(born in 1932), poet and playwright. The winner of many literary awards, including the Barbara Sadowska Award (1992), the Culture Foundation Award (1993), the Minister of Culture Award (2001), and the Silesius Wroclaw Poetry Award (2009). She lives in Puszczykowo.

Krystyna Miłobędzka occupies a separate and outstanding place in Polish literature. Miłobędzka’s poems, she herself prefers to describe them with a humble word “records”, are short, extremely intense pieces about the basic facts of our life in the world. Their narrator represents the point of view of a mother, daughter, woman entangled in a relationship with life, surrounding nature, the closest people, her own body (‘my all at once alive’). Life and all its manifestations though are an element – a being still changing and transforming into ever new forms.

In these attempts at expressing one's own life (and, at the same time, a universal human condition), it is of the utmost importance to find such a way of its articulation and recording that would be free of linguistic set patterns and repeating things that were already formulated many times over. That is why nearly every poem by Miłobędzka is, in a sense, a compromise between remaining silent and telling a lie, which originates from trusting to linguistic gestures, imposing and mummified by their widespread use.

Trying to express her truths “for the first time”, unlike anyone before, the poet, however, goes up against not only the clichés of our language. Simultaneously, Miłobędzka endeavours to explore what is in front of a word, a sentence, a poem. She strives to capture what is only sensed and thought of. In one of the poems, we read, “The space between my thoughts and my words. What to clear this space with? Clearly speak, clearly clear… (I say this loud the rest of what I am quietly thinking. I am writing this rest of the rest)”, and another one, a barely one-line record, which is a poem-spell, ‘One time, finally, say something beautifully and without the rest’.

This imperative of searching for fresh and possibly precise devices makes Miłobędzka frequently use the flexibility of Polish grammar and syntax in an unorthodox way (which obviously causes some difficulties in translating her texts into other languages ​​and it can be believed to be the main reason for their too modest presence in the non-Polish speaking world). It is no coincidence that Miłobędzka is also the author of theatrical plays for children and a theoretician of children's theatre, for it is the unprejudiced, ‘child-like’ approach to words that fits so well with her creative ideas.

Nonetheless, it must be emphasised that the uniqueness of Miłobędzka lies in the fact that her poems, struggling with fundamental problems for literature for decades, are in no sense ‘difficult’. On the contrary, they appeal to every sensitive reader very directly and instantly. It is probably also a form of modesty and openness of the author, declaring uncertainty and unawareness rather than offering any conclusive answers to the questions she poses herself. These questions are, or become, important also for Krystyna Miłobędzka‘s readers. What is also exceptional is the fact that it is exactly Miłobędzka, the poet deeply private and far from commenting on everyday life, that is also the author of the volume Pamiętam (I Remember), one of the very few artistically outstanding testimonies of martial law.

The poetry of Krystyna Miłobędzka combines extraordinary focus and inquisitiveness, as well as simplicity and credibility of expression, also when the author persistently inquires how to express what is inexpressible.

This alloy of simplicity and sophistication makes the records of Miłobędzka beam with a special kind of noble pathos, appropriate only to the greatest works of art, which is impossible to pass by indifferently.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

poetry:

• Pokrewne, Czytelnik, Warszawa, 1970.
• Dom, pokarmy, Ossolineum, Wrocław, 1975.
• Wykaz treści, Czytelnik, Warszawa, 1984.
• Pamiętam, Wydawnictwo A, Wrocław, 1992.
• Przed wierszem, Fundacja "Brulionu", Kraków-Warszawa, 1994.
• Imiesłowy, Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, Wrocław, 2000
• wszystkowiersze, Biuro Literackie, Legnica, 2000.
• Przesuwanka [sheet] Biuro Literackie, Legnica, 2003.
• Po krzyku, Biuro Literackie, Wrocław, 2004; 2005.
• Zbierane (1969-2005), Biuro Literackie, Wrocław, 2006.
• gubione, Biuro Literackie, Wrocław, 2008
• zbierane, gubione (1960-2010), Biuro Literackie, Wrocław, 2010.
• dwanaście wierszy w kolorze, Biuro Literackie, Wrocław, 2012.
• Na wysokiej górze, Wydawnictwo Miejskie Posnania, Poznań 2014

drama:

• Siała baba mak. Gry słowne dla teatru, Wydawnictwo A, Wrocław, 1995.
• Gdzie baba siała mak. Gry słowne dla teatru, Biuro Literackie, Wrocław, 2012.

TRANSLATIONS

English

• Nothing More, tłum. Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese, Arc Publications, 2013.