Imperative, irony and smuggling of the pie in the sky. Somenotes on the poem Do Jeruszalaim by Jerzy Ficowski

Abstract

The poem Do Jeruszalaim combines different original poetical solutions

applied in the collection of poems Odczytanie popiołów and remembering

the experience of Shoah. The language of the poem becomes a tool

employed in a “smuggling” of unsaved Jews, being done “belatedly”,

into the world of the living. Complicated, unspectacular by design,

constructional operations are finely tuned with the semantics of the escape

(flight) and are to lay a false trail, to rescue a human being in the

intricacies of the poem, somewhere between the sheer physics of the

escape and the possibilities offered by words. A particularly interesting

place is given to the phraseological units used in the poems such as

“a handful of pies in the sky” that simultaneously recall futility of the

action but somehow suggest a “smuggling” the act of life-giving activity.

The activities carried out in the language of the poem function

in a ceaseless (and self-augmenting) strain between the two contradictions.

They are: the imperative of memory, impractical (and unfeasible)

act of saving human “after-being” and the protest against the abyssmal

nothingness of Shoah on the one hand, and irony of the futility of these

“vindications from non-existence” as being only verbal, on the other.