Paradoxes of idiom Cover Image

Paradoksy idiomu. Glosa
Paradoxes of idiom

Author(s): Piotr Śliwiński
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Keywords: idiom; style; singularity; consciousness

Summary/Abstract: The poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz – a prophecy of its own (and general) incapability and impossibility in the world where ‘poets are dead’ – starts to resemble prose. It is a poetry after the death of poetry, it is written in the world after the death of the world. Różewicz – with all his details, described episodes, references to various “life’s” situations, quotes of factual events – being an angry moralist, at the level of a general diagnosis of reality, seems to be, despite all hesitations, a writer resigned, even a nihilist. The key question of this text is as follows: how it was possible to form own poet’s language, his own idiom, how it was possible within the radical consciousness of the end? The answer: the paradox of Różewicz is constituted on the fact that he has to – in the same moment – construct and to ruin his own poetic singularity. On the one hand, this singularity is to be found among the most important marks that enable us to identify poetry, on the other, its desire transforms the very same singularity into a dwelling of vanity, lightness, triviality, a sick ambition of all writers, a fetish. To be and not to be a poet, that is the Różewicz’s dilemma.

  • Issue Year: 2013
  • Issue No: 15
  • Page Range: 23-31
  • Page Count: 9
  • Language: Polish