Tadeusz Różewicz has been known in Hungary since the 1960s. Yet, even the postscript to his first volume published in this country sets out the way in which his plays differ from those of Mrożek, noting that Różevicz is really a poet. Accordingly, his theatre, too, reveals the lyricist's universe, a continuity of existence of the lyrical self on and off stage. Thus we did have some knowledge of Różevicz being one of the best-known representatives all over Europe of the new generation of Polish literature, yet, his introduction to a Hungarian audience has been slow in coming.

During a trip to Britain in 1970, I already discovered in a bookshop a collection of his poetry, published in Rapp and Whiting's contemporary poets series. It was around that time that I was invited, back in Hungary, by the Európa Publishing House in Budapest, to select and translate a volume of Różewicz's poetry. It should be pointed out that at that time, the late 1960s, works by him were already being published in book form in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and West Germany as well. (In Hungary, only three thin volumes of his had been published up till then.)

It was an accidental circumstance that brought Różewicz to my attention. In 1958, I was one of the poets featured, together with him, in an anthology presenting the new poetry of the socialist countries (Hlubši neż smrt, Prague). In my own poems, I was, at that time and later on as well, striving for a simplicity with more weight to it, and I seemed to detect, in Różewicz's lines, the kindred notes of a certain prosaic quality, in the positive sense of the word, and also of a concreteness free from pathos. That was perhaps the impression that really got me interested in trying to give him a Hungarian voice.

He was born in 1921, in Radomsk, a small town near Cheştochowa. Because of financial problems, he was not able to complete the secondary school. During the years of occupation, risking double persecution, he was active in the underground press. Then, in 1943–44, having completed a secret training course for officers, he served as a partisan with the National Army.

As attested even by these few facts, his pathway of becoming a poet has largely been mapped out by the War. With him, the repeated return to the nightmare of those years is not merely a capricious obsession of memory. Różewicz, with full reason, calls himself “a pit filled with memories”, “with each lying on the other”. It is a responsibility holding within itself the horror of humiliations, a humane endeavour relearning the elementary concepts of a community ethic, that have made Różewicz's attitude as a writer a valid example to his age and his generation. In one of his short stories, the hero—whom one can easily identify spiritually with the author—, on his way to France, instead of drinking tea, keeps sucking water from a tap turned towards his mouth, in spite of his companions' remonstrances—“Please, understand, you're in Paris, not in a concentration camp.” But the maniacal man closes his eyes and thinks to himself, brooding, “They're like children,—they don't know a thing. They don't know what water is. They don't know what air is. Don't know what bread is. Or soup. They don't know what a bed, a table, or an onion is. They don't know what your body, a song, a flower, a child is … I'm dead and they don't know.”

In his debut volume Niepokój (Restlessness), published in 1947, he described his existence in words whose dumbfounding quality make them fit to be engraved upon a tablet:

I am twenty-four
I escaped
when they were taking me to be slaughtered.

In his moving great lyrical monologue Plain, written in 1954, he already arrives at the insight that he has tarried for too long among the dead; yet, in the self-same poem, he repeats his vow, valid for his entire oeuvre:

I did not leave them
whatever else the appearance may be
it is not I who hold them but they
who hold me back
the Slaughtered the Just
hold me on their open palms

