Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Róźewicz

by Tadeusz Różewicz, Joanna Trzeciak (Translation), Edward Hirsch (Foreword)

Widely held to be the most influential Polish poet of a generation that includes Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, Tadeusz Ro ewicz gives voice in the sharpest, most disturbing way to the crisis of values that has plagued our civilization. Joanna Trzeciak's new translation displays Ro ewicz''s supernatural simplicity, his stark diction and sudden turns. From "regression into the primordial soup" finally I too came into the world in the year 1921 and suddenly . . . atchoo! time passes I am old and forgot where I put my glasses I forgot there was history Caesar Hitler Mata Hari Stalin capitalism communism Einstein Picasso Al Capone Alka Seltzer Al Qaeda

Genres: Poetry, Poland, Polish Literature

368 pages, Paperback

First published December 6, 2010

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

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rosy ideals hang
quartered in butcher's booths

In stores
clowns' masks are sold
gaudy post-mortem casts
made of our faces
we who live
we who survived
staring
into the eye sockets of war.

[David]

I picked this up because it was on display at the library and the title SOBBING SUPERPOWER struck my imagination. For the most part Rozewicz's poems are lovely because they are so direct. I find his work strongest when he combines very fluidly his direct experience with political situations. He wrote numerous poems about the confusion caused by witnessing the Holocaust:

I’m searching for a teacher and a master
let him give me back my sight hearing and speech
let him name objects and concepts again
let him separate the light from the dark

I was fascinated by these poems about the Holocaust because he is not Jewish and he was against the Nazi Occupation. He understood how horrible these atrocities were and it brought him to question all ethics. Everything can become perverted to horrible ends. In another poem he references a meeting between Heidegger (a well respected philosopher and Nazi sympathizer) and Paul Celan (a Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor) which struck me. Two great thinkers one who believed at one point that the other should be destroyed.

In other poems he is more playful about the absurdity of events.

finally I too came into the world
in the year 1921 and suddenly . . .
atchoo! time passes I am old and forgot where I put my glasses
I forgot there was
history Caesar Hitler Mata Hari
Stalin capitalism communism
Einstein Picasso Al Capone
Alka Seltzer Al Qaeda

Through Rosewicz's poems I gleaned a little bit more about the confusion between virtue and hatred. And I am left trying to understand a little more deeply how the Nazis were able to organize populations to murder people with calculated industrial efficiency. The poems demonstrate the disturbing absurdity of racism and bigotry anywhere.

[Tyler Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too moving not to read the entire collection three times in two days. Remarkable Polish poetry; unforgettable art.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This incredible volume of poetry is my favorite in quite some time. While recognized with a Nobel Prize in Literature, as many think she should have been, Rozewicz is a towering literary figure. He often defies categorization and form. He provides a witness to the life around him in broken conversation. The translation and introduction in this volume are remarkable, but the poetry is incredible.

Rozewicz describes his poetry in his poem “My Poetry”:

justifies nothing
explains nothing
renounces nothing
encompasses no whole
fulfills no hope

creates no new rules of the game
takes no part in merriment
has a defined place
it must occupy

if it’s not esoteric
if it’s not original
if it doesn’t awe
apparently it’s as it should be

it obeys its own imperative
its own capabilities
and limitations
it loses against itself

it can neither take the place of
nor be replaced by any other
open to everyone
devoid of mystery

it has many goals
it will never achieve

Perhaps he is being too hard on himself. His poetry has been very influential, even amongst towering contemporaries. He can be quite observant and introspective, as is the case in "In the Middle of Life”:

After the end of the world
after my death
I found myself in the middle of life
creating myself
building a life
people animals landscapes

this is a table I kept saying
this is a table
on the table are bread knife
the knife is used for cutting bread
people feed on bread

man should be loved
I learned by night by day
what should one love
I answered man

this is a window I kept saying
this is a window
beyond the winidow is a garden
in the garden I see an apple tree
the apple tree blossoms
the blossoms fall off
fruit forms
ripens

my father picks an apple
the man picking the apple is my father

I was sitting on the front steps of the house
that old woman
pulling a goat on a rope
is more needed
is worth more
than the seven wonders of the world
anyone who thinks or feels
she isn’t needed
is guilty of genocide

this is a man
this is a tree this is bread

people eat to live
I kept repeating to myself
human life is important
human life has great importance
the value of life
exceeds the value of every object
man has made
man is a great treasure
I kept repeating stubbornly

this is water I kept saying
stroking the waves with my hand
talking to the river
water I said
kind water
it 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
flowing
from the earth the water the sky
it was the voice of another man

That being said, the moments of true perfection come in his poems about the Holocaust. “To the Dead” is incredibly moving:

My concerns belong to the living.

