Salt Monody (New Polish Writing)

by Marzanna Bogumiła Kielar, Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese (Translation)

The austerity of Marzanna Kielar’s mindscape compels with its monochromy. Her poems insistently return to northern Poland cataloguing the sea, fog, wind, lakes, rivers, woods, fields, and crows. “My first homeland is a post-German landscape,” she acknowledges, “with wild rose bushes, stone stables, metal window fittings, red roofs.”

Kielar does not comment on Poland’s past or present. Like so many other young Polish poets who started to publish after 1989, she no longer needs to: confronting history and the state has finally become an aesthetic choice rather than a poet’s moral obligation. When Kielar speaks about her obligation as a poet, she speaks about bringing home what we tend to call reality, love, death. Always aware of the risk involved in naming, she strives to bring out of darkness words and their meanings.

Marzanna Bogumila Kielar (b.1963, Goldap), a graduate in philosophy from Warsaw University, works at the College of Special Needs Education in Warsaw and co-operates with the literary magazine Krasnogruda. She has published two collections of poetry and has received the Kazimiera Illakowiczówna Prize for the best debut of the year, and the Koscielski Foundation Prize; she has been nominated for the NIKE Prize.

Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese teaches translation and contemporary literature in English at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She co-edits Przekladaniec, a journal of literary translation; her translations of contemporary Polish poets have appeared in numerous journals, and the Zephyr anthology Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2006

About the author

Born 1963

Reviews

[Keeley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kielar's vivid imagery is a highlight of this impressionistic collection. I don't know Polish literature well enough to situate it in its tradition, nor do I know Polish pronunciation well enough to appreciate its sonic qualities. Within my limitations as a reader, I most enjoyed "The Dogs," "After the Rain," "Over the cliff, night...," and "Prediction."

[meggggg · Rating 4 out of 5]

political poems veiled as nature poems; ocean, forest, ice, traces of the domestic. abstract but occasionally really grounded in specific gestures, objects. relationships with others, self, sensuality. fragmentation. no set form that i can recognize; couplets, tercets are all used

[Juliet Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Salt Monody is the latest collection of poetry from the Polish poet Marzanna Kielar, here in a bilingual edition with excellent English language translations by Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese. The poems took me right back into the ancient forest heart of Poland that I visited briefly years ago. Kielar's writing is very evocative and full of wonderful images like:

dark splash of a crow in the floodplain of silence

from the poem Dusk. A lot of the book feels quite bleak, set in winter weather in stark landscapes and there are dark themes running through, such as death and abandonment. However the collection is not depressing or grim, its too beautifully written for that. I also have to say that this is one of the best poetic translations I've read, I don't speak Polish so I can't say how close to the original the translations are, but as poetry they flow wonderfully and multiple meanings can be read throughout - wonderful enough in poetry at any time but very difficult to achieve in translation.

I haven't been able to find a bilingual website that offers Kielar's poems side by side in Polish and English (For readers who are interested in reading some of her poetry in Polish, there is a sample and a short biography here).

[Curtis Bauer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know what it is about the Poles, but when they read their poems I want to drop it all and go to Poland to live and learn from them. I heard Marzanna read in Iowa several years ago. There's a great poem in here, "Ona" I teach all the time, as a translation exercise. I dedicated a poem in 'B A C" to her, "Poetry Reading" because of her voice.