born in transit / I came upon on the place of death

So Ryszard Krynicki begins the early lyric that gave his 1969 debut volume Act of Birth its title (a poem which ends: -I live / in the place of death-). These are not simply metaphors. One of the greatest poets of postwar Poland, Krynicki was born in 1943 in a Nazi labor camp in Austria, where his parents, Polish peasants from Ukraine, served as slave laborers. Act of Birth marked the emergence of a major voice-alongside Adam Zagajewski and Stanislaw Baranczak-in Poland's -Generation of 68- or -New...