Snow Q to projekt artystyczny stworzony przez grupę artystów z Brighton i okolic, którzy postawili sobie za zadanie opowiedzenie na nowo i umieszczenie we współczesnym kontekście Królowej śniegu Hansa Christiana Andersena. Zaczęło się od współpracy trójki artystów o polskich koneksjach: poetki Marii Jastrzębskiej, plastyczki Dagmary Rudkin oraz kompozytora Petera Copleya, do których dołączyli również artystka filmowa Wendy Pye, …
Even though Milan Šelj is a translator of poetry from English into Slovene, and has lived in the UK and spoken English on an everyday basis for some time, Tracing the Unspoken is his first book in English (he has published four poetry collections and a novel in Slovenia). What a daring debut it is. …
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This book offers a very intricate, highly precise collage of images, each capturing something about the times we live in. It shows various versions of the discontent and crises that have become the trademark of our era. Each chapter can be read as a short story – at least that was how I started my …
Read more “#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews PIXEL by Krisztina Tóth”
I delved eagerly into this book, excited to have the chance to learn more about the Bauhaus outside of my more usual art-historian context. The book tells the story of a Bauhaus student, Luise Schilling, who first does a stint in Weimar and then, after a three-year break, comes back to study at the Bauhaus …
Read more “#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews BLUEPRINT by Theresia Enzensberger”
These are very intimate poems; reading them is like peeping into somebody’s private space or spying between the pages of a diary that was written only for the author herself. There is, therefore, a lot of fragility here; the poet is delicately exposing herself to us. One does feel like an intruder at times, even, …
Read more “#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews TIDAL EVENTS. SELECTED POEMS by Mária Ferenčuhová”
The Stephen Spender Trust was established in 1997 to promote poetry and translation. In this post Anna Blasiak, poet, translator and literature co-ordinator of the European Literature Network, who works with the Trust describes some of the fabulously creative multilingual poetry workshops she ran with children in the UK. The Stephen Spender Trust has been …
This is the fifth volume in the Periscope series of translated poetry by the New York-based publisher A Midsummer Night’s Press, following One is None by Kätlin Kaldmaa, Anything Could Happen by Jana Putrle Srdić, Dissection by Care Santos and Caravan Lullabies by Ilzė Butkutė (the last was reviewed in The Baltic Riveter last year). All of these books are pocket-size. And I mean it: …
Read more “#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews HAVING NEVER MET by Inga Pizāne”
A dense, tense and intense collection of thirteen short stories dealing with heavy issues, from violence, bullying, abuse and cruelty to social exclusion and homophobia, Games with Greta & Other Stories is a broken mirror, reflecting various aspects of life for queer women in Slovenian society, which, like most post-communist countries in Europe, seems still to be struggling …
Maria Jastrzębska was born in Poland but arrived in the UK in the 1950s at the age of four. Anna Blasiak arrived in the UK from Poland in 2003, age twenty-nine. Both women are poets, both are queer. In the following conversation (which they hold in English), they discuss the similarities and differences between their …
Reading this book is like walking through an amusement park. Actually no, that would be too artificial, too unreal, while the book is so very real; there is something authentic and sincere about it, something raw. Perhaps reading it is like being dropped into a wilderness. It will excite you in a joyous and a …
Read more “#RivetingReviews: Anna Blasiak reviews HYDRA’S HEADS by Nora Gomringer”
There is something delicate and extremely fragile about Pierre Lepori’s poetry and about the character(s) he creates. The voice he writes in is hushed – you really need to be free of any distractions to tune into it, to adjust to the seemingly plain language and pace, to the language stripped of anything surplus. And …
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This is a very special collection, consisting of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s poems and prose poems written in French during her stay in Paris in the years 1960–1964 and later, back in Buenos Aires, shortly before her suicide in 1972. Like her Spanish-language poems, the French ones (later also self-translated into Spanish) are full of …
