SOURCE: “Without Boundaries,” in Parnassus, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring/Summer, 1991, pp. 110–28.

In the following excerpt, Aaron praises Różewicz's “The Survivor” and Other Poems.

Tadeusz Różewicz, strongly present in [Czeslaw] Milosz's anthology, is now available to American readers through a cogent selection, “The Survivor” and Other Poems, translated by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire and published by Princeton's poetry in translation series in 1976. The war is perhaps more overtly central to Różewicz's poetry than to that of any of his current contemporaries. A twenty-four-year-old survivor in 1945, having fought with the military underground, he was, he writes, “full of worshipful admiration for works of art (the aesthetic experience having replaced the religious), but at the same time, there grew within me a contempt for all aesthetic values. … I consciously gave up the privileges that accrue to poetry. … and I turned to the banal truth, to common...