THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN had a scoop on Saturday when it
published the translation of 'A Poem for Adults' by Adam Wazyk. Even from the translation one could see that the poem was excellent in itself, but the most extraordinary thing was that it should have been written by a Communist poet and published in the Communist Nowa Kultura of Warsaw. What could be more Fascist-cannibalistic than this moving stanza, for example : When the vulture of abstraction picks out our brains, When students are enclosed in textbooks without windows. When language is reduced to thirty incantations, When the lamp of imagination is extinguished, When good people from the moon deny us our taste— Then truly oblivion is dangerously near.
The censors came to their senses as soon as the issue was out and the police have tried to get every copy back. But the blow against the moon-men had been struck, and I shouldn't be surprised to learn that the effects of this courageous protest have rippled out already to the farthest borders of Poland.
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