is ambivalent – ironically, a poet, the one who confers glory, becomes the master of the glorified (Dąbrowski 1968).
The people, defined as the proletariat, liberated by communism or awaiting their liberation, called ‘humanity’, ‘peoples of the world’, ‘little people’, ‘comrades’, are an essential point of reference (though addressed only by Tuwim) in all the three poems. This is from them that the subject of Gałczyński’s poem learns to love Stalin, it is ‘the great [Russian] nation’ – the hero of Epic Poetry. Communism, treated as a quasi religion, is another obligatory field of reference (Głowiński 1992, Łukasiewicz 2004, Terc 1959). Poets of this rank avoided showing that ideology, after all atheistic, and its mentors in a brazenly sacred light. They chose the language of suggestion and allusion. Szymborska twice points to the consoling Party as the superconscious (sight, power, conscience) of the people, thus defining the dogma of the leading role of the United Polish Workers’ Party. She cites symbols of the revolution, idolatrously extending the holy trinity of Marx – Engels – Lenin with a ‘fourth profile’, thereby performing a lay canonisation of Stalin. The image of a hanging flag recurs twice in Gałczyński’s verse: as a surrealist mourning banner of a black sun and a sheet of black clouds spread over the Earth, evoking associations with palls and mourning banners. Julian Tuwim adopts an apparently lay viewpoint and applies metonymies to call the revolution Spring, and Soviet Union the East, but the epithets of ‘blue’, ‘eternal’, ‘ever-living’ hint at eternal life of the communist idea and its leader and allude to the religious language.
The creation of the lyrical ‘I’ as a member of the community of believers follows naturally. The first person singular in One of Those Days, which informs Szymborska’ work with a characteristic feature of simplicity, intimacy, and the resultant credibility, inevitably turns into the ‘we’ of the community chanting political-meeting slogans in the fourth stanza. In the language of political propaganda, ‘we’ imputes both a value system (allegedly) binding upon the addressee and identity with the sender (Bralczyk 1981). When the personal note recurs in the conclusion of the Nobel laureate’s verse, therefore, it is hard to believe. Tuwim adopts an impersonal tone, assumes the draped robes of an epic poet, provider and guarantor of glory. The Horatian topos of the immortal and immortalising song is transposed into the world of old Russian Bylinas, sung over centuries of heroic legends (Tuwim translated The Song of Igor’s Campaign, by the way). It is latent in the historical legend. Gałczyński, in his turn, applies a strategy of high-flown quasi reportage, avoids any disclosures, and only in the apostrophe to poets does he confess to sharing their pain. The obstinacy of the final line – the capitalised warning of a community unified in grief and mobilised against the enemy – is a result of the highlighted sense of community.
The evasion of a personal tone, relating to the need for confirmation of the group membership, stands in opposition to the process of inviduation in Social Realist mourning poetry. Gałczyński’s and Szymborska’s texts discussed here expose a sense of loss and bereavement by treating Stalin as somebody close, as the figure of a father or friend. The father image, internalised in a child’s consciousness after the former’s death, becomes an obligation to imitate the Absent One. The laments under analysis realise this by declaring adherence to the ideology, perceived as the spiritual last will and testament of comrade Stalin (Szymborska) or forging the power of community out of the suffering (Gałczyński).
A narrative concept of variable identity (as an unfolding tale), based on an atemporal notion of the individual, is revealed in both One of Those Days and Stalin Has Died. Ch. Taylor explicates the process of continuing reintegration of identity in the following terms: ‘as a developing and becoming being, I am able to know myself only through my history of maturing and regression, history of victories and failures.’ (2001, 95) The process takes place in language, but in the context of negotiation with the environment, tradition, culture, and significant individuals in relation to whom Dasein defines itself. Complexity and a certain lability of identity is also an effect of references to some universal categories, e.g. historical or worldview community (Rosner 2006). The internationalised communist universe, where an ideologically immature (therefore prone to despair) writer grows up to the role of a poet understanding the vocation of ‘the engineer of human souls’, becomes this category in the case of Gałczyński’s and Szymborska’s mourning verses. It remains questionable whether the lyrical ‘I’ that undertakes this self-interpretation is a merely fictitious construct for the purposes of a committed poem. I believe that Tuwim and Gałczyński distance themselves considerably from the subject of their laments, which is undergoing a transformation, whereas more autobiographical motifs can be noticed in Szymborska’s case.
