[In the following excerpt, Możejko praises Różewicz's style in Überblendungen.]

Überblendungen (Penetrations) is an attempt to give a cross section of Tadeusz Różewicz's poetry in German. Whether the attempt is successful is another matter. Różewicz has attained a position alongside Miłosz and Herbert as one of the most prominent Polish poets of the postwar era. He was awarded the State Prize for Literature in 1966 and five years later was recognized by a vote of younger Polish poets as the most distinguished living poet in Poland. His debut volume, Niepokój (Anxiety; 1947), opened a new vein in Polish poetry in that it established a terse, objective, almost factual style which spoke directly about the horrors of war and hitherto unknown humiliation of human dignity. In subsequent collections Różewicz pursued this tone of moral concern, which at times turned into bitter irony and expressed profound disappointment with the conditions of human existence. He avoided the pitfalls of the Stalinist period, in which poets often sacrificed sincerity in favor of opportunistic bows to the regime; unlike other writers, he survived that dreadful era virtually intact as an artist.

Różewicz's poetry is characterized by two major formal traits: a narrative structure which reminds the reader of prose, and concreteness of description, as in “Pigtail”: “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.” His poetry therefore poses no particular difficulty to translators, in either German or English. Moreover, he entirely abandons traditional stanzas and meter; what really counts is semantic cadence and intonation. By and large, Peter Lachmann, a minor poet himself, has coped well in rendering the Polish originals into German, although his tendency to abridge texts occasionally goes too far, as when he eliminates an entire stanza from “Cud dnia powszedniego,” clearly diminishing its ironic flavor.

My major reservation, however, is in Lachmann's selection of poems. A number of important, almost programmatic pieces are missing. Perhaps they exist in earlier translations of Różewicz's verse into German, but if so, this should have been indicated in a short introductory note. Despite this shortcoming, Überblendungen will doubtless solidify Różewicz's position as a poet of international significance.