New England Review

Ellen Hinsey

A State of Fog: Making Sense of the Polish (Non)Election

Ellen Hinsey reports on recent developments in Poland during lockdown, where the May 10 presidential election was not officially canceled, nor was it held.

OVER THE LAST TEN YEARS we have seen the progressive rise of authoritarianism in Europe and now also in the United States. Restrictions on the media, limits on freedom of assembly, and the dismantling of the separation of powers have taken different forms in different countries. In Central Europe, over the last two months, countries have used COVID-19 lockdown conditions to pass emergency laws or introduce further repressive measures. In Poland, the governing Law and Justice party attempted to push through legislation that would have resulted in a presidential election that was neither free nor fair. The story suggests a cautionary tale for us all.

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In Europe, the uncertainty brought about by the pandemic comes on the heels of a twelve-year period in which—after the 2008 financial crisis, the 2015 refugee crisis, and the recent rise of anti-democratic sentiment—social and political assurances have steadily been eroded. We are aware that we are facing not only a pandemic of exceptional proportions, but that something even more disruptive, even more dangerous, may await us. We are confronted with the most pressing questions: do we have the resources to maintain our civic decency, address our errors, in short, to save ourselves?

Among the critical tools we possess to counter this moment of pandemic uncertainty—in addition to farsighted medical recommendations and scrupulous crisis management—is that of legal certainty. The last two months in Poland, as the ruling Law and Justice party prepared for a presidential election, have shown us how the basis of a country’s rule of law and legal certainty—as it pertains to the fundamental democratic freedom of free and fair elections—can be dismantled.

Poland’s State of Fog
A review of the facts: like many nations, in the face of the gravity of the COVID-19 epidemic, the Polish government sought to introduce emergency regulations to address the crisis. The Polish Constitution allows for a response to such an emergency situation under its “extraordinary measures,” including a “State of Natural Disaster,” fundamentally suited for the COVID-19 epidemic. However, anxious to carry through with the country’s May presidential elections, the Law and Justice government held off, as enacting this extraordinary measure would have legally triggered the postponement of all elections until the crisis’s end. Moreover, with the incumbent Law and Justice President Andrzej Duda leading in the polls—national confinement having provided him with unequaled campaign visibility—such a step was not deemed advantageous. Instead, on March 13 the Polish Government introduced by decree a “State of Epidemic Emergency” (later changed to “State of Epidemic”). Legal scholars sharply questioned the proportionality of the restrictions introduced under the State of Epidemic (not among the constitution’s extraordinary measures), as well as its indefinite duration, but we leave that debate for another time.

Two weeks later, in early April, a sequence of events began to unfold that would gravely undermine Poland’s legal certainty regarding free and fair elections. Although voices, including the Polish Association of Epidemiologists and four hundred legal experts, increasingly called for the election’s postponement—and despite the fact that the country’s Constitutional Tribunal holds that no electoral law should be modified less than six months prior to an election—on April 6 Law and Justice introduced a special election draft act and pushed it though the Sejm in a single day. Defying growing opposition, the draft act proposed, with now only a month remaining before the presidential election, to organize national postal voting for 30 million citizens, a task never before attempted in Poland. It also included a highly disputed restructuring of the electoral process itself, in particular by transferring the organization of the elections from the country’s independent National Election Commission to the Ministry of State Assets, run by Jacek Sasin, a Law and Justice appointee.

Due to the controversial nature of the proposed changes under pandemic conditions, critics of the legislation contended that if the elections were to go forward, they would effectively be conducted without a genuine competitive campaign, with inadequate assurances for the ballots’ delivery and inviolability, and without requisite provisions for overseas voting. These doubts, and numerous others, were expressed not only by the country’s political opposition, but also by certain key politicians aligned with the leading party, and disagreement over the bill subsequently created a split between the majority Law and Justice party and its coalition partner Agreement, led by Jarosław Gowin, who resigned in protest.

