In my field of Slavic studies, there are a lot of things that deserve addressing - the anti-Semitism of many authors we read (I’m looking at you, Dostoevsky), the hegemony of Russian over other Slavic literary traditions, or the fact that syllabi are bereft of women. My friends and I have felt alienated by these problems, so we are doing something about it.

As a woman in my twenties, it has meant so much to connect with the work of Zuzanna Ginczanka, although I am sure she could be translated wonderfully by people from many walks of life. Scholar Izolda Kiec compares her poetic skill to the needlework of a spider “withdrawing thread from its intestines.” Her irony in “Virginity,” her precociousness in “Grammar,” which she begins boldly with a parenthetical, and her lucidity in “Fishing,” all speak for her sophistication. 

Ginczanka invents neologisms (e.g., “brainpulpish,” “apiarydom,” “greenweed-deep”). She leaves transitive verbs unfulfilled (i.e., without tagging any direct objects) and cuts away from them with enjambment (e.g., her use of “rid” in “Fishing”). In “Virginity,” she embeds a simile between an adjective and its paired noun in the final stanza, suspending each of these components in unitary lines as she controls her use of space. At the end of “Fishing,” she encloses the instrumental in a prepositional clause (in original word order “about with scales a sloshing wave”), although I sadly had to sacrifice the agitation of her word order for meaning.

Ginczanka modulates between majusculation and leaving things uncapitalized throughout the collection. She uses punctuation to accentuate transformations in how words appear and “mean.” In the poem “Grammar,” the equations she names mark the transformation from “you” to “You.” She is wont to have many iterations of this second person apostrophe (e.g., the italicized “you” at the end of “Fraud”). By way of another example, she has ‘god’ uncapitalized in “Process” as she describes scientific processes that happen despite God, while ‘God’ is capitalized in “Fishing,” despite it being a more pantheistic poem.

The punctuation in my translation reflects the facsimile (e.g., her double dashes), because historically these markers of her style, and the lines themselves, have been mutilated by male editors. While striving for grammatical accuracy, which has included respecting the use of the instrumental common to many Slavic languages, I have included some idiosyncrasies in diction resonant with my sensibilities as a writer of poems (e.g.,“gander”, “puzzlegrasses”). 

I thank Kasia Szymanska, Paulina Mascianica, and Beata Kruszelnicka for their copious feedback and look forward to translating more of her work.