Zuzanna Ginczanka is a name that poetry readers will soon become very familiar with—if she hasn’t enraptured you already. In thrilling, Dionysian verses of musical, mythic, and magical beauty, the young Polish poet astounded her contemporaries during her brief lifetime, and is now being introduced to a new generation of readers with the same powerful lyricism and sensual joy. We were delighted to feature some of Ginczanka’s poems in our Spring 2020 issue through the electric translations of Alex Braslavsky—who has since published a bilingual edition of Ginczanka’s selected poems, On Centaurs & Other Poems, with World Poetry Press.
In the following interview, Piotr Florczyk talks to Braslavsky about how translations can encourage active engagement with the source language; the sensoriums, pyrotechnics, and complex metaphoric mechanisms at work amidst Ginczanka’s words; and what makes this poet a necessary inclusion within the Polish—and the global—canon.
Piotr Florczyk (PF): If I’m not mistaken, On Centaurs & Other Poems is your first book-length translation. Could you talk a little bit about how you got started as a translator and, secondly, how you came to this project?
Alex Braslavsky (AB): As an undergraduate, I took a poetry workshop in which we read Tomas Tranströmer and Wisława Szymborska’s work in translation, and I remember being really struck by the intimacy I felt in Clare Cavanagh’s English versions of Szymborska—that was when I fell in love with Polish poetry. When I went on to pursue my master’s in the United Kingdom, I had the opportunity to start learning Polish. I also started attending Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation seminars run by Kasia Szymańska.
I shared my interest in poetry with Kasia, and she informed me that a full volume of Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poetry had just been released in Poland in the fall of 2019. I had never heard of the author, but I am really indebted to Kasia, because I remember that on the first day she and I sat down to read Ginczanka’s poems, I recognized it as some of the most sophisticated poetry I’d ever laid eyes on, and I also realized that my sensibilities could mesh with Ginczanka’s; I had the urge to translate her work.
PF: Your book is the first of at least two volumes of Ginczanka translations to be released this year. How do you account for this sudden and growing interest in her work?
AB: There has been a lot of push in Poland for Ginczanka to get her due recognition. Over the past decade, she has entered the canon of Polish poetry. Although she was long overlooked by Polish poets and scholars, she is now included in the prominent textbook, the Nasiłowska History of Polish Literature. Several monographs have also been written about her work over the last decade, and in 2020, Izolda Kiec’s biography of Ginczanka, Nie upilnuje mnie nic (Nobody Will Police Me), was published—then adapted into a play. Artists like Krystyna Piotrowska have also exhibited artwork paying homage to her. There is a pressing urge on the part of many to make sure Ginczanka’s life and work is thrown into high relief on the international literary stage. Mine is one of, I believe, four different translations of Ginczanka’s work to be released this year, all by female translators, and it is a special moment because her work is so brilliant. She deserves this array of renderings to her name.
PF: Although born in modern-day Ukraine to a Russian-speaking Jewish family, Ginczanka chose to write in Polish. Can you speak to what might have influenced her decision to do so?
AB: Although Ginczanka was a Nansen passport holder (never being granted Polish citizenship because she was Jewish), she felt throughout her life that she was Polish and was closely connected to the Polish poetic tradition. Her parents left her with her grandmother in Poland when she was still an infant, and she was raised in Równe, Poland (now Rivne, Ukraine). She went to Polish school, attending the prestigious Tadeusz Kościuszko State Gymnasium from the age of ten, and though she spoke Russian at home, she elected Polish as the language of her pen.
I think in part this was because she did not identify with her Russian parents, who abandoned her. Her father moved to America to become an actor and her mother stayed behind in Russia until after the October Revolution. Poland itself was partitioned by Russia at the end of the eighteenth century and lost its sovereignty for over a hundred years, and therefore Romantic poets and other artists were the linchpins holding together Polish identity throughout the nineteenth century. Poland’s sovereignty was reestablished in 1918, one year after Ginczanka was born, and in some senses, she may have identified with this nation that had for a long time been stateless—as a stateless woman herself. She also would have understood the grave way in which poetry had, out of necessity, become polity in Poland. In many ways, one could argue her poetry was her passport to her Polishness as well.
PF: Ginczanka had a habit of dating her poems, and in your collection, which presents the poems chronologically, we can trace the poet’s growth and development, although it seems that Ginczanka arrived fully formed as a poet, so to speak.
