The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language. The winning poets receive $65,000 (Cdn) each and an additional $10,000 (Cdn) goes to each shortlisted poet who reads at the annual Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Readings in Toronto, Canada.
Joanna Trzeciak, Griffin Poetry Prize 2012 International Shortlist
Biographies
Joanna Trzeciak’s translations include Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska, winner of the Heldt Translation Prize. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Tadeusz Rózewicz, Griffin Poetry Prize 2012 International Shortlist
Tadeusz Różewicz was born in Radomsko, Poland, in 1921. During the Nazi occupation he joined the Polish resistance. Following the war, at the age of 26, he published his first collection of poems, Anxiety, which was received as the work of a major poet and redefined poetry after the Holocaust. A prolific poet and major playwright, Różewicz lives in Wroclaw, Poland.
Judges’ Citation
“Hearts can smart, and kindnesses be minded. Sobbing Superpower‘s world-class document, compellingly assembled by Joanna Trzeciak, gives us an EKG-cum-EEG for an entire era – its double helix inscribed by that most sensitive device: a soul the equal of the world’s occasion. A second global war had cast its blooming shade abroad, when Różewicz?s carouseling lovers sang, on fabulous beast-back, in scarlet carnivale: ‘let us adjust the paper ribbons and wreaths / crouch down: let hip touch hip / your thighs are alive / let us flee let us flee.’ But Różewicz is himself too alive to history’s evidence to pass off life and death as mutually exclusive: ‘Man is killed just like an animal / I’ve seen: / truckloads of chopped up people … // Concepts are only words: / … / truth and lie / beauty and ugliness / courage and cowardice. // … / I’ve seen: / a man-both / vicious and virtuous.’ The etymological job of the skeptic: to keep an eye on things. Różewicz is that rare character – skeptic as full of passion as of intelligence, of warmth as wariness. Thanks to Trzeciak’s deft, deferential translation, English readers see his place among stars of his Central-European generation – Herbert, Szymborska, Popa, Holub – poets who illustrate the power of a single plainsong to be heard over milling mobs; one sensibility to outweigh hours of broadcast nonsense; one oddball to resist the prefixed troopers; one poem’s power to outlast the props of all sub-supers, super-subs. Over 60 years, with grand themes but plain speech, with mortal passion but Heraclitic judgment, in torment and in tenderness, Różewicz proves as wary of philosophy’s bureaucracy as government’s; as wary of heaven’s offices as man’s. Alert to our condition’s own momentous momentariness, he’s funny, fierce, or casual; but never inconsequential.”
Summary
Trzeciak’s stripped-down translation (as her foreword explains) tries to convey both Różewicz’s plain speech and his frequently intricate allusion to writers and works from Polish, German, Russian, and English, among them Franz Kafka and Ezra Pound. ‘Of course I try to write/ light carefree / even with my left foot/ but it’s tethered to a stone,’ a recent poem complains in a poetry able to incorporate almost anything, from headlines to the simplest sentences a child might say, which a disillusioned adult might need to hear again: ‘this is a man/ this is a tree this is bread// people eat to live.’
Note: Summaries are taken from promotional materials supplied by the publisher, unless otherwise noted.
Joanna Trzeciak reads The Story of Old Women from her translation of Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Rosewicz
The Story of Old Women
I like old women ugly women mean women
they are the salt of the earth
they are not disgusted by human waste
they know the flipside of the coin of love of faith
dictators clown around come and go hands stained with human blood
old women get up at dawn buy meat fruit bread clean cook stand on the street arms folded silent
old women are immortal
Hamlet flails in a snare Faust plays a base and comic role Raskolnikov strikes with an axe
old women are indestructible they smile knowingly
god dies old women get up as usual at dawn they buy bread wine fish civilization dies old women get up at dawn open the windows cart away waste man dies old women wash the corpse bury the dead plant flowers on graves
I like old women ugly women mean women
they believe in eternal life they are the salt of the earth the bark of a tree the timid eyes of animals
cowardice and bravery greatness and smallness they see in their proper proportions commensurate with the demands of everyday life their sons discover America perish at Thermopylae die on the cross
conquer the cosmos
old women leave at dawn for the city to buy milk bread meat season the soup open the windows
only fools laugh at old women ugly women mean women
because these beautiful women kind women old women are like an ovum a mystery devoid of mystery a sphere that rolls on
old women are mummies of sacred cats
they’re either small withered dry springs dried fruit or fat round buddhas
and when they die a tear rolls down a cheek and joins a smile on the face of a young woman
The following are links to other Web sites with information about translator Joanna Trzeciak and poet Tadeusz Różewicz. (Note: All links to external Web sites open in a new browser window.)
Have you read Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems by Tadeusz Różewicz, translated by Joanna Trzeciak? Add your comments to this page and let us know what you think.
Photo credits: Joanna Trzeciak, by Daniel Levin Tadeusz Rosewicz, by Pawel Koziol, Agencja Gazeta
