“Come, precious ones, let’s cry together before I go. I will be back with you as soon as I can. No, I won’t stay; they don’t want me here anymore. Władzia, dear, keep the peace, won’t you? Don’t let anybody hit Zosia. And please don’t fight amongst yourselves. I will miss you too…” From the […]
“Kitchen full of black aunties sighed, outraged with Grandma’s lack of respect for the written word and the bloody stamp in the corner of the page. Nobody questioned the war death. She was the only one who put her foot down.” From the short story “Tola” by poet and short story writer Mirka Szychowiak, translated […]
The latest issue of Asymptote is out with an awesome Latin America Fiction Feature, including work by Sergio Chejfec, Cristina Peri Rossi, Lina Meruane and Julián Herbert as well as an essay by César Aira on Osvaldo Lamborghini. The esteemed translators bringing this work into English include many who have worked with B O D […]
“So many poems. So many nice poems. More and more and still getting stronger.” This is from the begininng of Jacek Gutorow’s poem “Caedmon”, one of four of the Polish poet’s works published in B O D Y in translations by Piotr Florczyk.
The great Tadeusz Różewicz passed away on April 24, 2014, the last of a great generation of Polish poets to experience the country’s turbulent 20th century from the Second World War through communism and its aftermath. Today, B O D Y publishes his poem “Wishing Well” in a translation by Kasia Pilat. There have also […]
“I’m making notes from Lacan, I turn the page in my notebook and come upon the sprawled foetus of a poem…” The beginning of the first of two poems by Tadeusz Dąbrowski translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in B O D Y. And that, after some Polish fiction by Agnieszka Taborska in last […]
“when dad came out he had to push his way through a raging crowd of invalids everyone with a limp except me later he showed me some monuments but to me Warsaw was a city of people missing limbs” From “Warsaw”, one of four poems by Polish poet Piotr Macierzynski published in B O D […]
“To your mad world—one answer: I refuse.” – from new translations by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine of Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poems to Czechoslovakia.” The latest issue of Poetry magazine features a number of selections of the work of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. I will soon be writing something about Tsvetaeva’s brief but impactful time living […]
When I hear of looted cultural artifacts I think of the image of train cars stuffed with Old Master paintings and objets d’art steaming back in the opposite direction of equally packed troop trains. Then come accusations and bitter quarrels, pleas of national patrimony and then lawsuits and more lawsuits. In fact many of the […]
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