AB: Thank you for noting her poetic precociousness as a child! Once, another translator asked me why I was choosing to devote my energies to her early work when her later work is much more sophisticated. To my mind, a writer’s juvenilia are often disregarded; we put too much premium on “maturity” as a literary focus and frankly, that’s ageist. By the time Ginczanka was fourteen, she had already been writing for ten years—having begun writing poems at four years of age. When she went on to study at the University of Warsaw, she met figures like Julian Tuwim and other members of the Skamander poetic movement, who helped her chisel her work into the pristinely iconic collection, On Centaurs. However, the early poems inhere the raw essence of her self-formed poetic, before she was ever legitimized by male poets. The first poem in my translated volume is called “Holiday Feast”—a surreal treatment of the experience of everyday eating. It’s a poem Ginczanka wrote when she was only fourteen years old, and it’s a beautiful little piece.
PF: Which is your favorite Ginczanka poem, and why?
AB: I have a lot of favorites. When I got to translating the part of “Fishing” (the last poem in On Centaurs) where she writes “I spilled wide, effusive like an epic, / in the green singing of leaves, / in the red singing of blood— / believe in me, / believe in absentia”, I was overcome and burst into tears. In her injection to “believe in her”, she broke the fourth wall. It was like she was speaking directly to me in that moment—no longer only through the whispering leaves of her flora and fauna. I also can’t forget the glittering eye of the cat in “Grammar” and I had a lot of fun translating her playful nature morte of a plump tomato in “Still Life: Tomato”. Her indictment of post-war Europe in “Agony” is also powerful (“you rot with gangrene-police, / you drip with the pus of codices—/ —you are croaking, old Europe!”). And her furious opening of “Ascension of the Earth” (“Pull down, tear down, crush clouds / like a flabby cicatrix— / Let the sun melt you, / burn you with heat—”) is another charged moment in her work that really affects me every time I go back to it. She is very forceful in her fury.
PF: The volume presents your translations alongside the originals. Did you have any input in this regard? Bilingual editions serve a double purpose—to signal that we are in fact reading translations, and also to broaden the readership to include those who can read the originals—but translators seem split on this practice, with some favoring bilingual editions and others preferring to untether their work from the original. Where do you stand on this issue?
AB: I believe in bilingual editions because as a translator, I am an advocate both for the poetry I am rendering and for the beautiful original language. The “diptych” nature of bilingual editions, whereby the original and the translation are on facing pages, allows the two versions of a poem to talk to each other; it allows the person who only knows one of the two languages to explore the other and in the case of this project, it allows for those who know Ginczanka’s originals to square off with me on her Polish. It gives them the fair opportunity to see if I’ve done her justice—to be dismayed, surprised, or smitten by the translation, as they see fit. That transparency is important to me. Not only can the bilingual edition encourage more engagement with Polish, but it can also inspire someone else to translate Ginczanka their own way.
PF: What were some of the difficulties you encountered while translating these poems? Translating is never easy, but it seems to me that Ginczanka’s poems grew less precious, less ornate, over the years—which, in a way, could’ve made them easier to translate.
AB: The hardest poems to translate were in fact her earliest, both because I was less intimate with Ginczanka in the beginning, and because the early works are a lot more pyrotechnic than her later works, which have a more epic feel. The poem “May 1939” is a good example of a later poem that is deceptively simple and quick to translate, but required a lot of thinking off the page before I was able to touch things up. Her early poems were also tough due to her ornamental syntax and off-the-wall neologisms. At the end of “Fishing”, for instance, she encloses the instrumental in a prepositional clause (the original word order reads: “about with scales a sloshing wave”), an agitation I sadly had to sacrifice to preserve meaning. Translating her neologisms (“green deep-weed”; “brainpulpish”; “apiarydom”; “gray-humid”; “mysteriac”) was also very challenging at first, but once I got used to her making new words, I was able to have a lot of fun dissecting morphemes and performing word surgery, if you will.
Ginczanka herself writes “I bring substance to words that don’t exist, / I have bizarre words, which have no essence—” in the poem “Two Octobers”. Her process of echolocating and subsequently naming the essential matter of “the word” is a huge part of her poetic; the word “matter” appears many times in her work, including in “Grammar”, one of the earliest instances where she voices her poetic ethos of words having flesh. This is all to say that every challenge I had while translating was resolved as I spent more time with Ginczanka and better understood what she was doing. She sees words as bodied entities, and so I began treating my words as such.
