Tadeusz Rozewicz is no more

Tadeusz Rozewicz, the renowned poet, playwright and novelist of Poland died on 24 April, at the age of 92.

26 Apr 2014 | By Rahul Kumar

Uday Prakash, the eminent Hindi writer, who is all praises of Rozewicz, said, “It is a sad day for all the poets on earth. Tadeusz Rozewicz’s death is a big loss for us and has created a large vaccum like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s death did. The simplicity of his poems is remarkable. Good bye, the greatest poet of our time.”

Rozewicz belonged to the first generation of Polish writers born after Poland regained its independence in 1918 following the century of foreign partitions. He was born in Radomsko near Lodz.

His first poems were published in 1938. During the Second World War, like his brother, Janusz (also a poet), he was a soldier of the Polish underground Home Army. His second brother, Stanislaw, was a famous Polish film director.

Rozewicz was a seeker of new forms in poetic expression that abandon the avant-garde for aesthetic straightforwardness and the stunning short-cuts that are a metaphor for a human existence bounded by the act of birth and the act of death.

Rozewicz has won important awards such as – the European Prize for Literature in 2007 and Griffin Poetry Prize in 2012.

The extent of his published work includes innumerable poems, a dozen plays and several screenplays with Niepokoj (Anxiety) published in 1947 to Kup kota w worku, published in 2008.