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Which door do we use to get out of it all?

The 5th Miłosz Festival has come to an end

As Michael Ondaatje said, “from more or less halfway point of the book, the writer starts thinking about how to untangle the story”, and quite frankly we are also wondering about that, since it is hard to return to everyday life after such a festival. We simply keep instinctively turning into Piłsudskiego Street and going to Czapski Pavilion, or grabbing the piece of paper with festival programme.

On the programme, some meetings are marked with a circle: Michael Ondaatje, Breyten Breytenbach, Olga Sedakova, Ashur Etwebi, Stefan Hertmans and Adonis. There are small exclamation marks near other events – Stanisław Soyka & Cracow Singers, Jazzformance, films about Wisława Szymborska and Ryszard Krynicki. Some are marked with a squiggly line: Kacper Bartczak, Barbara Klicka, Aldona Kopkiewicz, Piotr Przybyła and Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki.

That was the programme. What did we manage to achieve? We have met with almost 60 guests and almost 2500 participants took part in the festival. 6 volumes of poetry were released together with publishing houses, and the celebration of poetry comprised over 40 events: one gala, two concerts and a lot of poems. There are also things that we were not able to count, despite our best efforts. We could not count the emotions, good jokes and new friendships. A lot of things happened over the course of those few short days. Staying with the uncountables, let us sum the event up.

There was no shortage of serious topics raised during the festival, even despite the fact that there is a certain lightness to this year’s theme – after all, the road-side dog is a friendly wanderer, who looks at the surface of things, but also a small mongrel, equipped with the Other’s perspective. The writers said that we should look for this nature primarily in ourselves, and that it is a very encouraging experience.

Michael Ondaatje reminded us that literature allows us to go beyond realms, eras and poetics, and that there is no such thing as one cohesive narration, covering all novels. During the debate on nomadism we could hear that the identity is a creation, built in cooperation with the other, and the concept that the world is seamless is but an illusion. Very often, we also ask ourselves and the authors about the sense and nature of home. We talked about various homes – the mobile ones and those connected with the place of origin; however, as Adonis observed, the difference between humans and animals is that we are able to break up with our birthplaces.

There were of course some political discussions, but the perspective always remained personal. Ashur Etwebi discussed the dramatic fate of an emigrant, while Breyten Breytenbach said, that a truly ethical man never feels fully at home, and that the sense of familiarity conceals a trap of appropriation of things that are different.

During the meetings we could also hear the voices of translators – we owe them the ability to discover the great and diverse art from many countries. It is also important that during the Festival, the Wisława Szymborska Award was awarded to the translators, dealing with the difficulties of poetic translation.

The road-side dog has ended. A fluffy cat lies in the sun near the Czapski Pavilion, and we are left here, wondering with Michael Ondaatje – how do we get out?

Staring in the darkness at the film portrait of Ryszard Krynicki, we collected our reflections after another dose of festival experiences. The poet himself says that he is a peripatetic – in order to write, he much travel, and the film is about the path he has travelled. The day passed under the sign of poetry. There were fewer conversations on social and political topics. We listened to the music of poetry and observed the artists.

“I’ll read in Arabic, because I want to read in Arabic”, said Ashur Etwebi with a smile when he and the meeting host, Krzysztof Siwczyk, could not agree on the choice of the poem. This time it was mainly about the melody of the language. We delighted in the melody as well when Olga Sedakova took Etwebi’s place. Back straight, smiling gently, looking just over the heads of the audience or closing her eyes, she recited her poems in Russian almost entirely from memory. Sedakova let the poetry speak above all. And through poetry, she gave voice to poets – she called up Dante, Rilke, Khlebnikov and others as masters. A while later, during another meeting, Julia Szykowiak asked in her poem: “Whom do I write with, whom will I read this?”
Krzysztof Siwczyk and Ashur Etwebi searched for a poetic tradition that linked them and debated over what drives a poem – sensuality and an ecstatic experience of the world, or perhaps the tension between the concrete and tradition? There was no escape, however, from a conversation about what takes place at the intersection of politics and the human condition. Etwebi spoke about his experiences in emigration. After the outbreak of the Arab Spring (which he would rather referred to a coil rather than a season), he had to leave Libya and travel to Norway. Emigrants are exhausted people, filled with a voice, often reduced to a mere number in the administrative apparatus, he said. “I wouldn’t wish this fate even on an enemy, and I never thought it would be my fate”. At the same time, he also spoke about saving what is most important to him – “I think and live in the future”.
The unusual dialogue between artists was maintained at many levels throughout the day. “Poets do not give the world a fever, but they take its temperature”, said Wojciech Bonowicz, paraphrasing the famous saying about philosophy during a meeting at the Church of St Martin.

