The volume is a result of a series of serendipitous accidents. Unfortunately, to this day no Roma¹ national institution founded and led by Roma has been established for taking care of Roma cultural and literary heritage (with the partial exception of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, founded in 2017). The precarity of this situation is signaled by the fact that the manuscripts of the world’s best-known Roma and Romani-language writer, Papusza (Bronisława Wajs), are stored in the Zbigniew Herbert Regional and Municipal Public Library in Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland (Wojewódzka i Miejska Biblioteka Publiczna im. Zbigniewa Herberta w Gorzowie Wielkopolskim). One would think that such material of a global rank should be better secured and made more readily available to researchers, for instance, in Poland’s Central Archive of Modern Records (Archiwum Akt Nowych) or in the country’s main institution responsible for preserving and researching Poland’s literature, that is, the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature (Muzeum Literatury im. Adama Mickiewicza), both located in Warsaw.

Tomek (Tomasz Kamusella), as a student during his time at the University of Silesia (Uniwersytet Śląski) in Katowice, chanced upon a collection of Papusza’s poems (1990). Specializing in English philology that stoked his interest in translation, he wondered about the Romani originals of the poems. It was a certain leap of faith, given that at the time in the freshly postcommunist country, the stereotype continued unabated that the Roma had no language of their own. That they constituted Karl Marx’s lumpenproletariat, or the lowest stratum of the working class. Yet, Tomek found fragments of Papusza’s poems in Romani, as cited in Jerzy Ficowski’s monograph on Roma in Poland (Ficowski 1986 [1965]).

After graduating from the Prague campus of Central European University in 1994, two years later, his master’s degree in European studies allowed Tomek to become a Regional Governor’s Advisor on European Integration (Pełnomocnik Wojewody Opolskiego ds. Integracji Europejskiej) in the Opole Region. He was nominated as the first-ever advisor of this kind in Poland. Meanwhile, a wave of Roma arrivals to Britain swelled. They came from Central Europe’s postcommunist countries seeking political asylum in the United Kingdom. As a result, the country’s diplomatic corps embarked on fact-finding missions across the region. In 1997, they also visited Opole and held a meeting under the regional governor’s auspices. Tomek interpreted for officials from the British Know How Fund. It was clear that the meetings and discussions were designed in such a manner, so as to lead to a desired conclusion. The intended conclusion was that Roma refugees were economic migrants, not genuine asylum seekers who suffered customary discrimination in Poland. Yet, it was easily discernible to anyone with a cursory knowledge of the country and Central Europe that Roma lost out most during the systemic transition, which followed the fall of communism. They were always the first to be fired and the last to be employed, just because they were Roma. It was pure racism, as readily visible in anti-Roma graffiti that began to brand Roma in Polish as czarni (‘blacks’). What is more, the freedom of speech that followed the ending of communist censorship allowed for widespread expression of antigypsyism (antiromism, antitsiganism) in public. Unsurprisingly, no Roma representatives were invited to the Opole meeting with the British delegates. Roma stories might derail the mission’s overall goal. After all it was just to rubberstamp the default denial of political asylum to any Roma arrivals from Poland.

Sadly, at one of the follow-up meetings the idea of a Romani language course for Opole Region’s civil servants was voiced. Representatives of the police became enthusiastic about this idea. Why? Because knowing Romani would enable them, in these policemen’s own words, ‘to better nail Roma criminals.’ It was shocking to realize that the silent acceptance of antigypsyism was the default modus operandi of the Polish civil service. The British delegation was pleased. Troubled by what Tomek saw, the following year, in 1998, he attended the course ‘Plight of the Gypsies’ at the Summer University, organized by Central European University in Budapest. At that time, Tomek’s conviction coalesced that as in the case of antisemitism, antigypsyism could be curbed – at least a bit – by making Roma history part and parcel of the mainstream of European historiography, like already happened in the case of Jewish history.

