Moving Poems

A Moving Poems production (with fingers crossed that Milosz’s heirs aren’t too litigious). The audio is Milosz himself, not the same translation as the one that made it into the Collected Poems (which you can read here).

This was “found video” rather than something deliberately planned and acted to go along with the poem, though of course I edited it to make a better fit.

You never know what’s going to turn up on Vimeo. The instigators behind this event were a collective of Chilean poets called Casagrande. They explain,

We chose Warsaw due to its literary tradition and importance during relevant events in the XX century. It is the land of brilliant philosophers, musicians and poets. For the latter we consider it an important moment to claim the role of written word in life and human history. This year the city commemorates the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of WWII and the 65th anniversary of Warsaw Uprising. We recognise the unquestionable and universal importance of these historical experiences, still formative of the inhabitants of Warsaw as well as for the identity of Europeans in general.

According to an article in a Chilean newspaper, the group, which consists of poets Julio Carrasco, José Joaquín Prieto and Cristóbal Bianchi, began its poem-bombing campaigns back in 2001, with an event designed to commemorate the 1973 Chilean coup. The 100,000 leaflets dropped over Warsaw included the works of 40 contemporary Polish poets and 40 contemporary Chilean poets translated into Polish. Carrasco assured the newspaper that they were not littering: based on his experience with previous poem-drops, he said that within five minutes after it was over, not a single poem would remain on the street.

There was also a public, bilingual poetry reading in Warsaw two days in advance of what I am beginning to think of as P-day.

A poem by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak; the animation here is by Nicholas Lawrence.