A unique mix of prose and poetry, of the joy of life and the agony of loss, Różewicz's Mother Departs creates a rich, complex portrait of his mother, Stefania, and of her indelible influence on her extraordinary family
Weaving together fragments from diaries, stories and notebooks – including moving texts written by his two brothers and Stefania herself – Różewicz creates a portrait of their lives and relationships that is sometimes brutal, often hilarious, and always tender.
Mother Departs has Różewicz attempt to give form, and perhaps even meaning, to life – and death. The book is released in English on the 15th of March 2013, by Stork Press, Ltd.
For Mother Departs, Tadeusz Różewicz received Poland’s most eminent literary prize, the NIKE award, in 2000. In her review of the Polish original, Anna Frajlich wrote,
This book, which is entirely focused on the inner life of a family, is nonetheless also a reflection of a whole epoch. Through the family’s experiences, the reader is taken on a journey which passes through some of the most important stages of the last century.’
Jerzy Drzewucki comments,
Mother Departs is not, as one might expect, a sentimental book. Instead it is about what people are in relation to their parents and in relation to their children, and it is a moving story of how parents in old age become – in a certain way – the children of their own children.
Tadeusz Różewicz (born 1921) is an author who is impossible to categorise, whose work is unsettling, a poet who has turned to stillness and silence, who rejects poetic accessories and, it is tempting to say, a mystical writer. But he is also a classic author of the avant-garde, a precursor of postmodernism, a discoverer of inner experience. He is frequently mentioned as candidate for the Nobel Prize in literarature.
Out of the remnants of war, Różewicz assembled a democracy of voices, past and present: newspaper reportage, travelogues, anecdotes, quips, quotations in several tongues - continuity in the rustle of language. "It's like the art of collage," he said in an interview, "putting in a piece of wood or metal or clothing. Then it can be replaced or painted.” In this way, Różewicz wilfully undermines the poet's status; he seeks the tone of the common man, from whichever country, the folklorish anon.
His working motto is: "The poem / is finished / now to break it".
Mother Departs
By Tadeusz Różewicz
translated by Barbara Bogoczek
Introduction and edition by Tony Howard
ISBN: 9780957391215
Published by Stork Press, Ltd
15th of March 2013
198x129x11mm
15 black & white photographs
96 pages
Editor: SRS
Source: press realese, Stork Press Ltd