Languages

A woman remains suspiciously calm in the face of her stepdaughter’s violent death in Cezary Łazarewicz’s reimagining of a 1931 murder. Brzuchowice, night of Wednesday to Thursday, December 30–31, 1931 It hurtles out of the darkness, flying straight at him. It’s small and bursts with color. The engineer’s clouded mind tells him it’s a hummingbird. He saw one like it in some book. Maybe in Trzaska, Evert, and Michalski’s encyclopedia? It has...

Marcin Wicha discovers that choosing the right urn for his father's ashes is a process fraught with nightmarish options that could wake even the dead. “Please choose an extension number or wait to be transferred to the front office,” and the voice of Louis Armstrong on the phone:                             And I think to myself,                    ...

In this excerpt from his literary nonfiction debut, Remigiusz Ryziński looks back on the French philosopher-provocateur's 1950s stint in Poland, which drew the attention of the secret police.  Urban Legend Michel Foucault came to Warsaw in October 1958. He took a position as the first director of the newly founded French Cultural Center at Warsaw University. It was in Warsaw that he finished his doctoral thesis, later published as A History of...

In this chapter from Polish journalist Karolina Domagalska's I Won't Apologize for Giving Birth: Stories of IVF Families, the author meets a Tel Aviv family of six: Dana and her girlfriend, Dafi; their two daughters; and the children's fathers, Ronen and Yanai, a gay male couple who have just broken up after seventeen years.   “Hey, Dana, I just wanted to ask which shoes Abigail's wearing today. The pink Crocs? Right, I'll pop over to your place before...

The child, a girl, is running ahead; she has a tiny face, long, thin arms and legs—in all, she makes you think of a puppy that you know will grow into a big graceful dog. It’s hard not to notice her bright, wide-open eyes and the almost unnaturally long lashes. Those eyes make her look a bit unreal, like an elf. She’s got a skateboard under her arm, even though it’s the middle of winter and the snow has just fallen. She gets to the elevator, which luckily has stopped...

The story is set in Lviv, Ukraine—formerly Soviet Lvov, and until 1946 Polish Lwów. In this chapter it is still Soviet Lvov, where the narrator lives with her grandmother (whom she calls Aba), her great-grandmother, and her opera-singer mother, Marianna—until Marianna, as a leader of the Ukrainian independence movement, is shot dead during a public rally in 1988.   Every evening Great-Granma locked the front door according to her own elaborate ritual, as if she...

  I remember the colors. I remember the textures, patterns and shapes—somewhere in between sight and touch. One fat stripe and two thin ones, stretching into infinity. A carpet? A sofa? All a bit rough, and possibly green. The baby bath was green, too. The bathroom floor was various colors, but mostly green. The dominant color. Was it really, or just in my memory? I’ve seen the baby bath in a dozen photographs, though only black and white ones. And yet I know it was...

  Grub’s throat was dry as hell. He blinked. When that didn’t help, he shook his head back and forth. Finally, he managed to overcome this strange, suffocating sleepiness. Bit by bit, he began to make out individual details of the chaos swirling around him. He heard cries, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. The room where he found himself was very cramped, so that someone was constantly bumping into him. People swarmed all around. He frowned. For the life of him, he...

Hanna Krall makes the rounds with a con woman In the elevator with Małgorzata P. We are going down to the ground floor, but first stop on the seventh, where the door flings open. Małgorzata P. freezes in terror—the woman who delivers milk lives on the seventh—but luckily someone else gets in. The sixth is a joke, Małgorzata has paid off her debt here and the elevator can stop, for all she cares. Once we get through Mr. Burek on the third we are home free. With...

Part Three Jerzy Lutowski takes us to Inquisition-era Spain, where intolerance demands a bold choice of a young Jewish woman.   House lights down. The measured peal of a bell. The doleful tune of a penitential psalm is heard. From the wings on the right three monks emerge, their cowls lowered over their faces. The middle one is carrying a black gonfalon, the other two carry lighted candles. They stop in mid-stage and turn to face the audience. On the gonfalon the words THE...

Here, translator Duda has upgraded nonsense phrasings with a nod to our digital age, and designer Kwiecień-Janikowski maintains the dynamism of the printed version in his digital layout, but again with a clever nod to our temporal remove from the original.   Translation © 2016 by Paulina Duda. Design © 2016 by Wojtek Janikowski. All rights reserved.

