Sister Prometheus: Discovering Marie Curie

by Douglas Burnet Smith

Wolsak and Wynn Publishers, September 2008

In Sister Prometheus: Discovering Marie Curie, Douglas Burnet Smith imagines the inner life of a scientific genius, mother, wife and lover in both verse and prose poems. Drawing on fact, but without the limiting boundaries of biographical narrative, Sister Prometheus is a flesh and blood portrait of Marie Curie that subverts history in favor of human nature. From the birth of her children to the death of her husband, from walks with Einstein to the publicity of her scientific discoveries, this deeply personal narrative gives depth and texture to the woman at its centre.

Sister Prometheus: Discovering Marie Curie is Canadian Douglas Burnet Smith's twelfth book of poetry. His book Voices from a Farther Room (1993) was nominated for a Governor General's Award and The Killed (2000) was nominated for the Atlantic Poetry Prize. He won the The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize for The Knife-Thrower's Partner (1989). Smith has served as the President of the League of Canadian Poets and as Chair of the Public Lending Right Commission of Canada. He divides his time between Paris, France and teaching at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

This book is a profound immersion in Marie Curie’s character and times, and what arises poetically is brilliant, a remarkable and multifaceted portrait of her passionate and turbulent life. – Jan Conn

Re-Reading Grotowski

A special issue of TDR: The Drama Review on Jerzy Grotowski

Guest-Edited by Kris Salata & Lisa Wolford Wylam
MIT Press Journals, May 2008
Publication was made possible, in part, through a grant from the Polish Cultural Institute in New York.

This important issue of TDR: The Drama Review includes previously unpublished material by Jerzy Grotowski, plus articles on theatre companies and artists who preceded and have followed in the footsteps of the great Polish theatre artist.

Grotowski viewed the first translated text, Reply to Stanislavsky, as one of his most important. In it he systematically addresses matters of continuity between the line of theatrical research initiated by Stanislavsky and his own. The second text by Grotowski, On the Genesis of Apocalypsis, is one of several texts that Grotowski wished to be included in a revised and expanded edition of Towards a Poor Theatre.

Zbigniew Osinski, considered to be the most significant Polish scholar of Grotowski's work, has written about a critical influence of the aesthetics, vision, and ethos of Reduta – Poland’s first laboratory theatre founded by Juliusz Osterwa, on Grotowski and his Laboratory Theatre in The Heritage of the Reduta Theatre in Grotowski and the Laboratory Theatre.. This material fills a crucial gap not only in Grotowski studies but in theatre studies more generally, as at present English-language readers lack access to any information about Reduta and its founder. The issue also features a translation of Acta Gnosis by Antonio Attisani, an article on non-representational acting from Grotowski to Thomas Richards by Grotowski translator Kris Salata, and articles by Mario Biagini, Kris Salata and Lisa Wolford Wylam.

Cunningham, Grotowski, and Beckett have several things in common; small means, intense work, rigorous discipline, absolute precision. Also, almost as a condition, they are theatres for an elite – Peter Brook

POZA: On the Polishness of Polish Contemporary Art

by Krzysztof Wodiczko, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Anna Bella Geiger, Dominik Lejman and other artists, edited by Marek Bartelik

Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, April 2008
Published through a grant from the Polish Cultural Institute in New York

POZA presents a selection of both well-established and emergent Polish artists, resident not only in Poland but also in the United States, Canada, France, and Brazil. These artists are proposed not as mere instances of a nationality, but as individuals who explore issues of national identity by casting them in the broader context of contemporary art and life. These issues include questions of the ethnic versus the national, gender identity in post-Communist Poland and the nomadism of contemporary artists. The artists featured are Kinga Araya, Azorro Group, Frida Baranek, Anna Bialobroda, Karolina Bregula, Anna Bella Geiger, Wojciech Gilewicz, Aneta Grzeszykowska & Jan Smaga, Ewa Harabasz, Joanna Hoffmann, Jerzy Kubina, Zofia Kulik, Dominik Lejman, Joanna Malinowska, Jacek Malinowski, Gabriela Morawetz, Adam Niklewicz, Karol Radziszewski, Krystiana Robb-Narbutt, Christian Tomaszewski, Maciej Toporowicz, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Monika Weiss, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Pawel Wojtasik, Xawery Wolski and Krzysztof Zarebski.

