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Archive for May, 2015

Różewicz’s Testament: Two Texts and an Enigma

By tjmsubl, on 6 May 2015

Barbara Bogoczek considers the last will and testament of the great Polish poet Tadeusz Różewicz, who died one year ago.

Tadeusz Różewicz in 2006 by Michał Kobyliński (Photo: Wikicommons)

 

God created man

in His image

 

the sequence is

was 

different

 

it was man who created God

in his image

 

and later when he

could no longer bear the presence of

God – he erased Him

from his life

 

and suffers because that was

his greatest creation

 

Already a year has passed since Tadeusz Różewicz unexpectedly died on the morning of the 24th of April 2014. The previous day, with his wife Wiesława and son Kamil, he was still enjoying the sight of the cherry tree blossoming in their garden. He was 92 but apparently in good shape, still receiving visitors, answering phone calls, writing. The next morning – as he might have put it himself – his life went missing somewhere…

He left a short note, a wry ‘Last Will and Request’, which baffled at least some of his friends. Didn’t this great writer – author of volumes of poetry, drama, prose and screenplays spanning almost eight decades – confess his loss of faith in God at the very onset of his career? In a conversation just a couple of months before his death he said, ”I’m not in a hurry to go anywhere. Because there is nowhere to go.” And yet in this testament, jotted down in his unmistakable handwriting, dated ”Karpacz, 5.III.2003”, he asked for an ecumenical burial:

”It is my wish that the urn with my ashes be buried at the Augsburg Evangelical cemetery by the Vang Church in Upper Karpacz. I also request the local pastor to say the appropriate prayers, together with a priest of the Roman Catholic Church (of which I am a member through the sacrament of baptism and confirmation). I wish to be buried in the soil which has become close to my heart like the soil on which I was born. Perhaps this will contribute to good relations between two divided faiths and bring closer the cultures and nations which lived and are still living on this land. Perhaps the dream of the poet who prophesied ‘All people shall be brothers’ will come true. Amen.”

And signed: ”Tadeusz Różewicz (born 9.X.1921 in Radomsko)”.

(more…)