Tadeusz Dąbrowski. "The Scent of Man". Bilingual Poetry Reading and Book Talk

The Chanin Center in collaboration with Russian and East European Cultures at Hunter College | 

Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s poetry is as beguiling, reflective and precise as a thousand fragments of a shattered mirror. The poet is properly suspicious of the ambiguities concealed in all language: “very dangerous to know/too many words.//Each of them has its/flip side, which/also has its flip side/and so on ad infinitum.” Whether gazing at art or looking at laundry, meditating on our cravings for bread or literature, the poems move effortlessly between the mundane and the exalted, suggesting that the messiness of human experience, its visceral realities, the carnal truths of the body, our small joys and inevitable decay, are all part of the same fragile narrative. The Scent of Man, masterfully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, moves intimately through spaces sacred and profane, suggesting we are never fully in one world or the other but ever adrift in between.

Monday, November 3 at 7:00 pm