New Poems, by Tadeusz Różewicz, translated by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books)

Born in 1921, Tadeusz Różewicz was eighteen when Germany invaded Poland, the catastrophe that ended a briefly euphoric period of freedom for the Poles whose country had previously been partitioned for 150 years by Austrian, Russian and German rule. He fought in the underground in 1943-44. His brother was arrested and shot by the Gestapo. The savagery and disillusionment of the war shaped the foreground of Różewicz’s first book, Anxiety (Niepokój), published in 1947. These poems, portraying a survivor’s mind strewn with images of brutality, spoke for his generation in its declarative stance among fresh graves. “I felt that something had forever ended for me and for mankind,” Różewicz wrote, “something that neither religion nor science nor art had succeeded in protecting.” For the past 60 years, he has spoken as an artist working with failed tools amid the impossibility of restarting what had ended. The war narrowed and deepened his vision to a grim focus on the insufficiencies of the human. From Anxiety, here is “The Survivor,” translated by Magnus Krynski and Robert Maguire:

I am twenty-four
led to slaughter
I survived.

These labels are empty and synonymous:
man and beast
love and hate
friend and foe
light and dark.

Man can be killed like the beast
I’ve seen:
cartloads of hacked-up bodies
who will never be saved.

Concepts are but words:
virtue and crime
truth and falsehood
beauty and ugliness
courage and cowardice.

Virtue and vice have equal weight
I’ve seen:
a man who was both
vicious and virtuous.

I seek a teacher and master
let him restore to me sight hearing speech
let him once again name things and concepts
let him separate light from dark

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, 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.

PHILOSOPHER’S STONE

this poem
should be put to sleep

before it starts
to philosophize
before it stars

to cast about
for compliments

summoned to life
in a forgetful moment

attuned to words
to glances
it seeks deliverance
from the philosopher’s
stone
passerby walk on
don’t lift the stone

under it a tiny white poem
naked
is turning
to ash

It is striking to see how many of these late poems turn against themselves and their art. But Różewicz’s muse apparently enjoys being slapped around. He writes in “landslide,” “you could say that the poets / have stoned poetry to death / with words.” And in “labyrinths,” “he sought a way out of language / but language has no way out / he sought more zealously / than any / other Polish poet // then he tried to flee from life / seeking shelter in poetry …” (This last is about the poet Boleśław Lesmian, regarded as the most prominent Polish poet at the turn of the last century whose “verse is characterized by complex, innovative uses of language” per the translators.) This amounts to an anti-ars poetica, and thus, an affirmation of his own stripped down method of address – but even so, the escape into beauty through language comes close to indicting the handsomeness of his own chiseled lines.

Różewicz writes his own brand of narrative poem, such as the (I’ll say it) beautiful poem “in a guesthouse” in which the speaker is enjoying a respite. He eats breakfast, signs a few books for other guests, takes his meds (“Concor Proscar Horzol Rutinoscorbin”). But a newspaper on a table turns his mood: “the news / in the papers was filled with blood / everything had become / dark fragile.” Aged, frail, needing balm, the strickenness of the speaker’s body exists in parallel to the violence of the world. Other narratives or extended scenes, such as “The Mystery of the Poetry Reading,” are lighter in tone with brief moments of endearments.

The fragility of his voice (for all its often aggressive or acerbic jabs) and the incapabilities of his tools have provided both devices and themes throughout the decades of his work. It is not old age we hear in the following lines from “so what if it’s a dream” but an inveterate point of view:

I write on water
I write on sand
from a handful of salvaged words
from a few simple phrases
like the prose of carpenters
from a few naked poems
I build an ark
to save something
from the flood
that takes us by surprise
in broad daylight
or in the middle of the night
and wipes us from the face of the earth.

To replace the verities of a world he had lost faith in, Różewicz came up with, and implacably stuck to, the strict truth of a naked, chastened vision. That world of words, inhabited by a man who deflated the reputation of words, maintained a remarkable consistency in form, sound, and message for many years, even as regimes changed and poetic styles came and went. This is a solid poetry, with a curious and stubborn self-reflexiveness. The opening lines of the 1965 poem "My Poetry" begin "explains nothing / clarifies nothing / renounces nothing / embraces no whole / fulfills no hope," such that the more recent "so what if it's a dream" echoes its predecessor. "My Poetry" also reads, "if it is no esoteric language / if it speaks with no originality / if it fails to astonish / evidently that's the way things should be." These are lines written by someone who would claim not to be astonished by any further human atrocities -- yet who also portrays himself as shaken by the sight of an open newspaper. His poetry speaks plainly, without affectation -- yet it astonishes in its own way. "My Poetry" ends with the lines "it has many tasks / it will never be equal to." Yet Różewicz clarifies quite a bit about what remains to the post-war psyche. Through it all, he has remained true to a poetry "obedient to its own imperative."

[Published April 2007, $16 paper, 260 pps. The National Book Critics Circle has nominated New Poems for its 2007 poetry prize. Quotations from the poet's earlier poems are taken from "The Survivor" and Other Poems, translated by Magnus Krynski and Robert Maguire, Princeton Univ Press, 1976.]