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The literary company in Łódź

RELATED STORIES

Łódź, the cultural capital of Poland
Julia Hartwig Poet
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I didn't stay long in Lublin, but it was the first university that was activated, it was the Catholic university. I was a student of Warsaw University which wasn't at all Catholic, but when the opportunity arose, and I found myself in Lublin and there was a university there, then I, of course, enrolled there straight away and I even have a register somewhere recording that I spent a year at KUL [Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski (The Catholic University of Lublin)]. Then, Warsaw University temporarily moved to Kraków and so I went to Kraków in order to return to my alma mater where I was being educated, and there, I took an interest in the various departments which I… earlier, I hadn't known much about them, namely, French, Spanish and Italian studies. At that time, Professor Wędkiewicz was there, a very notable person who later was head of PAN [Polska Akademia Nauk (Polish Academy of Science)] in Paris while I was there, so I had contact with him. And… that period in Kraków was brief, in the end, I couldn't really afford to support myself, it was either my studies or… it wasn't all that easy especially as Kraków was unfamiliar and that's why the capital in Poland of literature and altogether of the arts, of everything that is more sophisticated than just 'I'm hungry', was Łódź. So then I decided to move to Łódź and to find work there which was fairly easy. At that time, there was a publication called Kuźnica which was left-wing, but I think that the cultural section was a department where they tried to salvage cultural values and somehow marry them with Marxism which was quite a hard thing to do. But somehow, they managed these acrobatics quite well, and since there were people there who were very interesting, whom I'm referring to, I was very happy to stay in Łódź, and I think I was there for a full year. At that time, I had a very pleasant apartment allocated to me, it was rather empty there because people had left Łódź, there were no more Germans, no more Jews, unfortunately, their homes remained, unfortunately, the people were no longer there. So what did I do there? My poems were accepted for publication in Kuźnica straight away.

W tym Lublinie długo nie zabawiłam, ale to był pierwszy uniwersytet, który był... był jak gdyby zaktywizowany – to był uniwersytet katolicki. Ja co prawda przynależałam do Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, który bynajmniej nie był uniwersytetem katolickim, ale jak się nadarzyła taka okazja, że w ogóle jestem w Lublinie, a jest uniwersytet to oczywiście od razu się zapisałam na uniwersytet i mam nawet zaliczone jakieś... jednego roku na KUL-u – jakieś... jakiś dorobek. Potem jednak okazało się, że Uniwersytet Warszawski przenosi się na chwilową siedzibę do Krakowa, wobec czego wyjechałam do Krakowa, żeby znowu wrócić do uniwersytetu rodzimego w którym się kształciłam i tam właściwie w dużej mierze się interesowałam wydziałami, które... których przedtem właściwie nie... niewiele wiedziałam, mianowicie romanistyka. Wtedy tam był profesor Wędkiewicz – bardzo wybitny człowiek, który potem prowadził stację PAN-u w Paryżu, wtedy kiedy byłam – tak że się z nim zetknęłam. I... to był krótki okres w Krakowie, w końcu ja... nie bardzo mnie stać było na to, żeby się utrzymywać sama – albo nauka, albo... nie było tak łatwo, to zwłaszcza, że obce środowisko zupełnie, Kraków. I wobec tego, ponieważ jak gdyby taką... taką stolicą Polski w literaturze i w ogóle w sztuce, w ogóle w tym co jest ponad... powyżej „jestem głodny” to był... to była Łódź. I ja wtedy postanowiłam przenieść się do Łodzi i tam znaleźć jakąś pracę, co zresztą nie było takie trudne. Wtedy po prostu tam wychodziła „Kuźnica” – to było pismo lewicowe, ale no myślę, że z częścią kulturalną to była taka placówka, kiedy starano się ocalić wartości kulturowe i pogodzić się w jakiś sposób z marksizmem, co dosyć było trudne. Ale oni jakoś z tej gimnastyki dobrze wychodzili, a ponieważ byli tam ludzie bardzo ciekawi o których mówię, to ja tam właściwie chętnie się w tej Łodzi zatrzymałam i tam byłam pełny rok chyba. Zresztą wtedy były... przydzielono mi jakieś miłe mieszkanie, wszędzie było pustawo, bo w Łodzi się wyprowadzili, Niemców nie było, Żydów nie było, niestety zostały po nich mieszkania, niestety ich nie było. Więc cóż, cóż ja tam robiłam... W „Kuźnicy” jakoś od razu przyjęto moje wiersze do druku.

Born to a Polish father and a Russian mother, Julia Hartwig (1921-2017) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and author of children's books. She studied at the University of Warsaw, the Catholic University in Lublin and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Czesław Miłosz called her 'the grande dame of Polish poetry'. Julia Hartwig was one of the few poets in Poland who made masterly use of poetic prose. She translated poems by Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Max Jacob, Cendrars and Supervielle, and published monographs on Apollinaire and Gerard de Nerval. She also translated from English, and published a large anthology of American poetry which she co-edited in 1992 with her late husband, the poet Artur Międzyrzecki.

Listeners: Andrzej Wolski

Film director and documentary maker, Andrzej Wolski has made around 40 films since 1982 for French television, the BBC, TVP and other TV networks. He specializes in portraits and in historical films. Films that he has directed or written the screenplay for include Kultura, which he co-directed with Agnieszka Holland, and KOR which presents the history of the Worker’s Defence Committee as told by its members. Andrzej Wolski has received many awards for his work, including the UNESCO Grand Prix at the Festival du Film d’Art.

Tags: The Catholic University of Lublin, KUL, Warsaw University, Lublin, Kraków, Polish Academy of Science, PAN, Łódź, Kuźnica, Paris, Marxism, professor Stanisław Wędkiewicz

Duration: 2 minutes, 43 seconds

Date story recorded: June 2010

Date story went live: 27 May 2011