What Luck

 

What Luck

By Tadeusz Rozewicz

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.

This beautiful and affecting poem is about how we slowly come back to life and sense once again simple pleasures after a heartbreak in relationship.  Emerging from devastation, man (can be woman too) 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.

Widely held to be the most influential Polish poet of a generation that includes Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, Tadeusz Rózewicz gives voice in the sharpest, most disturbing way to the crisis of values that has plagued our civilization. 

Tom Paulin says the following about the poet in an afterword in the book I have.

“Rózewicz's poems have the clipped, intense feel of conversation in wartime. They are clandestine speech, wary phrases, oblique gestures, wry turns that stop, start, disappear like jammed radio signals. These are messages from the underground. Always in these poems the individual emotion seems not to be the possession of the writer so that each impersonal lyric appears clamped by something that is out there — history,politics, the metal sinews and coiled wires of the public world. He gives that grey void a voice, then turns that voice against, itself, against poet, reader, world.As he states in My Poetry, his poetry "loses even against itself. It hides "itself in itself" and explains nothing. 

Różewicz's poems were ascetic, without metre, rhyme or metaphors, stripped bare of any rhetorical posturing and ornamentation or anything that could be considered aesthetically pleasing. One result of this is that long before Barthes he creates what that critic terms "writing degree zero" — he designs "a non-style or an oral style" which is free from the frozen classical or romantic gestures of the printed word. His poems therefore have a tentative, throwaway, ephemeral, intensely vulnerable look to them— they seem to say "I'm like that bit of paper you see on the street.”

PIGTAIL

Tadeusz Rozewicz

Translated by

ADAM CZERNIAWSKI

When all the women in the transport

had their heads shaved

four workmen with brooms made of birch twigs

swept up

and gathered up the hair

Behind clean glass

the stiff hair lies

of those suffocated in gas chambers

there are pins and side combs

in this hair

The hair is not shot through with light

is not parted by the breeze

is not touched by any hand

or rain or lips

In huge chests

clouds of dry hair

of those suffocated

and a faded plait

a pigtail with a ribbon

pulled at school

by naughty boys.

The Museum, Auschwitz, 1948

 

Tadeusz Rozewicz , a holocaust survivor, is considered one of Poland's best post-war poets.

How simple and powerful this poem is!! I have rarely come across a poem that has  touched me as closely as the one above. The horrendous clarity with which death has been depicted leaves you gasping for breath. At a first glance, the poet seems to be just a mute onlooker of the tragedy - one who has the maturity to see those bits of pins and ribbons in the dry hair of the dead bodies but not the courage to do anything about it. Slowly, the poem sinks into your system and you realize that a poem of this depth just cannot be penned down without the poet having gone though it himself. The last few tender lines leave the reader with a sense of utter sadness. The poet seems to have deliberately ended the poem at a point where the reader was just beginning to connect to it (perhaps) to deny the readers the right to prod more into the lives of the victims. Was he remorseful? Or angry?

 Loved the adjective usage  in 'clean glass' and the 'stiff hair'. The static image  conveyed in the second stanza is truly poignant.