Lumpenbroletariat among the Polystyrene Butterflies: On Robert Rybicki’s The Squatters’ Gift (Dar Meneli) as Poetic Travelogue

Abstract

Dar Meneli (The Squatters’ Gift)—a collection by Polish poet Robert Rybicki, a self-proclaimed happener—is a poetic travelogue through numerous languages and locales, both real and imaginary. His peripatetic poems pass through—and sometimes squat in—numerous, often industrial cities, including Gliwice, Wrocław, Poznań, Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, Rybnik, Kraków, Warsaw, Toruń, Gdańsk, Świnoujście, and Lublin. Written over a five-year period in which Rybicki was intermittently squatting or engaging in collective action, Dar Meneli excavates syllable and song, mind and muck, to invent a transnational dialogic poetry pointedly unapologetic, where Greek mythology intersects with 1980s Polish punk music, poetic string theory, time travel, and psychedelic dumpster diving. An inheritor of 20th-century European avant-garde poets Miron Białoszewski, Paul Celan, and Tristan Tzara, Rybicki works at the border between performance and (language) disruptions. Understandably, his poetry presents an array of translational challenges, ranging from acrobatic multilingualism to implosive neologisms. Drawing from my own experiences as a translator of Robert Rybicki’s work, this article has three aims: first, to outline Joan Retallack’s concept of “the poethical wager”; secondly, to consider how Retallack’s “poethics” can open a pathway to transposing poetics to a translation practice (and to translating Rybicki in particular), a practice modeled after what Jerzy Jarniewicz has termed the “legislator-translator”; and thirdly, to demonstrate that what Sherry Simon terms the “translation zone” is a distinguishing feature of Rybicki’s multilingual poetics in his collection The Squatters’ Gift.