Polish Poetry in Translation: An Introduction

Witness, irony, and the generation after

Polish Poetry and the Question of Language: A Note on This Index

A language note that matters for this index: Kadya Molodowsky’s Paper Bridges, translated by Kathryn Hellerstein and published by Wayne State University Press, is in Yiddish rather than Polish. Molodowsky was born in what is now Belarus and wrote within the Jewish-Yiddish literary tradition rather than the Polish national one. Her inclusion here raises the question of how to handle Jewish writers from the Polish territories whose primary literary identity is not Polish — a question that recurs across Central and Eastern European indices. Paper Bridges is noted here but belongs more properly to a Yiddish language index.

Zbigniew Herbert in English Translation

Herbert is here in Alissa Valles’s landmark translation — the current standard in English and a genuine rereading of Herbert’s sardonic, classically inflected irony rather than simply an update of the earlier Carpenter and Dale Scott versions. Adam Zagajewski’s Eternal Enemies in Clare Cavanagh’s translation represents the lyric-elegiac mode that brought Polish poetry its largest English readership.

Recovered and Underread Polish Poets Now Available in English

The contemporary entries are where the index distinguishes itself. Zuzanna Ginczanka — a Polish-Jewish poet murdered in the Holocaust whose work has only recently received serious English-language attention — appears here in Valles’s translation from NYRB, a signal that the field is beginning to address historical gaps in who gets translated and remembered.

Contemporary Polish Poets in English Translation

Tomasz Różycki’s To the Letter in Mira Rosenthal’s Archipelago translation, Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s Peregrinary in Bill Johnston’s Zephyr version, and Julia Fiedorczuk’s Oxygen — also Johnston at Zephyr — represent a generation of Polish poets whose work responds to history without being consumed by it, and whose formal intelligence is not primarily testimonial. Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline, translated by a team of three including Rosenthal, Kovacik, and Lloyd-Jones, and Grzegorz Wróblewski’s Kopenhaga in Piotr Gwiazda’s translation extend the picture further into the contemporary.

Translators and Presses Bringing Polish Poetry to English Readers

Zephyr Press is the dominant publisher in this index, carrying four of ten entries, and their sustained commitment to Polish poetry in English is one of the more important institutional facts about how this tradition reaches anglophone readers. Alissa Valles and Bill Johnston are the two most present translators: Valles tends toward formal precision and historical attentiveness; Johnston toward tonal accessibility and lyric flow.

Where I would begin

Here. Wisława Szymborska; translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak; Polish; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

Building the Barricade and Other Poems of Anna Swir. Anna Swir; translated by Piotr Florczyk; Polish; Calypso Editions, 2011.

Colonies. Tomasz Rozycki; translated by Mira Rosenthal; Polish; Zephyr Press (AZ), 2012.

Oxygen. Julia Fiedorczuk; translated by Bill Johnston; Polish; Zephyr Press.

Begin with Szymborska’s deceptively casual intelligence in Here, then move to Anna Swir’s bodily compression in Building the Barricade. Różycki’s Colonies and Fiedorczuk’s Oxygen pull the route into postwar inheritance, travel, ecology, and contemporary form. The four books also let you compare Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak, Piotr Florczyk, Mira Rosenthal, and Bill Johnston as distinct makers of English poems.

Continue with the Polish-language archive, then use the translated poetry by country to place this archive beside a more distant language or country. The translator index shows how often access depends on years of work by people whose names can disappear in a quick recommendation. How to Read Poetry in Translation gives permission to begin without specialist knowledge, read aloud, and leave some uncertainty in place. The International Poetry Library is the route back to the full collection. Treat all of these pages as open shelves rather than a syllabus. One excellent poem is enough reason to stay with a book, and one book is enough reason to look for the tradition it cannot contain.

Further reading

Every Poet Has to Be Lonely: Tomasz Różycki and His Translators. World Literature Today. A conversation about collaboration, tone, and the afterlives of Polish poems in English.

Emigration, Displacement, and Loss in Polish Poetry. Words Without Borders. An interview that links translation to displacement and the changing geography of Polish poetry.