12 Polish Books That Will Change Your Life

my_project-1.png, default, Book covers, photo: publishers' press releases

Every now and then, many of us decide to make a fresh start in life – promising ourselves to change for the better, to become smarter, kinder and more independent, to fill our existence with new meaning. An excellent aid in this difficult and noble task is a good book. Literary expert Igor Belov has selected a dozen masterpieces of Polish literature that can change lives, make them more interesting, bright, and saturated, and simply deliver incomparable aesthetic pleasure – all while telling about Poland and its culture.

Bruno Schulz – Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

Thumbnail — 'Dedication (Introduction)' by Bruno Schulz, 1920. Photo: National Museum in Kraków

Bruno Schulz, a brilliant Polish writer of Jewish descent, a citizen of the world who lived all his life in the provincial town of Drohobych which was at first Austro-Hungarian and later Polish, wrote only two small works, both comprised of short stories – Cinnamon Shops (known as The Street of Crocodiles in English, 1934) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937). After his death (Schulz was shot by a Gestapo officer during a raid on the Drohobych Jews in 1942) these two collections brought the author – and, by the way, a very original fine artist – worldwide fame. Schulz’s prose is more than prose. This is the highly artistic mythology of the European backwoods, which turned small dusty Drohobych into a fairy-tale city with mysterious colonial shops, vacant lots overgrown with burdocks, and mysterious women and exotic birds living in attics. It is, in the words of Asar Eppel, a translator of Schulz’s works, 'unseen and unread communiques from the intuitive', 'consciousness of the unconscious'.

Many have called Schulz 'the Polish Kafka', but to me this comparison seems too straightforward and therefore not entirely correct. Schulz is much more vital, sunny, carnivorous, juicy. If we must resort to comparisons, then his prose is a rattling mix of Kafka and Isaac Babel, flavoured with Marcel Proust. And although Schulz’s degree of eccentricity is in no way inferior to the Kafkaesque, Kafka is a neurotic, while Schulz is more of an erotomaniac and fetishist (which can be seen, at the very least, in the scene where the provocatively sexy maid Adela compels the narrator’s father – who is, in effect, God the Father – to kiss her shoe). The figure of God the Father in general plays a very important role in Schulz’s works. Jorge Luis Borges wrote that all world literature is built around three archetypal plots – war (Iliad, War and Peace), an adventurer’s wanderings (Odyssey, Dead Souls), and the death of God. Schulz’s prose is undoubtedly in the third category. He describes the degradation and fall of the patriarchal world, which echoes and finds immediate recognition in the soul of the modern reader, as we seem to be witnessing the final act of this drama today.

Schulz is also essential reading for those who want to learn to see anew, to obtain genuine vision that allows them to feel deeply all the colours of the world. Thanks to The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, we begin to notice that the world around us, no matter how ordinary of a hole we live in, is full of magic and miracles. Schulz’s magic works – when I first read his prose, I felt just as if all the windows of my house had been cleaned after a long winter.

Marek Hłasko - Beautiful Twentysomethings, novellas and short stories

Andrzej Szczepkowski, Stefania Grodzieńska, and Marek Hłasko (right), photo: Lucjan Fogiel / Forum

Ksenia Staroselskaya, the great translator of Polish literature, was the one who opened the works of Marek Hłasko to a Russian-speaking readership. I think I would not be mistaken in saying that it is better to start an acquaintanceship with this author with his short stories, and only then to continue with his literary autobiography Beautiful Twentysomethings – a nostalgic story about the writer’s journey and literary formation, partying with friends from his youth, and the literary Warsaw of the 1950s. The biography of this writer was very interesting and stormy, as Hłasko is that sort of Polish beatnik, outwardly similar to James Dean, a wayward student of Hemingway, a sex symbol of that distant time, who turned his short restless life into a beautiful and dangerous legend. And yet his stories are something very special.

