S6E8 and all video recordings are available on our YouTube.

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.

Jacek Dukaj (b. 1974) is one of Poland’s most distinguished science fiction writers today, working in the literary tradition of Stanisław Lem, considering philosophical ideas and history in the context of futuristic scenarios as well writing straightforward essays about literature and the future of writing more broadly. He has won the European Union Prize for Literature, Kościelski Literary Award, the Czech Magnesia Litera covering all genres, and several Janusz A. Zajdel Awards given for science fiction in Polish, and Ursula Phillips’s translation of his monumental novel, Ice, is the winner of the Found in Translation Award for books translated from Polish into English in 2025.

In this episode we take some time to unravel some of the philosophical issues around the excerpts from Tadeusz Kotarbiński’s essay cited at the beginning of each section of Ice, and the problem of future contingents, or how we understand the truth status of statements about events that take place in the future. We look at the first part as a Warsaw novel-within-the-novel, and consider the many comparative dimensions of this rich work which is part dystopian, has a long journey by train, offers a reconsideration of history around the time of the Russian Revolution if the first World War were displaced by a world-changing natural occurrence, and presents the general atmosphere of a kind of futuristic past. We also consider the complexity of translating a work that is full of neologisms and is written in an archaic style that doesn’t really have a suitable analogue in English.

Jacek Dukaj in English translation and recommended resources:

Jacek Dukaj. Ice. Tr. Ursula Phillips. London: Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury, 2025.

Jacek Dukaj official website.

Ursula Phillips’s most recent translation is Jacek Dukaj’s sci-fi-cum-alternative-history epic Ice (2007) published in November 2025 by Head of Zeus (Bloomsbury), winner of the Found in Translation Award. Also in 2025, she contributed translations to The Penguin Anthology of Polish Short Stories, edited by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, of Pola Gojawiczyńska and Maria Kuncewiczowa (the latter’s controversial “Covenant with a Child,” 1927). Other recent translations include Piotr Paziński’s Bird Streets (2013, trans. 2022) and Agnieszka Taborska’s The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks (2013, trans. 2024). She has also translated academic books including Grzegorz Niziołek’s The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust (2019).

She is an Honorary Research Fellow of the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where she worked for twenty-three years as Area Specialist librarian responsible for the Russian, Ukrainian and Polish collections and also occasionally taught Polish literature to undergraduates, before devoting herself primarily to translation. She has contributed to and co-edited five volumes of essays on Polish literature. She has been instrumental in introducing the work of Polish women authors from the 19th and early 20th centuries to Anglophone readers. Translations include Maria Wirtemberska’s Malvina, or The Heart’s Intuition (1816), Narcyza Żmichowska’s The Heathen (1846), Zofia Nałkowska’s Choucas (1927), for which she received the 2015 Found in Translation Award, and Boundary (1935), for which she received the PIASA Wacław Lednicki Award in 2017.

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