At the turn of the 21st century, Tomek established a cooperation link with Poland’s premiere journal on matters ethnic, Sprawy Narodowościowe (Nationalities Affairs). This interwar periodical had been revived in 1992, following the end of communism. (Officially, in communist Poland, there were no ethnic minorities worth of any note, so such a ‘bourgeois-nationalist’ journal was not needed.) In 1998 the anthropologist and researcher of popular culture Wojciech J. Burszta became the journal’s editor. He hoped to make Sprawy Narodowościowe into a learned journal that would become noticeable to European and global scholars. Tomek proposed that to this end the periodical should include a section for relevant articles in English in order to attract contributors from all over the world. (Interestingly, in 2021, Sprawy Narodowościowe switched to publishing exclusively in English.) As a result, the journal was inundated with submissions, which Tomek sorted pro public bono, and corresponded with the authors. Eventually, it was decided that the periodical had no space enough to publish all the contributions in a timely fashion. Instead, a two-volume collection of these contributions was brought out (Burszta, Kamusella and Wojciechowski 2005–2006).

The world’s leading Romani studies specialists in the current period, Elena Marushiakova (Елена Марушиакова) and Vesselin Popov (Веселин Попов), contributed a ground-breaking essay to this volume, titled ‘The Roma – a Nation without a State?’ (Marushiakova and Popov 2005). As a result, since the early 2000s, Tomek has been in correspondence with the scholarly couple on Roma issues and other research matters. Upon becoming a researcher at the University of St Andrews in 2011, four years later, Tomek invited Elena for a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at this university. This year-long sojourn helped Elena and Vesselin access the relevant British archives and libraries, and establish contacts with fellow scholars across Britain and Ireland. The visiting professorship facilitated their successful application for an ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grant for the project ‘Roma Interbellum: Roma Civic Emancipation Between the Two World Wars’ (2016–2023). In this manner, the University of St Andrews was also made into a Romani studies center of a global stature.

On this basis, in 2018, Tomek and Elena successfully applied for the university’s KE & Impact Fund grant to organize, in 2019, an outreach event on Papusza’s long narrative (epic) poem Tears of Blood. Meanwhile, Tomek found out that Ficowski had transcribed, edited and published some Romani originals of Papusza’s poems in her first collection that came off the press in 1956, or during the period of the political Thaw that then swept across the Soviet bloc. In this volume, the poem ‘Ratfałé jasfá’ (Tears of Blood) struck Tomek as probably the first-ever written witness account of the Romani genocide (Roma Holocaust, Porajmos, Kali Traš, Samudaripen² ). The literary and historical importance of this poem is such that it can only be compared with Itzhak Katzenelson’s Yiddish-language book in verse Dos lid funem oysgehargetn yidishn folk (דאָס ליד פונעם אױסגעהרגעטן ײדישן פאָלק, Song of the Murdered Jewish People) (Katzenelson 1980).

In preparation for the 2019 impact event the Scottish poet of Scots and English verse, Hamish MacDonald, agreed to join the team. Tomek translated into English Ficowski’s literal Polish translation of ‘Ratfałé jasfá.’ Elena and Vesselin checked this English translation against the Romani original. On this basis, Hamish developed a poetic translation of Tears of Blood into English and Scots. Hamish, Elena, Vesselin and Tomek met for two days in St Andrews to discuss numerous translation and semantic problems involved. Using Hamish’s English version, Rody Gorman translated this poem into Gaelic. Aleksandar Marinov, a member of the Roma Interbellum research team, collated, edited and published a booklet with the event’s material, including Papusza’s poem in Romani and its translations into English, Scots and Gaelic. Apart from the already mentioned persons, the impact event’s speakers also included: Volha Bartash (Вольга Барташ, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany), Colin Clark (University of the West of Scotland), Bruce Eunson (Scots Co-ordinator, Education Scotland), Valdemar Kalinin (Вальдэмар Калінін, Romani Poet, Bible Translator, Gypsy Council) and Sofiya Zahova (София Захова, also a member of the Roma Interbellum research team, University of St Andrews and University of Iceland).