'Beautiful Twentysomethings' by Marek Hłasko, photo: NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIV

They say that a good story should resemble a dream. If that’s the way it goes, then Hłasko’s stories are dreams after which you wake up in tears with the feeling that you have been understood and forgiven. This is especially true of his debut collection The First Step in the Clouds (Pierwszy krok w chmurach), which came out in 1956 and was enthusiastically received by critics and readers. As time went on, Hłasko confirmed his great talent as a master of the short story. Almost every one of them - primarily those such as Lombard złudzeń (The Pawnshop of Illusions), Śliczna dziewczyna (Lovely Girl), Szukając gwiazd (In Search of Stars), Pijany o dwunastej w południe (Drunk at Twelve Noon) and Pierwszy krok w chmurach (The First Step in the Clouds) talk about the tragic collision of a dream with the rough underside of life, a fragile ideal with a cruel, sometimes revolting reality. A special – and almost frightening – authenticity to these stories is given by Hłasko’s musical ear, which helped him accurately reproduce the living colloquial speech of the characters. This authenticity acts like a tub of cold water at midnight. Marek Hłasko is like a surgeon who is forced to inflict pain on his patients in order to make them feel better later.

But it wasn’t easy for Hłasko himself – after he handed over two of his stories to Jerzy Giedroyc for publication with the emigrant publisher 'Instytut Literacki', this trip to the West made it impossible for him to return to Poland under the Communist regime. He drifted around Europe, at one time lived in Israel, where he took on any work, sometimes the most difficult and thankless jobs, and eventually died in a rundown German hotel from an overdose of sleeping pills combined with alcohol – though, in fact, he died by suicide, tired of poverty and homelessness. In his short story Namiętności (Passions) one of the characters, a doctor, says to a nurse: 'You don’t have enough of an imagination to imagine how much a person can endure'. Here, of course, one recalls the famous maxim from Crime and Punishment – incidentally Hłasko himself, being a subtle psychologist, did not hide what a huge influence Dostoevsky had on him. Hłasko relates how the infamous human toughness often turns easily into depravity. Of course, you can live for a whole lifetime and not learn much about yourself, the good and the bad. But Marek Hłasko’s prose significantly expands our understanding of ourselves.

Witold Gombrowicz – Pornografia

Krzysztof Majchrzak and Grażyna Błęcka-Kolska in the film 'Pornografia', directed by Jan Jakub Kolski, 2003, photo: Syrena EG

Witold Gombrowicz unironically called his novel Pornografia, released in 1960 in Paris by Jerzy Giedroyc, 'a modern Polish erotic national poem'. Literary critic and essayist Konstanty Jeleński, after reading the book, wrote to the author: 'This is the most scandalous book ever written in Polish.'

The novel is set during World War II in German-occupied Poland. Two middle-aged Warsaw intellectuals, Witold and Fryderyk, leave the capital for the countryside to stay at the estate of their friend Hipolit. Turning their attention to the owner’s sixteen-year-old daughter Henia and her peer Karol, who live in the same house, Witold and Fryderyk decide, for fun, to unite their destinies, despite the fact that Henia is already betrothed to a wealthy neighbour. However, this strange erotic game, which gradually drives the entire household mad, goes too far when the two elderly aesthetes decide to 'bind' the young people with the spilling of blood.

Pornografia is a very sensual novel. The reader consistently finds themselves peeping through a keyhole at someone else’s fall into sin. There is indeed something involuntarily pornographic in this peculiar voyeurism, though we are not talking about pornography in the usual sense of the word – rather we are talking about 'pornography of the spirit'. The main essence of the novel is its impeccable style, subtle wordplay, a real feast of phraseology, and its musical rhythm. Maybe that is why the novel is almost impossible to retell in the language of cinema, and why many connoisseurs of Gombrowicz consider Jan Jakub Kolski’s adaptation to be unsuccessful; although, in its own way, Kolski’s Pornografia is a beautiful, sad, and truly poignant film.

Stanisław Lem – Solaris

Stanisław Lem’s famed science fiction novel, which came out in 1961, generated a massive amount of controversy and interpretation. Everyone sees something of their own in Solaris, which is noticeable through two very different film adaptions of it: Andrei Tarkovsky was primarily interested in the problems of ethics and morality, while Steven Soderbergh made a love story. It is noteworthy that Lem himself reacted acutely negatively to both film versions. Lem is truly elusive, because his fantasy is not about technological breakthroughs, but ideological ones.

What is happening on the distant planet of Solaris, whose surface is covered by a sentient Ocean that is a highly developed form of extraterrestrial life? Strange things are occurring at the research station that orbits and studies the planet, and the earthlings send Dr. Chris Kelvin there to investigate. Arriving at the station, he discovers that one of the scientists has committed suicide, and the other two are definitely not themselves. It soon becomes evident that the sentient Ocean, penetrating the thoughts and feelings of the humans, materialises their guilt, fears, and shameful desires, populating the space station with 'guests' – phantoms generated by the human conscience. It is an attempt at communication from Solaris, similar to a conversation in an unfamiliar language, but the humans are completely unprepared for this form of dialogue. Chris Kelvin (and the reader with him) seems to be standing in front of a giant ruthless mirror, and he must answer a myriad of ethical and metaphysical questions, while at the same time finding out why, when confronted by this other mind, he is continuously forced to stumble upon himself. Perhaps the whole point is that a person, as Lem writes, 'goes on to explore other worlds, other civilizations, without fully known his own nooks, crannies, deep wells, and barricaded dark doors'. One way or another, Lem’s novel makes us look inside ourselves, feel that the universe is not limited to our 'I' alone, and learn to be extremely frank, especially with ourselves.

Andrzej Stasiuk – White Raven

stasiuk andrzej portret en_6317735.jpg — Andrzej Stasiuk, photo: Dariusz Zarod / East News

White Raven is the second book by Andzej Stasiuk, one of the most well-known and popular writers of modern Poland. The novel came out in 1995, when 35-year-old Stasiuk had quite a rich life experience behind him: in his youth he played rock music, was imprisoned for refusing to serve in the army, then wrote about his prison experiences in a poignant book of short stories Mury Hebronu (The Walls of Hebron), and finally moved to a remote mountain village, where he started breeding sheep and founded the publishing house 'Czarne'.

Balancing existential drama and crime thriller, somewhat reminiscent of Jack Kerouac’s cult novel On the Road, White Raven tells the story of five grown-up childhood friends who go on a winter camping trip in the mountains. The characters are having trouble finding themselves in the dull and predictable Polish reality of the 1990s – their youth is over, their dreams have not come true, their hopes have not been fulfilled. Therefore the friends, who often talk about the 'lost generation' and quote Bob Dylan, go in search of adventures to start their lives over from scratch. The adventures come along quickly, and the romantic journey gradually turns into a bloody nightmare.

'White Raven' by Andrzej Stasiuk, photo: Serpent's Tail

An innocent man’s adventure becomes a dangerous road into the unknown, an escape from himself, delivered in such a fascinating way that it is absolutely impossible to put this book down. This is not only due to the exciting plot, but also to the amazing sense of style that is characteristic of Stasiuk. White Raven is magnificent, sanguineous, muscular prose. Even the descriptions of nature, which are usually not enjoyed by the bulk of readers more focused on the plot, are written in such way that they are not boring to read at all – they add extra tension to the narrative: 'In the headlights, the forest looked like fiction. Not a hint of greenery, of branches – all oval, drooping silhouettes, exactly the symbols of dejection and helplessness. The forest of lowered hands, it could be called.'

Stasiuk’s novel doesn’t just tell us about the deep chasm that growing up forms between people. It is a kind of 'educational novel', a book about re-initiation, friendship, and betrayal. And most importantly, it is about the responsibility you take when you feel that the world is starting to take you seriously.

Antoni Libera – Madame

Antoni Libera, photo: Włodzimierz Wasyluk

Madame by Antoni Libera – prose-writer, essayist, theatre director, a major specialist in the works of Samuel Beckett, translator of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Sophocles and Friedrich Hölderlin – is rightfully considered one of the best Polish novels about love. First published in 1998, it caused quite a sensation, won the Grand Prix for novels from the 'Znak' publishing house, was nominated for the Nike Literary Award, instantly brought fame to its author and was translated into many languages, having already gone through several editions in Poland. This is not surprising – the novel is not only a dizzying love drama, but also a kind of magic box of fascinating stories with complex intellectual context.

