S6E5 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.

Stefan Żeromski (1864-1925) was born in Kielce in the wake of the January Insurrection against Russia to parents who died while he was young, so he was brought up largely by family and did not have a great deal of support as he set out to pursue education in veterinary medicine and a career as first as a private tutor, then as an author of short stories, and eventually as a novelist and playwright. This struggle proved to be an education in itself, bringing him into contact with people of high and low backgrounds as he developed a profound sense of empathy for others and ability to understand the struggles of the poor, of manual laborers, of victims of war including women, of animals exploited for their labor, and of those who were subject to environmental catastrophe brought on by industry. He was criticized for sentimentality, or “żeromszczyzna,” by some, but has been more widely loved as “the conscience of Polish literature,” as Czesław Miłosz calls him in his History of Polish Literature.

In this episode we focus on his novel The Homeless about a young physician who believes he must choose between love for his fiancée and duty to the poor as an advocate for public health. It is no coincidence that our guest began translating this novel during the early years of the COVID pandemic. We discuss the author’s representation of laborers, his portrayal of women, his focus on the environment, his use of humor, and his narrative techniques. Stephanie Kraft also tells us about the unusual path by which she became a translator of Polish literature as someone without Polish family background.

Stefan Żeromski in English translation:

Stefan Żeromski. Ashes. Tr. Helen Stankiewicz Zand. 2 vols. New York: Knopf, 1928.

Stefan Żeromski. The Coming Spring. Tr. Bill Johnston. New York: CEU Press, 2007.

Stefan Żeromski. The Faithful River. Tr. Bill Johnston. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999.

Stefan Żeromski. The Homeless. Tr. Stephanie Kraft. Intro. by Boris Dralyuk and Stephanie Croft. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004.

Stephanie Kraft holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Rochester (New York) with a specialty in the nineteenth-century novel. She was a journalist from 1974 to 2014, and in 1988 traveled to Poland on a study tour, afterward visiting the country each year for thirty-one years. In 1997, with help from Professor Robert Rothstein of the University of Massachusetts—Amherst, she began translating short Polish fiction and published stories in the translation journal Metamorphoses. Between 1999 and 2004 she translated The Emancipated Women by Bolesław Prus, which she self-published. Between 2005 and 2008, she translated Wojciech Żukrowski’s Stone Tablets, a controversial communist-era novel that was sympathetic to the Hungarian revolution (Paul Dry Books, 2016). Later she and Dr. Anna Gąsienica-Byrcyn  co-translated Marta by Eliza Orzeszkowa (Ohio University Press, 2018). In the early 2020s, during the covid pandemic, she translated a classic Polish novel concerned with the issue of public health, The Homeless, by Stefan Żeromski (Paul Dry Books,  2023).  In 2018 she received the Amicus Poloniae award from the Polish American Historical Association for contributions by a non-Polish person to the understanding of Polish culture.  

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