At the same time, when poetry was being read at the Church of St Martin, the Czapski Pavilion slowly transformed into a summer cinema. The space in front of the pavilion was filled with loungers and chairs, some of them still damp from the rain. In the twilight, Andrzej Wajda sat in one of them. There was a flash – not lightning, but someone taking a picture. The screening presented I Still Return / Nadal wracam, a documentary film about Ryszard Krynicki directed by Adam Sikora. The film was especially moving because the poet, as Andrzej Franaszek, screenwriter and host of the meeting, revealed, did not want to be in front of the camera. Reportedly he suggested that a famous actor play him in the film. “I don’t like myself from the front. Or from the back,” he says in the film, standing in front of the apartment block where Stanisław Barańczak lived in Poznań.

The film was projected on the façade on which the signature of Józef Czapski, the symbolic patron of the location, was visible the whole time. Today, join us for more meetings with festival guests: Breyten Breytenbach, Stefan Hertmans and Adonis, as well as a meeting dedicated to Zuzanna Ginczanka. See you there!

 

“I just cannot see my poetry being read in villas with any pools, I simply can’t”, says Szymborska in Napisane życie / Written Life about how she imagines the readers of her works, and the audience gathered at the screening bursts in laughter. “When my readers buy my work, they check how much money they have left in their wallets. But they still buy it”, she adds. In the same film, Michał Rusinek explains that one cannot believe the words of the poet, because that is her way of answering difficult questions – with an anecdote so captivating, that one simply forgets the question.

The day started with a meeting with the winners of the Wisława Szymborska Award, whom we asked some difficult questions. This year, the award was won by Jakub Kornhauser (Drożdżownia) and Uroš Zupan for Unhurried Seafaring, as well as the translators: Katarina Šalamun-Biedrzycka and Miłosz Biedrzycki. Also the poets who are no longer with us – Zdzisław Jaskuła and Witold Wirpsza – were present during the following meetings thanks to their works.

Michael Ondaatje spoke about how important solitude and the feeling of community are for a poet. According to him, an expansive dialogue with other kinds of art allows the creator, who sits in a cramped room, to understand that there are millions of similar creators, sitting in their rooms. This provides an opportunity to get into a broader context, but of course by adhering to the principles, which are different for film, painting and literature. When asked about his favourite childhood stories, Ondaatje answered that it would be hard for him to point any particular story out. “I grew up around stories of demons”.

Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki introduced us to the world of poetic demons, and Piotr Matywiecki, host of the meeting, spoke beautifully about his poems, filled with names and mysterious, often autobiographical inscriptions: “The name is a sound, and the sound cannot be interpreted in itself.” And the meeting was conducted in the same way – hard to interpret, trance-inducing, emotional, intimate and irrational. “The power of those poems and their convention invalidates any other convention, including the convention of this evening and my role in it”, Matywiecki summed up. As always, the poet did not want to discuss and only read his poetry. The words of his poem, saying that “In poetry, you cannot do anything / by force” seemed to be some sort of explanation.

The evening was a combination of two strong poetic performances – a hypnotic reading by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki and the “Wirpsza” concert by Jazzformance. Both performances, filled with authentic poetic power, which comes from – as the poet said – the fact that “one text kindles another”, did not leave anyone indifferent. We hope that this will be the result of this year’s festival – that it will become an inspiration for poetic endeavours and it will kindle our heads!

“I allowed you, for a moment, to see the flower of the nasturtium with the eyes of a butterfly. I allowed you to look at a meadow with the eyes of a salamander. Then I gave you the eyes of various people, so that you could look with them at the same city”, wrote Czesław Miłosz in his poem Eyes, featured in the Road-side Dog. We wish that you will be able to carry all the perspectives that you learned during the Festival with you, and to let them inspire you until the next Miłosz Festival.

