Poetry
Building the Barricade
Budowałam barykadę
Anna Świrszczyńska · 1974
Synopsis
Very short poems, most of which dwell on the death of a single person, adult or sometimes child, during the sixty-three days of the Warsaw Uprising: the building of barricades, hospitals in cellars, houses collapsing under bombs, the dead buried in shelters, the shortage of ammunition, food and dressings, and what the author lived through as a nurse. One section gathers poems about her father and mother.
Context
For thirty years the author tried to put the barricades, the cellar hospitals and her own days as a nurse into verse; these attempts, too wordy and too pathetic, ended up destroyed. She finally found the form in the miniature, the style she had discovered in her youth before illuminated manuscripts. The collection appeared in 1974; an English translation by Magnus Jan Kryński and Robert A. Maguire appeared in Kraków in 1979, in a bilingual edition, and Piotr Florczyk then produced a new one in 2011.
Who it is for
Pieces of a few lines, without commentary, which read quickly. There is no French edition of this collection.
Prizes and reception
The book that made her known for her testimony on the uprising; Czesław Miłosz, who translated it, took it as an example of the difficulty of writing such an experience.
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