I see hear touch
weigh myself on a street scale
I dodge a blue tram
In July I wipe the sweat off a shiny forehead
I drink raspberry soda
I am tired
I am bored I write poems
I think about death
I buy pretzels and fuzzy
peaches that look like baby mice
I read Marx
I don’t understand Bergson
I go out dancing with a redhead
and we laugh
about the A-bomb
the red circle of lips
a long golden straw
my girl in a green blouse
drinks the moon from the sky
a waiter carries foamy beer around
lights glisten on the eyelashes of evening
the memory of you
covered my anxiety with a hand.

These are my concerns. I live
and nothing is as alien to me
as you my dead Friend.

As well, “Survivor” is both horrific and resilient:

I’m twenty-four
Led to slaughter
I survived.

These words are empty and equivalent:
man and animal
love and hate
foe and friend
dark and light.

Man is killed just like an animal
I’ve seen:
truckloads of chopped-up people
who will never be saved.

Concepts are only words:
virtue and vice
truth and lie
beauty and ugliness
courage and cowardice.

Virtue and vice weigh the same
I’ve seen:
a man who was both
vicious and virtuous.

I’m searching for a teacher and a master
let him give me back my sight hearing and speech
let him name objects and concepts again
let him separate the light from the dark.

I’m twenty-four
Led to slaughter
I survived.

Perhaps no lines stop you dead in your tracks as harshly as the following lines from “Gold”:

gold bars and gold ingots
bare their teeth
the skulls keep silent the sockets speak

However, the two Rose poems to me are the most affecting, and memorable, in this volume. I do not believe I will ever study the Holocaust again without remembering these.

“Rose”

Rose is the name of a flower
or a dead girl

You can place a rose in a warm palm
or in black soil

A red rose screams
one with golden hair passed in silence

Blood drains from the pale petal
the girl’s dress hangs formless

A gardener tends tenderly to a bush
a father who survived rages in madness

Five years have passed since Your death
flower of love that knows no thorn

Today a rose bloomed in the garden
memory of the living and faith have died.

“Plains (part III)” is a masterpiece, returning to a heroine named Rose walking through a Polish city street:

Down Zabia Street
through a Polish city
walks Rose
in white feathers

It’s not a costume ball
for a long time the wind will carry
feathers from the beds
of those
departed

Their bodies will not leave impressions
in the grass of May meadows
nor on the waves which shimmer
under the saffron fins of fishes
their bodies will not leave impressions
in the hay
when a black lightning bolt of swallows
flies with a squawk
through an empty barn with dirt floor

Their bodies will not leave impressions
on any bed sheets

Down Zabia Street
through a Polish city
walks Rose
on uneven cobblestones
past houses with blue stars
and boarded-up windows
walks through a temple
where stray cats
have found their lair
She walks amidst the glowing feathers
on this black day
she walks through your cities neutral Swedes
she walks through your homes theaters places of worship
she walks through your villages neutral Swiss
through your clean towns
clean as tears

She passed as clouds pass
across the sky across the earth without a trace

Within me I preserved
her heartbeat
the silence of her eyes
the warmth and hue of her lips
the heft of her insides
her fleeting thighs
in the shadow of love
the shape of her head
and the reddish dusk of her falling hair
and the small sun of her smile
She passed as clouds pass
but from where is this immeasurably long shadow
being cast

This volume of poetry enraptured me. At times difficult and irascible, it contains the words of a true master of language, and one who witnessed and gave words to one of the worst events in human history.

See my other reviews here!

[Dylan Szczepanski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Been meaning to read more Polish literature and this was one of the few authors/poets my parents had recommended. The collection of poems combine both compassion and cynicism towards humans in a way that was very unique to me.

[Joseph Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joanna Trzeciak has done a brilliant job translating the great Polish poet, Tadeusz Rozewicz, whose selected poems, Sobbing Superpower, have recently been published by Norton. Trzeciak has the profound ability to disappear without trace of persona into the language of this great Polish poet. It doesn’t even feel like an act of ventriloquism for that suggests an active medium with valences and a voice of its own, rather, Trzeciak merely seems to turn a switch and Rozewicz miraculously speaks English. Fans of Rozewicz will be grateful for this volume that collects work over the course of his career, from the early book, Anxiety (1947) to poems from an unpublished manuscript, 2008. In addition, fans of Czeslaw Milosz and Wiswala Szymborska will want to add this fine book to their collection. What’s more, anyone who is interested in one of the great poets of the last seventy five years whose work has sorely been under-represented here in the United States, will be thrilled with the revelation that comes when one encounters an authentic poetic voice.
There are poems here that, like the very first poem in the volume (1947), memorialize what was lost in the Holocaust, “Rose is the name of a flower/or a dead girl”, and there are wonderful ecological poems like, “On Felling a Tree”

“hardworking roots
did not yet sense
the loss of the trunk
and crown

slowly the death of the tree aboveground
reaches the world underground”

There are also stunning poems that dwell on personal morality and personal mortality, like the poem, “July 11, 1968. Rain”, that begins with a powerful anecdote of a faithful dog that was killed and skinned for his hide “and he was such a faithful dog/so obedient/ he loved to eat and was so thankful/for ever bit/every scrap” and this shocking anecdote is followed abruptly by a second section that begins: “Will something bad happen to me?/nothing bad will happen to me/I’ll live through it all.” The poems in this volume testify to a great poetic sensibility that is at once self-reflective, skeptical, memorializing, and endlessly pleasurable to read.

