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A poetic outcry or in search of the sources of evil
(On the work of Konrad Sutarski on his eighty-fifth birthday anniversary)
In his foreword to the collection of essays, articles, interviews and translations of poems by Hungarian poets Before Twilight Comes (1995), a foreword entitled Commandments, Konrad Sutarski describes his childhood adventure when he was six years old and lived in the countryside. He went to the forest to collect blackberries and stayed there until dusk, and then spurred by fear he ran back home. That's how he says it: "Fear, which then overcame me outside of the village - in the area close to my heart and pleasant, near Częstochowa and the Jasna Góra monastery of the Pauline Fathers who came from Hungary - is still connected in my mind with the fear which grips (or rather: it should grip; how sad that it does not) people who cross the boundaries set forth by the experiences and sufferings of millennia (...) Among offenses we are probably most sensitive to murder. And he adds that there are different types of murders, from those committed against individuals to those committed against entire nations.
The consequence of these reflections is the poet's suspicion that it was Moses who was at fault, losing part of the stone tablets with the commandments received from God. "The stones were certainly incredibly heavy," we read at the end of this text. - He must have dropped and lost at least one of them, though he didn't admit it, the plaque with the inscription: "Live without hatred. If we had it, probably we wouldn't have to look at it so often: "don't kill". After all, commandment warnings are connected into a whole coherent system. With this one exception. And yet, without hatred and spitting at each other, life would be simpler every day. And you could go to the forest more often without fear that twilight will come again in a moment.
The story recalled here, this polemic with Moses, or perhaps - indirectly - with God himself, contains the main idea and genesis of Konrad Sutarski's creative achievements. And this is precisely the search for the sources of evil present in the world together with attempts to draw attention to what is the opposite of evil, i.e. kindness, love, brotherhood and empathy, as the poet truly cosmic. In his poetry, Sutarski points to numerous threats lurking in wait for us, for whole groups and generations of people over the centuries of our existence, calling these threats by name and already by this, trying to subdue evil with the word of the artist. This is, in fact, the fundamental message of all art. However, the poet's deep cognitive pessimism makes this task difficult for him.
Born in 1934 in Poznań, he spent part of his childhood and youth outside his birthplace, returning here in important moments for him and his country. In 1956, a poetic group Wierzbak was formed in Poznań, created by Józef Ratajczak and Marian Grześczak, as well as Sutarski among others. It was the beginning of our struggle for political freedom and democracy, so the poets mentioned above conveyed in their poems, apart from their personal experiences, their civic passions. They published together and separately in almanacs. Wydawnictwo Poznańskie published Konrad Sutarski’s first individual collection of poems The Edge of Movement at in 1960. In his early poems the poet leads a dialogue with existence, with his own single fate irreversibly connected with social life, with dramas of history, traps of civilization, with world culture, religion, nature, with a feeling of love and solidarity between people, internally torn between his own recognitions and anxieties.
It should be added that Sutarski's definitely factual, perhaps rather captivating poetry is certainly connected with his technical education. He is a mechanical engineer, doctor of technical sciences, creator of innovative solutions in the field of agricultural equipment. The poet's linguistic constructivism, from the very beginning akin to the linguistic tradition (Peiper) and anticipating the New Wave revolution, combined with the vision, perspicacity, rebelliousness of imagination and ironic perversity, make up an artistic creation with a strong emotional and ethical charge. Sutarski's belief in the morally righteous core of a human person, derived from the decalogue and memory of the past, as well as his eschatological premonitions, combine to form a coherent image of a thinking man, feeling and responsible not only for his own existence.
Departing momentarily from writing poems, in 1964 he arrived in Warsaw, where he became an assistant at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. However, as early as 1965 he left for Budapest with his Hungarian beloved, whom he married in 1962. Since then, he has divided his life between two homelands - Poland and Hungary - and has actively participated in the literary life of both countries as a poet, translator, essayist, literary critic, diplomat and television journalist. Among Sutarski's works are his own poetry books, translations of Hungarian poetry of many generations into Polish, from Pethofi, through Miklos Radnoti and Sandor Csoori to the youngest, as well as translations of Polish poets into Hungarian. Among them are Leśmian, poets of the Krakow Avant-garde and contemporary poets with Różewicz, Herbert and Szymborska. The Hungarians were shocked by Białoszewski's poetry, but the translator found the Hungarian poet Sandor Weoresa's affinity with him.