PF: You are also a poet and scholar. Did you find that helpful in any way while you were translating these poems?
AB: I was writing poems while I was translating, and one thing I found was that I began to understand Ginczanka’s poetic better by allowing her to influence me in my own work, which made for a really fruitful, freeing translation process when I turned back to the translation project. Writing my poems became yet another way to process what she did to my mind. As for my scholarship, I am rigorous in my research about the history behind certain poems—such as the advent of Mickey Mouse flicks in Poland in the 1930s (see “Tale of the Plush Toy’s Luck”), or the realities of post-war Poland (“Agony”), or Ginczanka’s resentment towards the architect who broke her heart (“New Year’s: A Handmade Greeting Card”). As a poetics scholar, I have a suite of terms on which I think about the rhetorical moves a poet makes, which helps me with the technical side of translating poetry. That kind of formal detail work is one of the most satisfying things about tinkering around in a poem.
PF: There is a lot to be said about how readers tend to reach for a translated book by a particular author, from a particular country, due to geopolitical events—the war in Ukraine being the most recent case in point. With that in mind, can Ginczanka be read outside of the context of her biography and untimely, tragic death?
AB: In the case of Ginczanka, who was murdered in the Holocaust at the age of twenty-eight, there is almost no way to extricate her poetry from her tragedy. However, though she was bastardized as a young Jewish woman (she was called “Tuwim in a skirt” by her contemporaries), Ginczanka wrote on her own terms. In reading her poetry, we witness her creating her own creation myth, wielding a consciously wild aesthetic on the page and exuding a vibrant sense of humor. Joseph Brodsky once wrote that a poet’s work is their autobiography, and it is true that Ginczanka’s oeuvre provides us with an account of her internal workings—which resound past her persecution. That doesn’t mean, however, that she wasn’t responsive to her circumstances. Bożena Shallcross once pointed out to me that Ginczanka’s central image of the centaur figure signals her personal awareness of her own hybrid status: as a woman working in a male-dominated world of arts and letters, and also with her Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish background. It’s no coincidence, politically speaking, that Ginczanka wrote so substantially about chimerical creatures.
PF: Where do you see Ginczanka’s work belonging, as far as Polish and world poetry is concerned?
AB: There are elements of Ginczanka’s early work that I think are possibly influenced by fin de siècle decadent poetics. In particular, I am thinking of Bolesław Leśmian, who was still writing in the interwar period and used many neologisms. He was an obvious name to know then and he was also of Jewish descent, but I don’t know to what extent he could have influenced Ginczanka.
Looking closely at On Centaurs, we can note elements of vitalism that stemmed from the group of poets who assembled in the Warsaw café Pod Picadorem in 1918 and part of 1919. This group wrote poetry including images of nature, procreation, life and vigor, eroticism, etc.—and these vitalistic motifs definitely appear in Ginczanka’s collection.
Eventually, the Pid Picadorem group became the Skamander avant-garde movement in the 1920s, and though Ginczanka became close to its members in the 1930s, she was never fully a part of it. She arrives when Skamander is no longer central on the scene. However, Julian Tuwim, one of Skamander’s most important members, certainly mentored her, and he does experiment in his 1921 collection Słopiewnie, which could have had a strong influence on Ginczanka. There was this feeling at the time that Jews were starting new trends in the Polish poetic context.
By that point, Skamander was much more mainstream and traditional, while Ginczanka was doing very innovative things in On Centaurs that most likely had other influences—such as the Kraków avant-garde and the Futurists. Both the Futurist and Kraków avant-garde movements included experimental poets of Jewish descent and in the case of the latter, the poets in Kraków were more interested in syntax and developing sentence-based lines. Ginczanka’s way of contracting and attenuating her lines—that dynamic interplay she has between long and short lines—could definitely have been influenced by the Kraków avant-garde.
It’s strange to think about the fact that Ginczanka was six years younger than Czesław Miłosz during the interwar period when she was writing, but our reception of her work comes decades after our reception of his. The interwar period was associated with catastrophism, with people like Miłosz and Józef Czechowicz, and is considered to be the second avant-garde wave in the Polish context. We see a slight change in this period to what happened in the 1920s.
