In May 2024, after attending the International Book Fair at the Warsaw Palace of Culture and Sciences as the newest member of the Union of Polish Writers Abroad (since the spring of 2024) and before giving a paper at the 9th World Congress of Polish Studies organized by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America (an organization that I've belonged to since 1997), I found time to visit old friends and the neighborhoods of my youth.
I was raised in a wooden house in a garden in "Osiedle Przyjazn" ("Friendship Estate") left over after the builders of the Soviet gift, the monumental Palace of Culture and Sciences left for USSR, and occupied by faculty and students of Warsaw Polytechnic University where my father worked. My family lived there from 1956 to 1970 and the following poetic prose or lengthy narrative poem is dedicated to my childhood memories. The house is no longer there, it made way to widened street, but other houses remained and I visited a neighbor, noted Chopin scholar, Dr. Zofia Chechlinska of the National Institute of Fryderyk Chopin, editor of a monumental series of facsimile of Chopin's autographs. We chatted over a sweet "napoleonka" with cream, black tea, and fragrant, fresh strawberries - but not really about music. I only found out that the publication of the facsimile series goes very slowly due to financial constraints, two volumes per year. While many more critical commentaries are already done, they cannot be published yet due to insufficient funds and costly format - hardcover in fancy boxes. Still, it is a monumental achievement deserving lots of praise. Congratulations! I bought some volumes of this series in the past, but I do not teach music history now, so I did not buy the rest. The annotations and critical commentaries are worth their weight in gold!
The Fryderyk Chopin Institute is the initiator, publisher and coordinator of the international project ‘Works by Chopin. Facsimile edition’, the aim of which is to publish all the available autographs of Fryderyk Chopin’s works, scattered around the world, in facsimile. The series has been edited since 2001, and from the beginning its Editor-in-Chief has been Professor Zofia Chechlińska. It is the first ever undertaking on such a large scale and the first attempt to publish the complete music autographs by Chopin.The series was initiated to preserve and popularize Fryderyk Chopin’s heritage in Poland and around the world. Its most significant value is the most faithful replication of the manuscripts in print, making the original texts of Chopin’s compositions available for research and enabling us to get as close as possible to the composer’s intentions as well as to verify the knowledge about the sources. Thanks to the use of contemporary photographic and printing technology, it is possible to replicate the original sources in a more faithful way than ever before!Each volume comprises two books: the facsimile and a scholarly commentary (in six languages: Polish, English, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese). Among the outstanding specialists who have prepared source commentaries are: Zofia Chechlińska, Jan Ekier, Jeffrey Kallberg, Mieczysław Tomaszewski, Jim Samson, Irena Poniatowska, Paweł Kamiński, Artur Szklener. The commentaries include the most recent information on the history of published manuscripts. The aesthetic design, hard covers and ergonomic slipcase further enhance the value of these unique editions.
The page features links to individual works and to the online NIFC store where the items may be purchased. https://publikacje.nifc.pl/en/dziela-chopina/wydanie-faksymilowe.
I still remember Prof. Chechlinska's piano ... from my childhood. I sometimes sat under it, playing with her daughter and listening to the music that filled my whole body with miraculous sounds. But I did not write about this experience in any poems. After the visit, I decided to walk along the narrow alleys of the neighborhood of my youth and see if things I remembered still remain... Below is my quasi-poetic account... Time plays tricks on all of us. No doubt.
A VISIT TO JELONKI, MAY 2024
We śnie gaszę pożar
We śnie ogień płonie
I dream in Polish
I dream of fires
After walking through the non-existent city of my youth
and returning to California, I wonder: do I belong
in my cozy ranch house in the rose garden,
or in Warsaw I left 30 years ago?
There was a wooden house painted peach with white trim and shutters.
There, I climbed a cherry tree to sit among green leaves
and taste the miraculous sweetness of the summer.
There, bright yellow daffodils bloomed in two circles –
I loved watching them sprout through rotten leaves
after the snow melted. I daily checked how many
poked their heads out of the ground, as curious
as I was. What was this new world like?
There, I stopped to smell the jasmine stretching through
the neighbor’s chain-linked fence. There, towering sunflowers
welcomed me back from vacations in the countryside.
They were so small when I left – and now? A proof of
the unstoppable flow of time. The summer’s over. How strange.
Time flows one way; it freezes, immobile, only in a loop of memory.
We śnie gaszę pożar
We śnie ogień płonie
I dream in Polish
I dream of fires
Where is the lilac blooming outside my six-paned window?
Where is the liquid charm of the nightingale song
mixed in with lilac scent that filled sleepless nights with delight?
