At the Limits of Possibility: Ursula Phillips on Translating Jacek Dukaj’s 'Ice'

Siberian Winter_River_Angara_fot-Alexey Avdeev GettyImages-641832192-1920.jpg, default, Siberian Winter, Angara River, photo: Alexed Avdeev / Getty Images

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Jacek Dukaj’s ‘Ice’ is one of the most ambitious novels in modern Polish literature: a 1,000-page alternate history where language freezes, logic bifurcates, and reality is reshaped by a meteor from the Siberian sky. For translator Ursula Phillips, bringing this linguistic and philosophical labyrinth into English meant seven years of deep immersion and confronting what she calls ‘the limits of possibility’.

Ursula Phillips has spent decades opening Polish literature to English-language readers, from the classic novels of the long 19th century to contemporary voices such as Agnieszka Taborska and Piotr Paziński. Though she is often associated with her pioneering work on women writers, her range is far broader, encompassing historical fiction, philosophical prose and, now, one of the most ambitious speculative novels of the 21st century.

Bringing Jacek Dukaj’s Ice into English required nothing less than a reconstruction of language itself. The novel’s vast alternate Russia – shaped by the 1908 Tunguska event and frozen into a rigid metaphysical order – bristles with archaic Polish, Russian bureaucratic jargon, scientific invention and hundreds of neologisms. For Phillips, the challenge was not just to translate a story, but to translate an entire worldview: its logic, its mood, its philosophical architecture, and the distinctive narrative voice of Benedykt Gierosławski. The result of seven years’ work is a landmark translation of a book that has already become a modern classic in Poland and is now poised to capture new readers in English.

In March 2026, Ursula Phillips was awarded the Found in Translation Award (FiTA) for her translation of Ice – a distinction that recognises not only the scale of Dukaj’s novel, but the equally demanding creative labour required to reimagine it in English. The jury described the work as exceptional, underscoring the translator’s role in giving new literary life to one of contemporary Poland’s most challenging texts.

Agnes Dudek: What first struck you when you encountered ‘Ice’ – the scale of its ambition, its language, or its philosophical depth? What convinced you that it was worth the extraordinary labour of bringing it into English?

Jacek Dukaj, 'Ice', photo: Head of Zeus / AdAstra Book

Ursula Phillips: I saw the language of Ice as an enormous translation challenge, everything else hinges on the language. This in itself was an attraction for someone like me who has been working with translations for many years: to attempt the seemingly impossible, like climbing the ultimate mountain. As I have mentioned elsewhere, it took me to the limits of possibility. On the other hand, translation is one of the arts of the possible – it is possible to find viable solutions to most problems, although some things have to be reinvented or reconceived, like Dukaj’s neologisms or his particular use of the Polish reflexive pronoun się in his narrative technique. Any translation is only ever an approximation of the original, only one of an unlimited number of possible versions. The immense size of the book and its many dimensions were daunting, but I happen to like reading long complicated books.

AD: You are best known for translating 19th-century Polish prose and women’s writing. What kind of mental or linguistic shift did Dukaj’s novel require from you?

UP: Yes, I am known in Poland mostly for my translations of women novelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. However, it’s a misrepresentation to suggest that I only translate dead women. I’ve recently published translations of Agnieszka Taborska and Piotr Paziński, and my first foray into translating Polish literature was Wiesław Myśliwski’s Palace. I’ve also translated contemporary academics, as many men as women.

My interest in translating the women writers emerged from my research, it had a specific purpose: why write in English about this dimension of Polish literary history, trying thereby to include these women in wider European debates, when no one outside Poland can read their texts? Of course, my work in this field convinced me that the writers I translated were important figures, and I have returned to them now: I’m currently working on a new English translation of Maria Kuncewiczowa’s The Stranger, and am planning to revive other projects which I had to put aside because of Ice, in particular Nałkowska’s The Impatient. But my long background in studying 19th-century Polish literature, as well as Russian, predating my work on Polish women, was fundamental when translating Ice, since Dukaj’s archaism dates from this period, namely the late Russian Empire, including the Russian partition of Poland. I am well used to reading this non-contemporary prose, so it didn’t feel like a seismic ‘linguistic shift’ to me.

