Posts featuring Zuzanna Ginczanka

Forceful in Fury, Forceful in Beauty: An Interview with Alex Braslavsky on Translating Zuzanna Ginczanka

June 7, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Piotr Florczyk

She is incredibly important to the Polish tradition and, at the same time, I believe she is a world’s poet.

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. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2020

April 27, 2020  |  in News  |  by Eva Heisler, Garrett Phelps, Henry Ace Knight, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Varun Nayar

Our section editors guide you through the riches of our Spring 2020 issue!

Our Spring 2020 issue has arrived amidst a rising desire for unity and community. As we seek new sights from views made familiar by isolation, Asymptote is proud to have gathered some of the most vivid and singular works from literary talents from thirty countries, so that we may all benefit from the vitality of their distinct imaginings and realities. Here, our section editors share their favourites and guide you around this edition’s abundance of ideas and inventions.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Galician Poetry Feature Editor:

If you enjoyed watching Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, you’ll probably love “Red Ivory” by Italian writer Matteo Meschiari from the new issue: like the film, it’s a survival tale set in the extreme cold (in the Siberian permafrost, to be specific), riveting in its depiction of the elements, narrated urgently with brilliant flashes of lyricism—including one electric moment of human contact collapsing 12,000 years. By the end, it’s also a möbius strip of a story posing big existential questions. (Don’t miss the edifying note by emerging translator Enrico Cioni, who did an amazing job rendering the story.) The omniscient narrator of Mirza Athar Baig‘s “Junkshop” transports us similarly through history—this time centering around the objects of a contemporary junkshop—infusing an everyday scene with wonder at just how much we don’t know. Many delights abound in the Galician Poetry Feature headlined by Manuel Rivas, Chus Pato, and Alba Cid (translated by Jacob Rogers, who also helped put together the Feature), but be sure to acquaint yourself with Luz Pozo Garza, one of Galicia’s literary greats, who passed away at age 97 less than a week after the release of the issue. In the selection that translator Kathleen March presented, she used cadences of the canticle and other musical forms to sing of an ecstatic yet bittersweet love for an evanescent world.

From Henry Ace Knight, Interviews Editor: 

Kamila Hladíková’s conversation with Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser for the Spring issue’s interview section centers on the precariousness of Tibetan cultural memory and the poet’s resistance to its wholesale erasure. Citing Milan Kundera and Edward Said, Woeser suggests that the survival of marginalized collective identity is incumbent upon the insistence of individual eyewitness memory and testimony. “The history of a nation consists of the personal histories of its people,” she writes. “Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am’; but in Tibet, it should be, ‘I remember, therefore we are.’”

From Varun Nayar, Nonfiction Editor: 

Following the footsteps of the great Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, Durian Sukegawa writes about a journey he made in 2012, traversing a landscape reshaped by the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster the year before. Alison Watts’s vivid translation of Sukegawa’s written account of this journey acquaints us with the personal and political stakes of living in post-Fukushima Japan. Part travelogue, part political meditation, Sukegawa’s writing pairs the beauty of the Japanese landscape with the ugliness of government negligence. At the heart of this piece is a desire to bear witness to the lives rendered invisible in the eyes of the mainstream media and the country’s disaster management apparatus. In its sober reflection of the human cost of events still fresh in Japan’s collective memory, Sukegawa’s piece also conjures an eerie relation to the current pandemic we’re living through.  READ MORE…

Our Spring 2020 Issue Has Landed!

April 16, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Feat. Anton Chekhov, Tsering Woeser, Phan Nhiên Hạo, Chus Pato and Alba Cid in our Galician Feature amid new work from 30 countries

Explore the grand scheme of things in Asymptote’s Spring 2020 edition “A Primal Design,” featuring poetry by Zuzanna Ginczanka and Phan Nhiên Hạo, drama from the great Anton Chekhov, Joshua Craze’s review of António Lobo Antunes’ latest fiction, and Fiona Bell’s essay on the “diva mode” of translation. Our Special Feature this season showcases Galician poetry, headlined by Chus Pato. The vivid colors of guest artist Ishibashi Chiharu set the tone for exciting new work from 30 countries and 24 languages, while Ain Bailey’s sonic art provides a fitting soundtrack!

The oracle reveals the obscure plan that drives history, and Galicia, as evoked by its poets, shimmers with oracular resonance. “Language endures / Bodies do not,” declares Gonzalo Hermo, and indeed, these verses seem meant for stone inscriptions. Lara Dopazo Ruibal’s work takes a more visceral approach: “the fig tree grows inside me while the scorpion hunts the ants coming out of my eyes.” But everywhere these poets deal in the essential, the “gold in its original depths,” as Alba Cid writes.

The primeval and the primordial abound in highlights like Matteo Meschiari’s dive into prehistory in his powerful fiction, “Red Ivory,” or Auschwitz survivor Edith Bruck’s lyrics, as immediate as they are minimal. Tareq Imam considers the sublime terror of blindness in a Borges-inspired tale, “Through Sightless Eyes”: truly we are as the blind before destiny. History, like that of Tsering Woeser’s immemorial Buddhist Tibet, provides an illusion of clarity in our confusion. Amidst all that disorientation, writes Seo Jung Hak, “Even if I scribble a poem, the absurdity like a fly who doesn’t bother to fly away somewhere is sitting on a chair like an old joke.”

As we sit quarantined in Plato’s cave pondering our collective conundrum, consider casting shadows of your own when you share news of the issue on Facebook or Twitter; as thanks, here’s a free flyer of the issue to print and share with friends!

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