From the Forgotten to the Famous: Antonia Lloyd-Jones on 'The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories'

antonia_lloyd_jones_fot_mikolaj_starzynski_img_8421.jpeg, default, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, photo: Mikołaj Starzyński / courtesy of the translator

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Polish literature has long remained at the periphery of the Anglophone imagination, glimpsed only through a handful of towering names. With ‘The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories’, however, Antonia Lloyd-Jones has drawn back the curtain to reveal an astonishingly rich, varied and often surprising tradition. In our conversation, the editor and translator offers her reflections on the making of the book and on what Polish fiction, at its most dazzling and humane, can say to the world.

Critical response to The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories has been strikingly enthusiastic. The anthology has been described as ‘witty and surprising’ and ‘an essential exploration of Polish writing’, with its thirty-nine stories stretching across the turbulent century between 1918 and the present day. The volume has been warmly praised for its wit, breadth and editorial daring – a collection that captures the soul of Poland while defying the clichés too often attached to its literature.

In addition to the flair of her translations, reviewers have noted the freshness of Lloyd-Jones’s curatorial approach: the decision to group the stories thematically under playful, even mischievous headings – ‘Animals’, ‘Children’, ‘Men Behaving Badly’, ‘Survivors’ – rather than to follow a dutiful chronology. This ‘rebel order’ is more than a structural quirk. It offers readers an accessible entry point into Polish writing, allowing humour, irony and absurdity to stand alongside wartime trauma and existential bleakness.

In her eloquent preface, the Nobel-prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk likens the short story to ‘the haiku of fiction’, a concentrated form capable of producing ‘a minor catharsis’ in the space of a bus journey or a sleepless night. She insists on the short story’s dazzling force: its ability to shock, move or delight in a single sitting, and to linger in the memory as vividly as a lived experience.

Tokarczuk also applauds her long-time collaborator Lloyd-Jones for breaking with the stereotypical image of Polish literature as sombre, war-bound or martyrological. Instead, she argues, the anthology’s constellation of animals, children, misfits and survivors reshapes the image of Poland for the English reader, presenting it as a place of irrepressible imagination and stylistic daring.

For her part, Lloyd-Jones writes with candour about the challenge of representing a century of Polish writing in a single volume. She traces her own journey as a translator back to 1983, when she first began teaching herself Polish under martial law, and acknowledges her debt to Maria Kuncewiczowa’s 1962 anthology The Modern Polish Mind. That book, she recalls, opened the door to authors who would later become central to her career – she hopes her own selection will likewise inspire future readers and translators.

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Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Olga Tokarczuk, 2018, photo: Maciej Kulczyński / PAP

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Lloyd-Jones makes a particular effort to recover overlooked voices, especially women writers under-represented during the communist period, and insists on including comedy, absurdity and tenderness alongside the darker legacies of war. The result is not a museum of Polish national suffering, but a living gallery of sensibilities, tones and experiments.

In our conversation, Lloyd-Jones expands on these themes, reflecting on the characteristic humour of Central European writing, the difficulties of translation, and the frustrations and joys of compiling an anthology. She speaks with particular enthusiasm about forgotten writers such as Anna Kowalska and Irena Krzywicka, whose rediscovery adds new depth to the Polish canon.

The essence of Polish literature

Agnes Dudek: When you think about Polish short fiction as a whole, is there a particular ‘feel’ or emotional tone that ties these stories together, despite their differences in style and era?

Antonia Lloyd-Jones: That’s a difficult question. I do have a vague sense of Polish fiction generally being a forum for uncomfortable aspects of life, tinged with a particular shade of black humour that’s characteristic of Central Europe (not just Poland); it’s certainly less plot-driven and less about personal relationships than much of British and American modern literature, more concerned with style and atmosphere.

But I can’t tell if these stories have a common emotional mood, unless it’s a slightly pessimistic one, a realistic tendency to expect things to be bleak – offset by the ability to laugh at life and oneself – perhaps derived in part from Poland’s difficult historical experiences, always having to fight for its existence and identity. But that seems to me rather trite, a simplistic label. I also find it hard to be subjective about this collection of stories – they’re united by my (probably quite eclectic) taste.

AD: You’ve mentioned unearthing overlooked writers such as Anna Kowalska and Irena Krzywicka. What drew you to them, and what do their stories add to the wider picture of Polish literature?

'The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories', edited by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, photo: Penguin Books

ALJ: In the case of Anna Kowalska and Irena Krzywicka, I had made a conscious decision to investigate forgotten women writers. I’m glad to say that thanks to her diaries and correspondence (and stormy relationship) with Maria Dąbrowska, Anna Kowalska has come out of the shadows recently. I had never read her stories before, and knew nothing about her except her name.

I went to the library at London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where I found two small volumes of stories, and then to the POSK (Polish Social and Cultural Centre) library, where the kind librarians rooted out two more slim collections, clearly once tatty paperbacks that had been carefully rebound. As with many of the authors I researched for the book, I simply read the books from cover to cover and chose the story that leaped out at me.

I was intrigued by ‘Horses’, Anna Kowalska’s story, because the narrator is a man who has gone to the countryside in a sulk, imagining his wife to have dropped him for a much younger man. It’s all in his head and he’s being ridiculous, but it’s an excellent piece of psychological writing, showing how he gradually comes to his senses in a different setting where he encounters a range of unfamiliar characters who bring him out of himself. It’s funny, poignant, and feels true, with beautiful images that stay in the mind.