Also, my own written English is not especially contemporary, in fact, so I didn’t feel it was any particular mental leap to immerse myself in the book’s setting and atmosphere. It felt familiar from my reading of the big 19th-century Russian novels. This is perhaps another reason why I chose to translate it – it felt close to my heart.

But I would add, as a general point, that translating women writers or translating as a feminist does not preclude translating men or translating genre fiction. I’m also a professional, so it’s my obligation to be as sensitive to all the possibilities contained in a text: the task is to translate as open-mindedly and empathetically as possible what one has before one.

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Jacek Dukaj and Ursula Philips, photo: Polish Cultural Institute London fb.com/polishinstitutelondon

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AD: How long did the translation take, and what sustained you through a project of this scale and difficulty?

UP: The translation itself took five years, and then there were another two years before publication, so seven in all. In the beginning, I was still working on other projects, but eventually these were finished or had to be put aside in order to complete Ice within a reasonable time. At times, it was very intense. I found myself working four, five, six hours a day on this one thing. Total immersion. What sustained me? Well, I often discussed individual issues as well as the experience as a whole with translator colleagues, experts on the historical or philosophical background, or simply other sympathetic friends and family members. This certainly sustained me. There were moments when I asked myself why I took it on at all, but it never crossed my mind to give up.

Working with the author also added to the time taken, resulting for example in lengthy exchanges by email or in person in Kraków or London and in several iterations of many files. But I regard such cooperation as time well spent, since it definitely improved the final product. As the work progressed, this process also gave me the opportunity to ask questions, as well as the confidence that I was more or less on the right track.

AD: ‘Ice’ is famous for its hybrid language – archaic Polish, Russianisms, neologisms and scientific-philosophical coinages. How did you approach this layered linguistic world at the sentence level? Did you attempt to mirror Dukaj’s linguistic eccentricities in English – his archaic spelling, syntax and wordplay – or did you seek other ways to evoke that atmosphere?

UP: Well, this is an enormous question, perhaps the most important, and I devote a postscript to it, a full sixteen pages, in the English version (on the invitation of the publisher). I’ll try to summarise here.

Starting with the ‘archaic’ Polish, it seems to me that the initial impact of the text when you first open the original, is visual, a view supported by several Polish native speakers whom I consulted. Polish orthography was reformed in 1936. Significant changes involved less usage of the letter ‘j’

Ursula Philips, photo: Edyta Dufaj / Instytut Książki

and the replacement of all -em and -emi adjectival case endings with -ym, -ymi. Seemingly minor changes, but given the frequency with which they occur, the impact is overwhelming. In order to reproduce such an effect in English, you would have to go back to the written/printed English of the early 18th century at least. The differences between our contemporary English and English at the turn of the 20th century are nowhere near as great. So, using the language (syntax, spelling, capitalisation conventions, obsolete vocabulary) of early 18th-century English would create not archaism but anachronism (in other words, the language would be inappropriate to the period of the book’s setting). So, I didn’t introduce any early 18th-century conventions such as capitalising nouns or using archaic past-tense verb forms (in apostrophe d, and not the modern -ed, e.g. ‘walk’d’ not ‘walked’). I took care, however, not to introduce any word not used in English before 1930 (the action starts in 1924 of the alternative reality, with history having frozen in 1908).

Another important aspect of Dukaj’s ‘archaism’ are the Russianisms. This is a very specific application of Russian: not only does it evoke Dostoevsky and other pre-revolutionary writers, it also conveys the language of administration, bureaucracy and power that Poles living in the Russian partition, in occupied Warsaw, would have heard on a daily basis. Polish readers, encountering this text in 2007, would have been able, however, to understand these Russian terms and phrases, even if they had never studied Russian, because of the common Slavic roots.

