Translated from the Polish by Karen Kovacik
This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.
Krystyna Dąbrowska (b. 1979) is a poet, essayist and translator. She’s the author of five poetry collections: Biuro podróży (Travel Agency, 2006), Białe krzesła (White Chairs, 2012), Czas i przesłona (Time and Aperture, 2014), Ścieżki dźwiękowe (Soundtracks, 2018) and Miasto z indu (City of Indium, 2022). In 2013, she won two of the most prestigious Polish literary prizes: the Wisława Szymborska Award and the Kościelski Award, and, in 2019, the Literary Award of the Capital City of Warsaw. Her poems have been translated into fifteen languages. They appear regularly in literary magazines in Poland and abroad, including Poetry, Harper’s Magazine, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Southern Review, and Modern Poetry in Translation. Her first collection in English, Tideline, translated by Karen Kovacik, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, and Mira Rosenthal, appeared in 2022 from Zephyr Press. She lives and works 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
