Tadeusz Różewicz

Tadeusz Różewicz (9 October 1921 – 24 April 2014) was a Polish poet,

playwright, writer, and translator. Różewicz was in the first generation of Polish
writers born after Poland regained its independence in 1918, following
the century of foreign partitions. He was born in Radomsko, near Łódź, in 1921.
He first published his poetry in 1938. During World War II, he served in
the Polish underground Home Army. His elder brother, Janusz, also a poet, was
executed by the Gestapo in 1944 for serving in the Polish resistance movement.
His younger brother, Stanisław, became a noted film director and screenwriter.
[1]

Rozewicz was the author of twelve highly acclaimed volumes of poetry. He

wrote over fifteen plays. This eruption of dramaturgical energy was also
accompanied by major volumes of poetry and prose. Różewicz is considered
one of Poland's best post-war poets and most innovative playwright. Some of
his best known plays include: The Card Index, The Interrupted Act, Birth Rate,
The Hunger Artist Departs, and White Marriage. His New Poems was
nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008.

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The Survivor (translation: Adam Czerniawski)

I am twenty-four
led to slaughter
I survived.

The following are empty synonyms:

man and beast
love and hate
friend and foe
darkness and light.

The way of killing men and beasts is the same

I've seen it:
truckfuls of chopped-up men
who will not be saved.

Ideas are mere words:

virtue and crime
truth and lies
beauty and ugliness
courage and cowardice.

Virtue and crime weigh the same

I've seen it:
in a man who was both
criminal and virtuous.

I seek a teacher and a master

may he restore my sight hearing and speech
may he again name objects and ideas
may he separate darkness from light.

I am twenty-four
led to slaughter
I survived.

Różewicz’s perspective is especially harsh regarding the privileges accorded to

art. If truth and falsehood are just words, then how and why does the poet
continue his profession? The why: to find a directness of speech that cuts
through the ruins of language, to prove that what survives is capable of a blunt
if hopeless decency. The how: prefer facts and image-objects over metaphor and
ideas, lose the punctuation, keep the rhythm familiar, the tone even but
pressurized. The poet is a figure sufficiently diminished to reflect the spiritual,

2
philosophical and aesthetic bankruptcy of the West itself. There is, of course, a
great ambition at work here, even as the poet takes a contra-aesthetic stance.
Before western taste-makers crowned Milosz and Szymborska as the most
grandly virtuous Polish poets, there was Różewicz, Poland’s favorite and most
imitated poet. The socialist authorities punished him for refusing to dilute his
gloominess, and the West neglected him for the same reason.
New Poems collects the poetry of his three most recent books in keen
translations by Bill Johnston. Most of the work is less than ten years old. He is
now 87 and memories of the war are disappearing with the passing of his
generation, but Różewicz writes with the same unabated intensity, a talkative
tenseness built into his struggle with language as art.

Proofs (translation: Adam Czerniawski)

Death will not correct

a single line of verse
she is no proof-reader
she is no sympathetic
lady editor

a bad metaphor is immortal

a shoddy poet who has died

is a shoddy dead poet

a bore bores after death

a fool keeps up his foolish chatter
from beyond the grave

In The Middle of Life (translation: Czeslaw Milosz)

After the end of the world

after my death
I found myself in the middle of life
I created myself
constructed life
people animals landscapes

this is a table I was saying

this is a table
on the table are lying bread a knife

3
the knife serves to cut the bread
people nourish themselves with bread

one should love man

I was learning by night and day
what one should love
I answered man

this is a window I was saying

this is a window
beyond the window is a garden
in the garden I see an apple tree
the apple tree blossoms
the blossoms fall off
the fruits take form
they ripen my father is picking up an apple
that man who is picking up an apple
is my father
I was sitting on the threshold of the house

that old woman who

is pulling a goat on a rope
is more necessary
and more precious
than the seven wonders of the world
whoever thinks and feels
that she is not necessary
he is guilty of genocide

this is a man
this is a tree this is bread

people nourish themselves in order to live

I was repeating to myself
human life is important
human life has great importance
the value of life
surpasses the value of all the objects
which man has made
man is a great treasure
I was repeating stubbornly

this water I was saying

I was stroking the waves with my hand

4
and conversing with the river
water I said
good water
this is I

the man talked to the water

talked to the moon
to the flowers to the rain
he talked to the earth
to the birds
to the sky
the sky was silent
the earth was silent
if he heard a voice
which flowed
from the earth from the water from the sky
it was the voice of another man

A Voice (translation: Czeslaw Milosz)

They mutilate they torment each other

with silences with words
as if they had another
life to live

they do so
as if they had forgotten
that their bodies
are inclined to death
that the insides of men
easily break down

ruthless with each other

they are weaker
than plants and animals
they can be killed by a word
by a smile by a look

Transformations (translation: Czeslaw Milosz)

My little son enters

the room and says

5
'you are a vulture
I am a mouse'

I put away my book

wings and claws
grow out of me

their ominous shadows

race on the walls
I am a vulture
he is a mouse

'you are a wolf

I am a goat'
I walked around the table
and am a wolf windowpanes gleam
like fangs
in the dark

while he runs to his mother

safe
his head hidden in the warmth of her dress

A Visit (translation: Adam Czerniawski)

I couldn't recognize her

when I came in here
just as well it's possible
to take so long arranging these flowers
in this clumsy vase

'Don't look at me like that'

she said
I stroke the cropped hair
with my rough hand
'they cut my hair' she says
'look what they've done to me'
now again that sky-blue spring
begins to pulsate beneath the transparent
skin of her neck as always
when she swallows tears

6
why does she stare like that
I think I must go

I say a little too loudly

and I leave her,

a lump in my throat

PIGTAIL

When all the women in the transport

had their heads shaved
four workmen with brooms made of birch twigs
swept up
and gathered up the hair

Behind clean glass

the stiff hair lies
of those suffocated in gas chambers
there are pins and side combs
in this hair

The hair is not shot through with light

is not parted by the breeze
is not touched by any hand
or rain or lips

In huge chests
clouds of dry hair
of those suffocated and a faded plait
a pigtail with a ribbon
pulled at school
by naughty boys.

The Living Were Dying

Walled in, the living were dying
black flies laid eggs
in human flesh.
Day in and day out
the streets were paved
with swollen heads.

7
The father, Aaron
had a beard of mildew and moss
and a head of white light
which died out flickering
before he expired he ate out of a hand
with his wilting lips
and opening his turquoise eyes.

In the little room

bodies were swelling.
Sally sold apples
silver ones smelling of an orchard
in front of the gate
which was made of azure.

Between gibberish
and red spittle
between the scabies of the wall
and the corpse of the passerby
with a cruel eye
between the stone
and the howling of a madwoman
Sally stood in her red dress
and the colors were absorbing venoms
and the apple rotted in her swarthy
hands. A white worm crawled out
from the smell.
Apples were wilting apples were rotting
mother was dying.

No one brought apples to the ghetto any more

no one in the ghetto bought apples any more.
Day in and day out
bodies were falling down.