It is welcome to have Adam Czerniawski's translations of Różewicz's poetry in print again. This latest collection [Conversation with the Prince and Other Poems] is an expanded version of the Selected Poems (Penguin, 1976), with a generous selection of Różewicz's recent poems. The translations are smooth, colloquial, both resourceful and very flexible, and also show a thorough familiarity with all aspects of the originals. The introduction raises a variety of issues. Perhaps one should not expect too much from a presentation that is necessarily constricted. Still, there are some assertions that seem to raise more questions than they answer.

First, the “moral preoccupation” of Różewicz is stressed; yet if he is a “moralist,” it is of a very special kind. One of the most winning features of his early work is a lack of moral pretentiousness: “I seek a teacher and a master / may he restore my sight hearing and speech.” But with the passage of time he became something of an “immoralist,” his “stale anger” (“Conversation with the Prince”) leading toward the near-total nihilism of “Job 1957” and “Nothing in Prospero's Cloak” (1962). The tone of truculent rancor pervading so many poems, often without a clearly defined object, is one of his salient traits. Might it not be said that Różewicz expresses a seductive, ingenuous hostility to moral concern?

Second, Czerniawski passes in silence over Różewicz's Stalinist phase in the fifties. Perhaps these poems were grudgingly written (which is not certain), yet this was a time when other poets preferred silence. The choice had consequences. Can we understand his subsequent nihilism without recalling it? Third, does “lack of self-consciousness” really characterize Różewicz's poetry? He has written more poems about poetry and the act of writing (as Czerniawski admits) than many of his contemporaries. Couldn't one stress his self-consciousness with equal validity? Fourth, Czerniawski notes with satisfaction that Różewicz's volume of collected poems runs to more than 700 pages. Yet his work is very uneven. Hasn't this prolificness resulted in dilution of quality? Fifth, are the “object poems” which Czerniawski especially admires—about a piece of rope, a birdcage, grass, a newspaper—really in the main current of Różewicz's work? I too like them, but I don't believe they show the force that is characteristic of his best poems.

Finally, must we accept the whole of Różewicz's poetry? I believe he has written some of the finest postwar poems in Polish, but in dealing with him one must, above all, make careful distinctions. Only then will we be in a real position to appreciate his strengths.