My brother-in-law at one point this summer asked me what I was working on and when I told him that I was translating contemporary poetry for an upcoming issue of an American journal, he asked, Szymborska? I told him that Szymborska was something on the order of ancient history. Andrzej Sosnowski, whose poems were on my mind at the time of our conversation, is roughly a dozen years older than my brother-in-law; according to the time-lag evinced by his suggestion, Sosnowski will have to wait until his generation's children are in their early thirties before his name will to the popular mind at the mention of contemporary Polish poetry. Assuming of course that he manages to win a Nobel Prize in the meantime. But it's more likely that a poet like Sosnowski is destined for an entirely different sort of recognition: he is recondite where Szymborska (or Rozewicz or Herbert) is, however elliptical, easily recognisable; he is hermetic where the earlier generation was public. The earlier poets belong to a poetic tradition stretching back, most famously, to Adam Mickiewicz, who compared his country's eminently lamentable fate to that of the Lord's Passion: Poland's re-emergence out of total dismemberment (completed in 1793--maintained until 1918) at the hands of Russia, Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be for Europe what Christ's rise from the dead was for a Christian mankind. It was in the context of this political oppression that Mickiewicz introduced the concept of evasion into Polish verse, as he tiptoed around the Czarist authorities; the same evasion is to be found in any number of parabolic poems written between the drawing of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (--the metap hor mixing with time). What's a poet to do when the pressure of political censorship is removed and everything can be said, when the content of a poem no longer has the potential to cause problems to those in power? After all, it was this very pressure, in the famous phrasing of Alfred Alvarez, that lent the poetry of postwar Eastern Europe the urgency that Alvarez found so lacking in the poetry of his native land. What indeed is the poet to do? In the back-and-forth of international literary influence, it's the Anglophone world's turn at service: John Ashbery makes it over the net as a generation of Polish poets goes in search of new sources of pressure. Jerzy Jarniewicz drew my attention to a couple of lines from a Sosnowski poem that might be taken as programmatic of the Polish reaction to Ashbery: Te dwie kobiety zlaly sie we snie-- nie chcialem tak tego powiedziec. The two women in a dream-- I didn't mean for it to out like that. (from Zaraz wracam [I'll Be Right Back]) If the earlier generation was compelled to think about how a government official would interpret its work, Sosnowski, with the other Polish poets who followed Ashbery's lead, shows himself thinking about how language contains within itself interpretations alien to the poet's intentions--assuming that the phrase streamed together carries the ambiguity (melted into one/urinated in unison) that is so apparent in the Polish (zlaly sie). Donald Davie, in a different context, pointed out that poetic composition results as much from what can't be said as from what can. The poet's inability to control how it will come out, in the case of these Polish poets, is no longer a question of politics, but of etymology and the growth of idiom; it is at this point that the poet ceases to be of interest to those not concerned--whether congenitally or professionally--on an everyday basis with language, itself, as a problem. …