S4E12 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.

For all the tragedy that Poland faced in the twentieth century, it might be said that Poland harvested a bumper crop in the field of poetry with Nobel Prize winners Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, and major international figures translated widely such as Tadeusz Różewicz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Adam Zagajewski, all of whom have been topics in this series. But where is Polish poetry today, after the age of giants?

In this episode we meet two productive, award-winning poets who have recent publications in English and who have been traveling and reading in the English-speaking world and beyond. They read some of their work, and we discuss their backgrounds. We have often asked translators how they work with writers in this series, but in this episode, we get to ask two poets how they see the author-translator relationship from their perspectives.

Krystyna Dąbrowska was born in 1979 and is a poet, essayist and translator. She is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Miasto z indu (City of Indium, 2022). She has won the Wisława Szymborska Award, the Kościelski Prize for young writers, and the Literary Award of the Capital City of Warsaw. Her poems have been translated into more than twenty languages. They have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Poetry, Georgia Review, Threepenny Review, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Akzente, and Sinn und Form. Full-length collections of her poems have been published in Italian, German, Swedish, Portuguese, and English. Tideline (Zephyr Press, 2022), translated by Karen Kovacik, Mira Rosenthal, and Antonia Lloyd-Jones, was a finalist for the Derek Walcott Prize and longlisted for ALTA’s National Translation Award in Poetry. She won a 2024 Pushcart Prize for “Travel Agency,” a poem translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. She has translated the work of William Carlos Williams, Thom Gunn, Charles Simic, Kim Moore, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Louise Glück into Polish. In 2022 she participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and she lives and works in Warsaw.

Tomasz Różycki was born in 1970 and has nine volumes of poetry to his credit, most recently Ręka pszczelarza (The Beekeeper’s Hand) in 2022, winner of the Wisława Szymborska Award. He has two epic poems Ijasz in 2021 and Twelve Stations, which has been translated into English by Bill Johnston; two novels, most recently The Lightbulb Thieves in 2023, winner of the Grand Continent Award; as well as two volumes of sketches, most recently The Test of Fire: The Erroneous Cartography of Europe published in 2020 and winner of the Ambassador of the New Europe Award. He has received among other honors, the Kościelski Prize, the Vaclav Burian Award, and the Samuel Linde Award and has been a guest of the Berliner Kuenstlerprogramm scholarship and the Siegfried-Unseld Professorship at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Krystyna Dąbrowska and Tomasz Różycki in English Translation:

Krystyna Dąbrowska. Tideline. Tr. Karen Kovacik, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, and Mira Rosenthal. Brookline, Mass.: Zephyr Press, 2022.

Krystyna Dąbrowska. Selections from The Poetry Foundation. Tr. Karen Kovacik.

Krystyna Dąbrowska. Selections from poets.org. Tr. Karen Kovacik.

Krystyna Dąbrowska. Selections from Solstice Magazine. Tr. Karen Kovacik.

Krystyna Dąbrowska. Selections from Versopolis Review. Tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Tomasz Różycki. Colonies. Tr. Mira Rosenthal. Brookline, Mass.: Zephyr Press, 2013. 

Tomasz Różycki. The Forgotten Keys. Tr. Mira Rosenthal. Brookline, Mass.: Zephyr Press, 2007.

Tomasz Różycki. To the Letter. Tr. Mira Rosenthal. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Archipelago Books, 2022.

Tomasz Różycki. Twelve Stations. Tr. Bill Johnston. Brookline, Mass.: Zephyr Press, 2015.

Tomasz Różycki. Selections from Asymptote Journal. Tr. Mira Rosenthal.

Tomasz Różycki. Selections from Words Without Borders. Tr. Mira Rosenthal.

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