Joining a group is usually reinforced by ritualistic means: ‘An individual celebrates its bond with what surpasses it; with a certain whole into which it is implicated,’ repeating the motif of entering a relationship with the most significant Other (Bielik – Robson 2000, 49). The funereal celebrations connected with Stalin’s death, the totalitarian pompa funebris that Herbert described as ‘the ignominious ritual of funerals’, proved an effective encouragement to political engagement.
Tuwim’s poem is essentially different. Stalin is sculptured and glorified into inaccessible realms of myth three years before his death.
P. Ricoeur, when writing about collective traumas, says that what is glory to some is a wound to others, treasured in collective memories; an excess of memory of recollected events is associated with a deficit of criticism – memory of their moral or historical costs. It is therefore impossible to combine mourning with real remembering [remémoration], ‘the labour of mourning’ (Ricoeur 2006, 104). Polish Social Realist panegyrists fell hostage to two contradictory strategies: the official mourning of the leader and the latent fear of the consequences of his demise. Lauding the dead while ignoring the truth breaches a writer’s poetic identity and gives rise to an anxiety which must be concealed. Szymborska presents poetic freedom as the awareness of necessity, bending the ‘trembling’ hand to propaganda slogans according to the party discipline. Gałczyński plumps for a riot of styles, from the colloquial simplicity through Expressionist images of worldwide mourning to the strident tones of political meetings. It is difficult to find an essence in the flux of words and images – which may have been the author’s intention. The hero of Epic Poetry, keeper of the noble Classical tradition on the one hand and the voice of emotions and desires of ‘the people of the world’ on the other, is utterly deprived of individuality.
A comparison of the funeral poems worshipping the deceased Stalin with the entire poetical oeuvre of the writers would be an arduous task, but even a cursory review of similarities compels one to conclude that all these poets managed to stamp their laments with their own brand, to transform and individualise the somewhat agit-prop pattern.
The formally virtuoso work of Julian Tuwim had tended towards Classicism, a cult of song and literature since late 1920s. Rhythm, rhyming, metre, features of the poetic order became far more than mere ornaments, constituting the primeval force of the poetic message. The word appeared as a dynamic, sense-generating force, speech – a link between man, history, and value of native traditions. The fairy tale, legend, and history as a tale spring from the same story-telling source. All these motifs, twisted round to glorifying the revolution, are present in Epic Poetry, although diluted and trivialised.
A provocative attitude to the social standards and limitations of both petit-bourgeois and intelligentsia worldviews, the masks of a poet de la Boheme and the poet as a clown, distancing himself away from any ideologies he came to bow to, were the distinguishing features of Gałczyński’s poetry. The volatility of his political sympathies and views make him seem a ‘courtly poet’, always associated with most influential protectors of literary life (Jeleński 1990). He initially emphasised his Bohemian credentials, went on to work with the nationalist Right magazine Prosto z mostu (Straight and Simple) and to write patriotic verse, reminiscent of a religious Romantic strain of Polish poetry, during WWII. This made him hardly acceptable as a servant of the Communist authorities, yet he switched allegiances, once again, and joined, after overcoming certain difficulties, the artists writing in praise of Communism. Nevertheless, Gałczyński combined his ideological opportunism with a creative independence in forming his poetry: he mixed styles freely, merged lyricism with an absurd sense of humour, seriousness with parody and pastiche. The same applies to Stalin Has Died. He juxtaposes elements of Expressionist and catastrophist poetics (worldwide mourning) with fairy-tale pathetic fallacy (personified nature), a stream of free associations in the spirit of visionary Surrealist techniques is broken with a record of simple everyday affections. Balancing on the edge of the grotesque (lamenting rivers of the Earth) is most intriguing. It may be an unintended consequence of overzealous expressions of grief, though it can be surmised that the poet is running amok in the belief that no critical voice will dare to recognise the parodied model of the mourning panegyric.
