Although Tytus Czyżewski (1880–1945) was one of the foremost representatives of Futurism in Polish literature, Charles S. Kraszewski, who edited and translated the present volume, opens his nearly fifty-page introduction by trying to convince us otherwise: “To call Tytus Czyżewski a ‘futurist’ is to risk succumbing to an oversimplified approach to literary history” (7). But let's succumb. Czyżewski certainly did, declaring his alignment with Futurist themes and aesthetics early and often, even as he was quick to point out other strains of avant-gardism that shaped and reshaped his work as a poet, painter, and occasional theorist. And A Burglar of the Better Sort will be most valuable to readers who approach this writer just as comparatively, probing the ways his work reflects broad, and broadly international, influences, from Cubist painting to industrial schematics. Kraszewski's clear, accessible glosses finally make such comparisons possible with Czyżewski.
Useful as this book may prove, however, what it does not provide is a pleasurable or even engaging reading experience for the poetry consumer or, for that matter, an effective introduction to the poet or his milieu for the student of Polish literature. Working primarily from Janusz Krysiak and Andrzej K. Waśkiewicz's excellent 2009 edition of Czyżewski's major works, beautifully produced and furnished with efficient commentaries and apparatus, Kraszewski's English-language version is nevertheless much less inviting of the varied uses to which we might put a “collected” volume. Absent effective editorial or scholarly accoutrements, an index to titles or first lines, or even a table of contents listing individual texts, the book seems to prescribe a single, complete reading, but this is not advisable. First, because Czyżewski's formal trickery and delight in warping demotic language can be stultifying in overlong sittings, like watching an adolescent misfit performing weirdness for its own sake. Second, because even as Kraszewski declares that “[t]he translator of poetry is more medium than scholar,” who “must allow himself to be possessed by the spirit of the original poet, and transmit, in the target language, the vital poetic plasma of the original,” there just is not a lot of that plasma here (46). The translations themselves rather read as refined trots; they would be most useful to a student or an especially ambitious reader looking for English-language assistance with the Polish original. Finally, the book's potential as an introduction to Czyżewski is particularly thwarted by the introduction itself, a relentless, often aimless catalog of nationalist clichés about the “greatness” of Polish culture, over-the-top claims about obscure lyrics (“Perhaps nowhere else in all of literature is our indifference to all suffering which is not our own more strongly, more effectively, expressed” [31]), and the settling of irrelevant personal scores, as when Kraszewski laments that he cannot publish his translations of Tadeusz Kantor “because of the intransigence of certain parties” (41). It is difficult to read Kraszewski's version of literary history without thinking of Witold Gombrowicz's brilliant parodies of Polish national discourse.
There are genuine rewards for the reader motivated to persevere through these discouragements. Czyżewski is a fascinating writer and artist, one who has generally been overshadowed by his more accessible (and enticingly blasphemous) contemporaries like Aleksander Wat and Bruno Jasieński. The poet's joy in irreverence and invention shines through many of Kraszewski's translations, especially in the visual poems that Czyżewski produced in the early 1920s, such as in the dramatic cycle “The Snake, Orpheus and Eurydice: A Classical Vision” and the poems collected in Night—Day, both originally published in 1922. Their idiosyncratic arrangement on the page and interplay with additional visual elements thwart any effort to excerpt these texts here, which might make an inadvertent homage to the poet's art. After all, Czyżewski sought to strip the poetic utterance of syntactic logic, so that the word, “cleansed of pseudo-values,” would be at once thoroughly expressive—and entirely unquotable (279).
