S4E9 and all video recordings are available on our YouTube.

Encounters with Polish Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish Literature series and the timeline.

Jacek Dehnel (b. 1980 in Gdańsk, Poland) is a Polish poet, writer, translator and painter. He studied at the Warsaw University’s MISH College (Interdisciplinary Individual Humanistic Studies) and graduated from the Polish Language and Literature faculty. His first collection of poems was the last book recommended by Polish Nobel Prize winner, Czesław Miłosz. The author of nine books of poems, five novels, a few collections of short prose works, columns and essays, Dehnel has also translated works of Philip Larkin, Henry James, Edmund White, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, J.M. Coetzee, Charles Dickens and William Faulkner, among others. His own works have been translated into over a dozen languages, including two novels in English, Saturn (Dedalus Books 2013), and Lala (Oneworld 2018), translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. There are also two volumes of the crime series he writes with his husband, Piotr Tarczyński, under the pen name Maryla Szymiczkowa, Mrs Mohr Goes Missing and Karolina or the Torn Curtain, also translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones for Oneworld. His poems appear in various anthologies and journals, and there is a collection entitled Aperture translated by Karen Kovacik for Zephyr Press that received an Honorary Mention in the PEN America Poetry in Translation award.  Dehnel has been awarded prestigious literary prizes that include the Kościelski Award for younger writers and the Paszport Polityki, and he has been nominated for many others. He and his husband have lived in Berlin since 2020 and are in the process of relocating to Warsaw.

In this episode, we discuss his autobiographical novel about his grandmother who was one of his literary and artistic inspirations, Lala, we take a look at his collection of poetry recently translated into English by Karen Kovacik, and we consider his newest novel, not yet translated, The Swans, about a family scandal in the 1970s and a collection of eighteenth-century porcelain. We ask about the conflicts that might arise from having an author of family novels in the family. We discuss an issue that comes up in many of our translation-oriented episodes—how much control should the writer exert over the translator—but this time from the perspective of a writer who also translates, and we also think a bit about how the priorities might change when translating genre fiction as opposed to artistic fiction. We also think about how the responsibilities of the first translator of a work might differ from those of subsequent translators.

Jacek Dehnel in English Translation:

Jacek Dehnel. Aperture. Tr. Karen Kovacik. Brookline, Mass.: Zephyr Press, 2018.

Jacek Dehnel. Lala. Tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. London: Oneworld Publications, 2019.

Jacek Dehnel. Saturn. Tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Cambridgeshire: Dedelus Books, 2014.

Mysteries by Jacek Dehnel and Piotr Tarczyński as “Maryla Szymiczkowa” in English Translation

Maryla Szymicykowa. Karolina or the Torn Curtain. Tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. London: Oneworld, 2021.

Maryla Szymiczkowa. Mrs Mohr Goes Missing. Tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. London: Oneworld, 2021.