Tag Archives: Polish
On the production and consumption of pierogis, by Tomasz Rozycki
In honor of familial feasting of all kinds we thought we would offer the great Pierogi Divertimento from Tomasz Rozycki’s book-length modern-day epic Twelve Stations, which we sampled in large part in Little Star #4 and will shortly appear in its entirety, in Bill Johnston’s translation, from Zephyr Press. It suffices to know that Twelve […]
Writers: Bill Johnston, Tomasz Różycki
Welcome Tadeusz Dabrowski
Writes Tomasz Rozycki of this week’s Little Star Weekly poet Tadeuz Dabrowski: “Tadeusz Dabrowski’s poetry is a child of its times, born of the two prevailing trends in recent Polish poetry, of two wonderful parents, who are nevertheless very different, often antagonistic, and occasionally at war. It is no accident that I use the word […]
Writers: Tadeusz Dabrowski
A Little Chess Table, new from Jerzy Pilch
It was a sweltering August in the year 1962. I was ten years old, and I was at the apogee of all possibilities. After some dozen months of incessant soccer playing, I had become a consummate forward. In a thick journal with a green binding, which I had received for my birthday, I was writing […]
Writers: Jerzy Pilch
Robert Wrigley: Allowable Error
A treasure from the AWP. Robert Wrigley reflects on the political in poetry across three wars. Wislawa Szymborska, who died this past February 1st, at the age of 88, won the Nobel Prize in 1996. She insisted no one was more surprised by this than she was. Newspapers all over the world reported her “embarrassment” […]
Writers: Robert Wrigley, Wislawa Szymborska
Zagajewski on Rilke
Out recently: the paperback edition of Edward Snow’s translations of Rilke, with Adam Zagajewski’s capacious introduction. From which: Maybe it’s more interesting to see Rilke’s work as not as virginal, not as ethereal, as it seems to many readers. After all, like the majority of literary modernists, he is an antimodern; one of the main […]
Writers: Adam Zagajewski
Two Poets from Adam Zagajewski: Tomasz Rozycki and Marie Lundquist
On Monday, March 28, Tomasz Różycki and Marie Lundquist will read with Adam Zagajewski in the Tenth Muse Series at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Here is a poem from each. CINNAMON AND CLOVES by Tomasz Różycki, translated by Mira Rosenthal I’m lying here with a hole in my head through which the […]
Writers: Marie Lundquist, Tomasz Różycki
Milosz celebrations all over
The centenary of the birth of Czeslaw Milosz has festivities busting out all over, with a bumper crop of marvelous participants. In New York, a tribute at the 92nd Street Y on March 21 will include Little Star‘s dynamic duo, Adam Zagajewski and his wonderful translator Clare Cavanagh (whose Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, […]
Writers: Adam Zagajewski, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert
Rozewicz Comes to America, II
Herewith our second of two samplings of the work of Tadeusz Różewicz, the last in his mighty generation of Polish poets to be fully heard in America. These three little poems find our poet in a characteristically laconic mode. The translator is Joanna Trzeciak. Click here for our first sample, a fantasia on who might […]
Writers: Tadeusz Rozewicz
Rozewicz Comes to America, I
Tadeusz Różewicz is the last of the great run of Polish poets that picked up where Polish independence left off to become fully audible in English. Norton publishes at the end of this month an ample survey of his career, Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Różewicz, translated by Joanna Trzeciak. Little Star brings you […]
Writers: Tadeusz Rozewicz
“An Interview with Atropos,” by Wislawa Szymborska
This fall’s bonanza of Polish literature continues with new translations of the Vermeer of modern poetry, Wislawa Szymborska. Szymborska was born in 1923 in Prowent, Poland. Five collections of her poems have been published in English. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. This poem is translated by Clare Cavanagh and the great […]
Writers: Wislawa Szymborska