Poems haunted by mythologized holocaust
By Lilian Munk Rösing
Janina Katz was born in Poland, but is now a highly respected author in Danish. She has recently written her first poetry anthology in Polish, but has also published it in her own Danish translation. The result is forty remarkably dense poems, as saturated with pain and anger they are with humour and tenderness, densely allegorical while still retaining a whimsical touch, as weighty as they are light-hearted.
The anthology is powerfully framed by two poems “Dengang (1)” (‘Back Then (1)’) and “Dengang (2)” (‘Back Then (2)’) where the lyric ‘I’ portrays herself as “little Eurydice,” a child “torn out of hell” and “sitting under a young apple tree / mocked by the war.” As a child Janina Katz was herself torn from the Holocaust hell where her parents perished and her poems are written from a position where she is and continues to be “mocked by the war.”
There is very little divine intervention in the universe of her poems; we live in an age where the world ends over and over (“behind the window / the end of the world celebrates / yet another birthday”) and where the sun quite frankly is fed up with the Earth (“I wish that old whore / would stop circling me”).
The poems are filled with ashes, losses, of negations - and of allegories (Eurydice, the war, the sun, the lady with the unicorn). They are about death (the mother, the father, God) and everything that never was: “unborn children’s unburied ashes”, “my non-wedding”, “an unshaken hand,” “poems, that don’t exist”. But there is also a promised land, manifested in the shape of Israel, conjured up in travel poems with mythical and Biblical references and more fleeting and abstract in the snippets of girlfriends chatter, the beauty of art and the tenderness of lovers that light up the grey ashes.
In one poem “the heart’s woodpecker taps out the Kaddish prayer.” The Kaddish prayer is a Jewish prayer which is both an elegy (mourning the dead) and a eulogy (gratitude for their lives). Katz’ poetry can be read simultaneously as an elegy and a eulogy, both for what was, for what never happened, and for what exists in spite of everything.
Translated by Charlotte Barslund
