An ask in exchange: can you recommend some favorite Polish writers? I think I've only read Wisława Szymborska (quite a bit) and Czesław Miłosz (a very little). I don't know what all's been translated into English, but I'd love to expand my horizons. :-)
Wow, I spent way too much time thinking about this ask. I’m sorry if it will turn out to be quite lengthy.
I think that if you liked Szymborska, you might want to try reading some Julia Hartwig. I actually like Hartwig more (maybe because Szymborska is all over the school curriculums and I got a bit too used to her voice). Her poems are simple, precise and profound, and there’s a lot of travel impressions (of America, among other places) in them. She’s also a bit more dark than Szymborska, I think.
As for prose… Well, this is difficult, because the books I like are either very dependent on their language, or very Polish, and thus probably not that interesting (or comprehensible) to someone who’s not. One of my favourites is Bruno Schulz, but he’s definitely not for everyone, given the dreamlike, mythological and generally surrealistic qualities of what he writes (some people compare him to Kafka, if you have read him). A lot of the beauty of his writing might be lost in translation, but I haven’t read it, so I don’t know how successful it is. I also like Witold Gombrowicz, especially “Ferdydurke”, but again, this is a really weird book. It uses absurd and invents new words a lot, and, although it deals with more universal themes like youth and opression of identity, it’s also a critique of certain aspects of Polish culture of the time (it was published in 1937), so… eh, I’m not very good at recommending things, am I. But Gombrowicz is probably the best-known non-heterosexual Polish writer, so his works, apart from being of literary interest, are also interesting because of this non/less-heteronormative perspective.
From more easily-digestible books, there’s the wonderful, musically constructed “Madame” by Antoni Libera, which I recommend to anyone who will listen. I think there might be even some translated fragments of it on the internet. The story is quite simple - it’s about a student hopelessly fascinated with his French teacher in the 60s (= communist government and all that it entails), but the writing is absolutely brilliant. Or, if one was after some late-XIX-century, published-in-installments, supposedly-Dickensian (I say “supposedly” because all Dickens I’ve read was “A Christmas Carol” years ago) portrait of Warsaw society, there’s “Lalka”/“The Doll” by Bolesław Prus (but it’s also kind of male-centric and the main female character is… ugh, little more than a motivator for the main male character).
Sadly, there aren’t many prose-writing Polish women whose style I’m a big fan of. I wish there were more of them. The one I like the most is probably Olga Tokarczuk. Her stories often have central female characters; she likes to write about uncovering the past of places (and people) in a mystical/spiritual sort of way. Which is not exactly my cup of tea, but she definitely can write.
ahahaha this is probably way more than you asked for, but I’m glad you did, because it made me think about what kind of books are “exportable”, i. e. would be understood and appreciated the most, and how much of what I like doesn’t seem to be “exportable” at all, at least to me. Not to mention the problem of translations, because, obviously, there are few and far between and their quality varies. I didn’t even bother to recommend you much poetry, because looking at the English translations just made me sad.
(I knew this would turn out lengthy. Sorry!).
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