The Assassination 1. They’ve set up the ambush by a small bridge across a stream. They’ve been hiding among the trees since early morning—and they’re lying in wait. They know that José Cláudio and Maria will have to slow down here. That’s when the first shot is fired. Discharged from a hunting rifle, the bullet hits both of them at once: it goes through Maria’s hand and lodges near the left wall of José Cláudio’s...

What won’t he fix, what won’t he do? The man’s a treasure, a must-have for any decent household. His fingers are like pincers, they can get a grip on even the tiniest little bits and pieces. His nimble joints can turn taps, table legs, and screws any which way. And then with some fast-drying adhesive, rubber cement or just ordinary glue, ta-da, he’s done. “Jeez Louise, how do you do it? Normally I’d have thrown that jewelry box in the trash already but...

1 Shuel is eighteen years old, in a checked shirt hanging loose over his trousers, and with the trusting smile of a child to whom nobody has ever done any harm. Shuel and I are sunk up to our ankles in some sort of gunk consisting of mud, crude oil, organic waste, sawdust, splinters, and scraps of asbestos. We’re walking along the deck of a huge ship, which has several dozen people buzzing around it with files, hammers, crowbars, and other basic tools. The sun is just about to set...

What did Suleiman Shakir paint? An abandoned house. An old man on a donkey. Children picking daffodils. The pictures didn’t need captions. Everyone knew what he was trying to tell them about the tragedy of a Kurdistan pacified by the Iraqi military. The painting is large: two meters high by six meters wide. It stands directly behind the chair from which the Speaker of the Iraqi Kurdistan Parliament will soon preside, and before the chairs where the deputies will sit. The seats are...

No Bukhara, no Samarkand, no meaning, just bare life in the rarefied air. That had been what I was after. A clarity of existence. To see sand sifting through the post-imperial rust. That would be enough for me, if anyone were to ask; for that it was worth traveling three or four thousand miles. I’ll go to Murghab, I thought, see the Chinese trucks on the road from Xinjiang. Each day a few of them came by, maybe a dozen or so. Along with extra wheels they each carried a few spare...

1 The tiny oval of Orefine has a remarkable number of canals. The island once served as a center for the islands nearby, many of them even tinier. In this network, the earth dug from the canals was used to fill in the shallow straits and connect some of the islands. The main canal, Canale Grande, went through Orefine in an elongated S. On every island, this shape created backwaters in the larger canals to protect ships from rough seas. The Orefine main canal didn’t merit the name...

I Once, on a long trip, I experienced an incident that was as trivial as it was enlightening. It happened that my luggage was lost for a couple of days while I was staying in a foreign city. Because I always bring with me two or three books by my favorite poets (reading while liberated from daily responsibilities has that special quality of intensity), in this situation I was left to the exercises of my own memory. As I wandered the waterfronts, parks, museums, and churches, from time to...

The guy who bought the world has his five minutes and the bartender puts yet another mark by his name. What is his name? The unknit wisps of sky, like in Grójec, like in Horyniec. And snow has covered up this world of yours, right? White letters hide the black background, but no stark tracks have been laid yet, no sleigh track pastiche. In the evening, love leads him on a leash from bar to bar, from Chinese to Italian neighborhoods and farther, beyond all borders. Oh, how he likes...

This is my room. The ice in the glass will melt here in a moment, will melt before the eye, and by the time the hand and fingers have felt what’s happening, an inkblot takes the page, dyes snippets of letters, turns mud. Again the cobalt night grows vast, streetlights, and you can hear nearby a rattle as the continent moves and shudders, searching for land in the East. Back, thigh, shoulder. Columbus was wrong. There’s no earth whatsoever after sunset, a boat sails into the...

The guy who bought the world is out for a walk down Thirty-seventh Street. No one in the least suspects that the deal just took place and the stock exchanges keep noting each little increase, ha, ha, ha. But now, he merges with the flock of people in the crosswalk and releases himself to jostling. Yellow taxis blast, drivers shout in a dozen different dialects, and he looks up, high, there in air, directly above where clouds go crazy and whipped gray stirs into yellow. The twenty-first...

February 2005. Violence rages following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the southern port city of Basra is dominated by the militants of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. The British, who are stationed in Basra, are doing little to stem the chaos. Mariusz Zawadzki, a reporter for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, takes a break from reporting on the chaos in Baghdad to travel to Basra—alone. Attempting to drive to Basra—which is about five hundred kilometers from...

I liked Peshawar. I preferred it to hot, racing Rawalpindi, or grand, haughty Islamabad. I think I preferred it to any other city in the world. Indolent in the autumn sun, it was the perfect place for waiting. Although formally it was part of the state of Pakistan, Peshawar belonged to Afghanistan by now. It lived according to Afghan laws and rules, it thought and felt the Afghan way, it spoke Afghan and it looked Afghan. And Afghanistan meant eternal waiting—always,...