The Polish word “poza” has a double meaning: “pose” or “posturing” (as one disguises his or her true nature for public display), and “beyond” or “besides”.

The book is a result of the exhibition POZA(Real Art Ways Major Multidisciplinary Exhibition 2006-2007). Curated by the Polish-born and New York based art critic and art historian Marek Bartelik, POZA gathered together works of 31 artists with roots directly or indirectly in Poland. The artists represent different generations – the oldest born in the 1930s, the youngest in the early 1980s. Works in the exhibition included painting, sculpture, photography, new media, video and site-specific installations and performances at Real Art Ways, as well as public projects located around Hartford and surrounding towns.

>>> MORE ON THE EXHIBITION

In Praise of the Unfinished: Selected Poems

By Julia Hartwig, translated by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter

Knopf, March 2008

Hailed by Czeslaw Milosz as “the grande dame of Polish poetry” and named “one of the foremost Polish poets of the twentieth century” by Ryszard Kapuscinski, Julia Hartwig has long been considered the gold standard of poetry in her native Poland. With this career-spanning collection, we finally have a book of her work in English.

The tragic story of the last century flows naturally through Hartwig’s poems. She evokes the husbands who returned silent from battle (“What woman was told about the hell at Monte Cassino?”) and asks, “Why didn’t I dance on the Champs-Élysées / when the crowd cheered the end of the war?… Why was I fated to be on the main street of Lublin / watching regiments with red stars enter the city.” But there is also a welcoming of new experience in her verse, a sense that life, finally, is too beautiful to condemn. She seeks a higher peace, urging us to hear other voices: “an ermine’s cry, moan of a dove, / complaint of an owl - that remind us / the hardship of solitude is measured out equally.”

Hartwig’s compassionate spirit in the face of destruction and suffering, her apparent need to live in the moment, make her poems monumental and deeply touching and the introduction of her work here long overdue.

Return to My Childhood Home
Amid a dark silence of pines—the shouts of
young birches calling each other.
Everything is as it was. Nothing is as it was.
Speak to me, Lord of the child. Speak,
innocent terror!
To understand nothing. Each time in a different
way, from the first cry to the last breath.
Yet happy moments come to me from the past,
like bridesmaids carrying oil lamps.

An admired poet and sometime bestseller in Poland – and an important translator of poetry from English into Polish – Hartwig (now age 85) has also led a memorable life, fighting with the resistance in WWII and taking part in the Solidarity movement. This set of limpid, quotable, often bittersweet lyrics and prose poems makes clear that she could become as acclaimed here as her Nobel Prize compatriots Milosz and Symborska. Countryside landscapes and artifacts from the classical past come to Hartwig as emblems of human endurance, compassion and humility. The same virtues illuminate her poems on public occasions, from 9/11 to the era of Polish martial law: Lord we aren't the only nation tormented this way, she prays, don't let us take pride in it. Later poems speak to the international legacy she favors, especially to the French modernist Apollinaire. For all her topical interest Hartwig is finally a poet of enduring consolation, measured reassurance and scenic clarity, who may also appeal to fans of Mary Oliver. – Publishers Weekly, February 2008 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Julia Hartwig has published more than a dozen collections of poetry in her native country, and her work has been translated into French, Lithuanian, German, Russian, Serbian, Hungarian, and Italian. The recipient of numerous awards for her work, she is also a well-known translator of English and French poetry into Polish.

Bogdana Carpenter is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Poetic Avant-Garde in Poland, 1918–1939, and Monumenta Polonica: The First Four Centuries of Polish Poetry, as well as other works.

John Carpenter is a poet and literary critic. He is author of Creating the World and a study of the literature of the Second World War. Among translations the Carpenters have done as a team are seven volumes of poetry and prose by Zbigniew Herbert.

