~ Nationality: Poland ~
Words (poems by Polish immigrants in the UK)
A beautiful film written and directed by Maciej Piatek with photography by Karol Wyszynski. The poems are “Kupiliśmy cegiełki” and “Translator” by Honorata Chorąży-Przybysz, “Wulgarni” by Jacek Raputa and “I’m telling you, Mate…” by Paweł Lysak, all of which may be found (in Polish) on the webpage “Poezja polskich emigrantów” at the Kobieta na Wyspach (Woman on Island) internet portal for Poles living in the U.K.
Delikatnie mnie odepchnąłeś całą… (You gently pushed all of me away…) by Bozena Urszula Malinowska
http://vimeo.com/35127990
You said…
—I do not want you
And you said
—leave
You said quietly
—through the fog
and so (it seemed) calmly
timidly
gently pushed all of me
away…
Another video by Marcin Konrad Malinowski for a poem by his deceased mother, part of his Dwa Nieba (“Two Heavens”) project:
It’s mostly inspired by the work of Bozena Urszula Malinowska, my mother, who left a substantial collection of poems. Whether or not it strengthens them, interpretation gives them new meaning because in poetry, we find ourselves. Videopoetry is a way to share these poems with the world, and also gives me the opportunity to respond to them.
(Rendered with the help of Google Translate)
I like the extreme minimalism in this one.
Wygnana (Expelled) by Bozena Urszula Malinowska
http://www.vimeo.com/21089942
Another film by Marcin Konrad Malinowski for a poem by his mother, the late Bozena Urszula Malinowska. Here’s the translation Marcin supplied. I think he’s open to suggestions on how it might be improved, but this is certainly enough to let the non-Polish viewer understand how the film images relate to, and play off of, the text:
Expelled from paradise
by me
by me alone
expelled
I’ll bury my sin in my heart
I won’t drop to my knees
in hope, that there
behind the gates
I’ll find silence and peace
Today I expel myself from paradise
With a curse
that’ll crush my heart
and I won’t yearn,
cry, wait and dream
I expel myself from paradise
So I can
live again
The post about the video on Marcin’s project blog reproduces a hand-written draft of the poem.
Dwa Nieba by Bożena Urszula Malinowska
http://vimeo.com/20305333
Filmmaker Marcin Konrad Malinowski‘s first videopoem, for a poem by his mother. Here’s the English translation he provided:
You and me,
Two heavens,
With a little bit of hell,
With the energy of a volcano
That has gone somewhere,
You and me.
His mother passed away four years ago, he told me in an email, leaving behind a box of poems.
UPDATE: Marcin has started a blog on Tumblr about the project, which hopefully will give rise to many more videopoems of this caliber: Dwa Nieba. (It’s in Polish, but Google Translate can give a pretty good idea of the contents.)
Ars Poetica? by Czeslaw Milosz
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.
Bombing of poems, Warsaw 2009
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.
Advertisement by Wislawa Szymborska
A poem by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak; the animation here is by Nicholas Lawrence.
