Philip Larkin has been criticized, after the waves of #MeToo and social justice movements, as a reckless womanizer and misogynist. A racist and elitist. A Cassandra-voiced pessimist. A self-absorbed man more preoccupied with death than life. An ironist lacking faith in any ideals. Unfashionably conservative in political opinions, he was skeptical about social progress and claims of natural goodness of human species. And in the field of literature, a doubter about dictates of modernism.
Larkin has been also recognized as the most important British poet of his generation. He is certainly one of the most challenging voices of the XX century, astounding for the clarity with which he articulates complex and paradoxical ideas. A contradictory man, he spent life amidst books and with books, but dismissed them with a nonchalant line “Books are crap.” He reaffirmed his agnosticism, but liked to visit a quiet church and found much beauty in the Bible. He feared the abyss, but didn’t turn his glance away.
Should we read his poems and appreciate them for clear-eyed observations unfolding in cadenzas to the heartbeat rhythm? Or should we rather make sure that no poems of his tint with gloom high school textbooks? Should we enjoy literary debates about gifts of his writings? Or should we denounce them as games shielding the author from rightful critique? What’s more important: a clear text or a clean hand? And what kind of dirt, declared by whom, makes the hand untrustworthy? (Ah - to his own, you might add his father’s sins! Sydney Larkin senior was known to hold pro-Nazi sympathies in the 1930s.)
He must have cut a startling figure in Hull: exceedingly tall (7ft/213 cm), with a stammer, hard of hearing, in thick glasses. He arrived to this provincial city on the edge of England in 1955, 33 years old, and stayed till the end of his days. In charge of 11 members of staff at the University of Hull library, he executed his professional job with authority and broad vision. But Larkin’s personal life was a total mess. He never married. Had several long-term relationships (for years, on parallel tracks). Never had children. No dog or cat to his name. A house bought only late in life, almost accidently, and when he was already drinking too much, every day. A permanent outsider he never felt quite at home. The best words he found for Hull were, “it’s very nice and flat for biking.”
Well, no more biking. But here he is: Standing tall and surprisingly gracious. In front of the train station, perhaps returning from a visit to his mother (filial duty completed, unhappily, every other week, until her death). A bit tipsy or lost in thought he stumbled, but already regained the footing. Moving forward now more freely, with a flair, as if in the spring light, starting afresh. Walk on, Philip Larkin, walk on.
G.D.
THE TREES
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
High Windows (1974)
DRZEWA
Drzewa już prawie rozwijają listki
Jak słowa, które ktoś zaraz wypowie;
Pąki dzisiaj są ledwie otwarte
Lecz ich zieleń zawiera też smutki.
Dlatego, że rodzą się raz jeszcze, a my
Jesteśmy coraz starsi? I one umierają,
Wiek w słojach drewna zapisany mają,
Doroczną sztuczką jest świeżość zieleni.
A jednak każdą wiosną siły niestrudzone
Wybuchają gęstwiną majową.
Stary rok odszedł, mówić się wydają,
Zaczynaj znowu, od nowa, od nowa.
Przekład Grażyna Drabik
HIGH WINDOWS
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives-
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
WYSOKIE OKNA
Gdy widzę parę smarkaczy, po których
Poznać, że on ją rypie i że im nawzajem
Dobrze dzięki pigułce czy innej diafragmie —
Wiem, że to właśnie jest tym rajem,
O którym każdy starzec marzył całe życie:
Dawne więzi i gesty, niby muzealny
Kombajn, zepchnięte na pobocze drogi,
A kto młody, ten zjeżdża po długiej zjeżdżalni
W basen szczęścia, bez końca. Ciekaw jestem, czy też
Ktoś czterdzieści lat temu, patrząc na mnie z boku,
Także myślał: Ten będzie miał dopiero życie;
Żadnego już tam Boga, zimnych potów w mroku
Na myśl o piekle, fałszu klękania przed katabasem,
Którym się gardzi. Tacy jak on będą drwili
Z tych bzdur, z radosnym piskiem zjeżdżając w swój basen,
Wolni, psiakrew, jak ptaki. I w tej samej chwili
Zamiast słów, myśl rozjaśnia blask wysokich okien:
Szkło przeniknięte objawieniem słońca,
Za szkłem błękit powietrza, puste i głębokie
Nigdzie, nic nie mówiące, nie mające końca.
Przekład Stanisław Barańczak
WYSOKIE OKNA
Gdy widzę parę dzieciaków i wiem, że
Ona spiralę nosi albo bierze
Jakieś globulki, a on ją posuwa,
Myślę: to właśnie jest ten raj, o którym
Wszyscy ci starzy marzyli: formuły,
Gesty i więzi zepchnięte na stronę
Jak przestarzałe kombajny – i każdy
Kto młody, sunie długim, śliskim torem
Ku szczęśliwości, bez końca. Ciekawe,
Czy ktoś tak na mnie czterdzieści lat temu
Patrzył i myślał: Ten będzie miał klawe
Życie; żadnego tam Boga, żadnego
Potu w ciemnościach na myśl o tym wszystkim
I piekle, krycia poglądów o księżach:
On i podobni jemu długim, śliskim
Torem polecą jak swobodne, ciężka
Cholera, ptaki. I od razu zamiast
Słów, myśl się zjawia o wysokich oknach:
Gdzieś za szybami zalanymi słońcem
Głęboki błękit powietrza objawia
Nic, które nigdzie jest – i jest bez końca.
Przekład Jacek Dehnel
Born in 1922 in Coventry, Midlands, died in 1985 in Hull, a port city in East Yorkshire. English poet, novelist and jazz critic. Graduate of St. John’s College, Oxford, with a life-long career as a respected and innovative librarian, working in Shropshire, Leicester, Belfast, and since 1955 as a chief librarian at the University of Hull. Author of two novels; literary essays and reviews of jazz music; and four slim volumes of poems, one per decade: The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) which present, in X. J. Kennedy’s phrase, “a poetry from which even people who distrust poetry, most people, can take comfort and delight.”
“High Windows” read by Philip Larkin: https://youtu.be/JIDnfdmQtrE?feature=shared
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
Philip Larkin, 44 wiersze. Tłum. Stanisław Barańczak. Kraków: Wydawnictwo ARKA, 1991.
Wiersze zebrane Philipa Larkina: Mniej oszukani, Wesela w Zielone Świątki i Wysokie Okna w przekładzie Jacka Dehnela. Wrocław: Biuro Literackie, 2008.
Philip Larkin, Śnieg w kwietniową niedzielę w przekładzie Jacka Dehnela. Kołobrzeg: Biuro Literackie, 2022.