History of a Disappearance with Polish Author Filip Springer and Translator Sean Gasper Bye
The Booksmith |1644 Haight Street | San Francisco, CA
History of a Disappearance (Restless Books) is the fascinating true story of Miedzianka, a small mining town in the southwest of Poland that, after seven centuries of history, disappeared in the decades after World War II.
In this collection of unsparing and insightful reportage, Filip Springer rediscovers this tiny town’s history. Digging beyond the village’s mythic foundations and the great wars and world leaders that shaped it, Springer catalogs the lost human elements: the long-departed tailor and deceased shopkeeper; the parties, now silenced, that used to fill the streets with shouts and laughter; and the once-beautiful cemetery, with gravestones upended by tractors and human bones scattered by dogs. In Miedzianka, Springer sees a microcosm of European history, and a powerful narrative of how the ghosts of the past continue to haunt us in the present day.
We’ll talk with the author Filip Springer and translator Sean Gasper Bye about bringing this intriguing book into English.
Read an excerpt of the book here(opens in a new tab).
This event is co-presented by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.
Filip Springer is a photojournalist and writer based in Warsaw. He studied archaeology and ethnology at university and has been working as a reporter and photographer since 2006. He is a contributor to the leading Polityka journal and a member of the Visavis.pl Photographers’ Collective. He has published four collections of reportage on socialist-era architecture and the Polish landscape, skillfully conveying the Polish landscape—“writing of a city that never was, buildings that have stood in spite of general disdain, and of a marriage united in a love for architecture.” His book of reportage, History of a Disappearance, was shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuscinski Literary Reportage Prize in 2011 and the the Nike Literary Prize in 2012, and was nominated for the Gdynia Literary Prize in 2012. He also won the third annual Ryszard Kapuscinski fellows contest for young journalists. Springer currently works with the Reportage Institute in Warsaw.
Sean Gasper Bye’s translations from Polish include The King of Warsaw by Szczepan Twardoch and Ellis Island: A People’s History by Małgorzata Szejnert. He studied Polish at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and spent five years as literature and humanities curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York. He is a winner of the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship.