like burned roses in my arms

Incredibly, the English-speaking world has never paid much attention to the twentieth-century Polish poet Krystok Kamil Baczyński. Bill Johnston has now brought out a book of new translations, White Magic and Other Poems.

Baczyński, at 18 already acknowledged a major poet, was killed in action in the Warsaw Uprising at the age of 23. He is particularly known for his love poems to Barbara Drapczyńska, who he married in 1942, and who was also killed. 

Baczyński's searing, relentless, cliché-free imagery explode even the purest expressions of faith - the Hail Mary now "Madonna of mine, full of sin" - and everything collapses, nightmarishly:  "Sucking and imbibing, / the colossal maw of the abyss...like a child that is dying, / and like a father who must live on."

Alongside unimaginable horror, Baczyński still knows what is beautiful, particularly in the erotics ("I'll open for you the golden sky/Where the white thread of silence is...").  Perhaps that is because he was so young.    Young men should not be dead, but instead should be in love, with their wives, with the world around, with music and dancing.  They should be full of joy, and faith:  that is the natural way of being young.  Youth was the only unspoiled thing.  w tej grozie jedna była czysta.