Stefan Hertmans walks around like a teacher, talking about Carpaccio’s painting, Adonis emanates calmness, and when Kuba Kornhauser received the statuette during the Wisława Szymborska Award Gala, he turned it in his hands several times, like he was carrying a crystal ball showing him the future. Take a closer look at the poets, as a lot of things can be seen in their steps, gestures and looks.

“Writing combines the musical and painting tradition in itself, as it uses both melody and image”, said Hertmans and he backed up his statement by not only reading, but also showing the Landscape According to Carpaccio. He also emphasised the immense influence of music on War and Turpentine, and on a side note the author also revealed that he is a jazz musician himself. Despite the saying that the nature is the mistress of all arts, Hertmans reversed it and said that the art is the mistress of all nature, as it provides a lens through which we can observe the world.

Would Adonis – author of the smallest festival publication, filled with powerful poems – agree with him? One of his poems says: “Poetry is a sin, religion is a gift / says the ancient Greek-Muslim tradition / and despite that the Arabs / demanded nothing from language as much / as poetry.

“The poem either defends itself or not”, said Hatif Janabi, host of the meeting and Arabic translator, announcing that Adonis was not going to talk about poetry. After a dynamic discussion about the significance of Miłosz for the young generation of poets, it was a really refreshing experience. The poems were given voice, and when they were read in two languages, silence fell in the room. However, the meeting did not go as planned, since the audience really wanted to talk with Adonis. At first, they asked about the poet’s attitude towards Submission by Michel Houellebecq and the author himself. Then Urszula Kozioł, who was among the audience, noted the extraordinary fact that the poet writes poetry in two languages – Arabic and French – which is a feat rarely accomplished by bilingual poems.

Breyten Breytenbach spoken about the opportunities and limitation of language, bringing us closer to the problems connected with using Afrikaans. According to him, it is a language that “came in from the back”. It was developed by a conquered people in order to be able to communicate with their conqueror – a language entangled in its history.

In her poems, Zuzanna Ginczanka speaks about other kinds of entanglements: “in the hermetic / like a steel thermos / peach wallpaper cubes / entangled in dresses to the neck / we conduct / cultural / discussions”. The History of Photography Museum, which hosts an exhibition devoted to the poet, was certainly full of cultural discussions.

The culmination of the entire day was the announcement of the Wisława Szymborska Award laureates. This year the prize was also awarded to an author of a volume of poetry in a foreign language. Uros Zupan and Jakub Kornhauser greeted each other on the stage with a strong handshake. What is more, the translators of Zupan’s poetry – Miłosz Biedrzycki and Katarina Salamum-Biedrzycka – also received the award. “It is a very important moment for Slovenian poetry in Poland”, the translator emphasised.

Congratulations to the winners, and don’t forget to come to a meeting with the laureates!

The Józef Czapski Pavilion, a beautiful day, clear air and a delicate murmur caused by discussions in the café. Ashur Etwebi slowly sips coffee at the table, looking around discreetly. The atmosphere of celebration can be felt in the air, even though it is still unclear what is going to happen. What was the course of this exceptional day with poetry and poems?

The road-side dog, a symbol of travel, poetic wandering and nomadism, is the motto of this year’s Miłosz Festival. As the participants of the first festival debate noted, it is an ambiguous character – on the one hand it is someone who travels in a physical manner, and on the other a thinker, exploring the secret of oneself. Adonis, Michael Ondaatje, Olga Stanisławska and Breyten Breytenbach discussed the various dimensions of travel, from initiation and formation travels, to refugee travels and escape. At some point in the discussion the host – Jarosław Mikołajewski – invited the Belarussian poet, Andrej Hadanowicz on stage, thus passing the border between the gathered audience and the invited guests. There were many such events during this meeting.

 

Anthony Miłosz, son of the famous poet, observed how the “road-side dog” has changed since the times of Czesław Miłosz. “We are in another phase, when it comes to wandering. Some build walls, others build rafts”. The wandering, which allows for renewal and for discovering something Other in ourselves, was discussed from the moral perspective.