The initial idea was to augment the booklet with the contributors’ articles and publish it as a stand-alone volume. A volume of this kind would bring to the world’s attention this largely unnoticed witness account of the Romani genocide. Yet, the covid pandemic intervened adversely. Under these exacting circumstances, the prospective editors and contributors had to attend to their own personal, teaching, research, and administrative duties.

Meanwhile, Elena and Tomek continued discussing again the whereabouts of Papusza’s manuscript of Tears of Blood. It would be ideal to include its facsimile in any prospective volume. Despite the recognition of Papusza as the world’s most important Roma poet, so far, the Romani originals of her poems have never been published as a book in its own right. Neither Elena and Vesselin nor their colleagues in the field of Romani studies knew where Papusza’s literary estate was archived, or whether her manuscripts survived at all.

Following a two-year-long hiatus, Volha kindly agreed to join the planned volume’s editorial team in 2021. She brought along a much-needed boost of enthusiasm and devoted a lot of hard graft to the flagging project. In conversation with the Polish researcher Emilia Kledzik (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland), Volha learned that for long time Papusza’s papers were in possession of the Association of Creators and Friends of Gypsy Culture in Gorzów Wielkopolski (Stowarzyszenie Twórców i Miłośników Kultury Cygańskiej), and as such they were inaccessible to researchers. In 1996 Jerzy Ficowski sold the poet’s manuscripts to the aforementioned Zbigniew Herbert Regional and Municipal Public Library. For this transaction Papusza’s friend used the Association of Creators and Lovers of Gypsy Culture (Twórców i Przyjaciół Kultury Cygańskiej) as an intermediary. Yet, until 2020, this association delayed the passing of Papusza’s papers to the library in Gorzów Wielkopolski. After World War II, Papusza used to live in this city, which was one of the urban centers where ‘nomadic Roma’ were ‘sedentarized’ by persuasion or force.

Until 1945 Gorzów Wielkopolski was known in German as Landsberg an der Warthe. At the Potsdam Conference, the wartime Allies passed most of the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line (deutsche Ostgebiete) to Poland (except for the northern half of East Prussia, nowadays, Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad). The Polish propaganda lauded them as the ‘Recovered Territories’ (Ziemie Odzyskane) on the rather spurious assumption that they had briefly belonged to medieval Poland six centuries earlier. As a result, the west of postwar Poland, ethnically cleansed of its former German inhabitants, was a tabula rasa, primed for all kinds of socio-economic experiments, including the sedentarization of Roma.

In the framework of her ERC project Roma Interbellum, Elena searched for the manuscript of Tears of Blood in various archives across Central and Eastern Europe. She also inquired the Regional and Municipal Public Library’s Head (Dyrektor) Sławomir Szenwald about Papusza’s literary estate. It turned out that among her papers archived in the library, the Romani original of Papusza’s Tears of Blood is also preserved. Importantly, this manuscript was established to be in the poet’s own hand. Subsequently, the library made a scan of this manuscript available to the volume’s editorial team.

In 1982, that is, amid the repressive martial law period in communist Poland, Ficowski published his Polish translation of Katzenelson’s harrowing work, alongside a facsimile of the Yiddish manuscript (Kacenelson 1982). At 1,560 verses this work is just a bit longer than Papusza’s Tears of Blood, which is comprised of 1090 verses. Yet, the discovery of the manuscript of Tears of Blood confirmed the oft-voiced suspicion that the Romani original is much longer than Ficowski’s 1956 version of 300 verses. Not that Ficowski hid the fact but mentioned it only once (Ficowski in Papusza 1956: 153), but remained silent on how much was chucked out, namely, three quarters of the poem. It is hard to know why, given that the volume was published during the political Thaw in the Soviet bloc. Somehow, he did not have to resort to such bowdlerizing in the case of Song of the Murdered Jewish People, though politically speaking, the time of its publication was most inopportune. First, in 1981 martial law was imposed on Poland’s restive population who in the millions opposed the communist system. This martial law was lifted only in the summer of 1983. Second, 1982 was merely 14 years after the ethnic cleansing of Poland’s remaining Jews in 1968. What is more, one also wonders why in the intervening decades, especially in postcommunist Poland, Ficowski did not attempt to publish the full version of Tears of Blood before his death in 2006 at the ripe age of 82.