I read in the newspaper that the Apocalypse wasn’t going to happen. To celebrate this piece of good news, I went to McDonald’s and ordered a hamburger. “How fortunate,” I thought, enthusiastically seasoning my hamburger with ketchup, “that there won’t be any angelic horns, no earthbound star plunging toward us on a path of fiery destruction.” Until that day I had eaten without enthusiasm, as I had been living in the shadow of impending...

               for S.F. I wish I had a master to teach me how to live, to eat with knife and fork as well as to write poems he’d tell me how the stars like people are born and die and like people live in constellations I’d listen to my master attentively for one stray word would mean the fall of kingdoms the suspension of time my master’s words carved from the body would be clear. Translation...

The rules are clear: no place to mill about. There’s no such thing as comfort for unhappy men. He leaves the tall house and passes through the eye of the blizzard, insignias unpinned, his neck exposed by a collar haphazardly removed. In silence. No one rings him, not even from his pockets, no sharp objects or dimes, his shoes unlaced, his loops without a belt. He’s free to think—or whatever else he pleases, no one cares where he goes or why— of Roland,...

it'll happen via levels and verticals, you won't even notice before a cluster of tongues has ground you, smelt from your body a thimble for death. you have no chance without me. only i am cruelty-free: a cyclist helmet, a warm button, a hand that puts away a sharp object, the truth is that sometimes i am not well: i give out spider-catchers for so-called luck, i dig in the ground in search of a glass under which at the beginning i hid a note with my name. Translation...

Amazing spring, warm, humid and full of backlit trees in various colors, even if it’s still unclear which ones, except for the rhododendron, which one way or another stays in shape, though it’s just a bush, and the unfurling leaves of the maple. And the greenery in the flowerbeds, which is green even at night. “Also in the dark?” Also in the dark. Amazing, silly, and even in such dark moments lucid days, because for starters, days, and nights, because of...

And of course the birds go on chirping, and how! Even if they’re not chirping. Bah, wires can chirp almost as well, so it’s easy to confuse them. It’s altogether loud and sensuous, almost phonetic. And the flowers blossom to make things colorful, and later wither, first on the graves, but they’re bent out of shape there, mostly due to us passing by on the paths between the trees as if nothing had happened. And no way to avoid the brown-eyed gaze of the...

children grow, no doubt happily verbs swell before your eyes or burst their seams, everything does something to be happy inevitably. In Studio “Bernardi,” Łódź, 17 Piotr- kowska Street, my two-year-old mother sits on her mother’s lap with her arms around her neck. “Negatives Preserved.” Forgive me, but for how long? I look for the atelier myself, where everything is recorded, day by day, and the negatives continue to be preserved,...

And then she died on us, utterly. The leg dead, the foot rough. The bend of the knee glows with emptiness. And the belly’s warmth turns to ash, a black sachet filled with down. Even the cigarette, that meager butterfly, the joining of lung, poison, and breath, is merely an inscription on a signboard that says nothing to passers-by. The mouth it rules being dead. And even I, lying on sheets already musty in late morning, as disposable as a syringe, soak it up like a...

They will greet you with mysterious smiles, those who were there before you. Later, when new ones arrive, you will already know it all. You will welcome them with the same smile and show them in. With a sweeping gesture you will present the freshly made beds and the expansive view of the gardens. At last, when they will have composed themselves a little, you will explain where they are and what the future has in store for them. Translation of “Pomieszczenia i...

We exist on innumerable photographs. Whoever you are you exist. In a country landscape there is no place for sublime pleasures of the soul. Whoever’s tired of the city this, or some other, can go to the country. City creates an atmosphere of unaccountability just as the country creates the atmosphere of irrelevance. Over the atmosphere of the country planes draw straight lines or fall burning. We could have found a plane but someone’s stomach growled. A...

The Fool (Głupiec, 2005) is set in contemporary Olsztyn, author Ewa Schilling's hometown in northeastern Poland. Alina is a thirty-year-old high school teacher and the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, who taught her that   " feelings are dangerous. " Dangerous, indeed: She falls in love—  "without sense, "   " without a chance  " —with her dynamic young student, Anka. While exceptionally mature, Anka is still months from graduation. With precise,...

