Behind a curtain of leaves, behind the trees – people’s shadows, heart-breaking stories told with reticence and hesitation. Something to do with nationality, memory, language and something about gender. Identity patiently revealed in the next image, memory, experience.
– Karol Maliszewski

In elegantly crafted, beautiful, original and nostalgic – never sentimen­tal – stories, Maria Jastrzębska shows us a reality filled with arrivals and separations in which ‘the two strangers’ can turn out to be your grandpa­rents.
– Urszula Chowaniec

In superb translations by Anna Błasiak, Wioletta Grzegorzewska and Paweł Gawroński, they sound clearly and are like the bumblees in the poem of that same title which granny Julka held to her ear. They hummed, grumbling in the dark/space between her palms and then/she’d let them go.
– Anna Piwkowska

This poet’s coat of arms has a wolf on it. Her language sniffs out, tracks, rips flesh, fights, sometimes choses escape, parties madly, desires. Don’t you wish you were in her pack!
– Eliza Szybowicz

 

Maria Jastrzębska − poet, editor, translator and animateur. Born in Warsaw in 1953, she and her family emigrated to the UK four years later. She studied psychology at Sussex University 1973-1976 and lives in Brighton.

She has published Postcards From Poland (Working Press, 1991), Home from Home (Flarestack, 2002), Syrena (Redbeck Press, 2004), I’ll Be Back Before You Know It (Pighog Press 2009), Everyday Angels (Waterloo Press 2009) and At The Library of Memories (Waterloo Press 2013). Her drama Dementia Diaries toured nationally including Edinburgh, Cardiff, Brighton, Southampton. She co-translated Elsewhere, the selected poems of Iztok Osojnik with Ana Jelnikar (Pighog Press 2011) and is translating the work of Justyna Bargielska.

Her own poems in translation have featured in: artPapier, Fraza, Poezja Dzisiaj, Pamietnik Literacki (translated by Anna Maria Mickiewicz), Pełnym Głosem, Szafa and Salon Literacki. In 2012 her work was recorded in the British Library archive project Poetry and Translation – Between Two Worlds. Her poetry has been translated into Polish, Finnish, French and Slovenian.

Cedry z Walpole Park / The Cedars of Walpole Park
By Maria Jastrzębska
Translated to Polish by Anna Błasiak, Paweł Gawroński and Wioletta Grzegorzewska
Published by K.I.T. Stowarzyszenie Żywych Poetów (5th volume in ‘Faktoria Poezji’ series), 2015
Co-published by OFF_PRESS
Supported by the Polish Cultural Institute in London
ISBN 978-8361381945
Order online