Even the few lines quoted make it manifest that Różewicz's style is far more prosaic and unmelodic, much drier than that of the Hungarian poets who recorded the dramas of anti-fascist commitment in their own country, Attila József, Miklós Radnóti, or János Pilinszky. For a Hungarian audience, the idea of what a fine piece of poetry should be like is still very much associated with the sort of regular, metrical composition exemplified by the aforementioned artists. Polish lyrical poetry in the inter-war period, however, more readily latched onto—more readily, that is, than its Hungarian counterpart—the form-renewing aspirations of the avant-garde. Early on, the school most renowned for launching and transmitting various trends, i.e. the Cracow school, founded by Peiper, had contacts with the Italian futurists, and subsequently with Russian and German constructivist and expressionist movements, as well as with French surrealism. Różewicz, though once attracted to them, is, in many respects, closer to the trend represented by the other major group of poets in the 1920s, namely, the Warsaw-based Skamander (Tuwim, Iwaszkiewicz, Słonimski). Instead of the luxuriant associations, the image-creating caprice of these, he attends to the dry facts of daily life, striving for an immediate object-centredness. Amongst those who have influenced his voice as a poet, we could probably mention several names from Przybo⋅ and Ważyik to Apollinaire or Blaise Cendrars. Still, right from the first mature verses, even in the peculiar, lapidary syntagms, one gets the unmistakably individual beat of emphatic suggestions, ellipses, or couplings of vocables. And, manifest from the start, too, has been a conscious craftsmanship in composition, a deliberate purpose, shaping even the simplest form, and, inwoven with the ostensibly monotonous diction, trenchant irony and sharp humour. All this, along with some later features of Różewicz's constantly more depersonalized tenor of vision, might be conceived of as an Eastern European parallel to contemporary French poetry after Eluard. Yet, even behind the diction, which, though mastered, he uses with natural ease, one can hear his distinctive voice, a voice all his own, whose only true source is his Polish destiny, the experience of the years spent on his native soil, which have matured him into a man. Therefore it strikes one not as a deplorable flaw but rather as a mark of individuality that Różewicz's poetry, intrinsically shunning the spectacular forms of euphony and, in its irregularity, all but creating an impression of improvization, employs images that are unembellished, pared down to the point of masochism, and ruggedly spare. His translator is sometimes embarrassed: he would like to impart some poetic heat to the puritanical adjectives and the laconically conceptualized images until he realizes that it is precisely this, viz. the to-the-point-and-no-frills, restrainedly bald diction, that is the very strength of Różewicz's poems.

Before embarking upon the job of translating him, I knew full well that the colours I needed to mix in order to achieve this array of hues were hardly to be found on the palette of contemporary Hungarian lyrical poetry. In addition to my own invention, I had to draw on such often contrasting poetic creeds as the reticent sombreness of Gyõzõ Csorba, the frivolously quotidian “voice trials” of Sándor Weöres and Dezsõ Tandori, Mihály Ladányi's illusion-free grotesques, or JÁnos Pilinszky's fragments from his late period, which he called “Splinters”.

Although earlier I had no personal contact with the Polish poet, it must be mentioned that Różewicz does have some direct experience of the Hungarians. In 1950, the recipient of a scholarship, he came to spend half a year in Budapest. As luck would have it, he was lodged in the Eötvös Collegium, then newly converted into a students' hostel,—the very building from which, shortly before, I had moved out. That was the period, incidentally, when poets were travelling between Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, and Sofia like children on exchange visits. That was how the Hungarian László Naǵy, for instance, got to Bulgaria. And, just as the latter wrote about the fair at Plovdiv and Bulgarian dances, naturally Różewicz, too, wrote about the Hungarian world. These verses of his are still extant, yet he himself, not without reason, left them out of his later poetry collection.

He fared the same way as his “fellow-wanderers”, that is, in the words of a Polish literary historian, “he took his optimism abroad”. Depressed by his experiences at home, he singled out the encouraging developments he saw in another, friendly country, and repressing his own bitterness, presented these with genuinely felt pathos, in terms verging on the eulogistic. He wrote, for example, a poem which he dedicated to the miners' children of Tatabánya (Swifter than a Dream). It concerns a miner's family who, having recently been given a new flat, are enthusiastically showing the poet, on the top of their standardized apartment block, newly sprung up on the hill, how the wind is swaying the green branches. These writings contain few platitudes and a great deal of poetry. Also,—besides naive hopes—some genuine warm feelings for a fraternal nation which had also emerged from the particular version. To us, it is more than just a curiosity that he has inserted in it a few scenes that the original, 1960 text did not initially contain. As a result, I could see some characteristic Budapest settings on the stage, complete with gipsy music, hotel waiters, and girls enjoying themselves at a poolside.

The helpless hero lying in his pyjamas on an old-fashioned brass bed is, in all conscience, redolent of Beckett's influence, yet, even if we were to discover in him the whole inventory of modern drama, the play's central preoccupation once again reflects the fate of middle-aged Poles who lived through the War. It also reminds one of a film-segment made by Andrzej Wajda (from Twenty-Year-Olds' Love, the work of several directors), where we see a former partisan by the name of Edmond, impersonated by Cybulski, who, surrounded by happy young men, moves about like some comical Rip Van Winkle, utterly baffling his young companions. The hero of file is a similar kind of character, for, while confronted with his whole life, eddying forth from his mind,—all the people he has met,—he is forced to confess to his peasant uncle, “I'm as empty as a basilica at night”. And when his kinsman from the countryside asks him, “Are you coming home at last?”—he answers, “No, I haven't swallowed enough yet. I'm such a one, I can't return home any more.” (It is worth considering what a bitter and acid variant this is of the destiny-formula offered in Cantata profana.)