Rozewicz was born in Poland and came of age during WWII. He bore witness to many catastrophes that befell Poland (6 million dead). Like other great poets of the period, he keeps these horrors and the nightmare of the Holocaust as ballast in the ship’s belly of his poems. That being said, Rozewicz’s poems are not, for the most part, heavy or gloomy, instead they sail lightly along. Take this nice poem, written relatively recently in 2000:

“rain in Krakow”
in the hotel room
I try to catch
a fleeting poem

Onto a sheet of paper
I pin a butterfly
a blue one
a blot of sky

rain rain rain
in Krakow
I’m reading Norwid
it’s sweet to be asleep
sweeter still to be made of stone

good night dear friends
good night
poets dead and living
good night poetry

This poem’s simplicity reads a little like the famous children’s book, “Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown, and indeed there is an elemental quality to Rozewicz work that is quite striking. Like many of his fellow Polish and Russian poets who lived through the horrors of WWII, Rozewicz is deeply suspicious of the seductive power of language. As he says, again and again, in his poems: words can kill. He carefully charts the damage wrought to language by politicians and newspapers and he seeks in his poetry, under the blistering gaze of his skepticism, to reestablishing a one-to-one correspondences between word and object and word and action. In it’s way, his poetry is like a critque of language in so far as it establishes the limits of what truthfully can be said. It’s for this reason, why especially now, in the context of Fox News jermiads and Tea-Party bloviations passing themselves off as truth, Rozewicz comes across like such a potent and contemporary poetic antidote at a moment when what constitutes truth is particularly under savage fire. As Rozewicz writes in “Smiles” (1956):

Here is a man
puffed up by other men
when they are gone
a dummy will remain

they call him Wise
and everything he says
becomes a saying

Here, a rare capital letter, “W”, on “wise” stands out and mock’s the leader’s ‘wisdom’.
Rozewicz is an intellectual in the way of Milan Kundera. He is in communion with his antecedents. For instance, he loved Ezra Pound as a poet. He gives Pound credit for being one of the first intellectuals to draw attention to the growing power of the military industrial complex. He praises Pound’s willingness to help other writers, and to help the disenfranchised, but he also chastises Pound for his attachment to Facism, and his anti-Semitism. He positions himself as a poetic heir to Pound, but he makes it known that it’s an uneasy filial bond. Rozewicz can often be fierce in his attack against those who would commodify poetry and worse, poets. Emblematic of this stance, is his poem, “You don’t do that to Kafka”. In this poem Rozewicz savages every profiteer from literature professor to coffee shop owner, from the city of Prague to Max Brod for commodifying Franz Kafka:

Franz Kafka earned the right
not to have monuments made to him
not to have T-shirts
undershirts teacups
hankies undies
plates with the image of his face on the bottom
he earned the right not to
have Kafka cafes
not to have
souvenir shops

He argues that the intensely private Kafka, who left orders behind that Max Brod burn his work, deserves at the very least, a posthumous anonymity.
If you are seeking refuge from a contemporary poetics that has given up meaning for a search into the remoter properties and signalings that language is capable of, then Rozewicz is your poet. He reads even now as a corrective to the abstractions of end-game language poetry. He is deeply suspicious of poetic gamemanship and the ways that such gamemanship can be co-opted by malign forces. If Samuel Becket dealt with James Joyce’s prolix effusions, by muting language to the most elemental murmurs, then Rozewicz responds to the cooption of language by de-humanizing political forces by reconfiguring the scale of poetic ambition to the daily. Like a snail, his job is to clean and simplify the language by digesting it. He eats words, and shits poems, but the poems are not shit, rather they are beautiful in the way of a Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud painting. In fact, this collection includes one of his great long poems, “Francis Bacon or Diego Valeszuez in a dentists chair”, that starts out with compelling simplicity:

for thirty years
I have been hot on Bacon’s heels

I’ve looked for him in pubs galleries
butcher shops
in newspapers art books photographs