Konrad Sutarski published a few separate collections of poems, but all of them are important in his work. After The Edge of Movement, he published his Expedition to an Untrodden Field in 1975, followed by the Thickened Air (1984) collection. He published many of his own poems in anthologies and Polish-Hungarian collections. Polish-Hungarian diptych published in 2015 in the Library of Topos. He is also the author of sketches on Polish and Hungarian literature and on the mutual reception of both literatures. Many critics, including Bela Pomogats, spoke about Sutarski's poems translated into Hungarian. His essay Modern History Hour is translated into a Polish collection of poems and sketches On Dual Land, published in Budapest in 2005: "Hungarian literature owes a lot to Konrad Sutarski. His books on Hungarian subjects, book editions of his poetry translated into Hungarian, selections of Hungarian poems in Polish translation, collections of scientific and journalistic studies (most of which he published as a leading figure in the Hungarian Polonia) make up the entire library, after all, a large part of Hungarian poetry today sounds in his translation or was created on his own initiative.
Paweł Gembal, a Polish critic, wrote about the same collection of sketches: "Sutarski is interested above all in the place where the individual and the collective intersect. (...) So I propose to read his work as a personal dialogue with the most important problems of our times. After all, it not only accompanied the transformations of the last fifty years, but also participated in them, often being an insightful analysis of history before our very eyes. (Akcent 1/2008).
I will quote one more double Hungarian statement, recalled in 2014 by Janusz Drzewucki: "The poet Sandor Csoori wrote at one time: For years we have considered Konrad Sutarski to be an ambassador of literature. He takes Hungary to Poland, but it also carries his own homeland on his back to us. This is a special, exceptionally beautiful fate'; while the critic Lajos Szakolczy, while reflecting on the Hungarian character of the Polish poet in his sketch 'The Swinging Cage of the Heart', points out how well his poems sound in Hungarian translations: 'of this pragmatic mind emerging from the structural order of machines and drawing boards into the sun-filled glades of nature'. No wonder that he was awarded the prestigious Gabor Bethlen Prize, after Zbigniew Herbert and before Bohdan Zadura. (Twórczość 9/2014). Konrad Sutarski also received many other Hungarian and Polish awards and distinctions, including the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (2004).
Sutarski's latest essayistic book is entitled Poland and Hungary in Defence of Europe and was published in Polish and Hungarian by the Irott Szó Foundation (Budapest 2019). In over twenty sketches, the author refers to the historical role of Poland and Hungary in defending Christianity in Europe in the past and present, as well as to the contemporary threats posed by the intense influx of non-European emigrants, the pressure of Islam on European countries, including those bound by the Visegrád Treaty, and the increasingly widespread globalization, which aims at the liquidation of nations in favour of a uniformization of the world. He believes that only strong resistance of nation states can prevent this process. The essayist also devoted a lot of space to young Polish and Hungarian democracy and methods of counteracting globalization in the field of economy, morality and culture. In several poems published here, and especially in the introduction to them, the poet presents his thesis that it is necessary to continue the mission of poetry known from the Romanticism era in defence of our eternal civilizational and cultural achievements.
Finally, I will recall a few verses from his book However late in may be. Above all, I would like to emphasise the poet's sense of belonging to a great community, not only linguistic, but also human, which transcends all the borders of our world. Already in the first poem of the collection entitled Creativity we read:
Adding fine dust grains to desert sands
is to add drops of water to the ocean's waters...
it's also going into the desert sands with your tiny grains.
and diving into the ocean with the drops of water. (...)
Finally, it's a vague and mysterious conviction of coming together
with that which so immeasurably overwhelming for us...
after all, the sands of desert and waters of the ocean
enchanting with their vastness
have grown over millennia of just such tiny seeds
Feeling at home in the immense area of creative expansion shaping the face of our cultural, moral and metaphysical identity, the poet does not put down his arms in the fight for an even wider influence of grace giving, hope awakening art. Called "Candidate 56" by Sergei Sterna-Wachowiak, with a raised bascinet of a knight-moralist, without doubting the sense of his mission, he continues to write with concern for the level of wisdom and dignity of the contemporary inhabitant of the earth and for the preservation of universal values belonging to us - truth, goodness and beauty - for future generations. Here are excerpts from the poem Trees of Wisdom (in Szymborska's poem, clouds do not take into account the borders of countries, here they are tree branches):
O - trees of all wisdom
how handicapped you are in your exclusivity
and we, the crippled are with you.
- after all, birds don't find secluded places -
Why don't you just
the winds bend your branches to the ground
and swaying them
blur the borders of separate kingdoms (...)
O trees of all uncertainty
I'd like to come across you already in this union.
so by leaving a city where bad feeling
and curses prevail rather than hope
even already now
I look for you in every forest I come to.
Let us admit that the maximalism of the poetic axiology of Konrad Sutarski, the doyen of the "Generation 56", deserves consideration and recognition. So let us wish for him to continue writing.
Adriana Szymańska