When his translation of the Odyssey was still in progress, Stefan Żeromski welcomed and encouraged it, praised his younger colleague and in some sense anointed him. That work was closely and deeply connected with one of the chief goals of Young Poland literature: the recovery of an ancient tradition, the European Mediterranean tradition of epic literature. Stanisław Wyspiański in his dramatic visions showed the Greek Skamander glittering with the wave of the Vistula, "Skamander wiślaną połyska falą," as he said. When Wittlin was translating the Odyssey, another outstanding Polish writer, Wacław Berent, was shaping, in the years 1907-1917, an epic, visionary novel about the Middle Ages, Żywe kamienie, (Living Stones). Begun during the First World War Wittlin's translation of the Odyssey was published in 1924. It assumed its final shape in the years between two other works: Hymny (Hymns), published in their first version in 1920, and the novel about the war, or rather about humanity confronted by the war, Sól ziemi, (The Salt of the Earth).

In his introduction to the Odyssey, Wittlin writes that he has translated Homer's poem for those who will be able "to find in it the history of their own souls, the adventures of their own tribulations, and their own longing and hope." Let all the disconsolate, says Wittlin, "find in this book the beauty of the struggle, even in vain, with the elements, with the gods, people and destiny."

"My gracious readers," says the writer, as if with the voice of a hierophant in the mysteries of art, "My brothers and sisters! Each of you is Odysseus, and here you have the history of your wandering! [...] When other convictions, and notions of so-called civilization collapse, a slumbering, lurking Greek awakes in us." In Wittlin's opinion, in the poetry of Homer, in the most integral art, we emancipate ourselves from the degenerate civilization, the crisis of which the first World War revealed to the eyes of the writer, and the following decades of our terrible century were to reveal infinitely more vividly.

Józef Wittlin will formulate similar opinions in an essay "O potrzebie wykształcenia humanistycznego," ("On the necessity of education in humanities"), published in 1929 in the Polish periodical Filomata in Lwów. In this text Wittlin sketches the ideal of Greece as a salutary haven to which we can try to sail in order to save our human substance. Such asylum he finds in Greek literature and art, as well as in all other literature and art worthy of that name. In his reply to the inquiry of a Polish periodical Wiadomości Literackie which in 1927 put to Polish writers the question what debts they owed to foreign literatures, Wittlin states that as soon as he became acquainted with Stendhal and Flaubert, he placed them in his private literary hierarchy at the very top alongside Homer, the Bible, and Joseph Conrad. Such a high evaluation of Conrad can perhaps be explained by the spirit of wandering that permeates the work of that great writer, a spirit akin to that of Odysseus, whose travels, we must add, were not voluntary. In almost all the texts of young Józef Wittlin we can recognize the so-called "religion of art," conceiving art as a kind of religion--a concept very significant for the years of the turn of centuries. It permeates the whole work of Friedrich Nietzche, formed earlier, in the nineteenth century, but most influential and studied most eagerly in the time which I mention. It lives in Proust and in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As for Wittlin, for Joyce it, too, is in some sense an escape from the horror of history, "this nightmare," Joyce will say, "from which I try to awake." It is also clearly discernible in Claudel, if we read the description of his conversion in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris attentively enough. The point is that this "religion of art" needs not necessarily be an ersatz religion. It may be, as Wittlin stated it in his essay, a way. The author of Salt of the Earth will follow this way to the Franciscan spirit, so characteristic for his mature work and which was foretold already in that introduction to the Odyssey: "Saint Francis," we read there, "was the last Greek, and a man of the Gospel at the same time. He and only he in his era was born from the spirit of the great religious epic tradition."

Odysseus

Homer has almost completely disappeared in his work. "O my poor bard," writes Wittlin in his poem "Elegia do Homera" (Elegy to Homer), "who have not even any proof that you existed at all." Homer--it means only: his art, his work. Homer's biography? "The fatherland of Homer," writes Wittlin, "is the pain which is everywhere," including the military hospital, where the translator, during the war, was continuing his work.

The literature of the crucial time of Young Poland is now more and more eagerly studied and more and more valued. New investigations concerning this epoch in Poland and in other European countries are now in progress. Even more important than any homage to that literature would be the understanding of its relation to our modern spirit. Modern poetry, shaped in the first decades of the century, modernism in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the term, is much more deeply connected to the artistic movements at the very beginning of the century than we previously supposed. It is perhaps symbolic that a typical quotation from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde

Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?

is found in two European poems independently, without any direct influence: Wittlin's "Tęsknota za przyjacielem," (Longing for a Friend /Hymns, [1920]), and Eliot's Wasteland (1922). Wittlin states that when he learned of this coincidence much later, he shuddered. The context of this quotation in Eliot's poem is the panorama of European civilization collapsing. In Wittlin's poem the lyric persona reminds his friend how they listened to the Wagnerian song in Vienna, and now, in Lwów, during the war, "nasty spies are walking in the streets."

