Różycki’s verse teems with sensuous, imaginatively rendered details: “that half-drunk cup of tea, the mirror / filled up with want, the strand of hair curling toward / the drain like the Silk Road through the Karakum / known as Tartary, the wall that defends the void. — The New Yorker about “To The Letter” (Briefly Noted, February 2024 column).

Dictums about the impossibility of translating poetry abound, from Frost’s oft-misquoted aphorism that poetry is what’s lost in translation to John Ciardi’s oft-misattributed statement that translation is the art of failure. But perhaps the two of us met young enough and with sufficient naïve optimism—spurred on by our mutual mentor Adam Zagajewski who introduced us in 2004—to take on the impossible. Soon I started translating Tomasz’s poetry. – Mira Rosenthal, “The Music of Other Tongues: On Translating Rhyme and Rhythm in Poetry”, Literary Hub

Tomasz Różycki, and award-winning poet and translator Mira Rosenthal present To The Letter, the third collection of Różycki’s poetry to be translated by Rosenthal.

Tomasz Różycki’s To the Letter follows Lieutenant Anielewicz on the hunt for any clues that might lead 21st century human beings out of a sense of despair. With authoritarianism rising across Eastern Europe, the Lieutenant longs for a secret hero. At first, he suspects some hidden mechanism afoot: fruit tutors him in the ways of color, he drifts out to sea to study the grammar of tides, or he gazes at the sun as it thrums away like a timepiece.

Tomasz Różycki is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose. He will be reading from his new collection in English translation, To the Letter. Over the last decade he has garnered almost every prize Poland has to offer as well as widespread critical acclaim, with work translated into numerous languages and frequent appearances at international festivals. He is the recipient of the 2023 Wisława Szymborska Prize and the 2023 Prix Grand Continent, among other awards. In the U.S., he has been featured at the Unterberg Poetry Center, the Princeton Poetry Festival, and the Brooklyn Book Festival. His volume Colonies (translated by Mira Rosenthal) won the Northern California Book Award and was a finalist for numerous other prizes, including the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Mira Rosenthal is the author of Territorial, a Pitt Poetry Series selection and finalist for the INDIES Book of the Year award, and The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and residencies at Hedgebrook and MacDowell, she is an associate professor of creative writing at Cal Poly. Her translations of Polish poetry include Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline and Tomasz Różycki’s Colonies, which won the Northern California Book Award and was shortlisted for numerous other prizes, including the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.