Non Fiction
Category: Criticism, Essays, Non Fiction
Number of pages: 325
ISBN: 9781854110237
Publication date: February 23, 1995
Price: £14.95
Out of stock
The poets of Poland witnessed sweeping changes throughout the twentieth century: often writing under repressive conditions, or in exile, their country is central to their work. Its plight has caused the very creative act to be questioned and reviewed.
The essays in The Mature Laurel trace the course of Polish poetry from Norwid to the New Wave, virtually the whole of the last century. They feature individual writers, most notably Herbert, Roiewicz, Milosz and Szymborska, but also more general issues: writing under Stalinism, the distortion of translation, relationships with visual art. The book also includes a section of shorter essays in which British critics discuss individual poems by Herbert, Norwid, Milosz and Rozewicz.
Adam Czerniawski
Adam Czerniawski is a leading poet and prose writer in Polish and a translator of Polish literature and philosophy. He was born in Warsaw, but left Poland during the war for Istanbul and then Palestine. He eventually settled in England in 1947, where he studied English literature and philosophy at London, Oxford and Sussex universities. He now lives in Wales and has worked in a range of academic and literary posts. His Selected Poems 1953-1978 appeared in Poland in 1982. He has also translated multiple volumes by Tadeusz Różewicz and is the author of The Burning Forest (Bloodaxe, 1988), translations of seventeen Polish poets. Reflecting on the changes that Polish poets faced throughout the twentieth-century, Czerniawski edited a collection of essays in The Mature Laurel: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry (1995).