Where is the weeping willow we used to climb by way of wooden fence?
Its trunk was too smooth, too tall for children’s feet and hands.
The beet and potato fields across the road
are now covered with tall apartment blocks. Cement, steel and glass.
The street was widened. Our house – demolished.
My childhood dreams paved over. My neighbors stayed
in their comfy, wooden houses, with their tall cherry trees,
their thick lilac bushes, their six-paned windows…
My school is gone and so is its row of acacia trees.
It made space for yet another black-asphalt highway.
I retrace the steps I took daily, always late,
dreaming of a white Pegasus to take me to my class
in an instant, or I could have at the very leastan electric car suspended high up on the wires…
I walk along the curb I fell off so often
in my brand-new, white stockings, torn and blood-stained
as I ran back home crying. Was it a premonition of my loss?
Why is the curb so low today? Why is the alley so narrow?
We śnie szumia drzewa
We śnie księżyc wschodzi
I dream of evening breeze
I dream of moonlit streets
The locked-up library with three steps I used to sit on, reading,
is still the same. I went there daily for my six books –
high with anticipation of the wonders to be found on their pages.
So disappointed when the librarian did not let me exchange
the book I just read while walking home: “Come back tomorrow.”
These books in brown paper covers overflowed with
the magic of color within – tales of a thousand and one nights,
of dragons, queens and kings, of gleaming treasures,
crystals, translucent waves of distant seas. Flights of fancy
always ending with happiness and love – serenity and bliss.
No fires and no darkness. No demons with bared fangs.
No S&M black latex clothing, with chains, weird cutout holes,
fishnet stockings, hideous platform shoes. No massive spiders,
horrid bugs, Satanist symbols, nor tattoos that took over
the stage of National Opera in a botched Magic Flute –
devoid of magic, robbed of charm, distorted and deprived
of beauty, yes – depraved. The world has surely changed
a lot since my youth. Where is the wonder of lilacs, cherries,
dried maple leaves, winter crickets, and spring nightingales?
The old library looks abandoned, with metal shutters,
peeling paint. The rickety house across the street seems ready
to fall apart any minute. It used to be our grocery store,
replaced by shiny metal and glass of Carrefours, Aldi’s,
and Biedronka’s. The cracked-asphalt parking lot survived –
I stop and my unforgotten joy floats in the air above my head.
Ever cautious, I refused to ride the bike without training wheels.
Dad made a stick to hold my bike upright. He promised
not to let go! He did promise! I hated pain so much,
hated the bloodied stockings. One day, speeding, with breeze
in my hair, I saw him standing far away, smiling.
I really could ride the bike by myself! Victory! The first!
The breeze of freedom in my hair. My heart - aflutter.
That joy is still here, as perfect as that day.
is there also – a quieter contentment, discovering
new worlds in words, alone, in silence –
the thousand and one hours of books
and thousand and one nights of tales
that saved Sheherezade's life. Prophetic.
Oh, starry nights!
Sezamie otwórz sie!
Sesame, open!
Abrakadabra!
The scent of cinnamon and jasmine fills my nostrils.
I collect fleeting joys in a necklace on memory string:
that wonder of white snowflakes suddenly twirling
in the yellow glow of the street-lamp. Those maple leaves
that covered my path and swish, swish, swished under my feet –
gold and bronze, not wine-red like Canadian maple –
such intense hue cannot possibly exist, it cannot
be real – whole forests in scarlet? Impossible!
Everything was paler, softer, gentler,
mellower in my Polish childhood.
So far away, so long ago.
We śnie kwitną kwiaty
We śnie ogień płonie.
There must be a place where the daffodils forever sprout,
the nightingales forever sing, the gold maple leaves forever crunch
under my forever six-year-old feet on the way to the library
for my daily dose of six wondrous books.
There must be a place where I am so happy
so so so incredibly proud and happy -
riding my bike all by myself, splashing through
rain puddles on the cracked asphalt.
We śnie kwitną kwiaty
We śnie szumią drzewa
We śnie pachną lipy
Słodycz, miód
We śnie gaszę pożar - In the dream I extinguish fire
We śnie ogień płonie - In the dream, the fire burns
We śnie szumia drzewa - In the dream, trees rustle
We śnie księżyc wschodzi - In the dream, moon is rising
We śnie kwitną kwiaty - In the dream, flowers bloom
We śnie ogień płonie.- in the dream, the fire burns
We śnie kwitną kwiaty - In the dream, flowers bloom
We śnie szumią drzewa - In the dream, trees rustle
We śnie pachną lipy - In the dream, linden trees' scent
Słodycz, miód - In the dream, sweetness, honey
