Poetry and survival

Tadeusz Rozewicz likes to tease. At his home in Wroclaw, west Poland, the 80-year-old Polish poet and dramatist tells me that on a visit to Scotland, he saw the Loch Ness monster; he declares that “Harry Potter will make our kids stupid,” and concludes with “I don’t like bad journalists, bad poets, bad painters, bad singers, and bad politicians, the latter inflict most harm. Next to the Germans.” Such statements are always accompanied by a chuckle or a grin, though the last comment betrays something of his past.

Rozewicz is one of Poland’s great post-war poets, and his latest work is now being championed by Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin. While Nobel prizes went to compatriots, Wislawa Szymborska, for her spirited, idiosyncratic poems, and to Czeslaw Milosz, for his more traditional, neo-classical work, Rozewicz seemed alone in his quest to find a language that could carry the horrors of war.

Born in Radomsko, Poland, in 1921, Rozewicz was a member of the resistance during the second world war, as was his brother who was murdered by the Gestapo in 1944. “I saw people who were brought through the streets on carts,” he explains, “dead bodies, naked bodies – these were Russian prisoners brought out from a German camp.”

In the aftermath, the nascent poet struggled to pick out the words for all he had witnessed. With its notions of beauty and transcendence, Poland’s Romantic heritage was incompatible with the Nazis’ murderous occupation of his country. Perhaps the only poet explicitly to take on Adorno’s famous refutation, Rozewicz writes in “I Did Espy a Marvellous Monster”: at home a task / awaits me: / To create poetry after Auschwitz.