I keep staring at the titles of Ilzė Butkutė’s two poetry collections – Caravan Lullabies and Carnival Moon – and I’m evermore sure that the alliteration cannot be accidental. The words mirror each other even more closely in the original Lithuanian: ‘karavanų’ and ‘karnavalų’. In fact the English collection, entitled Caravan Lullabies, consists of two parts, each a selection of …
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Often, without much thought (and quite insensitively), we consider other cultures to be intrinsically different from our own; we imagine our communities as divided from each other by huge crevices that are difficult or simply impossible to bridge. And yet the bridging happens, sometimes even when we don’t try. We stare at the divide and …
Read more “#RivetingReviews: SEVEN STONES by Vénus Khoury-Ghata”
Reading this book is like plunging head-first into deep water. You don’t know what awaits – either in the depths, or even right under the surface. You quickly learn, however, that you should expect anything and everything. There are moments when you swim smoothly through long passages, and these almost lull you. But then a …
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Justyna Bargielska has published eight poetry collections in her native Poland, as well as two fiction books and two children’s books. She has won some of the most prestigious literary prizes in Poland, has been translated and published in many languages (including in English in Modern Poetry in Translation) and has become a fixture on …
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Visegrad Insight (issue 1[10] 2017) has published my review of Natalia Fiedorczuk’s Jak pokochać centra handlowe (“How to Fall in Love with Shopping Malls”). Thank you to Julia Sherwood and the Visegrad Insight team for this amazing opportunity.
Julia Fiedorczuk, ELNet’s recent guest at one of our Euro Stars events, is known principally as a poet and a critic who popularised the idea of ecopoetry. She has published five collections of poems in her native Poland (Oxygen, translated into English by Bill Johnston, is about to be published in the US by Zephyr …
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Poland is Market Focus at The London Book Fair 2017. On this occasion British Council has commissioned a series of blogs and other texts focusing on Polish literature. Today was my turn. I decided to discuss some of the Polish writers living in the British Isles, both those writing in Polish and in English. Here it …
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Polish books in translation? It takes some effort to find them in bookshops and even more effort to read about them in the review sections of newspapers and magazines, or to find them in public libraries. And when it comes to books written by Polish women? Well, need I say more? We’ve heard it all …
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We meet the protagonist and narrator of Yasmina Khadra’s The Angels Die just before his execution. Turambo is an Algerian Arab living under French colonial rule in the 1920s. He lived in stark poverty as a child but later also experiences fame and fortune. However, it is the poverty and oppression that leave the strongest …
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The Polish writer Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki spent several years in Iceland before moving to his current home of Austria. His Lullaby for a Hanged Man is partly his own story and partly that of two men he met in Iceland: the eccentric Croat Boro and Szymon Kuran, the Polish violinist, jazz musician and composer. They are …
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Dygot, by Jakub Małecki, Published in Polish by Sine Qua Non, October 2015, Review by Anna Blasiak Dygot (Tremor) is a miniature saga (just over 300 pages long) about two families from rural Poland. The Łabendowiczs and the Geldas are portrayed across three generations, starting just before the break of the Second World War and ending in contemporary times. Both families are …
Quiet Flows the Una, by Faruk Šehić, Translated by Will Firth, Published by Istros Books (2016), Reviewed by Anna Blasiak The title of Faruk Šehić’s novel is a reference to the Nobel Prize winner Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don. Like the Sholokhov, Šehić’s book is about fratricide. However, it is completely different in mood, tone and language; this is not an epic story about …
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Czarne z białym i dużo zieleni. Rozmowa z Peterem Greenawayem Published / opublikowane w: Didaskalia 24/1998 Trzy dekady w górach Published / opublikowane w: Dialog 8/2000 Kostium jako element ‘Gesamtkunstwerku’ w filmach Petera Greenawaya Paper for Costumology Club of Polish Art Historians Association/ Referat na spotkaniu Klubu Kostiumologii Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki 2000 Dwie …