'Madame' by Antoni Libera, photo: Canongate Books

The plot of the novel takes place in Poland under Communism during the second half of the 1960s. The main character is a precocious and well-read student in the graduating class at a Warsaw lyceum. The bleak reality of life during the Communist regime does not suit the ambitious young man, forcing him to undertake, as he himself calls it, 'attempts to magically transform reality' – the energetic high school student forms a jazz ensemble at school and puts on theatrical performances with friends. And then he falls head-over-heels in love with the new French teacher – beautiful, elegant, and arrogant, like a Snow Queen. In his efforts to find out as much as possible about Madame, feeling that there is some mystery behind her inaccessibility and coldness, he not only writes her love letters disguised as essay assignments, but also starts a serious investigation into her past, and soon discovers the details of his teacher’s confusing and tragic family history. However, he can no longer abandon the 'orchestrated play', full of transparent hints and literary provocations, that he started for himself, because he has experienced for himself the magical power of imagination and artistic words.

Madame is a book that is greedily read, like a good detective story written in the refined language of a classic European novel. The two main characters, a student and a teacher, are engaged in a serious intellectual 'duel to the death', incessantly exchanging quotes from the world’s classics like fencers exchanging sword blows. Entranced readers follow this complex chess game, full of intrigues, and do not notice how they themselves become a part of it, how the author gradually makes them accomplices of the game.

And yet this book is also about how 'the Word' can transform our lives. After all, those magical times when, as Nikolay Gumilyov wrote, 'the sun was stopped by a word / cities were destroyed by a word' never remained in the past. Antoni Libera’s novel Madame not only reminds us of this, but also tells us how to live and act properly in this world of words.

Dorota Masłowska – Snow White and Russian Red

Dorota Masłowska managed to write her debut novel Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną (Published in English as Snow White and Russian Red, literally, 'Polish-Russian War under the White-Red Flag'), published in 2002, at the age of 19 during her final exams. The book whipped up an intense controversy and wildly contradictory reactions, bringing Masłowska a number of prestigious literary awards and making her the most popular author of the younger generation. In Russia, the novel was published by the 'Inostranka' publishing house, in a congenial translation by Irina Lappo.

Snow White and Russian Red is an inconsistent monologue from the main character, a young Polish drug addict Andrzej Czerwiakowski aka 'Silny' (Eng. version: 'Nails'), who is always high and is almost constantly getting into idiotic situations. Silny is a typical child of Polish national prejudices and stereotypes. He sees the ghost of the Polish-Russian war everywhere. In an interview, Masłowska herself called him 'a media-noise catcher equipped with collective memory.' Because of the nervous and aggressive manner of speaking with which Masłowska endowed her hero with, some critics dubbed Czerwiakowski a Holden Caufield of the 'aughts', although a parallel with Mark Renton from Irvine Welsh’s cult novel Trainspotting is perhaps more appropriate. As in the case of Welsh’s characters, Masłowska’s characters are a lost (or, rather, deliberately lost) generation, the members of which, in the words of BG, are 'sausage-like elephants on acid'. Suffering from violent withdrawal aggravated by metaphysical Slavic melancholy, these 'rebels without a cause' nevertheless try to somehow find themselves anew.

Masłowska has grown the flowers of new literature upon a basis of verbal dust and national imprints – painful-Baudelaire flowers, a kind of Polish 'Flowers of Evil'. It was the unique language of this book that contributed to the book’s feel resembling that of an exploding bomb. As the critic Vladimir Itkin rightly noted, 'Masłowska’s characters express themselves in completely otherworldly slang. Perhaps Andrei Platonov would have done this with language if he had been a twenty-year-old Polish freak who was hooked on heroin.'

Michał Witkowski – Lovetown

'Lovetown' by Michał Witkowski, photo: Portobello Books

Michał Witkowski has sometimes been called 'the Polish Jean Genet'. In many ways this is true, and not only because Witkowski’s 2005 debut novel Lubiewo (published in English as Lovetown) became the loudest and most radical coming-out in the history of Polish prose. Like his French colleague before him, Witkowski is primarily interested in 'people of the abyss', not members of the middle class.

Lovetown is an utterly frank book about Polish homosexuals, their difficult lives, joys and humiliations, loves and tragedies, complexes and unrealizable dreams. Typically, many gay communities have received the book ambiguously, since Witkowski’s characters aren’t just gays, but gay-marginals, 'the cream of the social bottom', for whom sexual otherness often goes hand-in-hand with vulgarity, violence, and hopelessness. The novel is shocking and defiantly politically incorrect, since it spoke in plain text about passion with a taste of vice. However, Witkowski would not be a real artist if his 'gay Decameron' did not go beyond a specific sexual subculture.

