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Jan Twardowski's poetry is hardly known outside Poland. This introduction will surely encourage those who have not heard of him to search for translations of the work of a poet `of great breadth and humanity who can speak to a great variety of readers on many levels about life and death, love and faith, God and mankind '.
Sometimes it happens that an author who is well known, widely read, and frequently quoted in his own country is entirely unknown outside it. It is odd that Jan Twardowski should be in this position, since there is a good deal of interest in Polish poetry now among English-speaking readers and his poetry is refreshingly universal. Jan Twardowski may be a parish priest, but his poetry is far from parochial.
Jan Twardowski was born in 1915 in Warsaw. In his twenties he published Powrot Andersena (The Return of Andersen - a reference to Hans Christian Andersen), but his next book had to wait until after the war and after Stalin. In 1944 Jan Twardowski took part in the Warsaw Uprising and watched the Nazis gradually win the street battles while the Russian army sat complacently on the other side of the Vistula River waiting for the smoke to clear. He must have already been a seminarian then, because he was ordained in 1948 and assigned a village parish outside Warsaw. In 1959 he went back to central Warsaw to the Church of the Visitation, where he has remained ever since. This is an interesting and historic church: part of the convent of the Sisters of the Visitation, an example of Polish Baroque with sunbursts and statues that almost move. This Church in Krakowskie Przedmiescie Street has always been the place for fashionable society weddings, even in the days when Warsaw wasn't supposed to have any fashionable society. Fr Twardowski now lives in semi-retirement in rooms in the convent complex attached to the church.
His poetic output since 1959 has been prolific. In that year he published Wiersze (Poems), the first volume of his maturity. He was unable to publish any poems before the relative relaxation of the Communist regime in 1956. Now a bibliography with only the most basic information would run to several pages....