This affinity – of language, if not of culture – cannot be reflected in English, as there is no language of equivalent status which would be so closely understandable and at the same time so closely linked to external domination. I decided to keep various Russian words, which should be understandable from the context (although we have provided a glossary, where Russianisms and neologisms are listed in a single sequence, since for readers who do not know Russian, the Russianisms also function as neologisms), those connected with everyday life (clothes, food) but also those associated precisely with Russian power: tchinovnik, natchalnik, ispravnik, okhrannik. In my translation, however, these are not italicised, because they are organically integrated into Dukaj’s Polish, worked into the structure of sentences, sometimes reflecting even the syntax of Russian. The number of Russianisms increases as the protagonist Benedykt Giersławski travels closer to Irkutsk, to the epicentre of the Ice.

I also had to decide on an appropriate system of transcription of the Cyrillic into English that would have been used at the time. This was a mental juggling act as well. Dukaj uses a ‘Polonized’ phonetic transcription suited to the Polish ear and orthography, so I had to deduce from this what the Cyrillic would have been and then re-transcribe according to historically appropriate British methods, which tend to prefer simple transliteration rather than phonetic transcription.

Most difficult for me was the philosophical terminology with which I am less familiar. Clearly, in philosophical speculations and propositions, the vocabulary needs to be precise and specific, distinct from everyday usage. Here, I turned to colleagues in the UCL Department of Philosophy, who helped me to establish the correct vocabulary used in logic and mathematical logic. The translation of niekonieczy (as ‘non-necessary’, and not ‘unnecessary’) and niekonieczość (‘non-necessity’) in this context was especially important to get right.

As to the scientific vocabulary, this was relatively straightforward, namely the actual vocabulary used in ‘regular’ physics, cold-temperature physics, chemistry, technology, all from which Dukaj then develops his neologisms for the so-called ‘black physics’ and the technologies based upon it.

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Jacek Dukaj at the Economic Forum in Karpacz, 2024, photo: Radek Pietruszka / PAP

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AD: Were there words or concepts you found truly untranslatable, and how did you respond when fidelity and legibility clashed?

UP: This is probably the best place to talk about neologisms, many of which were not directly translatable by any close equivalents, and about Dukaj’s narrative using się (again I go into greater depth in my postscript which is entitled precisely: Translating the Untranslatable).

On my first reading of the whole book in Polish, I noted at least 400 neologisms. These relate to new natural phenomena, to the black physics, prompted by an element brought from outer space by the Tunguska meteor (1908) called tungetitum (I kept the term used in the book by Nikola Tesla), and then to the scientific research, technological developments and new industries based upon it. Some neologisms lent themselves to literal translation, such as the all-important zimnazo, which I translated as coldiron (one word), created from the regular Polish words (zimny meaning ‘cold’, and żelazo meaning ‘iron’). Dukaj, however, plays with prefixes and other devices available in Polish, often based on opposites or rather obverses or negations, which do not have equivalents in English. For example, in relation to the ‘black’ light phenomena: ćmiatło, świecień, ćmieczka. The wordplay here depends on the prefix ćmi- (implying dark) and świ- (implying light), and connotes to the actual Polish words światło (meaning ‘light’), cień (‘shadow’) and świeczka (‘candle’). I played at first with etymological solutions, but these quickly became contrived and academic: darklight, lightshadow, darkcandle… Here, the author came to my rescue suggesting that I should not be so literal and to think more in terms of how I as a non-scientist would describe these phenomena to other laypersons. I came up with: unlicht, glintz, blackwicke. I trust they work in context, but another translator would have thought of different things, as there is no right and wrong here. I discuss the neologisms in more detail in my postscript to the book.