This Wagnerian allusion is, of course, not the only link between Wittlin's and Eliot's poetry. In spite of their significant differences, both poets try, as Eliot put it, to show "fear in a handful of dust." They also share a common rejection of trite poetical fluency. Eliot, by studying Baudelaire and Laforgue, the English Jacobean "metaphysical poets" and the theater of the seventeenth century, shapes a style which is adequate to that fear, while Wittlin develops a diction that would be a match to the shock of the First World War and its traumatic experience. In search for an appropriate style, he reaches out to ancient tradition, to the epic heritage of mankind, namely the Akkadian poem about Gilgamesh, the paraphrase of which he will publish in 1922, and chiefly to the Odyssey.

The peculiar diction of his Hymns imitates the old epic style, which in European literature is preserved not only in long poems, but also in old folk ballads. In all his works Wittlin tries to revive the epic tradition, including his novel, The Salt of the Earth (1935). It is a modern Odyssey, perverse in some sense, because in it the role of the chief hero is assigned not to the king of Ithaca, but to the swineherd Eumaios. In Wittlin's novel about the First World War this hero is named Piotr Niewiadomski. He is not only illiterate, he cannot even distinguish his right hand from his left one, but he and his human soul, contain a true antidote to the nihilism of the war, the Gospel's "salt of the earth." Piotr Niewiadomski is a new, changed Odysseus who begins a sea voyage, a voyage on the sea of the twentieth century which he knows only near the seaside--but it is already a parable of this much more dangerous sea which the author, and all of us, had to sail on in our century.

Wittlin shared the fate of many Polish writers after World War II. He was one of our émigré writers who up to the end lived abroad, chiefly here in America, and first of all in New York. These writers are becoming better known in Poland with the publication of various documents, chiefly letters. We know more and more about their life and about the moral reasons for their choice to emigrate, and the price they paid. Wittlin titled a collection of his essays published in Paris in 1963 "Orfeusz w piekle XX wieku" (Orpheus in the Hell of the Twentieth Century). We could indeed call the writer an Odysseus of the twentieth century. He is in various ways similar to that ancient hero, a figure so symbolical for the whole literary work of Wittlin. His exile, like that of Odysseus, was not voluntary, but was compulsory, forced upon him. Odysseus wandered in order to reach his Ithaca. Wittlin wandered in search of his home, the Mediterranean culture of Poland, which was persecuted in Poland by totalitarianism. At first he did not know that his exile would last forever, in the sense that he would die outside of his country. As the years passed, he realized this perspective more and more clearly. It was a very heavy price. "My ambition," he wrote in 1950 to Stanisław Baliński, another émigré Polish writer, living in London, "if I have any ambition at all, is to be read in Poland. There, in Poland, the Polish word lives another way than here among the émigrés." But, up to his death, he was convinced that his duty was to be an émigré.

During those émigré years Józef Wittlin wrote many new poems and essays that mirror those dramatic years, in some respect a shattered mirror, but all the more moving and full of substantial contents. In the words of the writer, and in his reticence, we read today much, very much. Especially important are also his letters, chiefly to other emigrants. They were a circle of friends, Wittlin, Wierzyński, Lechoń, Baliński, living chiefly in America, but also in other countries, a circle sometimes torn by violent contentions, but kept together by a deeper moral unity.

The tragic side of émigré life of writers deprived of their own country is so poignant that sometimes it is very difficult for us to read their texts. Here we have a poem of Wierzyński (from a collection of poems published in 1951) who left New York in order to live in the heartland of America.

I often wake at night
I look: it is only three o'clock
Too bad
I take the diary of brothers Goncourt
I'm in Paris among people
Towards the end of the previous century
(Again in a dream)

Solitude, solitude. Such were the later years of Kazimierz Wierzyński, a poet of Poland entre deux guerres, between two wars, free Poland, young, exuberant poet of regained liberty after the First World War when he wrote a volume of poems more joyful than any written by any other Polish writer, Wiosna i wino, (Spring and Wine).

In the late years of his émigré life, Wittlin wrote a short poem, entitled "Poeta emigracyjny," (Emigrant Poet):

He performs queer sorcery
The world around him grows more and more empty
And he in this desert
With free lips proclaims
The praise of free lips.

