“Tenebrae responsoria” & “An Image from Afar”

translated from the Polish by Karen Kovacik

Tenebrae responsoria

I started to walk after they bombed the theater full of children.

Always at night, always alone in my room. Walking feels shameful. Because why do it, in

the name of what, who gave me the authority?

At first I’d sneak away, like a tourist, to take in the major sites. On Google Maps,

everything’s still standing. Only water is striking the fountain in front of the

Drama Theatre. Beside it a girl on the stairs with a dachshund; someone nags a

child that he shouldn’t get wet; you can see each tree down to its last tiny leaf.

A young couple stands at the end of the pier, they’ve hung a bag on the railing and gaze at

the sea, the western sun; and when you rotate—two men, a woman in a slouchy

hat pulled low, and a girl of eight or nine in a black jacket with a hood, forever

without faces.

Before the Illichevets Stadium, an expanse of cheap concrete pavers, and a woman in a

blue coat is walking with her son, both preceded by long afternoon shadows. On

the opposite side, another woman in a pink blouse with short sleeves—it’s late

summer—and beside her a little daughter, in a matching shirt, is riding a bike,

also in that same improbably lifelike color on dull asphalt.

Then I started to walk further. To less obvious locations. Information about this site might no

longer be current. Always take into account reports of recent events as the situation is

subject to change.

In the Premium Apartments, a black fireplace. In the Hotel Czaika, you can turn around

in the bathroom. Everything’s still pristine: white towels and bathrobe, a pair of

slippers in their cellophane wrapper. In the library of the polytechnic

university, computers, not yet stolen, give off a silver glow.

Here a fence with a cracked post, buried in fall leaves. There an ugly office tower that has

not yet been bombed with an ATM, still unshattered, near blades of grass,

spring green and tender. No one’s around, just a couple of cars, absolutely

intact. At the intersection, two women chat, one with a black dog. A courtyard,

gray mural with a guy hunched under a table. Then a narrow bridge, where a

boy carries a blue watering can under his arm. Down below, a dull, sky-colored

train.

Over time, I became a long-distance runner.

I move then to my city, walk on the sunny side to the arched entrance of my street, as if

the entrance and the whole street no longer existed. As if everyone had been

shot, driven out, hauled away. The old woman in the white sweater, one hand

on the fencepost, the other on her cane, is not there. From the building, only

three floors remain, and on the top one, there’s a bed with its guts exposed. And

here’s our old café, and here, of those sitting at the little tables, maybe someone

survived, or maybe not, even if the placard announces the soup, mini quiche,

and croissant combo will always be there for 25 zlotys.

On Google Maps, my city’s still standing, but I walk through it as if it were already gone,

as if no one knew whether it would again exist.

You have to practice to not lose proficiency, so I shake my city from my eyes, like the guy

in the green shirt, standing on one leg, jostling a stone from his white sneaker,

which he doesn’t yet know is a piece of rubble.

Berlin, 23 June 2022

An Image from Afar

You understand everything, you’ve read everything, you viewed it and now

watch it yet again: the mother old, the son over thirty, the soldiers, both impatient and

indolent, as they lead him to his death after torturing him. You see the requisite blood,

that is, a lot, his face altered from the blows.

They stop and look at each other before he is killed, before she will have to live

for years, knowing he was killed, remembering that final moment when he still, in some

fashion, belonged to the living.

But that isn’t enough. They have to be dressed up for laughs. He gets a Versace

shirt with a gold pattern—you see it’s thick since the blood doesn’t soak through. On her

they place a kokoshnik brought from somewhere, wound in lace like toilet paper. “Do her

makeup, do it!” And they apply mascara, colorful shadow, as if for an evening out, so you

can hardly see her real face, which has sunken so deep she will never get it back.

They look carnivalesque, like dressed-up puppets, but through it all their dazed

suffering is hardly less authentic.

You look at Yeshua and Miriam on the wall of a Spanish church, but it’s not

Yeshua and Miriam you see.

Berlin, 5 November, 2022

Jacek Dehnel (b. 1980 in Gdańsk, Poland) is a Polish poet, writer, translator, and painter. His first collection of poems was the last book recommended by the Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. A prolific author of ten books of poems, five novels, several collections of short prose works, editorials, and essays, Dehnel has also translated works by Philip Larkin, Henry James, Edmund White, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and J. M. Coetzee, among others. His own works have been translated into over a dozen languages. A selection of his poems, Aperture (Zephyr Press, 2018, trans. Karen Kovacik), received PEN’s Award for Poetry in Translation honorary mention. His novels Saturn (Dedalus Books, 2013) and Lala (Oneworld, 2018), both translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, are available in English. In partnership with his husband, Piotr Tarczynski, he also writes a detective series under the pen name Maryla Szymiczkowa. Two volumes in this series, Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing and Karolina and the Torn Curtain (Oneworld 2019, 2021 and Harper Collins 2020, 2022) have also been translated by Lloyd-Jones. Dehnel has been the recipient of the Kościelski Award and the Polityka Passport Award. Since 2020 he has lived with his husband in Berlin.

Karen Kovacik is the author of the poetry collections Metropolis Burning (Cleveland State UP, 2005) and Beyond the Velvet Curtain (Kent State UP, 1999); the editor of Scattering the Dark: An Anthology of Polish Women Poets (White Pine, 2016); and the translator of Jacek Dehnel’s Aperture (Zephyr Press, 2018), a finalist for the 2019 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. With Mira Rosenthal and Antonia Lloyd-Jones, she translated Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline, which appeared from Zephyr Press in 2022. Her poems and translations have appeared widely in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New Letters, Poetry, and Southern Review. For her translation work, she received a Fulbright Research Grant to Poland and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

New England Review

Jacek Dehnel

“Tenebrae responsoria” & “An Image from Afar”