Lovetown is a universal statement about the modern world, a shameless hymn to sexual attraction itself, a novel about the brutal power of erotic lust, for which gender, age, social status, political views and aesthetic preferences are indifferent – and which, precisely because of this indifference to such trifles, still 'moves the sun and the other stars'. And it’s also a book about the loneliness that awaits us all, regardless of sexual orientation – after all, as Hans Fallada correctly noted, 'everyone dies alone.' Perhaps this frank, striking, brutal book will make someone’s loneliness a little more bearable.

Czesław Miłosz – Miłosz’s ABC’s

Миниатюра — Czesław Miłosz, photo: SIPA / East News

More and more often, we hear that the usual, tired literary forms are about to be replaced by new and more practical ones – for example, a novel in the form of a cookbook, a love story disguised as a guidebook, a moral treatise in the form of a quest. And, of course, a special role in this transformation of the literary landscape simply must go to… dictionaries.

'Miłosz’s ABC’s' by Czesław Miłosz, photo: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3PL

The great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz was able to foresee the work of the secret machinations of the universe. As if anticipating the coming trends, Miłosz, in the sunset of his earthly days, wrote the unique book Abecadło Miłosza (Published in English as Miłosz’s ABC’s) – a spiritual autobiography and encyclopaedia of himself, which reads like an encyclopaedia of the entire 20th century. Miłosz chose the form of a dictionary to implement his concept. Of course, this isn’t the first experiment of this kind – recall Milorad Pavić and his Dictionary of the Khazars. However, the scale of Miłosz’s personality helped him manage a truly global task – to tell the story of our modernity, our civilization.

This wonderful book covers everything on the planet – there are chapters about automobiles and alcohol, Baudelaire and Dostoevsky, alchemy and Buddhism, the Russian language and American poetry, Henry Miller and Arthur Rimbaud, time and money, Robert Frost and Edward Hopper… Miłosz shares with the reader his reflections on the topics of ethics and metaphysics, philosophy and politics, his recollections of various icons in the realms of art and science, the cities and countries he has seen. This interaction with such an interesting conversation partner is well worth the time – after reading Miłosz’s ABC’s, you will definitely acquire that breadth of worldview which will help you find the key to the secrets of the universe.

Sylwia Chutnik – Pocket Atlas of Women

Sylwia Chutnik, photo: Rafał Siderski / Forum

While reading the novel Kieszonkowy atlas kobiet (English translation: Pocket Atlas of Women), you may instinctively recall the following verses from Pasternak: '...from early childhood / I was wounded by the woman’s burden, / And the trace of a poet is only a trace / of its ways, nothing more…' The woman’s burden has always been heavy and dramatic, but serious discussion about it perhaps only began in the 21st century. Polish literature is no exception in this sense: in Poland, as in other European countries, the ideas of feminism are now very popular, and this has not been slow to affect the balance of power in fine literature, where many emerging texts take place in a world that is candidly gendered, female. I would even venture to say that an 'era of women' is now coming in Polish literature. And one of the brightest signs of this time was the debut novel of Sylwia Chutnik.

Pocket Atlas of Women, which was published in 2008 and won its author the prestigious Paszport Polityki Award, consists of four chapters, four short stories about the terrible fate of women. These are not even short stories, but rather urban legends – 'Purses', 'Messengers', 'Phonies', and 'Princesses'. The four heroines of the novel live in the same apartment building in the Warsaw district of Ochota, and even their names are almost the same: Manka, Maria, Marian (one of the four female fates fell to the lot of a man) and Marysia. In essence, these are four variants of the modern life of the Mother of God.

Sylwia Chutnik’s novel is a heavy and ringing slap in the face of this too masculine world on behalf of all humiliated and insulted women. This book will give modern men a unique opportunity to erase the rudiments of sexism and misogyny from their souls, and will help women hold themselves in higher esteem.

Joanna Chmielewska – Dead Man’s Tale

In the books of Joanna Chmielewska, the 'queen of Polish ironic detective stories', criminal intrigue has always played an auxiliary, plot-forming role. Humour is the main character.