Now in this New York which I admire so much, I understand how, even in this fascinating city, he longed here for Poland and for the whole of Europe. We see it in his very personal notes, which thanks to the vigilant care of his daughter, Elżbieta Wittlin-Lipton, are now being published in Poland. We recognize it when the doves at his New York window remind him of those in the mosaic in Ravenna or when in his last note in the hospital the illuminated building of PANAM (now renamed) is for him a visionary sign of hope that he will yet go beyond the Ocean.

To remain outside of one's own country, to be an émigré, is a dreadful decision and a dreadful lot for a writer. That decision was taken in a tragic period of our history. After the horrible, more than horrible war we were given away to totalitarianism. We lived under it for several decades, half a century, as we now see. But in that period we could even suppose that we were subjugated forever.

Totalitarianism is perhaps the central phenomenon of our century and a very mysterious phenomenon. It is possible the world does not really understand it yet. Perhaps the world will have to know more about it if there is any reality in the Cassandric prophecy, en vogue, as I hear, in America too, that the twenty-first century will be, on the universal, worldly scale, Chinese. We Eastern Europeans, after all our experiences, know a good deal about it. But even we do not know everything. The great Eastern Empires which to the outside world are incomprehensible, are incomprehensible to us too, but we have experienced their horror. I will tell an impression from my travels in the world. Two peoples which I specially like in Europe are two Mediterranean peoples, Italians and Greeks. I like equally both, but there is an important difference in my relations with them. Whenever I meet Italians, I am happy to be near them, but I always feel that there is a barrier between us. We do not have common lot, they have suffered as everybody on earth suffers but they have not experienced the horrors we have experienced. My relations with Greeks are quite different. I understand them at once, almost without a word. Because they, as we, have experienced an Eastern Empire, in their case Turkish.

Józef Wittlin and his family experienced this very early. They even told funny stories about it. I will relate what Mrs. Halina Wittlin, the writer's wife, told me about the visit paid to them shortly after the First World War by Joseph Roth, another writer from the domain of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this unbelievably mild western empire. After the war and the Russian Revolution, the author of Radetzkymarsch traveled for some time in the countries belonging to the new Soviet state. He visited some families which he had known well before those events. It was a melancholy discovery that not all of them wanted now to have relations with him, or even recognize him. But he was impressed by a conversation in one of those homes he had known, German-speaking family in Russia, with a twelve-year-old girl. She said: "You should see my grandma, she is a queer kind of person, she still believes in God." "And you, my child," asked Roth, "what do you believe in?" "Ich glaube an die Masse"--the girl replied.

Józef Wittlin knew what totalitarianism was like. There is a splendid poem by W. H. Auden about totalitarian discrimination. Sometimes it was racial, sometimes a class discrimination according to which so-called bourgeoisie (this term comprised, in Communist countries, even small, poor artisans or petty sellers, all who were--a terrible thing for communist mentality--private!--it means: not subject completely to the totalitarian state) had to be eradicated. Whatever the arbitrary basis of the discrimination, some people had a right to live, others did not. The poem by Auden which I have in mind is one of his Ten Songs, written in 1939, just at the beginning of the war. The first of them "Refugee Blues" open with the line, "Say this city has ten million souls..." Wittlin translated this poem during his exile years, and I must say that it is a kind of miracle. Whereas Auden's text is splendid, the Polish version is even more splendid, much stronger than the original. What Auden had known and imagined, and what Wittlin had experienced, become joined in this haunting version.

During the totalitarian decades we repeated often this stanza:

The consul banged the table and said:
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead."
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

The text of Wittlin is really even more poignant:

Pan konsul pięścią w stół walił i wołał w swoim gabinecie...

And now the words of the consul, the ghastly logic of the totalitarian state: "Skoro nie macie paszportów, to dla mnie wy nie żyjecie"--"If you've got no passports, then you're not alive, for me!"

Józef Wittlin and some other émigré writers kept their word to the end. Long ago, their youthful works, in that almost fabulous time before the Second World War, contained splendid, surely sincere, Mediterranean declarations, confessions of fidelity to Mediterranean ideals, to that patient, indefatigable march towards more and more spiritual, real, human freedom which is indeed the hard core of our Classical tradition. And behold, in their middle years, when those writers were in the prime of their lives, there came the most horrible trial of human values, of all Mediterranean tradition. The youthful declarations were put to a severe test. The totalitarian state was indeed a gigantic attempt to stop that patient march, and not only to stop it, but to build a different, autonomous, enduring world, in which those human values would be called crimes and crime virtue, truth a lie, and a lie--truth.

