Vox Populi
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Tadeusz Dabrowski: The Sentence
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
It’s as if you’d woken in a locked cell and found
in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence in a language you don’t know.
And you’d be sure this sentence was the key to your life. Also to this cell.
And you’d spend years trying to decipher the sentence, until finally you’d understand it. But after a while you’d realize you got it wrong, and the sentence meant
something else entirely. And so you’d have two sentences.
Then three, and four, and ten, until you’d created a new language. And in that language you’d write the novel of your life.
And once you’d reached old age, you’d notice the door of the cell was open. You’d go out into the world. You’d walk the length and
breadth of it,
until in the shade of a massive tree you’d yearn
for that one single sentence in a language you don’t know.
~~~~
Copyright 2025 Tadeusz Dabrowski and Antonia Lloyd-Jones. From The Scent of Man by Tadeusz Dąbrowski translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Arrowsmith, 2025). Included in Vox Populi by permission of Arrowsmith Press.
Tadeusz Dąbrowski is a poet, essayist, critic, and editor-in-chief of the literary bimonthly Topos. His work has been translated into 30 languages. He is the author of nine volumes of poetry in his native Polish and a dozen in translation. Two of his collections, Black Square and POSTS, have been published in English by Zephyr Press. He lives in Gdańsk on the Baltic coast of Poland.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading writers including Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk.
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Gasp! What a poem.
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Isn’t it great?
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How many of us build our own cells but don’t realize it until much, much later? This is a very thought-provoking and beautiful poem.
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Yes, I love this poem.
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oh my gosh. this. this.
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Thanks, Rosemerry. I love this translation.
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How often we assume the door is closed and closed tight, when all we have to do is walk across the threshold.
Thanks for this moving poem.
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Well-said, Luray. Thank you!
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I think the ‘sentence’ is your life, and that the ‘beginning’ was always in the ‘end’, and vice versa.
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an astute reading of the poem. thank you.
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it had a beautiful echo of Elliot’s going back at the end to the beginning.
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Oh, yes… I hear it now.
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Antonia’s translations wewre always gifts.
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aren’t they?
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Sometimes when I read a poem, I feel a real catch in my chest as if I saw a magnificent creature from the corner of my eye and when I turn to look, only the tiniest tail tip is disappearing behind a rock. This is such a poem. Thank you.
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perfect description, Barb.
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i love this! To me it’s a surreal statement of questioning faith and the places it leads you.
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How interesting! Thank you, Deborah!
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Aren’t we all trying to decipher that sentence?
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Michael: Sometimes I wish I could post pictures with my responses
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And so I must take the poem to be about the process of realization. Finding meaning and words for one another and indeed it is a kind of amnesty from ones innermost prison. We are strange creatures with our ability to write & speak but not so different from things of this world if you look out with understanding and see the world is crying and writing and marking and scratching everywhere. I hear an owl just now outside the window in the rising light as if he knew was saying this.
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a beautiful response to the poem, Sean.
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Sean, you write:
“the world is crying and writing and marking and scratching everywhere”
I just watched a squirrel carry a large walnut into the yard, then begin vigorously scratching a hiding place for its treasure. Yes, you remind us to look out with understanding on such things as squirrels and owls, but also the crying all around us.
–muchas gracias for the offerings of your writing you share with us readers–
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It seems to me, we humans in our “superiority” over think and complicate everything. Maybe, it’s not the words or the sentence we search for but the courage it takes to pen them and accept the horrors and failures we evoke.
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yes
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Love the owl. How wonderfully synchronisitic!
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And it was instantaneous with the thought that everything is making some kind of expression always. Suddenly, there’s this owl in the dawn.
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