This interview was conducted by email, in English and Polish, between 24 May and 1 June, 2010.   W. Martin: How did you begin writing The Fool (Głupiec), and what motivated you to tell this particular story? Ewa Schilling: Well, I was thinking about all these teachers and students who fall in love with each other, women and girls in the schools. And about all their stories, which are unspoken. Especially in Poland, with its politics and priests—all these men who hate...

One Saturday the summer vacationers appeared. The village was slowly becoming a tourist spot. A few cabins, a woebegone hostel, a kiosk selling Wyszków beer in its special bottles. The locals were used to it, and nothing special was going on. The Tonette was playing “Seven Girls on the Albatross.” The guys hadn’t gotten into the swing of things yet. They were standing huddled in groups, smoking Start cigarettes. A few girls were milling about in pairs. In the...

The Goat Polish comics began in 1919 with the publication in the Lvov satirical weekly Szczutek (“Fillip”) of With Fire and Sword; or, The Adventures of Mad Grześ, about a young soldier who battles enemies of Poland on various fronts.  For the next twenty years, the comics market developed slowly but systematically. Comics were published in magazines for both children and adults. Most were imported—among them Prince Valiant, Tarzan, and Mickey Mouse. The range...

The pyxel appeared at a most inconvenient moment for Robert. As usual on such appearances, the air flickered a little, an invisible violin began to play softly, and there was a whiff of vanilla. The pyxel materialized some thirty centimeters above the tabletop. He windmilled his little arms, piped, "Oh shit," and fell to the table with a crash surprisingly heavy for an insubstantial being. He got up, brushed himself off, adjusted his official cap, and turned a serious face to Robert and...

Polish speculative fiction has been developing for over two hundred years, although it was only sixty years ago that science fiction began to be treated as a separate segment of the publishing market, with its own publishing series, authors, and critical apparatus. As in the case of Polish culture more generally, extraliterary events—both historical and political—have had an enormous influence on the genre’s form, achievements, and reception in the stormy last two...

The street sizzled. The clatter of skytrains, the car horns, the rattle of speeding trolleys, the twitter of traffic lights and the massive hubbub of human voices, all seethed in dark blue air, sliced into smithereens by columns of light of all colors and shades. Like giant serpents, endless throngs poured this way and that, filling sidewalks to capacity, lit up by square shop windows and by house lights sinking into the twilight. Freshly watered asphalt hissed under hundreds of car tires....

I made a habit of visiting the refugees in the train standing in the middle of nowhere, outside the village of Karabulak. From far away you got the impression that the train had stopped because of some breakdown, or had simply taken a break in the journey due to the passengers' request. The people walked up and down alongside the cars, staying near to it, as though afraid of the train making off without them. They were stretching out their numb arms and legs. The men gathered in...

"Abulafia" is from a collection of short stories published in Poland in September 2008, entitled Cold Sea Tales. Although the eleven stories in the collection were written at different times over a number of years, they feature some common themes that have also appeared in Huelle's novels. The "cold sea" of the title is the Baltic—all the stories are set on our near the Baltic coast, most of them in the author's native region, in and around Gdansk. Almost all feature a large...

At first she tried struggling with the locks, but they were obviously not in sync, because when she managed to turn the key in one of them, the other stayed locked—and vice versa. The wind came in gusts off the sea, winding her wool scarf around her face. Finally he set down both bags in the driveway and snatched the keys out of her hand. He managed to get the door open immediately. The cottage they had always rented was right on the sea, among holiday cabins that all looked alike,...

So many saints that they obstruct the heavens. We have yet to buy a plastic Christ. Holy water which will be absorbed by the blotting paper of sin. Thoughts of unbelief watch us closely. Love converts. A reckless juicer squeezes shy testimony from us. Yes. Translation of "Sokowirówka." Copyright by Ewa Lipska. By arrangement with the auhor. Translation copyright 2007 Robin Davidson and Ewa Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska. All rights reserved. Read...

Let them hate, as long as they fear. --from the tragedy of Lucius Actius, Atreus The secret agent of order. He would prefer to present before the court the chaos of uncertainty. He places a teaspoon of obligatory jam into the mouth of a child. The assimilated taste passes from mouth to mouth. The univocal believer has mastered to perfection the smells of evil. The valedictorian of the unenlightened star gazing into the sky of hypocrisy. Yet bound to the...

I like you a twenty-year old poet writes to me. A beginning carpenter of words. His letter smells of lumber. His muse still naps in rose wood. Ambitious noise in a literary sawmill. Apprentices veneer a gullible tongue. They cut to size the shy plywood of sentences. A haiku whittled with a plane. Problems begin with a splinter lodged in memory. It is hard to remove it much harder to describe. Wood shavings fly. Laminate angels. Dust up to the heavens....

