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Preparing the anthology of American poets

RELATED STORIES

A year without my husband
Julia Hartwig Poet
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Wróciliśmy ze Stanów, znaczy, jak gdyby partiami. Artur Międzyrzecki – mój mąż – wrócił rok później niż ja – znaczy, rok akademicki – ponieważ postanowił coś zarobić jeszcze w Ameryce, żeby zostawić parę groszy bodaj na początek córce, bo to był taki problem – kupiła sobie i auto i to... i tych parę groszy, ale i tak to naprawdę była kapanina. Czyli wróciliśmy, znaczy ja najpierw wróciłam, bo chodziło o to, żeby przygotować dom, żeby zorientować się, co się dzieje, żebym mogła mu jeszcze dać znać. Bardzo tam cierpiał, bo to był takie... taki college polski na... w północnej Ameryce o słabym poziomie i z małymi możliwościami zaprzyjaźnienia się, bo po prostu nie poznał ludzi szczególnie ciekawych w porównaniu zwłaszcza z Nowym Jorkiem, gdzie jednak naprawdę można było odżyć w jakiś sposób.

We returned from America one by one. Artur Międzyrzecki, my husband, returned a year after I did, I mean after one academic year because he decided to earn a bit of money in America to leave a few pennies behind for our daughter since there was the problem that she had bought herself a car, and so these few pennies... but it was only just a small trickle. And so we came back, I mean, I came back first because I wanted to get the house ready and to see what was going on so that I could still let him know. He suffered terribly out there because it was a Polish college in the north of America which didn't have a very high standard and there were limited opportunities to make friends because he didn't meet any particularly interesting people especially compared with the people whom he'd met in New York where you could really regenerate.

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: USA, New York, Artur Międzyrzecki

Duration: 56 seconds

Date story recorded: June 2010

Date story went live: 14 June 2011