Rozewicz is a prolific writer and one senses when reading him that writing a poem a day amounted to a constitutional. This dailiness coupled with his conversational engagement, and his humble unadorned style evinced by the relative lack of capitalization and punctuation, makes Rozewicz perhaps the most accessible of the four great Polish poets of the post war years. He lacks Czelaw Milosz’s Catholicism and high Modernist stylings (though he loves Pound, Eliot, and Beckett); he lacks Szymborska’s formal precision and dry wit (a wit, by the way, that alludes to large tragic losses by discovering small absences), nor does he possess Zbigniew Herbert’s stoic intellection and scholastic abstractions, rather Rozewicz is often in conversation with the past, with artists and friends whom he has known, and of course with the reader. Indeed, this conversational quality is such a defining feature of his style that many of the titles of his poems include the words ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue’.
This book includes a fine introduction by Edward Hirsch that situates Rozewicz in relation to the Holocaust and to his Polish contemporary poets. Hirsch eloquently calls Rozewicz a “poet of dark refusals, hard negations.” This gets at the profoundly skeptical quality of Rozewicz ethos. Hirsch then goes on to call Rozewicz an antipoet and an outsider who speaks from the margins and tells ‘the truth, however painful it may be.”
One can’t help but wonder what influence Rozewicz might have had on American poetry if his books had been translated as they appeared. In this case, he might have had fifty years of influence. Rozewicz is an honest and genuine poet and he serves as a nice corrective in an age of irony. As it is, we are grateful for this fine selection of his remarkable poems.

[GretchenPhrase · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my answer
To your question
"What is the meaning of life
If I must die?"

By holding a finger to my lips
I answered you in thought
"Life only has meaning
Because we must die"

Eternal life
Life without end
Is being without meaning
Light without shadow
Echo without voice


An absolute must read.

[Chris]

Really good. Somber at times. playful and witty at others. Translator's notes are helpful. Includes a poem by Tadeusz's brother, who was murdered by the Nazis. Różewicz lived through hell and is a voice to be heard by anyone who wishes to understand humanity. or attempt to.

[James F · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sobbing Superpower is a translation from Polish of 125 poems from twenty-six collections. The poems were written between 1945 and 2008. I wish I were better at reviewing contemporary poetry; these are among the best I have read in the last few years. The language is simple and direct; the poetry is of course filled with imagery, but not the kind that needs to be decoded to be understood. The earliest poems deal with the Second World War and the Holocaust; later he turns toward satirizing consumerism, and the last poems contain more literary and personal allusions, which are all either obvious or explained in the abundant notes at the end of the volume. I'm not sure why the title was chosen as the poem of that name was not one of the best, in my opinion.

[John Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems in this volume testify to a great poetic sensibility that is at once self-reflective, skeptical, memorializing, and always pleasurable to read. There are poems here that memorialize what was lost in the Holocaust, as well as stunning poems that dwell on personal morality and personal mortality.

[Edgar Trevizo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Empezó muy bien. Pero muy pronto me cansó su estilo descuidado, su constante divagar, su falta de fineza en la exposición. Simplemente no es para mí. Bueno, la primera quinta parte sí. Sus primeros poemas.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting to see a poet radically expand his scope throughout the 60-odd years course of his writing.
Not what i would call a fun read, but relentless and steadfast and wounded. I appreciate his stance of general refusal: of easy answers, of relaxation, of artistry. This seems to be someone for whom art is less a way in to 'finding out what [he's] thinking' and more an inescapable necessity to get thru the day. And, as far as i am able to tell, the translation is outstanding, since it seems to adhere to the general anti-aesthetic that Rozewicz espouses (i realize this is a completely unfounded statement. i accept that criticism). Would recommend a selected as a start, either the old Princeton University press edition of The Survivor and Other Poems, or They Came to See a Poet.

[Howard Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

For my fellow readers looking for a spicy treat that one can intersperse between longer reads of fiction and non-fiction, i.e. a poem or two each day, I highly recommend Sobbing Superpower, Selected Poems of Tadeusz Rozewicz. What you will discover is accessible poetry, poetry described by Ezra Pound as "as clear as good prose." The poet, who died last year at age 92, answers the Holocaust and other 20th-century horrors, by renouncing literary ornament and creating a collection "not of verses but facts." His interesting style, coupled with his stinging sense of humor, adds an extra dimension to TR's keen insights into history, politics, and human nature.

All the best,
Howard

[Fran · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the scope of this collection of Rozewicz's poetry from after WWII to 2006. His poetry (which he calls 'impure') is accessible and wide ranging. There are lots of writers, poets, artists, politicians that find their way into his work, reflecting a wide range of interests and an historical perspective.

[l · Rating 3 out of 5]

he has some really remarkable poems, but a lot of them didn't strike me as being particularly interesting. the other collection of his verse that i read was enough tbh.