Spanning Sosnowski's entire career, from the publication of Life in Korea in 1992 to his newest poems, this is a book whose approach to language, literature, and representation of experience is simultaneously resonant and strange – a cocktail party where lowlifes and sophisticates hobnob with French theorists and British glam rockers, unsettling the reader with the hard accuracy of their pronouncements.
Andrzej Sosnowski is widely considered a difficult poet whose poetry, however, has managed to acquire some popularity, proving quite influential, especially with younger poets, some of whom consider him the master of poetical diction and the most powerful voice in Polish poetry today. Sosnowski's work itself showcases a variety of influences – the most significant coming from contemporary American poetry, including John Ashbery, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch. This makes the whole translation project undertaken by Paloff a highly risky and exciting enterprise.
In an interview that appeared in the Chicago Review in 2000, Polish poet and translator Piotr Sommer called Sosnowski 'maybe the single most exciting younger Polish poet' for 'breathtaking and very innovative' work that displays a 'rich cross-fertilization of influences.' Sommer also explains that the New York School poets and OULIPO were 'an important part of Sosnowski’s literary tradition and reading experience.' And indeed, what American readers of Lodgings will find is a poet openly in conversation with myriad writers – French ones, such as Mallarmé, and Roussell, but more importantly with Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, John Berryman, James Schuyler, and Elizabeth Bishop.
The difficult, polyphonic character of Sosnowski's writing and the accompanying sense of interpretive disorientation on the part of the reader are some of the first experiences upon approaching Sosnowski's poetry in Polish. These qualities seem also present in the English Sosnowski, stated E.C. Belli:
For all his eclecticism, Sosnowski is still capable of channeling those unambiguous, moral voices readers associate with certain aspects of the Polish tradition – Millennium, What Is Poetry, A Song For Europe and The End of The Century certainly attest to this. But what a primed reader should expect from Sosnowski, coming to him for the first time, is (in the author's own words) a 'complicated, polyphonic adventure, sometimes a dialogue, sometimes a polylogue'.
Paloff has rendered a superb, tonally consistent volume, and has effectively stretched the barriers of his own language. With this English-language Sosnowski, he has contributed a new voice to the canon of writers descended from Ashbery and Schuyler, and, in the process of establishing such lineage—here, across international lines—he has helped further define the bounds of poetic language.
Andrzej Sosnowski
Lodgings: Selected Poems 1987-2010,
translated by Benjamin Paloff,
Open Letter, 2011