XX

Budze sie. - Straszna nade mna kobieta                         French Translation
      Spiewala swoje czarodziejskie runy.                        Spanish Translation
"Ojczyzna twoja - wrzeszczala - zabita,                         Portuguese Translation
      Ja jedna zywa...a ty zamiast truny
Miales moj zywot. - Popiolem nakryta
      I zaplodniona przez proch i pioluny
Wydalam ciebie, abys byl mscicielem!
Synu popiolow, nazwany Popielem...

                  XXI

"Sam jeden jestes... ale cie przymioty
      Ojcow napelnia...a ja dam dwa duchy:
Na prawo stanie-c jeden aniol zloty,
      Na lewo jeden z krwi i zawieruchy;
Ci dwaj... ty trzeci...i i moj glos jak grzmoty,
      Pedzacy w zemste. " - (...)

                  I

Cierpienia moje i meki serdeczne,
      I ciagla walke z szatanow gromada,
Ich bronie jasne i tarcze sloneczne,
      Jamy, wezowa napelnione zdrada...
Powiem...wyroki wypelniajac wieczne,
      Ktore to na mnie dzisiaj brzemie klada,
Abym wyspiewal rzeczy przeminiete
I wielkie duchow swietych wojny swiete.
(...)

                        Juliusz Slowacki, Krol Duch. 1847

 

Mickiewicz's fellow-exile and main rival, Juliusz Slowacki (1809-1849), was less appreciated by his contemporaries. Yet his voluminous output spans a great many genres from lyric poems to poetic dramas to tales in verse and visionary epics, and his plays are a crucial factor in the evolution of Polish romantic poetry as well as theater. Written mostly in verse, they experiment with both versification and dramatic construction; their settings are variously realistic, historical, legendary, dreamlike, or symbolic. In his poems, Slowacki felt equally at ease in epic description or in lyric confession, in complex stanza patterns or in biblical prose. His book-length poem in ottava rima, Beniowski (1841), is a magnificent example of the gentre of the "poem of digressions" and of romantic irony, close in its style to Byron's Don Juan and Pushkin's Evgenij Onegin. The last, "mystical" period in Slowacki's short life yielded an immense (even though unfinished) poem, also in ottava rima, Krol-Duch (King-Spirit, 1847), a mythopoetic vision of Polish destiny shown through consecutive reincarnations of the nation's spirit.Slowacki's significance lies not only in his matchless technical virtuosity but also in that in his last phase he was an early forerunner of modern trends in poetry, including symbolism. Characteristically, his fame grew rapidly in the 1890s and 1900s.

 

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