In the works written from the mid-1970s onwards, a similar gesture regularly occurs no longer only within a complete phrase, but above all at the level of a single line. Some words are spaced further apart than others. The compositional voids, known in typography as white space, encourage reflection on the meaning of individual words, on their mutual mismatch, their wishful incompatibility: ‘he was thirty years old \ he died killed’, ‘posthumously \ he was awarded an order’, ‘the sky \ bars’. This forced pause offers the illusory hope that there is something else between the words (worlds), or that this empty space can be filled in at will.
In a 1989 parable about a lamp (‘The Lamp: A Parable about Art and Class and the Function of Kishinev in the Jewish Imagination’), the author confesses that poems come to her in the dark. ‘It is in it that my imagination finds solace.’ She treats light only as a tool to help her read a book, for example. Meanwhile, for the reader, this in-between void becomes a promise of a different, good ending. Most often unfulfilled.
...so many identities
The poet, whose work has evolved over time into prose, builds a literary world on oppositions. The protagonist is at once a traitor, a legend and a deserter, the embrace can be fatal and the flat becomes a prison. When she searches for her missing father, grief and rage dominate. When she writes to her mother, she recalls her words to ‘always see / things from the side of beauty’. The sexual act is mechanical, the love for the woman is based on closeness, touch, tenderness. On the one hand, brutalism and concreteness; on the other, emotion, metaphor.
The world of Klepfisz’s poetry is hermetic and overwhelming. It is impossible to feel safe in it. At the same time it is paralysing, one cannot get out of it. This rift between two continents, languages, duty and desire, recovering memory and living in the here and now leads to loneliness. Her protagonist – for she is most often a woman (the writer’s alter ego?) – doesn’t know her neighbour’s name, envies anyone who has a different job (although she wouldn’t want to do any of them) or is 25 cents richer. She envies those who don’t know that things could be different. She dreams of disappearing.
The author often uses the metaphor of a plant that takes root, but needs to be nurtured or it will wither. At one time it is a blossoming rose, at another a stubborn weed with no ‘sense in seizing space and crossing borders’. Between Worlds chronologically arranges Klepfisz’s works, so we can easily trace the maturation of an artist of words, a daughter, a woman, a rebel or an intellectual engaged in gender and sexuality issues. Reminiscences about the Warsaw Ghetto or passionate poetic comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although written decades ago, lose neither their topicality nor their emotional overtones. It is only in the later phase of her work, when Klepfisz leans towards prose as a form of expression, that her words are more balanced and her tone cooler, though still uncompromising. The essayistic analysis of the situation of women, especially Jewish women, the queer milieu, the experience of emigration and the issue of peace in the Middle East still bears traces of poetic language and sensitivity.
The hardest thing about being a poet? I feel a gap between what I experience internally as a writer struggling with poetry and how others imagine what it is to be a poet. I feel the pressure to ‘poeticise’, to be prolific, to be constantly ‘poetic’. For me, poetry is private.
[Irena Klepfisz, interview excerpt from the book ‘Meaning & Memory: Interviews with Fourteen Jewish Poets’].
Klepfisz reiterates that she is not afraid of being pigeonholed. In her biographical note in the Polish-English collection Between Worlds, we read that after coming out in the 1970s, she discovered a community of lesbian writers, became involved in feminist journalism and co-founded the women’s literary magazine Conditions. She then became involved with the painter Judith Waterman. A trip to Poland in 1983 awakened her desire to experiment with bilingual poetry and she edited the Yiddish section in the Jewish feminist cultural magazine Bridges. She became a translator and contributed to an anthology of texts by secular Jewish women writers. She supported the organisation Israeli Women in Black, and taught at Bedford College Correctional Facility – a maximum security prison for women. All these motifs are easily found in Klepfisz’s works.
Between Worlds is above all a journey of exploration: of form (from expressive poetry, through metaphorical parables, to intellectual essays), language (especially in A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, poems from the years 1983 to 1990), identity (a pot belonging to the mother – like objects in Hanna Krall’s work – reminds of the Polish roots), passion (an excellent ekphrasis of Ravens in Flight, or Millet’s La Fermière). It is also a book about finding one’s place – in literature (finally Polish!), in history, in memory, in everyday life.
Irena Klepfisz, ‘Pomiędzy Światami / Between Worlds’
Editors: Irena Klepfisz and Olga Kubińska
Translation of poems and essays: Justyna Bilik, Urszula Chowaniec, Sylwia Chutnik, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Bronisława Karst, Katarzyna Kaszorek, Bożena Keff, Paulina Kruk, Olga Kubińska, Agnieszka Legutko, Magdalena Macińska, Izabela Morska, Bella Szwarcman-Czarnota and Karolina Szymaniak
Published by Słowo/Obraz Terytoria, Gdańsk 2024
Number of pages: 640
ISBN: 978-83-8325-107-3