Future legal scholars may well single out May 6, 2020, as a particularly dark day for Poland’s constitutional history. On that day, with chaotic and incomplete postal voting preparations, and only four days to go, party leaders Jarosław Kaczyński and Jarosław Gowin, newly reconciled, issued a joint statement announcing that the presidential election—though constitutionally required to be held on May 10—would not be officially canceled, but neither would it be held (stay with me here), with the understanding that the Polish Supreme Court, which oversees the legitimacy of elections, would consider such a (nonexistent) election invalid, and having invalidated it, empower the Marshall of the Sejm to set a new date.

Here it seems, having left behind legal certainty, one reaches the abyss of the legally absurd.

To further complicate matters, even if it wished to do so, the Polish Supreme Court is only empowered to issue such a verdict on the basis of an election report by the National Election Commission. On election night, the National Election Commission would announce that since there had been no election, there had been no candidates, and no such report would be forthcoming.

Thus, on Sunday, May 10, 2020, the Polish nation awoke mystified, to no ballots, no election, and to candidates who had vanished. In short, fog and uncertainty reigned.

Subsequently (based on the National Election Commission’s legal fiction of nonexistent candidates, a contested fact) it was announced that the Marshall of the Sejm, as if ex nihilo, would set a new election date. After two months of contentious struggle, the opposition parties accepted this proposal.

At this writing, it appears that the Poles will have hybrid postal and in-person elections at the end of June. With the cost, however, of a clear disregard for fundamental principles of rule of law.

Life after COVID-19: Dancing on the Precipice
What can we learn from this cautionary tale? As we remember, a number of other high-stakes presidential elections are approaching—notably in the United States—where human safety and democratic legal certainty are being weighed in the balance of political ambition. The implications of basing one’s reelection on the compromised safety and lives of those one is mandated to serve deserves no comment. In this time of global upheaval, however, what we can know is that either we fight to uphold the integrity of our legal systems—with the hope they will be there for us after the COVID-19 crisis—or we can squander them now. To make such a dangerous trade-off now with our rule of law and legal certainty, to be sure, is at our greatest peril.

This special dispatch is a follow-up to Hinsey’s earlier pieces on Poland, which are available here.

Ellen Hinsey is NER‘s international correspondent. She has lived in Paris since 1987, and witnessed firsthand the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. She has extensively reported on the rise of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Irish Times, Die Welt and Poetry. Her most recent books are Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism and The Illegal Age, a poetic investigation into the twentieth-century’s legacy of totalitarianism and the rise of political illegality.

Books by NER authors

October 2019

The Professor of Immortality is a tragicomedy about the paradoxes of trying to be a decent human, and—maybe even trickier—of trying to be a decent mom. It’s also page by page a joy to read. Eileen Pollack is one of the smartest, funniest and most companionable novelists out there. —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

From the publisher: Professor Maxine Sayers once found her personal and professional life so fulfilling that she founded the Institute of Future Studies, a program dedicated to studying the effects of technology on our culture and finding ways to prolong human life. In the aftermath of her beloved husband’s death, Maxine is jolted from her grief by her sudden suspicion that a favorite former student might be a terrorist called the Technobomber and that her son might either be involved in or become a victim of this extremist’s bombing. Deserting her teaching responsibilities, her ailing mother, and an appealing suitor, Maxine feels compelled to set out and search for her son in order to warn and protect him.

Eileen Pollack is the author of the novels The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, Breaking and Entering, and Paradise, New York; the short-story collections In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic; and the nonfiction books The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club and Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull. Pollack has published many times in NER, and her most recent contribution, “Ranch House,” can be found in NER 32.4.

The Professor of Immortality can be purchased through HarperCollins Publishers or from your local bookstore.

A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys “the visceral effect that prison has on identity —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

From the publisher: Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a husband and father of two sons. The author of the memoir A Question of Freedom (Avery/Penguin 2009) and the poetry collection Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), Betts has been awarded fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the Open Society Institute, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Warren Wilson College. As a poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. Betts has been published in NER 31.4, 34.1, and 35.3.