Had she busied herself in time with the systematic counting of ship screws it would not have come to this— indecent acts of poetry. Translation of "Niedyskrecja." Copyright by Ewa Lipska. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2007 by Robin Davidson and Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska. All rights reserved. Read Ewa Lipska's "Juicer."

And so what that our planet is bookable. The moon listed in property records. The sun included in a notarized deed. Numbered cities. Mortgaged streets. Multi-digital fate. New wars secured by property of the Decalogue. Exorbitant sums of hope at public auctions. And so what when love a twig brushed by the wind is always Number One and leans toward us. Translation of "Numer Jeden." Copyright Ewa Lipska. By arrangement with the author. Translation...

The new century came as no surprise. Already past midnight, we call it by name. Your dress beside the bed. My suit, a pirate flag. Reports warn us of the slippery surface of history. The question, what happens now? we send back to the party. We speak to each other in fireworks. A groggy noun in the mouth. We subject breakfast to laboratory tests. 314 calories on a white plate. Zipped fast as lightning into a life-proof vest. Translation of "Nowy...

Translator's Note: Polish author Paweł Huelle was inspired to write his novel Castorp when he found a line in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain mentioning that the hero, Hans Castorp, had spent four semesters at the Danzig Polytechnic. This fact does not feature again in Mann's great novel, but as a native of what was once Danzig, now Gdańsk, and as a writer who has set almost all his fiction in that city, Huelle decided to fill in the gaps. The result is a prequel to The Magic...

The telegram came at eight in the morning. He was still lying in bed; he didn't really feel like getting up. He couldn't stand Sundays anymore; they were empty days difficult to fill. So he stayed in bed as long as he could, waiting for the morning commotion to die down in the apartment, and the scrambles for the bathroom and kitchen to cease. That usually took quite some time, since the apartment housed three families, one in each of the three large rooms. He himself occupied...

Style Queens I picked up my cigarettes and went for a walk through the ruts toward Świnoujście. I looked over and saw that pharmacist from Bydgoszcz lying there. She had her umbrella with the "Vichy" label opened up and was slathering on sunscreen as usual. I bowed politely, proffering my respect, and at once began pestering her about the crabs: How could I get rid of them? She gave me a whole lecture, explaining how I had to shave my entire body, even my legs and armpits because...

Chapter One Awakening It was a terrible dream. At first I couldn't find my bearings in it - I didn't know what I was actually dreaming about, what I felt afraid of, or what those big chunks of raw meat were supposed to be; despite being beaten to a bloody pulp, they were still showing signs of life. Only a while later, when an image loomed out of the confusion, moved towards me and came into sharp focus did I catch sight of an infinite multitude of human tongues, torn from...

Breslau Monday, November 28th 9:00 a.m. Kurt Smolorz, a sergeant in the Criminal Unit, was one of the best officers of the Breslau Police Department. His brutality was reviled by criminals, while the laconic brevity of his reports drew praise from his superiors. However, one of these superiors valued another of Smolorz's qualities above all else: his perspicacity. This morning, Smolorz had revealed the trait in a striking manner, twice. The first time was when he had entered...

I peel potatoes, stroke you on the head, pick up a leaf off the ground, turn on the light, light a cigarette, grab the doorknob, take out a tram ticket don't be in such a rush, you're greying too fast run run, as much is yours as stabs in the chest For the next poem in this sequence, click here.

I put off three dreams about father until later they may come in handy it's already an old tear, an automatic one I always find it in the same place

I lose verbs most quickly, nouns are left, things no more than personal pronouns (a lot of I, more and more I) and names? they vanish, conjunctions vanish three words, two words finally my, my inward my inward out world I in the first and last person For the next poem in this sequence, click here.

exactly the forehead, exactly the mouth, exactly the hands with that same dirty stain near the fingernail with little braids in an old-fashioned dress with a dahlia at the cheek, a strawberry at the lips in that blue grey band in the hair (and: will the ash blossom?) For the next poem in this sequence, click here.

four drab women Want Hardship Worry Guilt wait somewhere far away a person is born grows starts a family builds a home the four ghouls wait hidden in the foundations they build for the person a second home a labyrinth in a blind alley the person lives loves prays and works fills the home with hope tears laughter and care the four drab women play hide-and-seek with him they lurk in chests wardrobes bookcases they feed on gloves dust kerosene...

you have no name, no place talk to yourself, sand, grass are you crying? who heard the meadow cry? For the next poem in this sequence, click here.

