"Hand—compelled to strike" Mieczslaw Jastrun writes in his poem "Knife with Red Shaft," "do you need an angel?" A lyric poet and essayist, Jastrun survived the terrible years of the Nazi occupation and the Stalinist period in Poland, "endangered every moment," as Czeslaw Milosz says, "because of his Jewish origin." During his lifetime he published a dozen volumes of poetry, including A Human Matter, A Meeting in Time, Protected Hour and Memorials. Elegaic in tone, this selection from Memorials (published in 1969) presents some of his strongest, most mysterious poems. Never has his sense of mortality been stated more intensely or more precisely, "The cup extinguishes the drinker." Jastrun concerned himself most often with metaphysics and morality. "And space/grows emptier/in an empty glass—," the poet says, "the world,/four folded pages." However, as a poet who published his poems in resistance periodicals, he couldn't turn his back on the horrors of the genocide; nor was he able to escape historical necessity and despair in even his most mystical writings. "This wall, this air—/ after the shot,/ emptiness stood there,/ yet far/ lips—wall." Memorials introduces in English a powerful selection of poems by one of the most well-respected Polish poets of the 20th century. There is great sorrow in these later poems of the remarkable Polish poet and translator, Mieczysław Jastrun, whose great mastery of form and metaphysical thought are apparent throughout. The beauty of these spare lines and images both surprise and deepen the mystery of his complete engagement with experience: "Chrysanthemums, purple / with anger, almost disappeared in shadow," "the cup extinguishes the drinker," he writes. Experience for Jastrun was a matter of faith as well as intimate revelation, not to mention survival. These are truly extraordinary poems. Hats off to their translators, who have somehow managed to bring forth both his "cold fire" and "tree of sorrow/ rooted deep in my heart." —Philip Schultz Reading the poems of Mieczysław Jastrun, I am reminded of Sonnet 65 in which William Shakespeare writes: How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? The poems of Jastrun are testament to how it is indeed possible for a poet to show an amazing strength of art and life and spirit. I am so very grateful to Dzvinia Orlowsky and Jeff Friedman for making these necessary poems with their hard-won beauty available to American readers. —Stuart Dischell Orlowsky and Friedman render Mieczysław Jastrun into a new idiom, a third language in order to convey the inexplicable. As in the theological definition of translation as an act of miraculous displacement, these translations transform and enthrall the originals. In these wild, extravagant lines, I feel humanity, I feel faith. —Ewa Chrusciel