I also discuss Dukaj’s invented narrative with się there, which hinges on his use of the reflexive pronoun, which doesn’t exist in English, allowing him to hide the subjectivity of his first-person narrator Benedykt Gierosławski by replacing first-person pronouns and verb forms (marked masculine) with a third-person grammatical form using się and neuter verb endings, thus creating an impersonal narrative voice. To reproduce this in English is impossible. After experimenting with various ideas, I decided in the end to make this as succinct as possible: I took the semantic element only of the infinitive (eat, sleep, run, freeze), hence without tense and without person, and placed it at the very beginning of the sentence – thereby indicating to readers that this is the narrative voice speaking. It feels a bit strange at first, just as it does in the original Polish, but I am confident that readers will get used to it, as Polish readers have done.

I prefer to talk about linguistic closeness rather than ‘fidelity’ because what exactly am I meant to be ‘faithful’ to? Translating is rewriting, there is no avoiding this fact. A translation is merely an impression of the original. As to readability in English – this is ultimately the most important thing, otherwise readers will give up. If the new text does not read naturally in English, puts readers off because of clunky style, then the whole thing fails. You ask about syntax: well, the syntax needs to be adjusted to English, since preserving Polish syntax (as some translators admittedly try to do) can disrupt fluency and naturalness. Balancing on the tightrope between close adherence to Polish style and making the text comfortable to read, reminds me of the old conflict between preserving foreignness and domesticating. Ultimately, it’s a compromise.

AD: What does ‘Ice’ represent in the Polish literary imagination? Why do you think it captured such attention despite its intimidating complexity?

UP: Well, I’m not Polish, so I can only answer as someone who has studied Polish history and literature as an outsider, albeit for over forty years. When we talk about the Polish literary imagination, what first springs to mind is the Romantic tradition of Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, to which there are many references in Ice.

In Mickiewicz’s case, for example, to his Forefather’s Eve and especially, or so I felt, to the poems appended to part three of that drama, the ones that refer to Poles living in Russia and to the Wilno (Vilnius) students exiled to Siberia for patriotic activities in the early 1820s (Mickiewicz describes the kibitkas, mentioned by Benedykt at the end of Chapter the Third, when the express train crosses the border between European and Asian Siberia). Meanwhile a passage from Słowacki’s Anhelli is quoted at the point when Benedykt finds himself totally alone in the icy wastes. Katorga (another word I have preserved, without italics), which refers to exile into the depths of Siberia to penal settlements with hard labour in mines or logging work-gangs, an experience suffered by many Poles who participated in nineteenth-century uprisings against Russian power, is well recorded in Polish literature as well as painting. Ice features several prominent real-life exiles, who remained in Siberia and contributed to its scientific exploration, such as Karol Bohdanowicz, Jan Czerski, Benedykt Dybowski, Kazimierz Grochowski, as well as the ethnographer and novelist Wacław Sieroszewski.

So, the novel definitely draws on Polish historical experience, not least because the protagonist’s father is one such Polish ex-katorzhnik or Sibyrak, and it is in search of him that Benedykt sets out on his Siberian odyssey. In this sense then, we could say the novel captures at least part of the Polish literary imagination – but that imagination is not monolithic, just as individual readers are not stereotypical in what they choose to identify with in the text.

It is important to point out, however, that despite this historical experience, Poles are rarely presented in Ice as victims. Not all are ex-katorzhniks. In fact, the novel reflects the fact that Poles got everywhere in the Russian Empire and many took advantage of career and economic opportunities. The fictional, all-powerful Minister of Winter is a Pole, Piotr Rappacki. In Irkutsk, the mayor Bolesław Szostakiewicz is Polish, as are the powerful industrialists who have made fortunes on the new Ice minerals, such as Wojsław Wielicki, with whom Benedykt lodges. Many were born and raised in Irkutsk, and are not themselves former convicts. Meanwhile, the role of Józef Piłsudski, who leads a secret army of Polish exiles in Siberia on the Japanese side in a new (invented) Russo-Japanese war, is by no means idealised. On the contrary, he is shown, in his own words, to be a potential dictator. I had the feeling that Dukaj acknowledges the past, but creates self-confident Polish protagonists who have moved on from that status of victimhood or oppression.

