Tadeusz Rozewicz was born in Radomsko, Poland. He fought in the underground
Home Army during the Nazi occupation and began publishing with the clandestine
press. After the war he studied art history in Krakow and his first book
of poetry, Niepokoj (Anxiety), appeared in 1947. He set himself
the task of reinventing literature in the face of a brutality that seemed
to have devalued everything, including words themselves, for an audience
of survivors: "We learned language from scratch, these people and I." His
writing was stark, stripped, honest, distrusting every trace of rethoric.
Rozewicz was quickly recognised as one of Europe's outstanding poets and
became a major influence on modern British poetry.
In the early 1960s Tadeusz Rozewicz also established himself as one
of the most innovative post-war dramatists with The Card Index (Kartoteka),
an Absurdist social satire,which has been called Eastern Europe's Waiting
for Godot. Ceaslessly experimental, his other plays include Marriage
Blanc (a comic fantasia on fin de siecle erotism), the anti-heroic
war play Dead and Buried (which provoked national controversies
both during and after the Communist era) and The Trap, a haunting
story of Kafka's life and imagination, Rozewicz has been translated into
forty languages and performed all over the world.
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