Today’s Translation Tuesday Feature “Beanstalk”  is taken from Samosiejki (Self-Sowing, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2021), an eco-critical short story collection by the emerging Polish author Dominika Słowik. Compared to the other stories within the same collection, translator Jess Jensen Mitchell says this particular piece “has an especially light comic touch as it riffs on  bodily sensations, capitalism, and the whims of a quirky midlife woman-turned-plant. It is an ASMR for the soul, an ode to joys vegetable, animal, and mineral.” Need we say more? Read on!

On Thursday, a beanstalk started growing out of my nose.

On Saturday, it reached halfway up my forehead.

On Sunday, I was overcome with the desire to dip my feet in a cool tub of water.

On Tuesday, the first leaves appeared.

On Wednesday, without realizing what I was doing, I ran out into the rain, turned my face to the sky, and just stood there like that with my mouth agape for a good fifteen minutes.

Then I remembered how I got an F in my third year of grade school because I didn’t hand in my environmental science project. I was supposed to grow a bean sprout on a piece of moistened gauze. As luck would have it, the bean disappeared. We blamed our dog at the time, because I couldn’t have stealthily inhaled a seed, right?

I did a brief round of soul-searching. Of course I could have. I never liked my environmental science teacher.

It explained a lot. Whenever I got sick, only one of my nostrils would leak. If I started to run, I’d lose my breath immediately. I had an excellent tolerance for unpleasant smells and I was always picking my nose—despite forty-odd years on this planet, I never kicked the habit. READ MORE…