In One of Those Days, Szymborska demonstrated some characteristics that she was to perfect in her later poetry. Discrete manifestations of feelings, often in disguise, a distanced perspective upon an emotional situation are features of the lyrical ‘I’ in such masterful threnodies as Kot w pustym mieszkaniu (A Cat In an Empty Flat) or Pożegnanie z widokiem (Farewell To a View). Precise structure (in this case – suspension maintained in the first three stanzas) and a tendency to a distinct concluding point would remain the trademarks of her mature output. The heroes of her best poems face determining forces of biology, history, and blind fate, often called ‘accident’. They defend their dignity and independence, though without optimism or even lasting hope for changing man’s condition. These are effects of the earlier lesson, the commitment to building the brave new world of Communism, paid for with continuing scepticism.
The best Social Realist poets attempted the impossible. Writing to order, they wished to make the impression of writing straight from the heart, following the Party guidance, they desired to shape their own distinct styles. They intended to preserve their poetic sovereignty while publishing their work in the totalitarian state that monitored every expression of artistic activity, to save their poetic dignity when writing panegyrics in the service of propaganda. The poems in homage to Joseph Stalin that I have analysed represented attempts at maintaining relative creative freedom. An examination of the three (occasionally converging) defence strategies leads to the conclusion they were not effective. The Social Realist threnodies by Gałczyński, Szymborska, and Tuwim are mere documents – a proof of vain efforts to endow the enslaved poetry with individual features.
References
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Appendix[1]
Julian Tuwim, Epos (Epic Poetry)
Ludzi wielkich – nic nie uchroni Nothing will protect great people
Przed poezją historii: legendą. From poetry of history: from legend.
Już za życia zapowiedź im dzwoni When still alive, they can hear
O tej pieśni, co śpiewać im będą. Ringing notes of their future song.
Dzisiaj – cisi, strudzeni i skromni Today, quiet, hard-working and modest,
W prozie dnia pogrążeni są szarej, And immersed in everyday greyness,
Ale tli się już płomyk potomny, But the flame of the future is flickering
Co wybuchnie błękitnym pożarem. To burst into a blue fire.
I tak samo jest z wielkim narodem: The same is true of a great nation:
Aż do klechdy podniosą go dzieje, Till history lifts it to fable
Idącego upartym pochodem As it marches stubbornly onwards
W blask zwycięstwa, co w dali widnieje. Into the distant blaze of victory.
Szary trud – złote baśnie oprzędą, Golden tales will lighten grey efforts,
Struny o nim dźwięczące – zakwitną, Singing strings are going to blossom,
Ludy świata wspominać go będą World’s peoples will treasure it
Nie zwyczajną pamięcią –błękitną! In their extraordinary – blue memory!
I już tli się, czekając, ta łuna This glow of legends of Eastern Spring
Legend przyszłych o Wiośnie, o Wschodzie, is already glowing and waiting,
I zakwitniesz, zakwitniesz na strunach, Your flowers will spring from the strings,
Twórco ery, radziecki narodzie! Creator of the era, you Russian nation!
Wieki dadzą ci rangę bajeczną: Ages will raise you to a fable:
Epos – jakąś wszechludzką Bylinę Epic – a universal human Bylina
Z Rewolucją, krasawicą wieczną, featuring Revolution, the eternal beauty,
Z wiecznie żywym herosem Stalinem. And the ever-living, heroic Stalin.
Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, Umarł Stalin (Stalin Has Died)
Do pół masztu zwieszona flaga, A flag hanging halfway down,
flagę wiatr przedwiosenny targa. Early-spring wind buffeting the flag.
To nie wiatr, to szloch na wszystkich It’s not a wind, it’s a sob over
kontynentach i archipelagach. all continents and archipelagos.
Umarł Stalin. Stalin has died.
Jakby nagły wiatr zboża pogiął, Like a sudden wind bending grain stalks,
jakby w biały dzień noc w okno. Like night in windows in broad daylight.
Dzisiaj słońce jest żałobną chorągwią. The sun today is a mourning banner.
