Narracja historyczna Jerzego Ficowskiego o Zagładzie
Jerzy Ficowski’s Historical Narrative on the Shoah

Summary/Abstract: Devoted to Jerzy Ficowski’s poetic cycle on the annihilation of Jews, titled Odczytanie popiołów [‘A Reading of Ashes’] (1979), this sketch depicts the piece as one of the poet’s historical narratives. In Mr. Kandziora’s concept, the interpretative key to this work is the notion of ‘silence’ [milczenie] which reappears several times in Ficowski’s self-commentaries. It contains a conviction of futility of looking for words capable of describing the Shoah in a direct and adequate manner. In the cycle, a poetic equivalent of ‘silence’ becomes, on the one hand, the use of someone else’s word, quotation, and on the other, handling a ‘lame’, incorrect word or myth. Described is a group of poems being pictures of ‘Arcadia murdered’, introducing into the presented world sings of extermination as ‘blunders’ and verbal allusions, and a strategy of virtual ‘survival’ through disturbing the linearity of time and space using the power of poetic imagination.

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