Unease

by Tadeusz Różewicz

English, Polish (translation)

Genres: Poetry, Polish Literature

156 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Tadeusz Różewicz - poet, playwright, and novelist, was one of Poland's most versatile and pre-eminent modern writers.

Remarkable for his simultaneous mastery of poetry, prose, and drama, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Tadeusz Różewicz has been translated into over forty languages. The most recent English-language volumes, recycling (2001), New Poems (2007) and Sobbing Superpower (2011), were finalists for the 2003 Popescu Prize (UK), the 2008 National Book Critics Award (USA) and the 2012 Griffin Prize (Canada) respectively. In 2007 he was awarded the European Prize for Literature.

Mother Departs (Matka odchodzi, 1999), exploring the life of his mother Stefania, is perhaps his most personal work. It won the Nike Prize in 2000, Poland’s most prestigious literary award. He lived in the city of Wrocław, Poland.

Różewicz studied art history at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, but he has been associated with Silesia since the late 1940s and lived in Wrocław for thirty years. His work has been translated into many languages including English (his work is championed in the UK by the poet and critic, Tom Paulin, and the Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney), French, German, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Swedish, Danish and Finnish and he has received Polish state prizes and foreign awards. He is well-known in many countries as an excellent poet of the highest moral authority. Różewicz is a precursor of the avant-garde in poetry and drama, an innovator firmly rooted in the unceasing re-creation of the Romantic tradition, though always with a teasing ironic distance. He is a grand solitary, convinced of an artistic mission that he regards as a state of internal concentration, alertness, and ethical sensitivity.

Reviews

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 1 out of 5]

Recently I lost my heart to Tadeusz Rozewicz's 'What Luck', as translated by Adam Czerniawski:

What luck I can pick
berries in the wood
I thought
there is no wood no berries.

What luck I can lie
in the shade of a tree
I thought trees
no longer give shade.

What luck I am with you
my heart beats so
I thought man
has no heart.

There's such sparseness to this translation, such directness. Emerging from devastation, man finds his way back into the world: woods, berries, trees, shades. The world that had been taken away is slowly returned. And then one day, your heart beats again. Beats in time to another's. What luck. What luck that you can return to the world.

Having developed quite the crush on Rozewicz, I was pleased to discover another collection on the not-quite-a-shelf-full of Eastern European poetry at the public library. I started reading Unease, a 1980 collection from ten different volumes, translated by Victor Contoski, as I walked home. Skimming the pages as I walked along the street, I happened on 'How nice'

How nice. I can pick
berries in the wood
I thought
there are no wood no berries

How nice, I can lie
in the shade of a tree
I thought
now trees don't give shade.

How nice. I am with you
and my heart pounding
I thought
man has no heart.

And I thought: how nice? HOW NICE? Seriously? You're speaking of the return to the world from the darkness of the dead, and you pick how nice as your key phrase?

Flipping through the book, I rapidly lost heart. So many of the poems felt off, unbalanced, inelegant - none of that glancing brilliance, bitterness, beauty and anger I had found in Czerniawski's translation. One poem in particular I wanted to read in Czerniawski's words:

The Tree of Regret

All day long
grows the tree of regret
the tree of rain
fog words and silence

the express
cracked into
the steel rib of a bridge

In the recess the engineer
left for the poor
I await my departure

My regret rises and falls
one tear dissolved
this world of iron
cement and gold

It's you are the crown
of the tree which grows
in me from morning
to night.

There is something about this image of regret as a growing thing within you, that pushes against your skin and fills you with longing and the physical sense not of absence, but instead presence - the what might be - that slipped into me. But I felt like there was a strength that has been leached away by clumsy phrasing - especially 'In the recess the engineer / left for the poor / I await my departure'.

So, I was feeling a little let down. It ain't easy satisfying one's growing hunger for the beautiful misery of Eastern European mid-century lyrical poets through the public library. Luckily, the internet came through for me this week with this small hard bright glinting piece, again translated by Czerniawski:

white isn’t sad
or happy
just white

I keep
telling it
it's white

but white doesn’t listen
it’s blind
deaf

it’s perfect

and oh so slowly
it becomes
whiter

I wish I could articulate why this poem does to me what it does. I think - I think I think I think - it is the sense I get of Rosewicz's intense concentration on the world. I imagine him talking to white inside his head - not literally, but this notion forming, being drawn out, held away from him, brought closer, turned and inspected, shaped and refined. And combined with that, there is the slow pace of his poems - the simple heavy weight of each plain-spoken word. Not tricks ... just wonder.

[Postscript. I was delighted to find, when I flipped to the front page of 'Unease', that someone had added in blue ballpoint the phrase these are not good translations. My favourite library book defacement thus far.]

[Post-postscript. The one star is the translator's fault. I hope.]

[Mills College Library]

891.8517 R893u 1980