S5E2 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.

Bronisława Wajs, known most widely as Papusza (1908-87) is Poland’s, and arguably the world’s, most well-known Roma poet, though little of her work has been translated into English until recently, and most translations into languages other than Polish have been secondary translations from Polish. She was born in Sitaniec, a village in Eastern Poland near Lublin and Zamość, survived World War II in Volhynia, and like many Poles from the region that became Soviet Ukraine after the war, she was relocated to the “recovered territories” that had belonged to the Germans before the war in western Poland. Poet and researcher Jerzy Ficowski introduced her to the Polish-language audience beginning in 1949, and her poems in Ficowski’s translation were championed by such poetic luminaries as Julian Tuwim and Julian Przyboś. Her poetry has been described as “epic,” and though there is as a stereotype that Roma culture is static and folkloric, a number of ironic historical and political references can be found in her work. She has been the subject of a few films, most notably the feature biopic, Papusza (2013) directed by Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze, which won several festival awards.

In this episode, we look at some of the newly translated poems from Papusza’s memoir of the Volhynia massacre of 1943-44, Tears of Blood and a separate poem ostensibly about mushrooms. We consider the problems of translating and studying Papusza’s work, given the availability of materials, challenges posed by the language and existing editions, as well as methodological changes in how minority cultures are studied, and we discuss what some newly available letters reveal about her poems.

Papusza in English Translation:

Papusza / Bronisława Wajs. Tears of Blood: A Poet’s Witness Account of the Nazi Genocide of Roma. Ed. Volha Bartash, Tomasz Kamusella, and Viktor Shapoval. Roma History and Culture, v. 4. Paderborn, Germany: Brill, 2024. Open Access PDF available for free, includes an essay in English by Emilia Kledzik.

Emilia Kledzik, dr hab., works at the Laboratory of Literary and Cultural Comparative Studies at the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Author of the monograph Perspektywa poety. Cyganologia Jerzego Ficowskiego [The Poet’s Perspective. Gypsy Studies of Jerzy Ficowski] (Poznań 2023).  Editor-in-chief of the journal on comparative studies Porównania [Comparisons].

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