I. if I only possessed a sunlit room for sure I'd rid myself of my foes aside from the bones of my ancestors prey to lengthy fevers nothing brings me pleasure aside from the bones of my ancestors with whom I was not seen there's nothing I'd squander it's not what I've placed inside me that matters and I've tried to place lots but what is prey to lengthy fevers and impossibility ("beat it, Dycki") for us stirs no associations II....

"It's past and gone [...] Best would be to go mad." (Tadeusz Konwicki, Afterglows) And once again the past begins best would be to go mad you're right Tadzio but our generation doesn't go mad our eyes stay open to the very end we don't need to be blindfolded we have no use for the paradises of faiths sects religions with broken backs we crawl on yes Tadzio at the end we have to relive everything from the beginning you know that as well...

The blue winter sky like a stone on which angels sublime and quite unearthly sharpen their wings moving on rungs of radiance on crags of shadow they gradually sink into the imaginary heavens but in another moment they emerge even paler on the other side of the sky the eye's other side Don't say that it's not true there aren't any angels you immersed in the pool of your indolent body you who see everything through your eye's color and stand sated with world -...

Marked in the guidebook with two stars (in reality there are more) the whole principality, that is to say the city, the sea and a stretch of sky, looks great at first glance. The graves are whitewashed, the houses are detached, the flowers are plump. All the citizens are guardians of landmarks. Due to the low number of tourists, the work is easy - an hour in the morning and an hour at night. In between there's a siesta. Over the principality a cloud of snores rises,...

the day is shorter the sundial stands hourless in the rain the sanatorium emerges from clouds like a vast passenger liner the columns of black trees drip with water and moonlight the sanatorium sails away with the November mists it rocks its windows darken one after another it plunges into shadow into sleep only below underground the devil's lit the old stove in "Little Hell" don't be afraid it's only a late-night spot a cafe...

At the turn of the century it seemed that angels were leaving us forever and that every trace of them would be lost. They were still employed here and there by funeral services. They also held up unfashionable canopies. But essentially they went pale from inertia and slowly turned into pink powder. The real renaissance of angels came with the development of airline companies. You could say without exaggeration they came back to earth and took on the flush of life. They provide aid in...

"What makes gray a neutral color? Is it something physiological, or logical?" "Grayness is situated between two extremes (black and white)" --Wittgenstein my gray zone is starting to include poetry here white is not absolute white black is not absolute black the edges of these non-colors adjoin Wittgenstein's question is answered by Kêpiñski The world of depression is a monochromatic world dominated by grayness or total darkness in the...

She was doing her hair before going to bed and in front of the mirror it lasted an infinitely long time between one bending of the arm at the elbow and another epochs passed from her hair soldiers of the second legion said to be Augustus Antoninian's spilled soundlessly Roland's brothers-in-arms artillery gunmen from Verdun with resilient fingers she secured the halo on the top of her head it took so long that when she finally began her swaying march towards me my...

Like a clumsy bumblebee he alights on a flower bending the fragile stem he elbows his way through rows of petals like the pages of a dictionary he wants in where the fragrance and the sweetness are and though he has a cold and can't taste anything he goes on trying until he bumps his head against the yellow pistel and gets no further than that it's too hard to push through the crown into the root so the bee takes off again he emerges swaggering loudly...

Peat bog, fossilized air, loops of an evening sky. Words close themselves against other words, and there is only a burnt-out path, a pipe in ether with after-voices and after-crackles whitened and beaten by water, wind and rain down the drain, into the muddy heart of November. Slates of bark, grains of earth, and the never-ending granulation; the fields give off the smell of smoke and the shreds of afternoons flash in ponds. More words are more shut doors and dusty...

Arcades: steps toward the sun. Stone crossbeams with figures of griffins and nereids. Saint James shoulders up a prison tower and Saint Anthony stands in the door of a café where you have just drunk espresso and finished your panini. The marble procession in Prato della Valle and via Donatello where you are led by a blind boy. Gardens full of morning glories, their lines apparently designed by a Botticelli. And a woman's voice - a whisper? a rustle of thoughts? -...

I find the trace of your teeth in the foreign town. I find the trace of your teeth in my arm. I find the trace of your teeth in the mirror. At times I'm a hamburger. At times I'm a hamburger. Salad sticks out of me and mustard drips. At times I'm so totally like all other hamburgers. First layer: skin. Second layer: blood. Third layer: bones. Fourth layer: soul. And the trace of your teeth is deepest of all, deepest of all.

