The Subsistence of the Aging Voice: Krystyna Miłobędzka’s Encapsulation of Present-Time in 'Gubione' (2008)

• In Event: Fearing and Embracing Aging

Abstract

The Polish poet Krystyna Miłobędzka (1932-), recognized from the 1990s, has been prolific in her old age. Her poetry imparts a temporality in which the dynamic elements of time’s passing are as if paused. This paper examines her 2008 collection gubione, in which the perpetual present-time enacted by the imperfective nature of the title always being lost is complicated by the persistence of a present whose ontology is dubious; in bending the present tense according to the whims of her own poetic conceits, the author pushes past her biographical age out towards poetic agelessness.

Author

• Alex Braslavsky, Harvard U