This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.
Translated from Polish by Karen Kovacik
Jacek Dehnel, born in 1980, is a poet, novelist and translator. In 2005 he was one of the youngest winners of the Kościelski Prize for promising new writers. He has published nine volumes of poetry and numerous works of prose. Several of Dehnel’s books have been translated into other languages. Available in English are the novels Saturn (Dedalus, 2012), and Lala (Oneworld, 2018), both translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, and the poetry collection, Aperture (Zephyr, 2018), translated by Karen Kovacik, a finalist for the 2019 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. With Piotr Tarczyński, Dehnel is also co-author of three crime novels set in turn-of-the-century Krakow, whose crime-solving heroine is a bored professor’s wife. One of these, Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing, appeared recently in Lloyd-Jones’s translation. Dehnel is himself a literary translator, who has brought into Polish Philip Larkin’s Complete Poems, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. Originally from Gdańsk, Dehnel lives in Warsaw.
Karen Kovacik has published translations of contemporary Polish poetry in many journals, including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry East, West Branch, Mid-American Review, Poetry Southern Review, Trafika Europe, Two Lines, and World Literature Today. In 2011 and 2018, she was awarded a fellowship in literary translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, and she’s the translator most recently of Jacek Dehnel’s Aperture, a finalist for the 2019 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She’s also the editor of Scattering the Dark, an anthology of Polish women poets (White Pine, 2016). With Mira Rosenthal and Antonia Lloyd-Jones, she is translator of poems in Krystyna Dąbrowska’s collection Tideline, published by Zephyr in, 2022, which is a finalist for the Derek Walcott Prize and has been longlisted for the National Translation Award. Also a poet, she’s the author of the collections Portable City (forthcoming in 2025), Metropolis Burning and Beyond the Velvet Curtain. She was Indiana’s Poet Laureate from 2012-2
