“Hand—compelled to strike—” Mieczslaw Jastrun writes in his poem “Knife with Red Shaft,” “do you need an angel?” A lyric poet and essayist, Jastrun survived the terrible years of the Nazi occupation and the Stalinist period in Poland, “endangered every moment,” as Czeslaw Milosz says, “because of his Jewish origin.” During his lifetime he published a dozen volumes of poetry, including A Human Matter, A Meeting in Time, Protected Hour and Memorials. Elegaic in tone, this selection from Memorials (published in 1969) presents some of his strongest, most mysterious poems. Never has his sense of mortality been stated more intensely or more precisely, “The cup extinguishes the drinker.” Jastrun concerned himself most often with metaphysics and morality. “And space/ grows emptier/ in an empty glass—,” the poet says, “the world,/four folded pages.”   However, as a poet who published his poems in resistance periodicals, he couldn’t turn his back on the horrors of the genocide; nor was he able to escape historical necessity and despair in even his most mystical writings. “This wall, this air—/” Mieczslaw Jastrun writes, “after the shot,/ emptiness stood there,/ yet far/ lips—wall.” Memorials introduces in English a powerful selection of poems by one of the most well-respected Polish poets of the 20th century.  

 

Dzvinia Orlowsky and Jeff Friedman won an NEA Translation Fellowship for their translation.