Those were years when in Poland even the writers who were honest and who wrote only truth, could not publish all they had written, because of censorship. For the continuation of the true spirit of Polish literature which cannot exist without truth, which must die without truth, it was absolutely necessary that some Polish writers live completely outside of the closed totalitarian state. Once again in our history, perhaps in a greater measure than whenever in the past, Polish literature required this tragic sacrifice, the sacrifice by some writers, to suffer the lot of exile. Even in those years we read their books which were fortunately smuggled to us. Now they return triumphantly to their country.

They had been exiled to a hermitage which they reasonably assumed would be their home forever if totalitarianism won its terrible, apocalyptic war against the Mediterranean traditions of humanity. In the seventeenth-century allegory of John Bunyan, the Pilgrim descends to the Valley of the Shadow of Death that he might come to light some time in the unknown future. The metaphor is taken from the Gospel of St. Luke and from the prophecy of Isaiah. In the Vulgate text of St. Jerome it sounds: Habitantibus in regione umbrae mortis, lux orta est eis. They entered into the shadow of death that Polish literature might survive, and regain its pure strength and beauty.

Dawny wstęp do przekładu Odysei (1924), zasługujący na przypomnienie, wiąże pisarza zarówno ze starą tradycją epicką ludzkości, jak i z macierzystym dla niego środowiskiem "Młodej Polski". Zresztą jednym z głównych dążeń owego okresu było pragnienie odzyskania tradycji epickiej, przejawiające się u Wyspiańskiego, Żeromskiego, Berenta.
Szczególnie dla Wittlina znamienna jest w tym dążeniu miłość do antycznej kultury śródziemnomorskiej, zwłaszcza greckiej, będąca u niego wyrazem uwielbienia sztuki, a nawet -- częstego w owej epoce przełomu wieków -- pojmowania sztuki jako wartości metafizycznej, pewnego rodzaju religii. Owa "religia sztuki" nie zawsze była namiastką, lecz nieraz -- jak dla Claudela czy Wittlina -- drogą. Pisarz doszedł nią zarówno do religijności franciszkańskiej, jak i do sztuki bliskiej dawnej epice -- w przekładzie Odysei, w stylu poetyckim, jaki osiągnął w Hymnach (1920), będących odpowiedzią pisarza na doświadczenia pierwszej Wojny Światowej.
A także w powieści o owej wojnie, w Soli ziemi (1935), będącej przewrotną Odyseją, w której króla Itaki zastępuje bliski Eumajosowi Piotr Niewiadomski; jego ludzka dusza jest bezcenną "solą ziemi". Wędruje on po morzu grozy XX wieku, lecz tylko blisko brzegu. Na pełniejsze morze wypłynie z wyroku losu pisarz nasz w następnych dziesięcioleciach wieku. Nazwawszy siebie samego w tytule tomu esejów (Paryż, 1963) Orfeuszem w piekle XX wieku, odbywa wędrówkę nie wybraną, lecz narzuconą. Narzuconą przez wrogą historię i przez osobistą wierność wybranym wartościom.
Pozostając po wojnie na emigracji, Józef Wittlin i niektórzy inni pisarze polscy złożyli ofiarę szczególnie dotkliwą dla artysty: ofiarę polegającą na oderwaniu od ojczyzny, od przestrzeni ojczystej mowy. Nie po raz pierwszy w dziejach pisarze nasi składali taką ofiarę. Tym razem chodziło przede wszystkim o to, by przynajmniej część ich pozostała całkowicie poza obrębem systemu totalitarnego, który dzieła innych, nawet uczciwych, pisarzy okaleczał działaniem cenzury. Totalitaryzm, będący zapewne centralnym zjawiskiem naszego wieku, jest do dziś tajemniczy, nie w pełni rozumiany. Jedno można o nim już teraz powiedzieć: jest największą w historii negacją samej esencji tradycji śródziemnomorskiej, cierpliwego marszu ku większej i rzetelniejszej wolności. Państwo totalitarne było gigantyczną próbą stworzenia innego świata, w którym kłamstwo byłoby prawdą, a prawda kłamstwem. Józef Wittlin i jego przyjaciele poświęcili się, aby wielka literatura polska, która bez prawdy umiera, mogła przetrwać.

(zk)

Rozdział książki: Between Lvov, New York, and Ulysses' Ithaca: Józef Wittlin - Poet, Essayist, Novelist, ed. by Anna Frajlich. Toruń-New York 2001 - Archiwum Emigracji T.10.

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