Ethnic groups other than Poles are also portrayed, of course, in particular the Tungusic peoples. Dukaj introduces aspects of shamanism, drawing on the research of some of the Polish exiles mentioned above but also on records kept by earlier travellers. Meanwhile, Russian political dissidents are included amongst the katorzhniks, in particular the former Marxist turned religious fanatic, the alcoholic Filimon Romanovitch Zeytsoff. Interestingly, or significantly, the most virulent criticism of the Russian ruler, Nikolay the Second Aleksandrovitch, does not come from Poles but from disaffected Russians, such as the army captain Privyezhensky whom Benedykt meets in the train.

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Castle Square with the tents of Russian troops stationed in front of the Royal Castle, after 14 October 1861, photo: Karol Beyer / National Museum in Warsaw

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AD: The novel envisions an empire frozen in time, where even logic and history turn to ice. In translating ‘Ice’, did you sense that you were also translating a worldview – a system of logic and metaphysics rather than just a story? How do you read its political and philosophical undertones – and what do they suggest about Poland’s relationship to empire and modernity?

UP: I’m unwilling to give my own interpretations of the political and philosophical undertones. I want readers to decide for themselves, not hear my views. But yes, I did have the sense that I was translating a worldview, an approach to understanding the world grounded in logic and mathematics that indeed had fundamental ontological implications which transcended the specific historical context of Polish-Russian relations, but this is not divorced from the development of the ‘story’, if by ‘story’ we mean ‘plot’.

Without being a spoiler, I’ll try to explain where this worldview and its implications originate, if I’ve understood them correctly. Put briefly, Dukaj’s starting point is the essay by Tadeusz Kotarbiński entitled The Problem of the Existence of the Future (1913) which distinguishes between two different types of logic: two-valued and three-valued (quotations from Kotarbiński are included as mottos to the four main sections of the novel). Dukaj then tries to imagine how this dichotomy, in particular the Aristotelian two-value logic, might play out in reality, in life, in the material world. Wishing to locate his speculations in Kotarbiński’s own time, he found an ideal catalyst for transforming known reality in the Tunguska meteor explosion of June 1908. He uses that moment of impact to introduce into Siberia a new element from outer space that gradually transforms everything.

As for Poland and its relation to empire and modernity, Dukaj’s narrator Benedykt does not convey a message of victimhood, as I indicated above. Despite the experience of katorga, Dukaj’s Polish industrialists, scientists, manufacturers and politicians in Irkutsk are shown successfully exploiting the new natural resources, building fortunes, affording material luxuries and adopting the artistic styles of the contemporary West. In this sense, the Poles adapt to modernity. In relation to empire, he also does not omit to mention that in the early history of Siberian conquest and exploitation, cruel feats worthy of imperial overlords were committed by named Polish adventurers.

Of course, reading the novel today through the lens of our contemporary politics, it is tempting to regard Vladimir Putin as a present-day emanation of the frozen logic of the Ice, of the uncompromising ‘yea-yea nay-nay’ approach to truth and falsehood, portrayed in the novel as typical of Russian religion and politics, forever torn between these two mutually exclusive extremes. In a recent interview, Dukaj described Putin as ‘a pure emanation of the Russian worldview and mentality’. Certain aspects of Russian power remain disturbingly constant: the present-day FSB is a modern variant of the tsarist Okhrana, katorga was a forerunner of Stalin’s GULAG and today’s Siberian prisons (I refer to the experiences of Aleksey Navalny and Maria Alyokhina). In more generalised terms, we could say that the dichotomy operates on every level from logic to physics to biology to ontology to mentality to politics: two-valued three-valued, yea-yea nay-nay, truth-falsehood, necessity-non-necessity, Winter-Summer, Ice-Thaw, Lyednyaks-Ottepyelniks, Russia-Poland.

