The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II by Aleksandra Kremer

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II by Aleksandra Kremer E. M. Stańczyk Kremer, Aleksandra. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA London, 2021. 364 pp. Notes. Index. $45.00: £39.95: €40.95. In this brilliant new monograph Aleksandra Kremer studies poetry readings by major Polish poets that have been preserved through official, semi-official and private sound recordings. Her primary focus is on seven male and three female poets — Julian Tuwim, Czesław Miłosz, Miron Białoszewski, Aleksander Wat, Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Anna Kamieńska, Anna Świrszczyńska, Tadeusz Różewicz and Julian Przyboś — in addition to several others. Kremer sets herself an ambitious task: to explore how the poets’ approach to reading reflected their attitude to the Polish literary tradition, poetry performance and, importantly, poetry creation. Using the computer programme Praat, which analyses pitch, duration, loudness and timbre of sound waves, Kremer studies ‘each poet individually, trying to grasp their individuality at the crossroads of acoustics and linguistics’ (p. 27). To Kremer, a poem is not a static piece of work. Rather, the ‘the sounds of the poets’ speech […] supplement or contradict what we learn from print’ (p. 28). The book consists of five excellent chapters. Chapter one discusses what could be potentially the oldest recorded reading by a Polish poet, produced as a sound postcard in the United States in 1941. Julian Tuwim, the poet behind the recording, emulated an older tradition of reading poetry to friends and family. His sound postcard was sent as a Christmas gift to his sister in London, two decades before authors in Poland had access to comparable technology. In a similar vein, the young poet Halina Poświatowska recorded two of her works in 1959 during a stay with relatives in America. The recording was meant as a family keepsake which became all the more cherished after the poet’s untimely death eight years later. Kremer’s analysis of these early recordings [End Page 549] illustrates what she does so well throughout the monograph as a whole. She demonstrates that studying voice recordings such as these can open up space for thought-provoking comparisons; in this case — comparisons that run across generational, gender and stylistic lines. Chapter two discusses Czesław Miłosz as a reader and translator of his own poems. Kremer shows how the two roles overlapped in the poet’s biography. Miłosz’s own translations into English followed the Polish syntax and prosody which, even if unnatural in the target language, was meant to facilitate his participation — through poetry readings — in the cultural life of the United States where he lived for more than three decades. While his rhythmical and beautifully enunciated speech in Polish bore all the hallmarks of the ‘phonetic patterns from another time’ (p. 117), distinguishing his readings from both everyday speech and existing recitation styles, the poet’s recorded performances in English were visibly less skilled. Like Miłosz, Miron Białoszewski, who is the focus of chapter three, was an avid performer of his own poems. Tape-recording became central to his work in the 1960s and ’70s, as seen, for example, in the private recordings produced for close friend Jadwiga Stańczakowa. In contrast to Białoszewski’s theatrical style, readings by the Nobel Prize-winning Wisława Szymborska were understated and conversational, conjuring an atmosphere of home, even in the setting of a recording studio. The penultimate and final chapters deal with sound recordings that speak to the fragility of the poet’s body and their unwillingness or inability to deliver a ‘good’ reading, respectively. Chapter four discusses ‘taped farewells’ — recitations of poems interspersed with informal commentary — by sick and aging poets, such as Herbert, Wat, Kamieńska and Świrszczyńska. According to Kremer, these ‘highly somatic final recordings were courageous in revealing weakness, but they also aimed to overcome the body one last time in order to create variously imagined recorded afterlives’ (p. 216). Chapter five looks at the ‘unbeautiful readings’ by poets such as Różewicz who disliked performing and whose reading style...