Andrzej Slomianowski

It is a sequence of three poems that relate crusades undertaken in the defence of language - or simply, the word. The English title would be "The Captive Word - or the three crusades" and is an allusion to the famous book by Czeslaw Milosz "The Captive Mind". When Milosz wrote his book over half a century ago the dangers to language were mainly political. Today they are more complex: aside from politics those dangers come from many directions. Media, advertising, IT, computer programming, new sciences, new technologies etc. - all use language as we know (or knew) it according to their purposes, that is mainly as an instrument. As a consequence of that purely utilitarian use of language the meaning of words changes and communication becomes increasingly more difficult. The three poems in this book describe imaginary crusades that aim at saving language - that is at freeing the word from its captivity.

The book is a moving description of a middle-aged woman's fight with a breast cancer, her suffering, her hope and eventually hear death. She is a teacher of English at a Roudolph Steiner school in Saarland, Germany, and her fight with her terminal illness is shown both in its physical and spiritual apsects. Her overall atittude to her fate is like that of Herrmann Hesse, a famous German writer. With Hesse she believes that death is not the end of all. Death, so seen, is rather a stage in an undending process of eternal rebirth and transformation.