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Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian 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 and Ukrainian Literature series and the timeline.

Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1894-1980) was one of the most important and prolific Polish writers across genres of the mid-twentieth century who stayed in Poland. He served for many years as editor of the journal Twórczość and head of the Polish Writers’ Union and Vice-President of the Polish PEN Club. He wrote several stories that made their way into films such as Andrzej Wajda’s The Maids of Wilko and The Birch Grove as well as Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels. He wrote the libretto to Karol Szymanowski’s opera King Roger. He published poetry and novels throughout his life, including the three-volume family saga covering the period of both World Wars, Fame and Glory,

In this episode we focus on two longer stories by Iwaszkiewicz that might be considered novellas, “The Birch Grove” and “Mother Joan of the Angels.” We talk about some aspects of his biography, his activity during World War II, his open homosexuality, his position in Communist Poland as a powerful editor and long-serving head of the writer’s union, and how he managed to maintain his integrity through Nazi occupation and Communist corruption.

Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz in English translation:

Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. “The Birch Grove” and Other Stories. Tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Intro. by Leszek Kołakowski. Budapest: CEU Press, 2002.

Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. “Icarus.” Warsaw Tales. Sel. and tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Ed. Helen Constantine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. Pgs. 31-38.

Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. “Mother Joanna of the Angels” (extract). The Dedalus Book of Polish Fantasy. Ed. and tr. Wiesiek Powaga. New York: Hippocrene, 1996. Pgs. 268-99.

Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. “A New Love.” The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories. Ed. and tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. London: Penguin UK, 2025.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. She is best known for her translations of novels by Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. One of her earliest translations was of works by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, The Birch Grove and Other Stories (CEU Press). Her most recent publication is The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories, for which she selected and co-translated the 39 stories dating from 1925 to the present.

Benjamin Paloff chairs the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, where he is also Professor of Comparative Literature and a faculty affiliate of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies. His most recent books are Worlds Apart: Genre and the Ethics of Representing Camps, Ghettos, and Besieged Cities (Columbia University Press, 2025) and Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning (Northwestern University Press, 2025); vs Computer, his third collection of poems, is forthcoming in 2026. He has translated about a dozen books and many shorter literary and theoretical texts from Polish, Czech, Russian, and Yiddish, notably works by Dorota Masłowska, Marek Bieńczyk, Richard Weiner, and Yuri Lotman, and he has received grants and fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows, Stanford Humanities Center, and National Endowment for the Arts, among others.

David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer
Bartek Remisko, Curator and Executive Producer
Natalia Iyudin, Producer