Furioso – 3 Angry Poets

by

Marcel Weyland

Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Julian Tuwim

Poland underwent a dismemberment by the Russian, German and Austrian empires at the end of the eighteenth century, and after a brief rebirth , a fourth bloody partition between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. It was a long, hard and painful period for a proud nation to endure. No surprise then that in reaction it produced some great writing and that its finest writers used considerable spleen, anguish and yes, fury, directed at their targets: Adam Mickiewicz at the Tsar and his hired henchmen, Juliusz Słowacki at a pope who turned a blind eye to the suffering of his most loyal people (and against God himself), and a hundred years later by Julian Tuwim aimed at the leaders of Europe pushing it into the bloodiest conflict ever. The poets’ weapons were satire – and, of course, fury.

Translated from Polish by Marcel Weyland

About the Author

Marcel Weyland

Marcel Weyland escaped war-time Poland in 1940 and arrived in Australia as a war refugee in 1946. He is an architect with a law degree, and an interpreter and translator of Polish poetry, his previous translations being Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, Echoes – Poems of the Holocaust, The Word: 200 Years of Polish Poetry and Wladyslaw’s Szlengel’s What I Read to the Dead. Recently published is Love, Sex and Death, the poems of Boleslaw Lesmian, all published by Brandl & Schlesinger. He has lectured and given readings extensively in London, Poland, Lithuania, New Zealand and throughout Australia, and been invited to three successive International Congresses of Translators held in Krakow, Poland. He has been awarded the Order of Merit by the Polish Minister of Culture (2005), the medal of the Order of Australia (2008), the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit by the President of Poland (2012) and the Gold Cross Gloria Artis again by the Minister of Culture (2013).

In 1952 he married artist Phillipa Keane. They live in Sydney Australia and have 5 children, 21 gandchildren and 3 great grandchildren.