Janusz Szuber was the third son of Zbigniew and Ewa of the Lewicki family (his two older brothers died in childhood). His father Zbigniew Szuber lived from 1918 to 1996; he came from a family that dates back to the German settlement in Haczów in the 15th century. He was an instructor-pilot operator professionally associated with the Podkarpackie Aeroclub. In his novel Mercedes-Benz, Paweł Huelle based a character off Zbigniew. The writer's mother – Ewa, neé Rogala-Lewicka, was born in 1922 and died in 1991. Her family was of landowner-intelligentsia descent and cultivated multi-ethnic traditions (German, Russian, Armenian, Croatian). Thanks to the relations with the Drewiński, Rylski and Zachariasiewicz families, amongst others, Ewa’s family had become strongly attached to Sanok and its neighbouring lands.
Already at the time of his debut, Szuber was a mature, formed, complete poet. Almost thirty years of writing just for his own sake contributed to this. Very quickly, he gained an unquestionable, distinct and very important place in Polish contemporary poetry. He also gained recognition abroad – which is confirmed by translations into a dozen or so languages and the spectrum of magazines in which his work was published, from The New Yorker to Innostranna Litieratura. His work is of a very high standard. The extraordinary beauty of the language, sensitivity to the musicality of the phrase, sublime, multi-level irony – they all coexist in the author's poetic world alongside thematic and problematic richness, arousing multiple resonances of meaning. The poet could penetrate the cosmos of fundamental matters. The search for one's own identity, cognitive helplessness, loneliness, alienation from nature, culture as fiction, ‘possible worlds’, the need for transcendence, being torn between the ‘self’ and the ‘non-self’, the discontinuity of human existence, the determinism of biology, the inability to grasp the ‘now’, sensualism and epiphany, suspicion of language – these are just some of the themes he explored.
Usually, the starting point of his poetic reflections was something concrete, such as in his poem Układanie Pasjansa (Playing Solitaire) from the volume Apokryfy i Epitafia Sanockie (Sanok Apocrypha and Epitaphs), where a box of postcards from the first decade of the 20th century becomes a medium through which we commune with the fates of people who have already passed away, with their unfulfilled love affairs, miscarriages, suicides, diseases – with all the suffering written into human existence. Meta-poetic motifs, so typical of Szuber, build a world of meaning in the poem Na Przykład Szklanka (For Example, a Glass) from the volume Pan Dymiącego Zwierciadła (Master of the Mirror of Smoke).
The world (a glass, a knife, a stool, a cloud, a bird) is not accessible to human cognition, the ‘language tamed by language’ is not able to bridge the chasm separating the self from the non-self. Thus, a man ‘thrown into existence’ is doomed to boundless loneliness.
Amongst Szuber’s poems depicting ‘cursed problems’, there is also Wiersz Rekolekcyjny (Retreat Poem) from the volume 19 Wierszy (19 Poems) which presents the experience of the modern-age man faced against the ‘empty sky’; the attributes of the civilisation of the 20th century – ‘neon sky’, ‘lift between floors’ – these figures intensify the boundless loneliness and the horror of death.
Anyone who reads Szuber's poems is captivated by having contact with an author who is philosophical in a natural, deeply intellectual way, who uses the artistic language of specifics, where elementary particles of the world become carriers of meaning, as Stanisław Balbus said – ‘mundane anchor points of the imagination’. At the same time, the bard of the Salt Mountains did not succumb to the temptation of easy answers, leading the reader to the edge of the abyss and leaving him there as ‘frail, unaware, divided against himself’. It is the poetry of constant movement and at the same time tender contemplation, faithfulness to tradition and memory. In light of this, Czesław Miłosz's true appreciation of the poem The Crowing of Roosters is not surprising – ‘It is a masterpiece’. The reaction of Stanisław Barańczak: ‘For the first time in years, I have read poems so dense and filled with specifics’. Zbigniew Herbert, in turn, wrote in a letter to Szuber:
...this book [‘Bitter Provinces’ – ed.], read at night, simply delighted me. [...] during the reading of your poems, my tail-bone went numb several times. Unfortunately, my dear friend, you are a poet and nothing can be done about it. I express my admiration.
Szuber made his debut in Sanok in 1994 in Tygodnik Sanocki weekly, where texts selected from the collection entitled Apokryfy i Epitafia Sanockie were published, which was honoured with the first prize in the fourth edition of a local competition organised by the Municipal Public Library of Sanok. In 1995, the first two parts of the Szuber's ‘pentateuch’ were published: Paradne Ubranko i Inne Wiersze and Apokryfy i Epitafia Sanockie.