Umarł Stalin. Stalin has died.
Płaczą ludzie na ulicach. Ciężko. People out in streets are crying. Hard.
Taki ciężar zwalił się na ręce. Such a burden has fallen on their hands.
Płaczą ludzie zwyczajni jak ziarnko piasku, Little people like grains of sand are crying,
a ci go kochali najgoręcej. Those who have loved him the most.
Krzyczy Wołga, szlocha Sekwana. The Volga’s crying, the Seine’s sobbing,
Woła Dunaj. Jęczą rzeki chińskie. The Danube’s shouting. Chinese rivers are moaning,
Broczy Wisła jak otwarta rana. The Vistula is bleeding like an open wound.
Lamentują potoki gruzińskie. Georgian streams are lamenting.
Krzyczy Aragwa: Stalin! Chmury całego globu Aragwa’s shouting: Stalin! Wind has sewn
wiatr zeszył w jedna chorągiew żałobną. Clouds from world over into a single mourning flag.
O poeci, rozpowiadajcie O poets, go and tell,
w każdej wiosce, w każdej krainie in every village, every land,
ból nasz wielki po wielkim Stalinie. Our great pain for the great Stalin.
Umarł Przyjaciel. The Friend has dies.
Cień padł na ziemię od tej śmierci, A shadow of this death has fallen
od oceanu do oceanu, over lands from ocean to ocean,
od Gibraltaru do Uralu. From Gibraltar to the Ural.
Ale niech wróg nie liczy na cień i nieszczęście. Let not the foe count on the shadows and misery.
Ale niech wróg nie myśli, że przez ten cień przejdzie. Let not the foe think they will pass the shadow unnoticed.
NIE POŻYWI SIĘ WRÓG NA NASZYM BÓLU I ŻALU. THE FOE SHALL NOT FEAST ON OUR PAIN AND SORROW!
Wisława Szymborska, Ten dzień (One of Those Days)
Jeszcze dzwonek, ostry dzwonek w uszach brzmi. The bell, the sharp bell still ringing in my ears
Kto u progu? Z jaką wieścią, i tak wcześnie? Who’s at the door? What news comes so early?
Nie chcę wiedzieć. Może jeszcze jestem we śnie. I won’t know. Perhaps I’m still dreaming.
Nie podejdę, nie otworzę drzwi. I won’t come over to open the door.
Czy to ranek za oknami, mroźna skra Is it morning outside and frost sparkling,
tak oślepia, że dokoła patrzę łzami? So blinding that I look round through tears?
Czy to zegar tak zadudnił sekundami? Is it the clock booming seconds so loud?
Czy to moje własne serce werbel gra? Or is it my heart drumming out?
Póki nikt z was nie wypowie pierwszych słów, Till one of you utters the first word,
brak pewności jest nadzieją, towarzysze… this uncertainty is hope, comrades…
Milczą. Wiedzą, że to czego nie chcę słyszeć – Silent. They know I must be reading
muszę czytać z pochylonych głów. From their bent heads what I’d rather not know.
Jaki rozkaz przekazuje nam What order is the fourth profile
na sztandarze rewolucji profil czwarty? On the revolutionary banner giving us?
‘- Pod sztandarem rewolucji wzmocnić warty! ‘ ‘Reinforce the guards by the the revolutionary banner!’
‘- Wzmocnić warty u wszystkich bram! ‘ ‘Reinforce the guards by all gates!’
Oto Partia – ludzkości wzrok. This is the Party – the sight of humanity,
Oto Partia – siła ludów i sumienie. This is the Party – the power and conscience of peoples.
Nic nie pójdzie z Jego życia w zapomnienie. Nothing of His life will be forgotten.
Jego Partia rozgarnia mrok. His Party disperses darkness.
Niewzruszony drukarski znak The unmoved printing sign will not
drżenia mej piszącej ręki nie przekaże, convey the tremor of my writing hand,
nie wykrzywi go ból, łza nie zmaże. It will not be disfigured by pain or smudged by a tear.
A to słusznie. A to nawet lepiej tak. This is right. It’s even better this way.