Felon can be purchased directly from the publisher or from your local, independent bookstore.

Impressive in its precise articulation and range of insights, [Timothy] Donnelly’s dazzling third collection extends the thematic reach of his 2010 Kingsley Tufts Award–winning The Cloud Corporation. Charting the underbelly of Western capitalism, the speakers in Donnelly’s poems locate the imperialist impulse in humanity’s distant origins. From gut flora to galaxies, these poems offer glimpses “that waver like air above lit candles,” restoring meaning to the world in the process. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: In astonishingly textured poems powerful and adroit in their negotiation of a seeming totality of human experience, Donnelly confronts—from a contemporary vantage point—the clutter (and devastation) that civilization has left us with, enlisting agents as far flung as Prometheus, Flaming Hot Cheetos, Jonah, NyQuil, and, especially, Alexander the Great. 

Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches in the Writing Program of Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family. His work appears in NER 40.1.

The Problem of the Many can be bought from Wave Books or from your local bookstore.

From the publisher: Through vivid imagery that celebrates the world, Boruch meditates on memory and time, and the process of living with, and working through, grief. Boruch’s poems challenge typical associations with the subject, exposing new facets of a universal feeling.

Marianne Boruch has been awarded fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University and often in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Boruch has published frequently in NER, most recently with the essay “In the Archives of the Humanly Possible: Two Rooms” in NER 37.1.

The Anti-Grief can be purchased through Copper Canyon Press or from an independent bookstore.

In the annals of publishing there is surely no comparable record of hospitality to poets, young or old. —The New York Times

From the publisher: In celebration of the prize’s centennial, this collection presents three selections from each Younger Poets volume. It serves as both a testament to the enduring power and significance of poetic expression and an exploration of the ways poetry has evolved over the past century. In addition to judiciously assembling this wide-ranging anthology, Carl Phillips provides an introduction to the history and impact of the Yale Younger Poets prize and its winners in the wider context of American poetry, including the evolving roles of race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Carl Phillips is professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and has served as judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets since 2010. His own books of poetry include Wild Is the Wind and Pale Colors in a Tall Field. He is a frequent contributor to NER, and his work appears most recently in NER 37.1.

Firsts: 100 Years of Yale Younger Poets includes works by NER authors such as Maura Stanton, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Nicholas Samaras, Richard Siken, Valerie Wohlfeld, Ellen Hinsey, Fady Joudah, Eduardo C. Corral, Noah Warren, and others. This anthology can be purchased from the publisher.

Ellen Hinsey

Polish Poetry in Translation: Bridging the Frontiers of Language

Torn Posters III Rue Ordener Paris, by Roger Camp

Translation is a mysterious, imperfect art. Its impetus often arises out of unforeseen circumstances: impromptu voyages, a book’s accidental discovery, or the punishments and revelations of exile. These chance factors mean that, despite the increasing so-called globalization of the world, one can never definitively be sure that a text, no matter how important it is for one culture, will make its journey across the frontier of silence to another language.

[Read more]

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New Books from NER Authors

With Dots & Dashes, Jehanne Dubrow gives us a panoramic view of the landscape of marriage within the structure and confines of military life. This difficult and layered collection refuses to avert its gaze from trouble in all its overt and nuanced forms… Dots & Dashes is a series of messages called out over the waters of a life—isolation, separation, the silences and failures of communication—a reminder that sailors are not always the ones who are lost at sea. —Brian Turner, author of Phantom Noise 

From the publisher: Moving between the languages of love and war, Jehanne Dubrow’s latest book offers valuable testimony to the experiences of military wives. Frequently employing rhyme, meter, and traditional forms, these poems examine what it means to be both a military spouse and an academic, straddling two communities that speak in very different and often conflicting terms.

Born in Italy, Dubrow grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She is now an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Texas, where she teaches advanced poetry workshops among other courses. Dubrow is a contributor of book reviews to Southern Review, New York Times Magazine, and Hudson Review. Her poetry most recently appeared in NER in 36.1, with her poem “Reading Sappho in Pensacola.”

