Poetry
Kwiaty polskie
Not translated into English
Julian Tuwim · 1949
Opening lines
Bukiety wiejskie, jak wiadomo,
Wiązane były wzwyż i stromo.
W barwach podobne do ołtarza,
Kształt serca miały lub wachlarza
Country bouquets, as is well known,
Were tied up high and steep.
In their colours like an altar,
They had the shape of a heart or a fan
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from wolnelektury.pl
Synopsis
A teeming poem ordered by memory rather than by chronology. Around Ignacy Dziewierski, a gifted artist who practises learned art and folk art alike, the author returns with nostalgia to his childhood in Łódź, to gardens, flowers and country bouquets, to the streets and faces of the past, then slips away to distant islands and songs heard from afar. The poem mixes genres and tones, from lyricism to satire, as one composes a bouquet.
Context
The author began the poem in November 1940, in Brazil, continued it in the United States from 1941 to 1944, then after his return in 1946, and worked on it until his last days without finishing it. The first volume appeared from Czytelnik in the second half of January 1949, after numerous changes imposed by the censors. Critics see it less as an epic than as a quasi-epic, a hybrid form into which very diverse genres enter; Mieczysław Weinberg drew his eighth symphony from it.
Who it is for
A long poem in rhymed verse, unfinished, whose thread rests on memory rather than on a narrative. No French or English translation.
Prizes and reception
Counted among the works by which its author is best known, together with his pre-war lyric collections.
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