Eternal Enemies: Poems

By Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2008

One of the most gifted and readable poets of his time, Adam Zagajewski is proving to be a contemporary classic. Few writers in either poetry or prose can be said to have attained the lucid intelligence and limpid economy of style that have become a matter of course with Zagajewski. It is these qualities, combined with his wry humor, gentle skepticism, and perpetual sense of history’s dark possibilities, that have earned him a devoted international following. This collection, gracefully translated by Clare Cavanagh, finds the poet reflecting on place, language, and history. Especially moving here are his tributes to writers, friends known in person or in books – people such as Milosz and Sebald, Brodsky and Blake – which intermingle naturally with portraits of family members and loved ones. Eternal Enemies is a luminous meeting of art and everyday life.

Celebrated on two continents, Polish poet Zagajewski looks back with some self-consciousness, in these new poems, at the lyricism of his compatriot Czeslaw Milosz, at the prewar Poland he portrayed, and at a Miloszian mixture of pathos, faith and doubt. Set in Krakow, Italy, Houston and New York, these frequently brief and always inviting works present, at their most general, the world's materiality at dawn - / and the soul's frailty. More specific elegies remember Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Wat, W.G. Sebald, or look back on the poet's own childhood, which evaporated / like a puddle gleaming with a rainbow of gasoline. Cavanagh's supple translations let the verse sing in American English without making this Polish poet sound too American: as much as he embraces his new home (he is now teaching at the University of Chicago). – Publishers Weekly, April 2008 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Adam Zagajewski was born in Lwow (Lviv) in 1945. His previous books include Tremor; Canvas; Mysticism for Beginners; Without End; Solidarity, Solitude; Two Cities; Another Beauty; and A Defense of Ardor – all published by FSG. He lives in Paris and Houston.

Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (Annals of Communism Series)

edited by Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski

Yale University Press, January 2008

Following the Soviet invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939 (a result of the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact), 14,500 Polish army officers, policemen, gendarmes, and civilians taken prisoner by the Red Army and held in three special NKVD camps – Kozielsk, Ostaszkowo and Starobielsk – were executed at three different sites in spring 1940, of which the one in Katyn Forest is the most famous. Another 7,300 prisoners held in NKVD jails in Ukraine and Belarus were also shot at this time. The murder of these Poles is among the most monstrous mass murders undertaken by any modern government.

In February 1943 the Germans announced that they had discovered the graves of those murdered by the NKVD in Katyń. The Soviets denied having done it and accused the Germans of the crime, deliberately fabricating evidence. The post-war Communist regime in Poland silenced the truth about the massacre. But for the people, it became a key symbol of oppression, falsified history, and dependence on the Soviet Empire.

Three leading historians of the NKVD massacres of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn, Kharkov, and Tver – now subsumed under “Katyn” – present 122 documents selected from the published Russian and Polish volumes that were edited by Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski. The documents, with introductions and notes by Prof. Cienciala, detail the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up, the admission of the truth, and the Katyn question in Soviet/Russian-Polish relations up to the present.

"An extremely important book on one of the signature crimes of Stalinism and one of the great efforts of obfuscation of Soviet propaganda." – Timothy Snyder, Yale University

>>>WAJDA'S FILM ON KATYN

Flaw

by Magdalena Tulli

translated by Bill Johnston

Archipelago Books, November 2007

A single streetcar line runs around the sleepy square of an unnamed city. One day – out of nowhere – refugees pour from the streetcar and set up camp in the square. The residents grow hostile and eventually take extreme action.

“The originality of Tulli's writing is not lessened by representing a family tree that includes Michaud, Kafka, Calvino, and Saramago.”                                      — W.S. Merwin

Magdalena Tulli has been hailed as the new Bruno Schulz by Polish critics. Her first novel, Dreams and Stones, won Poland's Koscielski Foundation prize in 1995. In Red (W czerwieni, WAB, 1998), her second book, also received great critical acclaim in Poland and elsewhere. Moving Parts was short-listed for the 2002 Nike Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award. Tulli has translated the work of Italo Calvino and Marcel Proust. Born in 1955, she lives in Warsaw, where she works as a psychologist and translator.