The reason why the young man cannot return home is that he is unable to adjust to the changed circumstances,—although this hero, too, was once a resistance fighter. “Brothers!”—he once exclaims, “My generation! I can't understand you. For I've been—I've been many things, and now I've got nothing in me …”

The author's most devastating judgement is contained in the sentence, “Everything dies in your hands, because you lack faith.” For us, however, there is an obverse to that statement, too,—namely, that Różewicz cannot relinquish faith, either as poet or dramatist.

The Hungarian collection of Różewicz's poems was published in 1972, under the title The One Who Has Escaped. The first to respond to it was the poet himself, who was most impressed with it. Recalling some of the intrigue and disputes surrounding the preparations, he expressed his pleasure over the fine book like this: “as the saying goes, all's well that ends well”.

Of the critical responses here in Hungary, the one I prize most is Gyōzō Csorba's dictum, contained in a letter he sent me. This is what he wrote:

The bull's-eyes in your translation have really inspired me,—which, in itself, would be nothing extraordinary with you,—but you have achieved this in translating a poet whose voice is fairly far-removed from yours. You have done an excellent job, and I think it would be a good idea for you to try in your original poetry this austere, puritanical, but at the same time extremely tough and compelling voice.

Różewicz himself I did not meet for some considerable time. For over a decade, neither of us visited the other's country. Then, in the autumn of 1985, he revisited Budapest. Appealing to the happy memories of long ago, he sent for me, saying he would like to see me. Also present at our reunion was the helping spirit of our collaboration concerning his volume, Konrad Sutarski, a Polish poet based in Hungary. This is how the occasion is recorded in my diary: “Różewicz has mellowed a great deal. His movements and his speech have become slower. He enunciates so clearly that, although my Polish is a bit rusty, I am surprised at the ease with which I understand his words. His lineaments have grown softer, less angular. He says generalities, but his gloomy predictions betray intelligence. “Yes”, I submit to him, “there are a lot of problems in our part of the world.” He, on the other hand, is of the opinion that the whole planet is heading in the wrong direction. “This is not the way we envisaged things …” His equanimity is also pierced by a glint of self-mocking humour. Later, when, at Koorád's flat, we toast our reunion, he banteringly remarks, “There. We're talking nothing but politics, instead of talking about poetry or women.” Yet, when the conversation turns to the spreading Eastern European fashion of bathing naked, he is wryly dismissive: “What good is that for someone with our figure?” All the same, he describes, in a few sentences, political and literary conditions in Poland, and hands me a copy—printed on low-quality paper—of his latest volume of verse, which, however, largely contains his earlier poems. He mentions how pleased he was to discover in Gyorgy Somlyó's novel Ramp a motto borrowed from him, translated into Hungarian by me: “I am twenty-four / I escaped / when they were taking me to be slaughtered.” to me, this brief outburst of humanity alone is proof enough that, now in 1985, he is still the same Różewicz who, in 1947, reborn, made his debut.”

Finally, if asked whether, looking over his career, the Polish poet has remained Eastern European, and if so, what defined the characteristics of this attitude, my answer would be a strong affirmative. It seems to me that his output as a dramatist, too, is deeply anchored in that fact of topography, the particular ambience in which it has been created. To that extent he differs from his Western colleagues, practitioners of the genre of the absurd. That is why, at a conference of poets organized in Mexico, he finds it easier to communicate with his Hungarian colleague,—bound to him as he feels, instinctively, by the kindred tragedies experienced; for—though having suffered many disappointments and much bitterness—we have both preserved the old ideals behind our sense of a shared destiny. And, although he has, by now, visibly withdrawn from the more publicly active domain in Polish letters, it is inconceivable that he should be able to live and work in any other place than Poland. Presumably, only in that milieu is he capable of preserving his faith—a glow surviving even under the ashes—in man's mission. Here it was, in Eastern Europe, that he first knew, for instance, the old women who “believe in eternal life”; who are “the salt of the earth / the bark of the tree / the meek eyes of beasts”; who “see all things on their true scale / on a scale much like that of / everyday demands”. Their faces, like some living map, bear the imprint of the changes wrought in us. Our own interior world, too, is as scarred, bearing the marks of countless battles. Yet, it is still a vital, effective organism.

It is this same faith—a faith, however, which harbours no illusions—that is at work in Różewicz as well: a resolve—battered, yet undiminished—to continue, with the dogged optimism of those who understand, that which, according to our destined ends, we have sworn allegiance to.