"Uh huh" says the streetcar, or it seems to say. When did the clock with the tune get here, it's getting harder to hear. Wrong: tremors should be caught, fixed, accommodated. How far we've come, my dear Statistics, vanilla sugar, three waters and pudding responds to the deep needs of the reader, invites him to an exchange, embodies a philosophy of dialogue. Is there "incomprehensible" poetry? Of course there is! Incomprehensible poetry is egocentric poetry, based...

The landscape is effective. We're calling out the hills. Echoes want untwining. We're drawing water from fountains. A half-open window. The half-closed sea. The rest just flickers and we are taking these moments apart. The fractured time may be reset otherwise, the other way round, toward inside. Perspectives will run into unknown directions. Water becomes melody, melody fulfills desert places after our last conversation. Melody drills the rock and...

Weeks spent. a month devoted to the study of a detail in a magazine ad. The guide tells us there are two kinds of people: creative and not. Soap washes off, milk washes down. Push the cart. For the next poem in this sequence, click here.

Her house in the middle of spring. Ribbons in girls' hair, a smell of starch. The wind distributes words, puffs out curtains. The house is on flowery fire, a sparkling stream. How many times has she crossed the point of silence, the blue zone? Mid-spring reflected in water and the house is divided into frames. The sky releases paints and smears, the sun landing upon pillows. Yes, it might be summer, its blues getting hotter and hotter. Meanwhile the world's axis...

Good night, one-night flies. Bye, bye.

A boy stood on a narrow balcony in the afternoon: autumn was moving through a labyrinth of dishwashing and cigarette smoke. Pines and starlings made quick imitations of one another: a long grey zone in stripes and dots; worthless lyrics in a bottom drawer or sometimes even lower when it was a dream in which he was being led by a stiff old hand through levels of hum or rustle - who remembers? It was afternoon. Nothing special. No material for poems, just unfinished...

The question about this fact-free life brimming with great notions is, can you live up to it? At dusk the megaphones get all confidential in the words of mountains the sun never scales. In the rising murmur you listen for the tinny undertones of carnival: saltimbanques get under your skin, cymbals and triangles yell like a riot of doomed may-flies. The heart does an about turn and reason breaks into slivers when the world grows dim in your eyes, which retreat bewildered,...

A late afternoon, snow is falling. Near the striking Musee d'Orsay you see a grey bundle on the edge of the sidewalk: a bum rolled up into a ball (or a refugee from some country plunged in civil war) still lying on a plaid, wrapped in a blanket, a salvaged sleeping bag and a right to live. Yesterday he also had a radio switched on. Today freezing coins are laid out on the newspaper in constellations of non-existent planets and moons. For the next poem in this sequence,...

Sweet, innocent words, sweet, round phrases, from sweet, smooth rounded comma's pure poison seeps For the next poem in this sequence, click here.

I see two castles one bright one dim one close the other far the larger at the forest's edge the smaller where the empty road from market place to pointed firs comes to an end in the international style according to experts the market is of interest to people walking hand in hand to the parking lot interesting people to talk to even about the stars who take an interest in people and markets according to experts when the castles go under darkness will...

A mutilated Giotto. A loud: Silenzio! From a car transporting animals we passed on the way the helpless look of a calf being taken off to slaughter follows me. Help, Saint Francis. Appear before the slaughterhouse gate. And if you are busy at the moment, please send your brother Sylvester or a wolf from Gubbio. For the next poem in this sequence, click here.

1. Sunday, Kazimierz Market they have everything you can imagine here at least that's what it seems like though as usual everything amazes everyone with its poverty in fact i can't see myself in it says one to another who in turn sees her in it as sharp as the apparition emerging from the entryway like sad reality i dream about raspberries and end up buying plums i go up there and get pissed off is all says yet another to yet one more i can't stand it when...

1. What futures do the oracular oaks predict for us, the prophetic cups, what horoscope do computers draw, whom do they allow to read to the end? On which continent do dolphins carry which islands to cities under the embers? 2. Time measured by the hourglass of a drip. On the monitor, a point of light jumps. Who were you? A scribe, maybe a pimp. I don't remember. I touched a snake in order to be a woman, being a man, and you, the skeptics, jeered at me. 3. Give...

On the other hand, maybe poetry can flout its own time, its own conventions, pieties, syntactical laws, aesthetic (anesthetic) canons and going definitions and habits. These are a few poets who think it can, at least in Polish. Krystyna Milobedzka, one of the most astonishing living Polish poets, virtually unknown to an English language audience, writes in her most recent volume of poems, After the Cry: the greatest discovery seems to me the grey, soiled light about which we speak...

