7 September 2011 3rd Conrad supplement out now!
Today’s issue of Tygodnik Powszechny features the third supplement prepared specially for the 3rd Joseph Conrad Festival in Krakow organised by the Krakow Festival Office, Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation and the City of Krakow.
Featuring in the latest supplement:
Wojciech Nowicki on Marek Bieńczyk, a guest of the 5th day of the Conrad Festival: “One more word about mother. Unlike in Barthes, the principal figure of Bieńczyk’s book is father. Mother stays silent in the background. This bond – and it is not for me to judge whether stronger or weaker – is peculiar, mainly readable through a lack. To answer the question about causes, we should subject the author to vivisection, just as he does with his heroes. What drove Krasiński? Why did Mickiewicz ask for a bottle of Bordeaux just before he died? Dead people, such is their virtue, better submit themselves more readily, fully and without vividly protesting. Bieńczyk, a living man, I did leave in peace.”
Grzegorz Jankowicz presents Swiss novelist Fleur Jaeggy. Jaeggy will be a guest of the third day of the Conrad Festival: “Everything begins with obsessive activity that supplies Jaeggy’s characters with joy. To some extent it is a result of the environment they grow up in. Young people respond to compulsion and unwaveringly go towards perdition, sometimes renouncing any desires, needs and actions, falling into a horrifying stupor in which they stay to the very end. Is the stupor a consequence of bliss and obsessive aspirations or simply another form of the same illness, whose etiology we do not really understand? I do not know.”
Brian Patten is a guest of the fifth day. Julia Fiedorczuk’s portraiture of the poet: “Meetings with Patten become embedded in the memory, as he is a poet who cares about meeting the audience. In a talk with Sommer, Patten asked rhetorically: “(...) if you don’t write for people, then for whom?” After a short pause adding: “I think that poetry should be always accessible. Just look at the most famous academic poets of ancient times, at the likes of Wordsworth and his early poems, say Lyrical Ballads – Wordsworth said he wrote them for people. I don’t think there’s anything wrong about it. I write my poems for people – that’s it. I will always write in an accessible way.
Mariusz Treliński is also a guest of the 5th day. Daniel Cichy writes about the director: “Undoubtedly, in the opera world, Mariusz Treliński is a distinctive phenomenon. It is true he often has arguments with the composer, it happens he doesn’t listen to music carefully and doesn’t agree to a hierarchy of themes given by a librettist, and that he wants to see problems the authors did not even dream of and reads pieces in a controversial manner. Though as befits an enfant terrible of Polish opera direction, he more than fulfilled his task.”
Agata Kula talks with Justyna Bargielska, a winner of the Gdynia Literary Prize in 2009-2010, writer, novelist, a guest of the fourth day of the Conrad Festival: “If you had not been an artist a decade before childbirth, then nobody will give you a right to write afterwards – be it childbirth, bringing up a child or simply in order to recover from certain things via a kind of artistic activities. And we have a right for it. If we wish so, we have a right. That’s it.”