Janusz Szuber's book debut was largely due to the poet's cousin Grażyna Jarosz, a doctor of microbiology from Oslo, who financed the book and helped with the final editing of the first two parts of the series. Three subsequent books: Pan Dymiącego Zwierciadła, Gorzkie Prowincje and Srebrnopióre Ogrody (Silver-Feathered Gardens), together with Marian Pankowski’s Letter to a Poet, were published in 1996. In the same year Szuber received the Barbara Sadowska and Kazimiera Iłłakowicz Award and became a member of the Polish Writers Association. In 1997, the Historical Museum in Sanok published Śniąc Siebie w Obcym Domu (Dreaming of Yourself in a Foreign Home) with an introduction by Antoni Libera and illustrations by Jan Ekiert. The year 1999 was a breakthrough for Szuber's literary career. After the publication of the excellent selection of poems O Chłopcu Mieszającym Powidła (About a Boy Stirring Jam) by the publishing house Znak, the poet was granted the main prize of the Culture Foundation. After over 20 years, he returned to Warsaw:
[...] going to Warsaw for the Culture Foundation Award was something incredible for me. It is not only that I was a laureate and that Antoni Libera gave a laudation in my honour. And that the opinions of Barańczak, Miłosz and Herbert were recalled. It was incredible that I was here, 20-something years after I was sentenced to not being that promising. Meanwhile, I was sitting in a wheelchair [...]. I was able to live almost normally, to touch reality. And that was my real success. Also in the literary sense, yes, because for several dozen years of writing, I had no idea if my writing had any sense. And here I was so beautifully received by the literary community and, in addition, recognised by my Masters.
The a5 publishing house also published Biedronka na Śniegu (Ladybug on the Snow) in 1999, and a bilingual book 7 Poems / Gedichte translated by Steffen Huber, with illustrations by Marian Kruk, was published by the Municipal Public Library in Sanok. Three more books with poems were published in 2000: Okrągłe Oko Pogody (Round Eye of the Weather), Z Żółtego Metalu (From Yellow Metal) and 19 Poems, the first by Wydawnictwo Literackie, the second by Księgarnia Akademicka in Kraków, and the third as a special edition in Lesko. The popularity and appreciation of Szuber’s work was reflected in his admission to the PEN Club and in naming his poem O Chłopcu Mieszającym Powidła (About a Boy Stirring Jam) from the book under the same title, one of the best-written poems during the Third Polish Republic (1989 to the present), alongside the poems of Herbert, Miłosz and Szymborska.
Szuber announced the poem book Las w Lustrach (Forest in The Mirrors) in 2001 – it was published by YES publishing house in a bilingual Polish-English edition, with illustrations by Henryk Waniek and an afterword by Andrzej Lam. The translation was done by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough and Clare Cavanagh. Two years later, Wydawnictwo Literackie published Lekcja Tejrezjasza i Inne Wiersze Wybrane (The Lesson of Tiresias and Other Selected Poems). The same year brought Glina, Ogień, Popiół (Clay, Fire, Ash) – a volume published in Sanok as a manuscript. In 2004, the BOSZ publishing house published a selection of poems entitled Tam, Gdzie Niedźwiedzie Piwo Warzą (Where the Bears Brew Beer).
The joint work of Janusz Szuber and Władysław Szulc, a prominent Sanok-based photographer, culminated in an album devoted to the city, entitled Mojość, published in 2005 in Sanok. It is a book in which photography and poetry contribute to an extremely intimate, distinct image of the poet's home town. The tenderness of memory and restitution of the past, as well as discreet autobiographism, connected with a polyphonic narrative, constitute a kind of a modern silva rerum (a multi-generational chronicle), in which, as in the poem Narratives from this book: ‘Something ends, something new begins: / My ‘was’ returns to some ‘is’, ‘here and now’, / With them, with me, telling about them.’
Another book of poems, Czerteż, was published in 2006 in Kraków by Wydawnictwo Literackie. In the author's foreword we read:
The noun ‘czerteż’ of Russian (Ukrainian) origin belongs to the group of ‘żarów’ names, connected with the archaic economy of the Carpathians: logging, burning and grubbing up of woodland for future settlements. Hence the whole series of key meanings in anthropology: fire, place, practices taming that which is non-human, etc. I took the title of this series or, as one could say, of the poem (due to the biographical and meta-literary interjections), from a village near Sanok. There is a beautiful wooden church there, which dates back to 1742.
