Miron Białoszewski
A revised translation from the Polish by Madeline G. Levine
On
August 1, 1944, a twenty-two-year-old Miron Białoszewski, later to gain
renown as one of Poland's most innovative poets, went out to run an
errand for his mother and ran into history. With Soviet forces on the
outskirts of Warsaw, the Polish capital revolted against five years of
Nazi occupation, an uprising that began in a spirit of heroic optimism.
Sixty-three days later it came to a tragic end. The Nazis ruthlessly
slaughtered some 200,000 people, ultimately suppressing the insurgents.
Białoszewski's blow-by-blow account of the uprising brings it alive in
all its desperate urgency, written in short, stabbing, splintered,
breathless
sentences full of the white-knuckled poetry that resists the very
destruction it records.
Madeline
G. Levine has extensively revised her 1970 translation, and passages
that were unpublishable in Communist Poland have been restored in this
edition.
"A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising
is a faithful, antiheroic, and nonpathetic description of
disintegration: bombed houses, whole streets, human bodies disintegrate,
as do objects of everyday use and human perceptions of the world."
—Czesław Miłosz
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