The main character of the 1972 novel Całe zdanie nieboszczyka (English translation: Dead Man’s Tale) is an architect and writer named Joanna who is a terribly absent-minded and terribly charming person, who many believe is based on Chmielewska herself. She is mistaken for another person in an underground casino and is given a mysterious cipher. As a result, Joanna is kidnapped by the mafia, forcibly taken to the other side of the globe to Brazil, where she manages to escape and return to Europe by sailing across the ocean in a stolen yacht. And that is only the beginning – our heroine will have to go through many more dangerous adventures to save her own life.

The healing effects of humour have been known for a long time. Alla Shteynman, director of the Russian publishing house 'Phantom Press' which was originally a small branch of a Polish publisher and in the 1990s created a real hunger for Chmielewska’s ironic detective novels in the post-Soviet space, had this to say about the wonderful properties of Dead Man’s Tale:

It was 1991 when everything collapsed in my personal life, in the country, everywhere. One desperately rotten day, a friend, for therapeutic purposes, slipped me the book "Dead Man’s Tale", which was published in a collection of Polish detective stories in 1983. But I was in such despair that of course I didn’t believe that reading could help change anything. And so I read "Dead Man’s Tale" and in two days I didn’t just feel like myself again – I had a completely frenzied drive and a very distinct thought: if these sort of books could help me so quickly, then they could help anyone.

Among Sorrowful Storms: Polish Poetry of the 19th and 20th Centuries

This wonderful anthology of Polish poetry translated by Anatoly Geleskul and published several years ago by the Ivan Limbakh publishing house in St. Petersburg presents sixteen Polish poets spanning two centuries, from Adam Mickiewicz to Tadeusz Nowak.

Anatoly Geleskul (1934 - 2011) – the great Russian poet-translator, the first winner of the 'Master' translation prize and winner of the 'Inolittl' and 'Illuminator' prizes – is known and loved primarily as a translator from Spanish and Polish. In particular, he gave us the poems of Federico García Lorca. Geleskul’s translations have everything – incredible skills and almost alien musicality, the finest ear, amazing tenderness and truly chivalrous prowess.

Therefore, it is a special pleasure to read the poems of Leśmian, Staff, Tuwim, Baczyński, Iwaszkiewicz, Gałczyński, and others in his magnificent translations. In addition, the translator wrote a short essay about each poet, presenting a portrait of the author against the background of the era, in historical and cultural context.

What can these poems, the vast majority of which were written more than half a century ago, give us today?

Reading poets is the best way to understand another language, another people, and their culture, which is why, having become acquainted with Polish poetry, we will be able to understand Poland. As the translator himself admits in the preface of the book, 'poetry is an effort of the collective soul.' And in the history of Poland, there were times when Polish poetry literally was a substitute for the homeland.

We should not forget that poetry, according to the definition put forth by the English poet Samuel Coleridge, is 'the best words in the best order', and therefore it is able to give our awareness a truly colossal amount of vigour. It is a kind of medicine, a cure for the meaninglessness and futility of life. It’s no accident that Joseph Brodsky noted that poetry teaches us the particulars of human existence – in other words, it turns a person from an obedient cog of historical necessity into a person with an 'uncommunicable expression'. The meaning of human life is to become oneself, to exist as a unique individual. And on this thorny path we have no better ally than poetry.

Available English Translations:

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, New York: Walker and Company, 1963 (translation by Celina Wieniewska of Sklepy Cynamonowe (Cinnamon Shops) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, New York: Penguin, 1988, (translation by Celina Wieniewska of Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą, with an introduction by John Updike)
Marek Hłasko Beautiful Twentysomethings (translation, from Northern Illinois University Press, by Ross Ufberg, 2013) Short Story: The Most Beautiful Girl translated by Ross Ufberg 2014 https://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/polish/the-most-beautiful-girl/
Witold Gombrowicz - Pornografia in 2009 Grove Press published an English translation by Danuta Borchardt, from the original Polish.
Stanisław Lem - Solaris multiple translations
Andrzej Stasiuk - White Raven translated by Wiesek Powaga published 2001 by Serpent’s Tail
Antoni Libera - Madame translated by Agnieszka Kołakowska published in 2004 by Canongate U.S.
Dorota Masłowska - Snow White and Russian Red translated by Benjamin Paloff published in 2005 by Grove Press, Black Cat
Michał Witkowski - Lovetown translated by William Martin published in 2011 by Portobello Books
Czesław Miłosz - Milosz’s ABC’s translated by Madeline G. Levin published in 2001 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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