In 2012, a collection of limericks Emeryk u Wód (Emeryk at the Waters) was published by Fraza Literary-Artistic Association. The next poetry books are Tym Razem Wyraźnie, (‘This Time Clearly, 2014, Wydawnictwo Literackie), Rynek 14/1 (2016, Wydawnictwo Literackie) and Przyjęcie Postawy: Wybór Wierszy z Lat 2003-2019 (Taking a Stance: A Selection of Poems from 2003-2019, 2020, Wydawnictwo Literackie).
Despite being a member of the generation of 1968, Szuber’s poetry has as a separate voice, distinct from the literary phenomena of its times. In 1973, Jan Błoński formulated a thesis about the bipolarity of Polish poetry of the last 50 years. Undoubtedly, taking into account Błoński's terminology, Szuber is on the ‘Miłosz side’ and not on the ‘Przyboś side’. The poet entered literature under the significant influence of Herbert. They both shared a classicist attitude, interest in tradition, aversion to the chaos of contemporary civilisation and were on a search for lasting values or a multitude of quotations and allusions from various cultures. Szuber, just like Herbert or Miłosz, wrote in a natural high style; the ancient pursuit of order, simplicity and clarity was important to him. It is worth noting, however, that for Herbert the field of his literary peregrinations was primarily Greek and Roman antiquity, whilst Szuber, almost like a sophisticated anthropologist, freely drew on the entire spectrum of other ancient cultures, as if deliberately avoiding the spaces reserved for his master – ancient Greece and Rome. This tendency was broken only in The Lesson of Tiresias.
Of course, Szuber's poetic worldview cannot be reduced to classicism, because it was characterised by a multitude of constructions, the play of well-known and recognised forms and content, the domination of ironic tone, numerous allusions to other people's as well as his own works, the presence of pseudo-quotations, weariness with modernity and its unifying and standardising character, the crisis of culture, the exhaustion of literature and its conventions. All this confirms the existence of a multitude of elements connecting his work with postmodern literature. Szuber’s worldview, similarly to that of postmodernists, was characterised by a loss of trust in the objectivity of science, a conviction that contemporary man functions only amongst worn-out signs, which rules out any chance of originality.
Within the scope of poetics, this resulted in eclecticism, an ironic distance to realism, a desire, in the formal processes, to break up and re-assemble the pieces instead of connecting them. At the same time, Szuber returned to the narrative, the melodies being the traditional components of a work of art, and thus established contact with a diverse audience, mixing high and low form, pointing to the chaos of the world surrounding man. Typical for this work was the revealing awareness of the decay of one’s personality. With great reverence, the poet protected ‘separate’, unique experiences from the past from nothingness. With a great eye for details, he reconstructed past experiences in order to ‘preserve’ what is individual, characteristic in its existence, whilst at the same time escaping the melting, blurring of identity in the universality and repetitiveness of human experience.
Poetic artistry, the whole multitude of literary tricks, motifs and issues in the work of the author, the complication of the structure all contributed to the image of a game-worldview, in which the issue at stake is the cognition of the human condition, the cognition that constantly eludes the cognitive subject. In a way, it was a religious attitude, because the Latin religio means ‘to bind’, ‘to combine’. Thus, Szuber was on the side of order; in his work, he was constantly striving to arrange the inner microcosm of man. This was accompanied by bitter awareness of the tragedy of these actions, because man's alienation from the world, suffering, vanitas, inability to grasp the whole ‘vast earth’ are inseparable attributes of human existence, and both the word and reason are helpless in the face of the absurdity of existence.
Szuber's poetic works were published in such Polish magazines as Tygodnik Powszechny, Kultura, Więź, Twórczość, Odra and Zeszyty Literackie. They have appeared abroad in The New Yorker, Poetry, La Poligrapfe, Books in Canada and Die Horen. His poems were translated into English, French, German, Ukrainian, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Serbian and Portuguese. In June 2009, the New York publishing house Alfred A. Knopf published a selection of Szuber's poems They Carry a Promise translated by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough.
Connected with the Sanok region throughout his entire life, Janusz Szuber was also a social activist: he was the co-founder (with Tomasz Korzeniowski) of the Korporacja Literacka Association, integrating the local literary environment. In the Municipal Public Library in Sanok, he organised research around the work of Marian Pankowski, an eminent writer from that city. He organised meetings with writers under the format ‘Guests of Janusz Szuber’, during which the citizens of Sanok had a chance to talk to such writers as Antoni Libera, Bronisław Maj and Paweł Huelle.
Originally written in Polish by Jacek Mączka, October 2006, update: NMR, May 2016, act. November 2020, translated to English by PG, November 2020