The unexpected discovery of the full-length manuscript of Tears of Blood in Papusza’s hand necessitated a rethinking of the intended volume and its shape. The decision was made to transcribe the manuscript and use it as the basis for a new translation into English. The problem was that there are few specialists who can read Papusza’s Romani phonetic hand rendered in Polish spelling, executed with the use of an imperfectly mastered cursive as employed in interwar Poland’s schools. Luckily, Elena, Vesselin and Volha knew the right person to face up to this steep challenge, namely, Viktor Shapoval (Виктор Шаповал) based at Moscow City University (Московский городской университет Moskovskii gorodskoi universitet). Viktor was an active collaborator and consultant in the ERC project Roma Interbellum. Volha learned Romani from Viktor’s extensive handbook of this language (Shapoval 2007). Even more beneficially for the book project, this handbook focuses on these varieties of Romani in which Papusza and her family group spoke and wrote.

With much enthusiasm for the task at hand, Viktor joined the editorial team in 2022 and swiftly transcribed Papusza’s manuscript in the poet’s own idiosyncratic Polish spelling. Subsequently, Viktor developed another transcription in the so-called consensual Romani spelling and translated the poem into Russian. In addition, Viktor established the standardized verse numbering and marked Ficowski’s much abbreviated version against Papusza’s manuscript.

Drawing on Viktor’s Russian translation, Tomek developed an English philological translation of the poem. Viktor, Sofiya, Elena and Vesselin checked this philological translation against the Romani original. In turn, regularly consulting with Elena and Viktor, Hamish worked out an English poetic translation of the entire poem. Meanwhile, Viktor developed section titles for making the poem more intelligible to the uninitiated reader. He also translated Tears of Blood into Polish and Ukrainian, whereas Emilia improved this Polish translation. Likewise, Hamish translated the full poem into Scots. Hopefully, after the publication of this volume, some venturing publishers may bring out these Polish, Russian, Scots and Ukrainian translations as books in their own right. Should the hope be realized, I am sure Rody Gorman, or a colleague of his, may also develop a Gaelic translation of the complete poem of Tears of Blood. Furthermore, given the fact that Sofiya now is Director of the Vigdís International Centre at the School of Humanities, University of Iceland, a good chance is that the poem will be translated also into Icelandic. As a result, European and world literature will regain a masterpiece of the sadly half-forgotten and even disregarded Romani belles lettres.

The editors aspire that this critical edition of Tears of Blood may serve as a versatile springboard for translating this important poem into further languages. The rarely realized difficulty is that the socio-cultural and historical context of multilingual Roma and Romani-language culture and literature is hardly known and appreciated outside Roma communities themselves. As a result, assumptions drawn on the basis of German, Polish, French or another European national literature are typically inadequate or even plainly wrong when applied to the analysis of Roma and Romani literature. First of all, until recently Roma and Romani-language literature was mostly an oral phenomenon. This is true of most of Papusza’s own oeuvre. Her manuscripts are an afterthought and rather imperfect records of orally composed and performed poetry, that is, songs. The genuine Romani original of Tears of Blood is not the poem’s manuscript but Papusza’s sung performance of it for a group of Roma listeners. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, there is no recording of Papusza performing Tears of Blood.

Thanks to his research background, Viktor is acutely aware of this predominantly oral character of Roma literature and of ways in which it is (or was) composed and performed. In his contribution to the volume, Viktor explains in detail this often-misunderstood context of Romani culture and literature. Furthermore, in close rapport with his chapter, Viktor provides a wealth of explicatory notes on the poem itself. Crucially, as an editor, Viktor took the responsibility for coordinating all the versions of Tears of Blood offered in this book. We trust that this effort will permit future translators of this poem to read and interpret it as Papusza intended. Furthermore, Tomek translated the Russian original of Viktor’s chapter into English and streamlined the English prose of Viktor’s commentaries on Tears of Blood.