Bill Johnston is director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University. In 2005, he won an ASTEEL translation prize for Tulli's Dreams and Stones.

The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

by Diane Ackerman

W. W. Norton, September 2007

 

Diane Ackerman, a noted writer on natural history, recounts the horrors of the German occupation of Poland in World War Two through the unusual prism of the Warsaw Zoo, where its director,Jan Zabinski, and his resourceful wife, Antonina, managed to save hundreds of Jews.

With the German invasion in 1939, Warsaw had been devastated and the zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, the Zabinskis found a way to put their empty cages to good use. The Germans had allowed Jan to turn the zoo into a pig farm, and to enter the ghetto for food scraps for the animals. He smuggled food in and smuggled people out. One thing led to another, and while the Jews were transported to death camps, the Zabinskis hid some 300 Jews over time in sheds, animal enclosures, and even the lion house. At any given time about a dozen of these "guests" were hiding inside the Zabinskis' villa. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina, with extraordinary ingenuity, courage, and even humor, kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants — otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes. She had a unique gift, “a nearly shamanistic empathy when it came to animals.” For Antonina, animal and human formed a continuum. It is the perfect story for a writer like Diane Ackerman, with her loving grasp of natural history.

Using Antonina's diaries, other contemporary sources and her own research in Poland, Ackerman keeps the story in context by leading us into the Warsaw ghetto, the 1943 Jewish uprising, the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, and introducing us to the leaders and volunteers of Zegota, the Polish underground organization that rescued Jews. But with her exuberant prose and exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Ackerman also engages us viscerally in the lives of the zoo animals, their keepers, and the other hidden visitors. She shows us how Antonina refused to give in to the penetrating fear of discovery, keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her. 8 pages of illustrations.

Diane Ackerman has surpassed even herself in her latest book, which is alternatingly funny, moving, and terrifying. – Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel

I can't imagine a better story or storyteller. The Zookeeper's Wife will touch every nerve you have. – Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated

Stunning… Rarely does one read a book in which the author and the heroine are so magically matched. – Dava Sobel, author of The Planets and Galileo's Daughter

The alpha female in a unique menagerie… [Antonina] was special, and as the remaining members of her generation die off, a voice like hers should not be allowed to fade into the silence.                    – D.T. Max, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Sept. 9, 2007

Ackerman's writing is viscerally evocative, as in her description of the effects of the German bombing of the zoo area: “...the sky broke open and whistling fire hurtled down, cages exploded, moats rained upward, iron bars squealed as they wrenched apart.” This suspenseful, beautifully crafted story deserves a wide readership. – Publishers Weekly

Diane Ackerman is the author of the best-selling A Natural History of the Senses, among many other books that demonstrate her broad knowledge of animal life. Also an accomplished poet (Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems), she lives in upstate New York .

The Forgotten Keys
by Tomasz Rozycki, translated by Mira Rosenthal, bilingual edition
Zephyr Press, June 2007

“Personal” for Rozycki means also transpersonal; the persona of his poetry holds the memory of an entire family or tribe, or perhaps even of society in general. And there's no mockery here. Rozycki's poetry is serious, a private response to the historic moment. Without a doubt, a vital new poet has emerged from the Polish language.
– Adam Zagajewski

Tomasz Rozycki belongs to a group of outstanding younger poets from Silesia, a region in Poland that bears the mark of a distinct mixture of cultures. Many families were relocated to the region in a forced migration after World War II, and shifting borders have likewise added influences from Germany and other neighboring countries. Through translations of a selection of poems from Rozycki's five collections of poetry in Polish, as well as a critical introduction, The Forgotten Keys acquaints readers with a distinctive and formidable Polish writer. Unlike other contemporary Polish poets who clearly reject the heavy historicism of Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert, Rozycki claims such influence, exploring both personal and collective memory.

The translator Mira Rosenthal is a poet and founding editor of Lyric Poetry Review. She has been a Fulbright Fellow to Poland and selected and edited a special issue of Lyric on new Polish poetry in translation. Her work has appeared in the journals Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Notre Dame Review, among others.