This Era

Tomasz Różycki
Translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal

I’ve said goodbye to the twentieth century,
its porches choked with bindweed, its wild weeping
and wild grapevines. When finally the black
patrol car leaves, then you can hear the panting

of the train, the horses snorting, sweat steaming
in icy air. Nervous, you wonder what might be worth
taking for good: a useless notebook, minor
snapshots, cheap religious medals? Forests and cities

along the way sleep like huge dark churches.
I’ll not be coming back here, windows draped
with dirty towels, signs of widespread plague.
Below the sand, I’ve hidden a handful of words

not yet infected. For you. I put the rest outside
along with the still warm body to see how these times
will take care of it at night. What shape this era will carve
in the flesh, what will be left when morning arrives.

What Keeps Us

Poems to Read in Community

Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Tomasz Różycki’s “This Era,” translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal, as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself. 

Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers hereRead poems by selecting below.

What Keeps

Some nights We stay up
passing it back and
forth
between us
drinking deep

Read >

This Era

Forests and cities

along the way sleep like huge dark churches.

Read >

Talisman

each of us bearing the art
in a curve of wing, a small motif
of feather,

Read >

Rewind

Have you ever seen something that buzzes inside you?
I am watching two kids encounter each other

Read >

Rationale

Because she still won’t sleep alone, you sleep deeply
with her small warm body wrapped in your arms.

Read >

Pupusas

no, the pupusa is a portrait
            of this life, crusting & breaking
                        with every lick & tooth

Read >

Psalm III

in what language should I speak to you, sun
so you’ll rise tomorrow for my child, so you’ll
rise and stimulate the growth of our food,

Read >

Night Song

You’ll never know
what became of me
in the dark, how
my body opened,

Read >

Handfuls

Summer is a pure lone mountain.
Somehow, a winter flowers against an enormous blue loneliness

Read >

Eurydice

It snowed the day I died, a freak spring storm.
(It was in the papers.)

Read >

December

Instead of snow, a dark pouring rain
to dodge as passersby reject us.  No spruces, but sycamores with their white cankers.

Read >

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Photo of Tomasz Różycki

Tomasz Różycki is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose of widespread international acclaim, with work translated into many languages. A recipient of the Wisława Szymborska Prize, the Kościelski Award, the Prix Grand Continent, and a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship, he is an “Ambassador of the New Europe” and one of the leading writers of his generation in Poland. He has served on the juries for the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award and the Swiss Prix Jan Michalski. In the U.S., he has been featured at the Unterberg Poetry Center, the Princeton Poetry Festival, and the Brooklyn Book Festival. He also teaches and translates French literature.

Photo of Mira Rosenthal

Mira Rosenthal is the author of Territorial, a Pitt Poetry Series selection, and The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. Her translations of contemporary Polish poetry include Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline, which was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize and the National Translation Award, and Tomasz Różycki’s Colonies, which won the Northern California Book Award and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell and the Jan Michalski Foundation. Rosenthal’s translation of Różycki’s To the Letter is currently long-listed for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Cover of To the Letter

Brooklyn, New York

"“We live in feral times,” the poet says, asking us “what shape this era will carve / in flesh.” In Mira Rosenthal’s exacting, beautiful translations, Tomasz Różycki's work gives us a moment of honest assessment, answering hard questions without patronizing, with lyric precision. One of Poland’s best living poets, he is writing at the height of his powers. Which, for me, means: there is mystery in his work, that feels trustworthy—“we will dig ourselves out of our private muck /of subtext, shed the weight,” he says, “and fly off, empty, for the nearest lightbulb.” It is amongst the quotidian that he seeks to be saved, his is a vision in which despite all the tragedy of this new century, the thrush that sings “at two a.m. outside / our window in the parking lot has saved / the day, the month.” If that is to be our new metaphysics, count me in."
— Ilya Kaminsky

"In this philosophical collection that explores doubt—regarding language, God, and the prospect of repeating history—many poems address an unreachable “you” who could be a lover, a deity, or a ghost of someone long dead. Rosenthal’s translation draws out these poems’ shades of melancholy and whimsy, along with the slant and irregular rhymes that contribute to their uncanny humor. Różycki’s verse teems with sensuous, imaginatively rendered details."
The New Yorker

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