AustLit

'This article is an overview of literature in Polish produced in Australia. As Michael Jacklin has argued (2009), LOTE (Languages Other Than English) writing in Australia ‘has yet to be recognised’. Multilingual writing constitutes a hidden history within Australian literary studies. Polish-language writing is one such hidden history. The two largest waves of emigration from Poland to Australia took place in the decade after the Second World War (ca. 1947-1956), and in the 1980s and 1990s, in the wake of the martial law imposed by General Jaruzelski in 1981 to suppress the opposition movement, Solidarity (Kujawa 142). Our primary focus in this article is the literature in Polish created by authors who came to Australia as part of these two waves. We also discuss the work of Liliana Rydzyńska, who arrived in Australia in 1969, i.e. between the two waves. We then offer a brief survey of more recent Australian writing in Polish, from 2000 till the present. We close with reference to work produced in English by Australian authors of Polish-speaking heritage. Our research on Polish-language writing in Australia traces an evolution from post-WWII writing, on the one hand dominated by traumatic memories of war and experiences of alienation, on the other characterized by exuberant satirical impulses, to post-Solidarity-era writing, largely reflective of a closer engagement with Australian landscapes and culture, and often, a sense of cosmopolitan and transnational identity.' (Publication abstract)

'This chapter highlights the abundance of cultural and literary forms and themes featured in Polish-language periodicals published in Australia. With over 150 individual titles published before the 1990s and contributions from a relatively high number of sophisticated writers, the Polish-language press is a unique Australian LOTE (Languages Other Than English) phenomenon. The chapter argues that this profusion of literary work indicates that these periodicals served predominantly as a means of self-expression, reinforcing the cultural identities and sense of belonging of a dislocated diasporic intelligentsia, and that this function might have been more important to some editors than dealing with issues of interest to the broader migrant community. These periodicals shed light on hidden histories of migration to Australia, and hence refine perspectives on Australia’s migrant communities, past and present.'

Source: Abstract.

'This article looks at some poems by Polish Australian writer Andrzej Chciuk (1920-1978). Chciuk migrated to Australia from France in 1951, having escaped Nazi-occupied Poland as a twenty-year-old in 1940. In Australia he worked as a schoolteacher in Melbourne while continuing to write poetry and fiction in Polish. His work was published in prestigious Polish emigré outlets like the Paris-based journal Kultura and in Australia with sponsorship from the Polish migrant community; to date no English translations of it have appeared. My article focuses on a sequence of poems in his 1961 Pamiętnik poetycki (Poetic Memoir) called ‘Tamta Ziemia’ (That Other Land), about the cities and towns of Chciuk’s childhood: Lwów, Borysław and his hometown of Drohobycz. When the author was growing up these towns were in eastern Poland; by the time of his writing, in the 1950s, however, they had become part of Soviet Ukraine, and were thus doubly removed from his life in Australia. He wrote as a displaced person whose childhood home had itself been displaced. Hence the powerful note of longing that pervades his ‘poetic memoir’. Through a reading of some passages in my English translation, I hope to convey something of Chciuk’s lively poetic voice, and to show that he deserves admission to discussions of twentieth-century transnational Australian literature.'  (Publication abstract)

With reference to Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation (1989) and four other texts I examine how translingual writers represent experiences of bringing what Hoffman calls 'terms from elsewhere' into dominant cultural dialogues. Alongside Hoffman's memoir I consider Bulgarian-French philosopher Tzvetan Todorov's Bilinguisme, dialogisme et schizophrenie (1985), Indian-born US writer Ginu Kamani's Code Switching (2000), Russian-born Australian journalist Irene Ulman's Playgrounds and Battlegrounds (2007) and French-Australian novelist Catherine Rey's To Make a Prairie it Takes a Clover and One Bee (2013). For all the diversity of translingual trajectories these 5 texts represent, there are conspicuous parallels between their accounts of speaking in a 'minority voice'. My focus is on experiences of involuntary dissent, a form of ambivalent group membership, which constitutes a significant and critically overlooked aspect of translingual identity. [Author's abstract]

Krystyna Wanda Jackiewicz (1920–1977) and Liliana Rydzyńska (1938–2005) were two Polish-born women poets who emigrated to Australia in the postwar period, Jackiewicz as a ‘Displaced Person’ arriving from India in 1947, Rydzyńska choosing to move here from France in 1969. Their poems could not be more different. Rydzyńska's apparently autobiographical poetry represents Australians as severely emotionally repressed, and her move to Australia as ‘one great mistake’ (‘Martwa natura z Australią’ [Still Life with Australia]). This perspective contrasts markedly with Jackiewicz's embrace of Australia in poems like ‘Druga Miłosć’ (A Second Love), about her home city of Lwów (L'viv) and her new home of Tasmania, where the speaker's affection for her adopted country is as palpable as her attachment to her lost homeland. Through a discussion of some poems by each author, in translation, I compare their perspectives as women writers belonging to different generations of migration from Poland, and explore the extent to which one can fruitfully read their work through the concept of gender. [Author's abstract]

'Although Australia prides itself on being multicultural, many Australians have little awareness of what it means to live in two cultures at once, and of how much there is to learn about other cultural perspectives. Translating Lives is an immensely moving collection of personal stories tracing the experience of twelve people living in Australia who speak more than one language.' - Back cover

Translating Lives 'offers an insight not only into aspects of the Australian migrant experience that have not been addressed before, but also into the cultural perspectives of peoples in the Asia-Pacific region, with contributors who migrated as adults from South and East Asia and the Pacific: China, Singapore, Korea and Fiji' (xx).

'Life Writing is one of the leading journals in the field of biography and autobiography. It has the unique and unusual policy of carrying both scholarly articles and critically informed personal narrative. The journal has three sections: Academic Articles, Reflections and Reviews. Reflections essays differ from academic articles in that we do not expect a high level of analysis and referencing. We do, however, expect that the reflexive "I" will filter the subject matter, and that on the continuum from discursive/analytical to creative, these essays will fall somewhere in the middle. In other words, we do not publish purely creative essays, ficto-criticism, or memoirs; we include essays which fall into the genre of autoethnography. 

'The journal aims to publish work from many disciplines as well as work that is interdisciplinary. Historically, life writing has been the preserve of literary studies. Now, however, many other perspectives use biography and autobiography as analytical tools, hence object biography, autoethnography, autofiction, and many other inter-generic codes are thriving.  Life Writing provides expert and sympathetic reviewing of such interdisciplinary work. ' (Source : Taylor and Francis )