Sobbing Superpower

In the great constellation of postwar and contemporary Polish poets, Rózewicz has been a sort of dark star: neither pellucidly wise nor gravely witty, in the manner of Nobel laureates Milosz and Symborska, Rózewicz's gritty, ragged verse has for more than half a century given his responses to the unanswerable conditions of history, beginning with the Holocaust and WWII. Rózewicz truly came into his own in the 1960s and in the 1990s, when longer forms given to free association allowed him to write without pretending that writing could alleviate the injustice that pervades any society. Trzeciak's stripped-down translation (as her foreword explains) tries to convey both Rózewicz's plain speech and his frequently intricate allusion to writers and works from Polish, German, Russian, and English, among them Franz Kafka and Ezra Pound. "Of course I try to write/ light carefree / even with my left foot/ but it's tethered to a stone," a recent poem complains in a poetry able to incorporate almost anything, from headlines to the simplest sentences a child might say, which a disillusioned adult might need to hear again: "this is a man/ this is a tree this is bread// people eat to live." (Dec.)