One of Poland’s best living poets Tomasz Różycki and award-winning poet and translator Mira Rosenthal present To The Letter, the third collection of Różycki’s poetry to be translated by Rosenthal. The reading will be followed by a conversation about writing and the art of translation as a process of losing and the longing we feel for our own absence with Judy Halebsky.
Tomasz Różycki’s To the Letter follows Lieutenant Anielewicz on the hunt for any clues that might lead 21st century human beings out of a sense of despair. With authoritarianism rising across Eastern Europe, the Lieutenant longs for a secret hero. At first, he suspects some hidden mechanism afoot: fruit tutors him in the ways of color, he drifts out to sea to study the grammar of tides, or he gazes at the sun as it thrums away like a timepiece.
In one poem, he admits “this is the story of my confusion,” and in the next the Lieutenant is back on the trail. “This lunacy needs a full investigation,” he jibes. He wants to get to the bottom of it all, but he’s often bewitched by letters and the trickery of language. Diacritics on Polish words form a “flock of sooty flecks, clinging to letters” and Lieutenant Anielewicz studies the tails, accents, and strokes that twist this script.
While the Lieutenant can’t write a coherent code to solve life’s mysteries or to fill the absence of a country rent by war, his search for patterns throughout art, philosophy, and literature lead not to despair but to an affirmation of the importance of human love. Różycki collects moments of illumination – a cat dashing out of a window and “feral sun” streaking in, a body planting itself in the ground like rhubarb and flowering. He collects and collects, opens a crack, and clutches a shrapnel of epiphany.
Presented with support from the Polish Cultural Institute New York and Dog Eared Books, San Francisco(opens in a new tab).
Tomasz Różycki is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose of widespread international acclaim, with work translated into many languages. A recipient of the Wisława Szymborska Prize, the Kościelski Award, the Prix Grand Continent, and a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship, he is an “Ambassador of the New Europe” and one of the leading writers of his generation in Poland. He has served on the juries for the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award and the Swiss Prix Jan Michalski. In the U.S., he has been featured at the Unterberg Poetry Center, the Princeton Poetry Festival, and the Brooklyn Book Festival. He also teaches and translates French literature.
Mira Rosenthal is the author of Territorial, a Pitt Poetry Series selection and finalist for the INDIES Book of the Year award, and The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and residencies at Hedgebrook and MacDowell, she is an associate professor of creative writing at Cal Poly. Her translations of Polish poetry include Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline and Tomasz Różycki’s Colonies, which won the Northern California Book Award and was shortlisted for numerous other prizes, including the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged). With Ayako Takahashi, she translated Wago Ryoichi’s collection of poems, Since Fukushima. Fellowships from MacDowell, Millay, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Japanese Ministry of Culture have supported her work. She directs the MFA Creative Writing program at Dominican University of California.