Book News: Polish Poet With Mission To 'Create Poetry After Auschwitz' Dies
The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.
Polish poet and playwright Tadeusz Rewicz, who was a member of the resistance during Germany's occupation of Poland in World War II, has died, according to reports in the Polish press. He was 92. Writing in The Guardian, the British-Hungarian poet George Szirtes called him "one of the great European 'witness' poets whose own lives were directly affected by the seismic events of the 20th century." Rewicz's older brother was killed by the Gestapo in 1944, and Rewicz made it his mission to refute Theodor Adorno's dictum that it is barbaric to create poetry after the atrocities committed at Auschwitz. Rewicz wrote, "at home a task / awaits me: / To create poetry after Auschwitz." Czeslaw Milosz wrote in an anthology of Polish poetry that Rewicz's "first poems published immediately after the war are short, nearly stenographic notes of horror, disgust, and derision of human values. Long before anybody in Poland had heard of Samuel Beckett, Rewicz's imagination created equally desperate landscapes." Rewicz's bleak poem "cobweb" begins:
four drab women
Want Hardship Worry Guilt
wait somewhere far away
a person is born
grows
starts a family
builds a home
the four ghouls
wait
hidden in the foundations