Dots & Dashes can be purchased directly from its publisher, Southern Illinois University Press.

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Hardy writes his poems as though he is one with nature, and absorbing every little sound and flutter around him. —Introduction to Rural and Regional Studies, Southwest State University

From the publisher: In Domestication: Collected Poems (1996-2016), Rob Hardy brings together the wide range of gifts that place him among the few whose common touch makes them exceptional. In work that is at once accessible, enjoyable, and wonderfully well-made Hardy shows, without pretentious display, that poetry is not an outsider’s cryptic game. His poems demonstrate what Henry David Thoreau teaches: That profundity may best be found in simplicity. Hardy gracefully combines his deep knowledge of the ancient classics and his wide interest in scientific learning with his first-hand experience of nature and human relationships.

Rob Hardy’s adaptation offers a stripped-down style in which every word counts and immediacy trumps Aeschylean grandeur. . . . Hardy has succeeded in producing a script that is evocative and unhurried. It engages with today’s concerns alongside those of fifth-century Athens. — Eric Dugdale, Didaskalia

From the publisher: Rob Hardy’s adaptation of the classic Greek trilogy renders Aeschylus’s tale of family revenge and civic justice in vivid, graceful poetry. This one-play version captures the intent and grandeur of the original and reads as compelling drama.

Hardy lives in Northfield, Minnesota, where he intermittently teaches Latin and Greek at Carleton College, serves on the school board, plays the lowest bells in the community handbell ensemble, hosts a monthly poetry reading series, and reads books by neglected writers. His essays have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, New Letters, Ploughshares, Critical Flame, Sonora Review, and in various scholarly journals. Rob was most recently featured in the pages of NER 37.2 with his essay “Deceit only was forbidden: A Brief Literary Biography of Richard Henry Wilde.”

Domestication can be purchased directly from the publisher, Shipwreckt Books, or from various independent booksellers. Hardy’s translation of The Oresteia is for sale from the bookstore of the Hero Now Theater.

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From the accomplished poet, scholar, and international correspondent for the New England Review comes a broad-ranging series of interviews with the enormously influential Tomas Venclova that is as sure to interest even casual readers of Eastern European literature as it is to prove indispensable to scholars in the field.

From the publisher: Ellen Hinsey‘s Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova is a book in the European tradition of works such as Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz and Aleksander Wat’s classic My Century. The book interweaves Eastern European postwar history, dissidence, and literature. Venclova, who personally knew Akhmatova, Pasternak, Milosz, Brodsky, and many others, was also one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. Magnetic North provides an in-depth account of ethical choices and artistic resistance to totalitarianism over a half century.

Ellen Hinsey is the International Correspondent for New England Review. Based in Paris since 1987, she witnessed firsthand the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Hinsey is the author of six books of poetry and translation, and her translations from French have been published with Riverhead/Penguin. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, Die Welt, Paris Review, Poetry, and New England Review (most recently in NER 37.4 with her essay, “Poland’s Illiberal Challenge“). A former Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, she teaches at Skidmore College’s Program in Paris.

Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova can be found online or at independent booksellers.

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Surely every poem desires to be read and read again. Zana Previti’s poems deserve it. The poems of Previti’s first collection, Providence, possess the rare capacity to make the personal appear universal and the universal appear personal. She blends present and historical time, immediate and distant place, and she applies layer after layer of rich details in lines that vary from a terse, trimeter-like pace to Whitmanic lines that threaten to sweep beyond the margins. —Ron McFarland, Professor at the University of Idaho and author of  Strange in Town: New and Selected Poems. 

