"William Blake was inclined to see human sins as phases through which humans pass and not as something substantial. In . . . Anna Swir there is a similar empathy and forgiveness." -Czeslaw Milosz "In the same way that memory gave birth to the muses, Anna Swir crafted exquisite mnemonic miniatures thirty years after the Warsaw Uprising, miniatures that allowed human hope to shine through bloody rubble. Reading Swir, one longs to know this heroic poet, who, like Whitman, nursed humans broken by war. Piotr Florczyk translates the poems in Building the Barricade with chilling precision, constructing equations that become magical spells to address the twentieth century and serve as cautionary tales for the twenty-first." -Sandra Alcosser "To translate Anna Swir is to translate a cemetery's stories as nakedly and starkly as any human can. It is to tread on hallowed, stunned ground-the ground of an earth stricken not by its own nature but by our species' own warring, bombarding instincts. Only reverence could lead someone properly into the reaches of Swir's numbed witness of the atrocities of WWII. Piotr Florczyk has the reverence and skill to bring Swir into English verse with crystalline witness and warnings." -Katie Ford "These short poems by Anna Swir, keenly translated by Piotr Florczyk, have the urgency and clarity of a poet staring back at a burning building from which she somehow escaped, except the building is Poland and she is looking back in memory, talking to its war-torn corpses, and to us, the lucky recipients of these explosive poems." -Edward Hirsch This collection includes Piotr Florczyk's striking new translations of Anna Swir, featuring the best of her poems about the Warsaw Uprising, as well as poems that focus on the human body and Swir's experiences of love and family.
Author
Anna Świrszczyńska (also known as Anna Swir) was a Polish poet whose works deal with themes including her experiences during World War II, motherhood, the female body, and sensuality. Świrszczyńska was born in Warsaw and grew up in poverty as the daughter of an artist. She began publishing her poems in the 1930s. During the Nazi occupation of Poland she joined the Polish resistance movement in World War II and was a military nurse during the Warsaw Uprising. She wrote for underground publications and once waited 60 minutes to be executed. Czesław Miłosz writes of knowing her during this time and has translated a volume of her work. Her experiences during the war strongly influenced her poetry. In 1974 she published Building the Barricade, a volume which describes the suffering she witnessed and experienced during that time. She also writes frankly about the female body in various stages of life.
