Back in January, I set myself the goal of reading 6 Polish books this year, and halfway through the year, I was at…zero. Oooops. I was introduced to this collection by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in a (really excellent) translation workshop where we collectively worked on translating one of the stories, and maybe for that reason I noticed, as I was reading, all the things that would be very challenging to convey in translation. Which is too bad, because it’s such a terrific book!
These are wonderfully expansive stories — traversing years, continents, such that you almost feel like you’re reading a novel, and then you reach the finale and it somehow frames the entirety in such a way that you realize, no, it’s definitely a story; it’s so cool. They are also expansive in their sense of Polishness, being as much about life abroad as in the country itself, but without constantly calling into question what that means. Poland has always been a more cosmopolitan place than the right-wing nationalists would have you believe, but it’s really exciting to read literature that takes that for granted.
Kasia Reads 