“In language at once spare and unsparing, Zana Previti’s staggeringly wide-ranging and pitch-perfect Providence takes us from the ‘immense / old age of the Atlantic’ through war-time starvation experiments, family, Kung Fu movies, Greek myth, bathtub mystery novel reading, a Galveston hurricane, environmental degradation, and King Lear—reckoning in deeply humane ways with individual and historically-aware questions of the human capacity for suffering and love. ‘These stones are the generations / upon which we build images of the end of us,’ she writes, using her formal and lyrical skills to again and again find these ‘images of the end’ and their complex corollaries in our continuance and living. ‘Kill us if you will / but kill us in the light,’ Ajax is quoted as crying, and this poem—which is like nothing you’ve ever quite seen before—is a new, acute light.” –Alexandra Teague, author of the poetry collections The Wise and Foolish Builders and Mortal Geography, and Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts

Zana Previti, whose story “The Letters of Odysseus to Kalypso” appeared in NER 32.4,  was born and raised in New England. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine, and her MFA in poetry from the University of Idaho. She was recently named the recipient of Poetry International’s 2014 C. P. Cavafy Prize for Poetry and the Fall 2016 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Penn State Altoona. Previti teaches at English at Fairmont State University in West Virginia, and Providence is her first published poetry chapbook.

Providence can be purchased directly from the publisher, Finishing Line Press.

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Completed over a century ago but unpublished until now, Schnitzler’s droll, engrossing short novel of artists in 1890s Vienna tempers its satire with keen insight. . . . Readers are fortunate to have this late publication. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Eduard Saxberger is a quiet man who is getting on in years and has spent the better part of them working at a desk in an office. Once upon a time, however, he published a book of poetry, Wanderings, and one day when he returns from his usual walk he finds a young man waiting for him. “Are you,” he wants to know, “Saxberger the poet?” Is Saxberger Saxberger the poet? Was he ever a poet? A real poet? Late Fame, an unpublished novella recently rediscovered in the papers of the great turn-of-the-century Austrian playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler [and translated from the German by Alexander Starritt], is a bittersweet parable of hope lost and found.

Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. He was born in Vienna in 1862 and died there in 1931, and the city often served as the setting for his works. During his lifetime, Schnitzel’s works were often censored for their psychoanalytical exploration of explicit sexual encounters; the author himself was a contemporary and correspondent of Freud. After his death, Schnitzel’s writing was deemed “Jewish filth” by Hitler, and was burned publicly in Germany and Austria alongside the works of Einstein, Marx, Kafka, and other Jewish intelligentsia. In 1997 in NER 18.1, a translation of his story, “The Dead Are Silent,” appeared, a story which illustrates his and Freud’s shared obsession with the Eros-Thanatos complex.

Late Fame can be purchased online directly from its publisher, New York Review Books, or at your local independent bookstore.

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Can mournfulness be wry? Can irony be heartfelt? Yes, when the writer is as insightful as Lynne Sharon Schwartz, her voice urgent with life even as she speaks about death. From Veronica Lake to her old boyfriends to lost family members, a whole peopled world is created for us here, at the intersection of memory and dream.—Linda Pastan, former Poet Laureate of Maryland 

“A poet of poise and power. No Way Out but Through, [Lynne Sharon] Schwartz‘s third collection of poems, showcases some of this writer’s many strengths. She’s a stubborn anti-sentimentalist who can write wrenching elegies. She’s an archivist of memories, a celebrant for the forgotten or nearly forgotten, who also writes eloquently of the undertow of oblivion. She’s an anthologist of anxiety dreams. Irritated by Cordelia and partial to the Fisherman’s Wife, she’s a contrarian reader. At all times, Schwartz’s poetic voice is piercingly honest. Her tough-minded intelligence leaves plenty of room for questions and regrets.”—LA Review of Books

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Schwartz has taught at universities and writing programs across the country, including Bryn Mawr, Columbia, the University of Michigan, and the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. She currently teaches at the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the Columbia University School of the Arts. Schwartz is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. This is her third poetry collection, and her translation of Natalia Ginzburg’s work “Universal Compassion” appeared in NER 23.1.

No Way Out but Through can be purchased directly from the publisher, University of Pittsburgh Press.

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