Conversation With the Prince and Other Poems

by Tadeusz Różewicz, Adam Czerniawski (Translator)

Tadeusz Rózewicz was born in 1921 in Radomsko. With Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert, he is a major figure in the generation of writers whose work was indelibly marked by Poland's traumatic and tragic war-time experience. `What I produced is poetry for the horror-stricken. For those abandoned to butchery. For survivors. We learnt language from scratch, those people and I.' Distrusting myths and archetypes, and rejecting traditional aesthetic values which struck him as offensive and gratuitous in the face of what he had witnessed, Rózewicz created a stark, direct poetry devoid of embellishment and rooted in common speech, fashioned as he has written `out of a remnant of words, salvaged words, out of uninteresting words, words from the great rubbish dump, the great cemetery.' But Rózewicz's poetry is far from being confined to recording the horrors of the past. He is committed to poetry as a way of life, to the transmutation of a whole world of experience, from the seemingly trivial to the profound. He is a natural social realist whose subject-matter is extremely varied; his delight in ordinary human existence, and the precision with which he traces it, make him a rich, humane and very accessible poet. His poetry translates effectively in its clarity of expression and outline. This selection, the most extensive to appear in English, is drawn from thirty-five years of Rózewicz's prolific writing and will confirm his standing as a major European poet of our time.

Genres: Poetry, Poland

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

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 4 out of 5]

I see
the smile
removed from his white face
against the wall.

The stranger the harbinger of death
bowed his head
lower

By the stove
I see
a funny statue of pain
in well-trodden slippers
a tiny crooked
little figure
of a petrified mother.

- - -

Pink quartered ideals
hang in abattoirs

Shops are selling
clowns'
motley death-masks
stripped off the faces
of us who live
who have survived
staring
into the eye-socket of war.

- - -

I grow
in the bondings of walls
where they are
joined
there where they meet
there where they are vaulted

there I penetrate
a blind seed
scattered by the wind

patiently I spread
in the cracks of silence
I wait for the walls to fall
and return to earth

then I will cover
names and faces

- - -

I see her tiny feet
in large paper coffin
slippers

I sat between
the table and the coffin
godless I willed a miracle
in an industrial panting
city in the second half
of the 20th century

dragged out of me into light
that thing
weeps

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

same translator as faces of anxiety, and many of the same poems are included. i am struck by the beauty of rozewicz's lack of punctuation, the way the reader is forced to think via the way one naturally chooses to insert pauses, and how re-reading can give the reader more freedom to play with meaning because of familiarity. there's a lot to digest.

[Mills College Library]

891.8517 R893c 1982