In the Introduction, Volha showcases Tears of Blood as a historical document – and more exactly, a witness account or a survivor testimony – that sheds much light on the Romani genocide in Volhynia and elsewhere across Eastern Europe. In turn, Emilia focuses on the life of Papusza with much attention paid to the official and rather stereotypical making of her into a poet in communist Poland. In her chapter Sofiya reflects on the functioning of Papusza’s poetry in Roma literature as created, read and sung across the world.

And last but not least, Mikhail Tyaglyy (Михайло Тяглий, also Mykhailo Tiahlyi), Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies (Український центр вивчення Голокосту Ukrayins’kyi tsentr vyvchennia Holokostu), Kyiv, provides the historical context of the Romani genocide as it was carried out in what today is the borderland that straddles the adjacent areas of Belarus, Poland and Ukraine. This is the area where Papusza, her family and fellow Roma sought refuge in the extensive forests from roaming Einsatzgruppen (nazi special task forces) under the order to kill each single Rom and Jew they encounter. Another danger Papusza and her Roma community faced was the mutual ethnic cleansing of Poles and Ukrainians that reached its acme in 1943. Whenever their extended family group happened to meet a military detachment, they had to be wary of what they said about which ethnic group in the region not to fall foul of the soldiers’ ethnic or ideological affiliations, which could expose the Roma to persecution and even summary execution.

Tragically, Mikhail was unable to fully edit his chapter, drafted for the front. He finalized the first version of the text and pressed on with the initial revisions, when already in the Armed Forces of Ukraine (Збройні сили України Zbroini syly Ukrainy). In this situation, Tomek and Volha must take responsibility for any infelicities remaining in Mikhail’s text, together with changes and additions, which the author might not have intended. Tomek streamlined the article’s English prose and sorted various linguistic versions of placenames mentioned. First, this linguistic version is given that was current in a given period under discussion. Then the present-day form is supplied in parentheses. Most of the localities are hamlets and villages, which would not be readily obvious to global readership. Hence, in many cases Tomek provided additional spatial information on such villages’ proximity to this or that major town or city. Volha, as a specialist in Romani history in Eastern Europe, gave this chapter an oversight regarding the events analyzed and their historical context.

Another difficulty that the editors were posed with was the question of who now owns Papusza’s literary estate. Their inquiries on this matter remained inconclusive until the end of the covid pandemic. Then, in 2021 Emilia informed the team that Papusza has a single living inheritor, namely, her granddaughter Ewa Wajs. Volha and Tomek repeatedly strove to get in touch with Ewa Wajs by letter, phoning and texting her, but to no avail. Finally, using her local networks, in 2023 Emilia managed to facilitate a trusted working contact between Ewa Wajs and Volha. Ewa Wajs signed a copyright agreement and received from Tomek and Volha the entailed payment for publishing rights to the poem, its transcription, translation and facsimile in this open access volume.

Within the framework of the ERC project Roma Interbellum, Elena, Vesselin, Sofiya and Viktor also focused on the situation of the Roma in interwar Poland. As a result, it became possible to allocate some project funds for ensuring open access to the volume. After some discussion with Brill, the matter was agreed. So, most fortunately, no paywall will separate Tears of Blood from interested readers and researchers who might want to peruse it.

Now, after half a decade in making, the volume is poised for release soon. Under different circumstances, it would be a happy moment for Roma and world literature. Yet, war wreaks havoc in Europe again. The current situation closely resembles what Papusza narrates in Tears of Blood. Now, the dark history of 20th-century Europe replays in the early 21st century. In the tentatively happy conclusion to her poignant poem, Papusza hoped for lasting peace, stability, and mutual respect for all.

Unfortunately, her wise words fell on deaf ears.

St Andrews, Scotland

July 2023