In the introductory lecture Michael Ondaatje reminded that these days we are not dependent on environmental and social impacts, and geography does not have to be a cultural barrier. Opening to the world allows for both importing and exporting art. There is no single version of history, we have to speak about all histories at the same time, which has both artistic and political dimension. In his words, the road-side dog is a mongrel – someone who wanders around, constantly looking for their own place, questioning who they are. He also spoke about blurring the boundaries between various kinds of art (literature, film, architecture), genres, poetics and – finally – between people, because literature creates connections between worlds and people. It could certainly be felt in the Czapski Pavilion – the meeting place for a variety of languages, cultures and experiences.

 

The discussion the moved to the Tempel synagogue. The language of the discussion also changed, in spite of the fact that the poets were still speaking; now they spoke through their works. Almost symbolically, at the beginning of this unique meeting of ten poets of the East and West, the voice of Czesław Miłosz sounded in the darkness. “Rue Descartes”, his poem written in 1980: “And suddenly saw in the light the reeling wheel of the seasons / Where empires have fallen and those once living are now dead / There is no capital of the world, neither here nor anywhere else”, corresponded with the words of Anthony Miłosz, spoken during the previous meeting. The solemn atmosphere could be felt in poets’ words and seen in their biographies, as most of the invited guests were – and are – wanderers and refugees.

The evening reading was just a foretaste to the lecture, which continued in the Czapski Pavilion. Those who want more poetry can find a mobile bookstore with volumes of poetry written by the festival guests. Today we would like to invite you to a meeting with Ashur Etwebi, conducted by Krzysztof Siwczyk, and a meeting with Olga Sedakova, hosted by Adam Pomorski. The day will end with two atmospheric events – reading poetry in St Martin’s Church and the premiere screening of I Still Return. A Portrait of Ryszard Krynicki. Come and talk about poetry, and maybe you will be joined by Stefan Hertmans, Adonis or Breyten Breytenbach.

 

 

From 6 to 8 June 2016, UNESCO – in cooperation with the People’s Government of the Beijing Municipality and with the support of the National Commission of China for UNESCO – organized the Second UNESCO Creative Cities Beijing Summit, on the theme of “UNESCO Creative Cities Network: a lever for sustainable urban development”, in Beijing, People’s Republic of China.

In the framework of the Culture and Sustainable Urban Development Initiative, launched by UNESCO to nourish the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Creative Cities Beijing Summit positioned the Network as a key programme to achieve the cities’ sustainable development. Justyna Jochym, responsible for international cooperation at the Krakow Festival Office, represented the City of Krakow and the UNESCO City of Literature programme at this conference.

Mayors and policy-makers of the UCCN, academics and experts from all over the world gathered at this event, which served as a dialogue and discussion platform for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. By focusing on research and policy-making, they explored innovative and effective ways of fully integrating culture and creativity into local development strategies and plans.

During the conference, Justyna presented on the topic of “Structuring a mid-term research agenda for the UNESCO Creative Cities on creativity and sustainable urban development” . Moderator of the panel was Mr Francesco Bandarin, Assistant Director-General for Culture, UNESCO and other panelists, included:

• Mr Dongliang Chen, Director of the International Center for Creativity and Sustainable Development under the auspices of UNESCO (Category 2 Centre)

• Mr Daniel Laven, Associate Professor and Head of Department, Mid Sweden University, Department of Tourism Studies and Geography, Sweden

• Mr Ian McShane, Senior Research Fellow, Deputy Director, Centre for Urban Studies, RMIT University, Melbourne (Australia)

• Mr Bryan Beattie, Representative of Dundee (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island), Creative City of Design

• Mr Rainer Kern, Representative of Mannheim (Germany), Creative City of Music

Justyna is also the representative of the UNESCO Cities of Literature in the UCCN Steering Committee, where she is delegated to the coordination of joint activities, communication, evaluation and research on behalf of the 20 Cities of Literature.

Lastly, this summit supported the UNESCO’s contribution to the Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat-III), which will take place in Quito, Ecuador, in October 2016.

Working and information documents: 

Programme of the Second UNESCO Creative Cities Beijing Summit

List of participants

Agenda of the Summit

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