Category: Translations

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Café by Wren’s St James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime by Anna Blasiak and Lisa Kalloo

CAFÉ BY WREN’S ST JAMES-IN-THE-FIELDS, LUNCHTIME (Holland House Books 2020)

translated by Marta Dziurosz, Maria Jastrzębska, Danusia Stok and Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese

ISBN 978 1 910688 36 6

This book has collaboration and translation at its heart: between people, words and images, languages, cultures. The poems came first, in Polish. Then came the photographic response to them. Then four translators, MARTA DZIUROSZ, MARIA JASTRZĘBSKA, DANUSIA STOK and ELŻBIETA WÓJCIK-LEESE, took a set of 12 or 13 poems each and translated them into English. All people involved were women: the poet, the photographer, the four translators and the two editors. Together they arrived at 51 Polish poems, 51 English poems and 51 photographs making this collection. They raise themes such as cultural identity and migration, queerness, racism, isolation and family memories.

Praise for Café by Wren’s St James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime

Wioletta Greg:

Anna’s poems make me think of the verse of the Swiss French poet Phillippe Jaccottet. She seems to be interested in analogies of life events, mysteries that are invisible at first instance, slips of tongue, contrasts, things held back, hidden moods and emotions. Just like Anna‘s poems, Lisa‘s photos capture and arrest details, writings, colours, lights and shadows, as well as textures of the world, they are snapshots, images captured as if by chance on a journey. 

Peter Valente:

Anna Blasiak’s Café By Wren’s St. James – In – The Fields, Lunchtime is a book of mysteries, a world where dreams and memories glaze over the consciousness, where nature and objects are sentient evoking a past, in some cases, long gone; the poems suggests a narrative without a conclusion; they are like photographs, taken so long ago, where objects are at once clear and ambiguous. The poems record intense memories of loss but Blasiak is not sentimental; rather, she is concerned with self-transformation, wherever it is still possible in the present world; she is searching for a “hidden symmetry” in a world is receding into a kind of digital oblivion. As the World recedes, we are given in its place a seamless digital copy; a simulacrum; where Life was once discontinuous, boring, joyful, and sad, we now have the eternal hope for a kind of digital paradise, where there is no loss, where one is constantly preoccupied, obsessed, but with a sense of mourning, a sense of something missing, a lack. She navigates this lack, with great conviction, and the result is the strong and elegant poems in this book.

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The Great Plan B by Justyna Bargielska

THE GREAT PLAN B  (Smokestack Books 2017)

translated by Maria Jastrzębska

ISBN 978 0 9957675

Justyna Bargielska is one of the most distinctive and original young poets writing in Polish today. She has published eight poetry collections, won the Rainer Maria Rilke poetry competition, and twice won the Gdynia Literary Prize. Although her work has been translated into French, German, Slovene, Dutch, Russian and Czech, this is the first time that her poems have been collected in English. The Great Plan B introduces British readers to the work of a poet who examines, with forensic precision, the landscapes of quotidian existence, our disappointments and humiliations. Combining colloquial diction, philosophical enquiry and religious references, these poems are witty, tongue-in-cheek, both self-deprecating and macabre while death is increasingly present, implacable. You can never be entirely certain whether she is serious or joking.

Praise for The Great Plan B

Tiffany Atkinson:

Justyna Bargielska’s poetry is an art of fierce surprises. Poems that might look small and docile on the page are anything but – they soon reveal themselves to be rigged boxes of devilish wisdom, opening out onto a world that is both familiar and suddenly, unpredictably, luminous, frightening, or both at once: “Do you know what our odds are? Zero./ But I’ve learnt to play for time / as it’s the body no less which is left on the battlefield”.  Bargielska’s flexible idiom accommodates the most intimate, absurd and profound aspects of our contemporary lives at an almost breathless speed. Like telegrams these poems demand to be read over and over. And Maria Jastrzębska’s razor-sharp, glittering translations now bring the full range of Bargielska’s extraordinary voice to an English-speaking readership. If there can be such a thing as a tender rallying cry, this poetry is it: “I’m not enclosing hugs, I don’t send kisses, I wage /war on all fronts. Write back to me asap”.

Jamie McKendrick:

These poems by Justyna Bargielska make the word ‘daring’ sound tame. They move at a cruel speed, or as she puts it with characteristically mordant wit “I’m not leaving you, shoes, I’m merely walking ahead.” In a fairer world talent as prodigal as this would not be allowed. Maria Jastrzębska’s translations are urgent and electric, and effortlessly manage to keep up.

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Elsewhere by Iztok Osojnik

ELSEWHERE (Pighog Press 2011)

translated by Ana Jelnikar and Maria Jastrzębska

ISBN 978 1906309 09 1

Elsewhere presents new and selected poems of the celebrated Slovenian poet Iztok Osojnik in a definitive English translation by Maria Jastrzebska and Ana Jelnikar. The volume captures the extraordinary breadth of Osojnik’s oeuvre, which addresses the rapid displacement and change experienced by his nation while maintaining an admirably international outlook. The poet’s travels to East Asia clearly provided him with a rich seam of experience and the jet-lagged flanerie of poems such as ‘Green Skyscrapers’ opens the way to a telling exploration of globalisation and cultural drift. A more lyrical persona comes to the fore in ‘Ode to a Hind,’ while selections from 2004’s Mister Today chart the moving and funny struggles of a character who pins the very meaning of life on poetry.