Czechowicz could have also had an influence on Ginczanka with the magical metamorphoses in his idyllic poems. In her book on the metaphor in Polish poetry, Teresa Dobrzyńska discusses the “granicy metafory” or the “boundaries of the metaphor,” and in one instance she quotes Czechowicz:
za jabłonkowym wieńcem
kościół podnosi wieżyce
wspina się białym źrebięciem
w niepokojuże nie może się srebrem nasycić
księżycowego wodopoju
(prowincja noc 2)beyond the apple-tree wreath
the church raises its spiers
clambers up as a white foal
in its anxiety
that it cannot saturate itself with the silver
of the moon’s watering hole
(province night 2)
Dobrzyńska describes how Czechowicz plays with the Polish idiom “the church raises its steeples,” but uses an “animalizing metaphor,” with the towers described as a climbing foal. The white foal is interpolated into the body of the church via the instrumental case, a transformative feature of Slavic grammar systems. The way the church is transformed into a foal and the moon into a watering hole—is it magical reality or metaphor? Czechowicz ultimately allows “the illusion to be taken for reality”, as Dobrzyńska puts it, and a similar thing can be said for Ginczanka’s technique. She grafts together opposites, conjoining wisdom with passion, sensuality with sage, the effete with the mannish. One of the key ways Ginczanka achieves this kind of formal grafting is by a manipulation of metaphor; hers is a chimerical metaphor of sorts that feels steeped in certain vitalist and surreal strains of Polish and other Slavic poetic traditions.
For example, in her eponymous poem of the “On Centaurs” collection, she compares eyes to “handless owls”, and this is intriguing for several reasons: it implants what we assume to be human hands in the body of an owl, very Czechowicz-esque, and yet also surgically removes those hands through negation. The metaphor also operates to describe our eyes—the seeing vessels which rest in our heads—by describing a lack of hands—the outward-reaching appendages of touch. It’s highly complex in terms of the sensorium she’s building. And if there’s any way to assess Ginczanka in these lineages, I’d say it’s best done through her sophisticated use of metaphor.
Ginczanka is one of the few crucial women writers in twentieth century Polish literature. But since there was a gap in her reception, we’re basically only now witnessing her impact on the Polish literary canon. I believe time will tell more of how she’s made an impact on contemporary Polish poetry.
In terms of her place in world poetry, I can say I invited Yusef Komunyakaa to write a preface to this volume because I saw a resonance between his 1988 collection Dien Cai Dau—in which he addressed his experiences in Vietnam during the war—and On Centaurs. The way both poets orchestrate flora and fauna to violent ends in their respective collections is curiously symbiotic, and I knew Komunyakaa had the perfect sensibility to understand Ginczanka and to introduce her to more audiences. It was very important to me that the poet who introduced her was not a poet from a Slavic background because I want as many people to be exposed to her as possible, and also because I find that as a scholar in Slavic Studies, we are often a lot more insular, exclusive, and territorial than other fields. She is incredibly important to the Polish tradition and, at the same time, I believe she is a world’s poet.
PF: On Centaurs & Other Poems is an excellent read, and I’m sure the process of translating it and seeing it published has been both fun and challenging. Are you taking a well-deserved break, or working on a new project?
AB: Having my first book out means that I might have the chance to continue doing this kind of work for the rest of my life, and I don’t take that for granted. Now I am continuing to publish new poems of my own, and I am also translating Czech poet Bohumila Grögerová’s 2008 collection Rukopis, or Manuscript, which presents me with a series of exciting new challenges. Grögerová’s collection is stunning. She wrote it after her husband Josef Hiršal passed away, so it marks her return to working independently in her eighties, after having worked collaboratively with her husband for the larger part of her career. Grögerová also wrote Rukopis while going blind, and this loss of her sight brought about a shift in her aesthetic; although she wrote primarily Concrete poetry during her lifetime, with this collection, Grögerová began to focus more on imagery in her work rather than on its visual layout. I have found working on this project to be deeply meaningful and since I’ll be teaching undergraduates in Prague this summer, I hope to be able to access Grögerová’s archives while I’m there.
Alex Braslavsky is the translator of On Centaurs & Other Poems (World Poetry Books, 2023) by Zuzanna Ginczanka, who was killed in the Holocaust at age twenty-eight. She is also a poet and scholar working toward her doctorate at Harvard.
Piotr Florczyk is an award-winning poet, translator, and critic. He teaches Global Literary Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.
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