Ocalony – Saved
Tadeusz Różewicz
Translated from the Polish by Anna Maria Nowak
I am 24 years old
I was saved
From the path to the slaughter
These are names that are empty and unequivocal
A human and an animal
An enemy and a friend
Darkness and light
A human can be killed like an animal
I saw:
Wagons of chopped humans
Who will not be redeemed
Terms are only words
Virtue and vice
Truth and a lie
Beauty and ugliness
Bravery and cowardice
The same is the weight of the virtue and the vice
I saw:
A human that was at once
Vicious and virtuous
I am looking for a teacher and a master
Let him return to me the seeing, the hearing, the speech
Let him once again name things and concepts
Let him separate the light and the darkness
I am 24 years old
I was saved
From the path to the slaughter
§
Tadeusz Różewicz (9 October 1921 – 24 April 2014) was a distinguished Polish poet, dramatist and writer. He has referred to himself as an “anti-poet”, owing to the absence of metaphor in his poetry. His works have been translated into more than forty languages. English-language translations of his books have been finalists for the Popescu Prize (UK), the National Book Critics Award (USA) and the Griffin Prize (Canada). In 2007 he was awarded the European Prize for Literature.
Anna Maria Nowak is a student in the English Department at Bar-Ilan University. She was born in 1994 in Bonn, Germany, grew up in Moscow and Vilnius and finished high school in Toruń, Poland. Laureate of the National Olympiad of Literature and Polish Language as well as the National Festival of Youth Theatre in Poland, she is currently balancing between three languages and cultures, Polish, English and Hebrew.