Kopenhaga is the first comprehensive collection of prose poetry by
Grzegorz Wróblewski, one of Poland's leading contemporary writers. The
book offers a series of vignettes from the crossroads of politics and
culture, technology and ethics, consumerism and spirituality. It
combines two tropes: the emigrant's double identity and the
ethnographer's search for patterns. While ostensibly focused on Denmark,
it functions as an investigation of alterity in the post-cold war era of
ethnic strife and global capitalism. Whether he writes about refugees in
Copenhagen (one of Europe's major transnational cities), or the
homeless, or the mentally ill, or any other marginalized group,
Wróblewski points to the moral contradictions of a world supposedly
without borders.
There is something strange and indecent about people who suddenly
dispose of their libraries. Recently, the well-off R. appeared at my
door with a carton of books; he is moving and there is no space for them
in his new apartment (which is probably bigger than the previous one).
This is how Formy by Tadeusz Rózewicz (Czytelnik, Warsaw, 1958, 1st
edition) ended up in Christianshavn. Last sentence of the volume: Amid
all this din we walk toward silence, toward explanation.
Grzegorz Wróblewski, born in 1962 in Gdansk and raised in Warsaw,
has been living in Copenhagen since 1985. He has published ten volumes
of poetry and three collections of short prose pieces in Poland; three
books of poetry, a book of poetic prose and an experimental novel in
Denmark; a book of selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina; and a selection
of plays. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. His poems
in English translation appear in many journals, anthologies, and
chapbooks, as well as in two collections Our Flying Objects (Equipage
Press, 2007) and A Marzipan Factory (Otoliths, 2010).
Translator Piotr Gwiazda has published two books of poetry,
Messages (Pond Road Press, 2012) and Gagarin Street (Washington
Writers' Publishing House, 2005). He is also the author of James
Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007). He is an Associate Professor of English at the
University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).
Alien to Joycean effulgence, Kopenhaga is nonetheless a book of
silence, exile, and cunning: silence instead of moralizing in the face
of modernity's indignities; exile from native land and language; cunning
in cajoling these conditions to sing a new song, one lacking in all
jubilation, still somehow victorious in the absolute character of
defeat. Grim, glancingly beautiful, always necessary. --Joshua Clover
Wróblewski is the true poetic chronicler of our 21st century diaspora in
all its absurdities and anxieties. Kopenhaga, his book of aphoristic
prose poems, pulls out all the rhetorical stops to present us with a
relentless, sardonic, and hilarious picture of a culture (at once highly
particular and yet anyculture) as insane as it is public-spirited and
kindly. Kopenhaga is a journey to the end of the night that always
makes a U-turn in the middle, to take in the latest folly--and also
self-rescue mission--of the transplant. Read it and weep--and then
laugh! --Marjorie Perloff
Wróblewski has written one of the most important books of our time:
these are at once unsettling and comforting, timely and wryly moving
poems about the laughable annoyances, limited joys, and the never fully
present sorrows of cosmopolitanism, the life of the citizens of the
world. Gwiazda has rendered this study in a language full of 'water and
shouting and whalers.' I can think at the moment of no better book for
you to read in this our immense and always new Copenhagen. --Gabriel
Gudding
