Meeting with Ryszard Krynicki, one of the most prominent poets of post-war Poland, and Clare Cavanaugh, a renowned translator of Polish poetry. Krynicki will be reading his poems in the original Polish while Prof. Cavanaugh will be reading her translations of those works, which were published just last year by New Directions in a volume titled "Magnetic Point: Selected Poems, 1968-2014". We ought to also mention that if it weren't for Prof. Cavanaugh's fabulous translations of other Polish poets including Wisława Szymborska and Adam Zagajewski, our Massolit events manager Lynn Suh probably wouldn't have moved to Poland to experience in person the poetry scene in Poland.
RYSZARD KRYNICKI one of the most prominent poets of postwar Poland, was born in 1943 in Sankt Valentin, Austria, where his parents had been deported to a Nazi labor camp. In Poland in the 1960s he became a leading member of the "New Wave" group of poets, which included Adam Zagajewski and Stanislaw Baranczak. He was co-editor of Zapis, the first independent literary magazine in Communist Poland to be published outside the reach of official censorship. He made his debut in 1968 with the collection Speed of Chase, Speed of Flight, and after the publication of his second collection, Collective Organism, in a form severely cut by censorship, his work was published by the Institut Littéraire in Paris and by underground presses in Poland. His most recent collection, Magnetic Point, was published in 1996. Krynicki is a distinguished translator of German-language poetry, in particular of Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs. He has received many awards, among them the Polish Poets' Award, the Koscielski Foundation Award, and the Robert Graves-PEN Club Award. Since 1989 he has run the prestigious independent publishing house a5, which publishes Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski and the work of many younger Polish poets, as well as literary essays and poetry in translation.
CLARE CAVANAGH is a scholar and translator. She is the author of Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (2010), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Other works of scholarship include Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (1995), which received the AATSEEL Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book in Slavic Literature. She is currently working on the authorized biography of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Her interests in contemporary Slavic languages and poetics led her, as a graduate student at Harvard, to Polish literature. She is now one of the preeminent translators of contemporary Polish poetry, and has translated numerous collections from poets including Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski. Cavanagh's many awards for translation include the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation and the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize for Outstanding Literary Translation. Her translation of Wislawa Szymborska’s latest volume, Here (2010), won the Found in Translation Award. She teaches Slavic and comparative literatures at Northwestern University.