Brother and sister, inscrutable sphinx, noble snail: what fate are you inscribing in your uncertain hand on the airport runway, in the last fall of a murderous century? 2000 For the next poem in this sequence, click here.

How did you find yourself here, poor mummy of an Egyptian princess, exposed to alien stares? Now it is here you have your afterlife. I myself am a part of it for a moment, while I'm looking at you. So far there is no other. No one knows if there will be. For the next poem in this sequence, click here.

An anthologist from Berlin asks me for poems new or recognized: ideally, they should amplify the union of love and death. I'd like to suit her, since I'm dying, but love is a master from outer space restrained like a text message and no one can afford to say more so I keep losing and losing and can't afford anything so let me lose "and" once and for all like everything else, one of these days. Queueing for monuments we follow love like aerobics on television:...

From unexpiated sins poems are born. That's why you sent down thickening darkness on my eyes. A spiral staircase carries me to countries under the earth - republics of shadow, kingdoms of grayness. The girl waiting by the stairs is a replica of that other Theban servant girl. Only from loudspeakers the insistent splinters of their music. Still lives Lose their color, turn cold, and now I no longer wish to reach the pear or the pomegranate, like the tired dog of a gardener...

The sea's color is green. The white sand is stained with blood. An old woman dies at the diner, underfed, under prepared. The telephone only takes phone cards. Some people are hard to recognize, even on the street. Already April, and here, imagine it, snow. Contradictions, contradictions. Eh, it's better late than at all, better at all. So we can't live more now? Even when we're by ourselves we invoke metaphors of the heart. Imagine a situation where...

Only when I turned it over on its other side did I see that the heavy sandstone circle which looked like the top half of a mill, grindstone or the top of a well, had been taken from an old Jewish tombstone. From the worn away inscription you could only guess at the name of the deceased woman: [Br]ejnche (Bräunche?), that she had been a widow and her death date: in the night in the fourth day of the eighth day of the month of elul 595 (or 598?) by the little calendar - 2 September...

Remember the very first time you did it tough wasn't the word. Turning the key, a sudden boardful of lights and music swelling behind our backs and acts of attention, you'd think the clothes would be off in a minute. Well, it's no joke, gunning it close to ninety nine round and round the hotel garage. You might have been led by the nose with a knife. With a razor raising a hair on your throat, let me have a go, I'm good at feeling my way in the dark. What a...

As her Polish husband Petro lies dead in the snow outside their home, Ukrainian Paraskevia thinks about their life together. In this extract she remembers the war, when the Soviet army occupied the eastern Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, where she and Petro lived, and deported many Poles to Siberia. Every seven years you should have a repeat wedding ceremony because—so Aunt Marynka used to say—every seven years you become a different person. So you should renew every sort of...

Stranded in Argentina at the outbreak of World War II, the great Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz records his blunt impressions of the country, its culture, and its writers. Journey to Argentina's Far North At six in the morning in Buenos Aires I board the long-distance train called El Tucumano—glittering, with an electric locomotive. I look around the carriage: it's sealed hermetically because of the desert dust that will accompany us in the last phase of our journey, at...

Magda comes in, but without Eric. She looks like something's happened, like she's been shattered into little pieces, her hair this way, her handbag that way, her dress to the left, her earrings to the right. Her panty hose all muddy on the left. Her face on the right, black tears flowing from her eyes. Like she'd been fighting in the Polish-Russki war, like the whole Polish-Russki army had trampled her, running through the park. All my feelings come back to life within me. The...

Dorota Masłowska is coping with literary fame in an especially literary country. Her first novel, Snow White and Russian Red, was published in 2002 to immediate critical praise and commercial success. Among its many important distinctions, the novel was named a finalist for the 2003 Nike Prize, Poland's top literary honor, alongside recent books by Nobel laureates Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska. And as one might expect in a media-driven culture, Masłowska was hounded by...

1 In 1930, in September, on a boat trip to Cairo, I fell into the Mediterranean Sea; I fell with a mighty splash, since at the time the sea was smooth, unruffled by any wave. Nevertheless, my fall was noticed only a minute later, after the ship had already sailed a kilometer and a half on-and when it was finally turned around and sent back in my direction, the agitated captain gave it too much speed and the immense vessel's momentum carried it past the place where I was choking on...

He who always knows to which god he prays, will never be heard.

Buddha, Christ, in vain you are hiding in so many incarnations.