Wcielenie słowa: On the Drafts of the Poem To Piotr by Tadeusz Różewicz

In the frame of the poetic works of Tadeusz Różewicz (1921-2014) has been observed and widely studied his inclination to avoid the closed form of his poems, changing and proposing them again with slight variations in different volumes and, quite often, in completely different contexts, in order to renew their meanings. What is still to be studied in depth, however, is the creative process regarding his unpublished works, such as the preparatory drafts kept in his archive. Genetic studies are a precious key to discover not only Różewicz’s creative process, but also some aspects of his poetics, which in the published works remain rather clouded. In his creative process, as he himself admitted in the poem Przypomnienie [Reminder, 1992] (“I become a poet / when I cross out words”), he used to proceed by elimination. In this paper I’d like to analyse, from a critical-genetic point of view, the manuscripts of one poem from Płaskorzeźba [Bas-relief, 1991], that is Do Piotra [To Piotr], in order to recover the parts the poet decided to remove. The four manuscripts ascribable to this poem are extremely different from each other and all of them reveal an interesting aspect of Różewicz’s poetics. Among the more important matters are placed numerous biblical citations, which disclose a religious way of reading the poem, that completely disappears in the published form of To Piotr. From the analysis of these drafts some interesting interconnections with other poems of Bas-relief are also to be found, exposing a much deeper level of interpretation of the entire volume.