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Tatra Mountains in winter, Morskie Oko, photo: Karol Majewski / Getty Images

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AD: Were there any particular English literary models or voices that helped you capture Dukaj’s tone – perhaps from Victorian prose, speculative fiction, or philosophical writing?

UP: I prefer to talk about ‘inspirations’ rather than ‘models’. The word ‘model’ suggests that a translator might chose to follow or even copy another writer’s style in order to convey that of their own writer, whereas it’s important to convey the unique individual style with which the translator is tasked. As to ‘voices’ we should be clear that we are not referencing Dukaj’s ‘voice’ or ‘tone’ but that of his narrator and protagonist Benedykt Gierosławski: it is Benedykt’s voice that matters here, not that of the author – after all, novelists write different books with different narrators, and so the narrating ‘voice’ can vary. Benedykt’s tone reflects his personality and is quite distinct: he has a detached, humorous, tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecatory attitude towards himself. This provides a self-ironic counterbalance to his philosophical speculations (or ramblings?) about logic and existence.

Regarding ‘inspirations’ (as distinct from ‘models’), there were many. An aspect of the book that made a particular impression on me was the fantastical architecture and atmosphere of the extreme ice – I found it tantalising, beautiful and menacing at the same time. I was inspired by literary ice journeys written in English, from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, to the opening scenes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to the trek across the ice fields in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.

As I was beginning the project, I read Polly Clark’s Tiger (2019), which is about researching tigers in the taiga. Her descriptions of the frozen forests, the ‘skin-paring cold’ and the birch trees exploding in a ‘deadly spray of wood and ice’ encouraged me to stretch for extreme vocabulary (though I don’t remember using ‘skin-paring’). Meanwhile, there are also the indigenous Siberian peoples, especially the Tungus, whose shamanic rituals feature in the second half of the book. After reading more recent academic articles on the topic, I opted to apply the vocabulary suggested by the Polish anthropologist Maria Antonina Czaplicka in the glossary to her book Aboriginal Siberia, published in English in 1914 when Czaplicka was a scholar at Oxford University. Her terminology was contemporary to the action of Ice and therefore seemed ideal. For example, my choices for the various shaman souls come from her.

The original has a strong storytelling impetus. In the first months working on the translation, I re-read several novels by Dickens, not as ‘models’ but in order to absorb something of their narrative energy and slight archaic tone: this reconfirmed me again in the conviction that the translated text has to have drive and personality, and that such a long book as Ice has to be as vigorous on page 1000 as it is on page one. Sustaining this requires attention to brevity and clarity of expression, variety in the structures of sentences, choice of colourful but appropriate vocabulary (I am constantly looking for synonyms to avoid repetition of the same words) and the reduction of too much wordiness – Dukaj uses a lot of what I call ‘padding words’ (in Polish: przecie, przecież, jednak, nawet, również, tudzierz) which may add nuance (a certain informal chattiness) to Benedykt’s narrative and therefore work in the Polish, but they clog up the English style and add little to the meaning. English is less tolerant of such padding.

Towards the beginning of the project, I also read all three volumes of Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World, another enormous feat of energised storytelling. Dukaj has sometimes been compared to Stephenson. From the scientific or sci-fi point of view, this makes sense: the centrality of the contrasting visions of Leibniz and Newton underlie all mathematical, scientific and philosophical speculations, but there are also significant differences. Stephenson does not attempt to recreate the ‘archaic’ English of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and although many characters are fictional, he does not fundamentally change the historical setting, does not create an alternative historical reality to the extent that Dukaj does, wherein the First World War, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and Polish independence have not taken place. Nevertheless, reading The System of the World did in some way help me to manage such an enormous volume of complex material.

Dickens was also an inspiration for the speech of Tchingis Shchekelnikoff. Here I examined the speech of Magwitch and Bill Sykes. Certain divergences from the grammar of standard received English, for example, can give a flavour of lower-class speech, although I was extremely wary of importing anything resembling dialect, such as Cockney or Scottish or West Country, because this would have created a cultural mismatch with the setting of the novel in Siberia.

Ice also feels like those long 19th-century Russian novels, in particular Dostoevsky’s, clearly, one of Dukaj’s inspirations. This was perhaps my overriding stylistic aim: to make the narrative sound like Dostoevsky, including digressions, long sentences and all. I tried to imagine, without consulting those contemporary translations too deeply, how such a long novel translated from a foreign language might have read at the beginning of the 20th century – much like a novel written in English, in fact.

Finally, I should mention Andrij Pavlyshyn’s 2018 Ukrainian translation. It’s sometimes helpful when translating to refer to the solutions of translators into other languages, although the usefulness is limited given the different structures of the languages. As I read Ukrainian, it was interesting to see how he had tackled issues where I had had difficulty, where I was not confident that I had grasped the sense of the Polish, it was a kind of insurance policy.

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Frozen Dunajec River, photo: Wojciech Wójcik / Forum

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AD: How do you think English-language readers will approach ‘Ice’ – in terms of genre, themes or expectations – and what kind of readership do you imagine for the book outside Poland? Do you anticipate that Anglophone readers will interpret its dramatic ‘Thaw’ or its Siberian setting through contemporary lenses such as climate fiction or Eastern European history?

UP: I am unable to comment on sales in Poland, I haven’t researched that. The novel was originally published in 2007. I remember reading, early in 2008, an intriguing review by Wojciech Orliński, if I remember correctly, which prompted me to buy the book at the time. I gathered that the book was selling well; how subsequent editions have fared I’m not sure, but the fact that there have been new editions suggests that its popularity persists.

On whether the novel in some way represents ‘climate fiction’, Dukaj himself is quite clear: this was not his intention. However, it is possible that English-language readers may construe such a reference. Without my giving too much of the plot away, the great Thaw that takes place late in the book is massively impressive and may come, on a first reading, as a shock. This drama is not related, however, to theories of climate change, less still to present-day ecological campaigns. However, as I was translating these sensational descriptions of the melting ice, I couldn’t help but be aware that Siberia is currently warming and the permafrost is thawing, although the causes in the novel are quite different. Even so, some of the physical phenomena envisaged by Dukaj are actually coming true right now: the collapse of the soil, massive distortions to the ground resulting in bumpy airstrips and crooked buildings, not least the release into the air of long-dormant species of insect, which only add to the huge swarms of summer mosquitoes tormenting animals and people, the so-called Siberian gnus.

As to how it will sell in English, let’s wait and see. The publisher (Head of Zeus, part of Bloomsbury) clearly believes that there will be enthusiastic readers. It’ll be published in the United States after Christmas. I already have two online interviews booked with American critics in January/February to discuss the translation. There has been good publicity here in Britain, but I myself am waiting for longer in-depth reviews from commentators who have had time to read the whole book and reflect upon it. I imagine that the book would appeal to at least two audiences: first, science fiction aficionados and readers who enjoy immersing themselves in alternative realities, and second, readers who follow literary fiction from Eastern Europe, including historians of Russia.

I’m often asked, as a translator and as a historian of Polish literature, how I expect Anglophones to be able to understand the context and sense of Polish literary texts, the implication being that they may not be able. If I achieve anything, I would dearly love to break down the misconception that only Poles can really understand their history and literature. It is possible to understand them by studying them. I see a work such as Ice, as I have many others before it, from Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz to Bolesław Prus’ The Doll to Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, as precisely the means by which non-Polish readers can learn about Polish history and culture. It’s not that one has to know the history of Poland and Russia in order to understand Ice – on the contrary, the book itself provides the insights. That said, it is probable that the scientific and philosophical, i.e. universal, supranational aspects of the book may appeal more to English-language readers. The publisher also classifies it as ‘steampunk’ which may likewise attract a specific group of readers. It remains to be seen.

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