I must go back to some of her other stories – some that I found very powerful were also quite nasty, about people behaving ruthlessly, and I read them at a point when I wanted more humour for balance in the collection, so I chose ‘Horses’ instead. Maybe it’s time for a Polish reissue of her collected stories?

Irena Krzywicka, 'Love, Marriage, Children', photo: Iskry

Irena Krzywicka was another writer I’d never heard of. I asked my friend and fellow translator Jess Jensen Mitchell, who is superb at researching literature, if she could look out for Jewish women writers, and Krzywicka was one of the names she found. The first book of hers that I read was a set of comical stories about her experiences with domestic animals, not exactly fiction, except in style. Again, I was looking for humour at this point, and although I also read Krzywicka’s stories based on her wartime experiences, which were harrowing, needless to say, I preferred the freshness and (almost) carefree tone of the animal stories. And to be honest I think they are far better written than her stories of Holocaust survival. So I chose ‘Life and Love in the Hen House’, a wonderful piece about geese, chickens and turkeys, and Jess translated it beautifully. If you don’t think that sounds promising, read it and see for yourself.

In fact, I was hoping to find a story set firmly within Polish Jewish life, and unfortunately I don’t think I’ve included one that fits that bill in the book. I keep finding things I didn’t know about but wish I had included – compiling an anthology is a frustrating task, limited by time and space.

The fact that it was hard to find collections of stories (or anything) by women writing in the communist era in particular implies to me that they simply weren’t published. So I’d like to think I’ve done a little bit of digging to uncover what may be a rich seam of writing that has been overlooked or forgotten – I hope my start will encourage others to dig deeper. There may be stories out there in journals, not collections, and if I’d had time, that’s where I’d have looked.

These aren’t the only writers in the book who were unfamiliar to me at the start. To begin with I made a very long list of authors who seemed essential, but of course I had to reduce it as I did my research, and the choices of whom to keep and whom to cut were often painful. I consulted with Polish literary experts whose judgement I trust.

I ended up with three writers I had never heard of, another seven whose work I had never read before, and of the 39 authors I included, fewer than half have been translated into English, some of whom not for decades.

A thematic ‘rebel order’

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Olga Tokarczu, 2025, photo: Marcin Gadomski / PAP

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AD: Your decision to group the stories into categories like ‘Animals’, ‘Men Behaving Badly’ and ‘Survivors’ breaks away from chronology. How do these playful headings change the way readers approach Polish literature?

ALJ: The headings are a bit anarchic on purpose, not to be taken too seriously. In the first place, I wanted to take the opportunity to challenge the stereotypical British assumption that Polish literature is only about the Second World War, the Holocaust, and a life of struggle. Of course there is a lot of excellent and important Polish literature that is about the war and the Holocaust, vital topics that need to be recorded and discussed by literature. But I know Polish literature has plenty more to offer, so I was determined to try to present a more balanced picture in my anthology.

I also knew most readers of this book would know next to nothing about Polish literature, so I decided to organise it in a way that helped them to choose where to start. A chronological order seemed a bit bland, and I was afraid no one would read the oldest stories. I could have arranged it at random, perhaps by alphabetical order of authors’ names, or sensibly by genre. But I decided that animate nouns as my category headings would be intriguing. The reader who knows little or nothing might open the book and see ‘Children’, think (as I would), ‘I like stories about childhood’, and start there.

Of course, there are plenty of disturbing stories in the book under seemingly innocent headings. There are also stories about the war and the Holocaust too, in the categories ‘Soldiers’ and ‘Survivors’. I may have put those topics in their boxes, but that doesn’t mean the book is otherwise full of happy endings. (If we’re going to label Polish literature with an emotional tone, we could say that it doesn’t really do happy endings.) Instead my ‘rebel order’ aims to give an idea of the range of Polish writing in an accessible way.

Polish humour & irony

AD: As you already mentioned, many English readers think of Polish literature as sombre or ‘about war’. How important is humour, absurdity and irony within Polish storytelling traditions?

ALJ: As I’ve said, very broadly speaking I think there’s a Central European sense of humour that exists as a counterbalance to the region’s difficult history. It’s black humour, often self-mocking, and it ranges from surrealism to social satire.

'The Bicycle, or Morality’s Revenge' by Leopold Tyrmand, audiobook, photo: mg

Perhaps the most obvious representative in my anthology is Sławomir Mrożek, whose story ‘Last Words’ is about a writer whose efforts to write some memorable last words for a condemned mass murderer are hi-jacked, first by would-be profiteers, and then by the writer’s own aspirations to literary greatness. It’s absurd, but also wryly cynical about human nature. The same could be said of Leopold Tyrmand’s ‘The Bicycle, or Morality’s Revenge’, in which an egomaniacal Polish master thief is psychologically destroyed by the incorruptibility of the Swedes.

Gombrowicz’s ‘The Tragic Tale of the Baron and His Wife’ is very black humour indeed, as the baron forces his poor wife into a series of compromising situations that ruin her life, and we find ourselves laughing at social conventions taken to a point of monstrosity. I was especially surprised by Jerzy Andrzejewski’s story, ‘The Passport Wife’, which was written during the war, and unlike most of his stories from this period, is a comedy of errors based on adopted identities. I wish I knew if it was inspired by a real incident.

Two of the most recent stories, ‘Her Sovereign Decision’ by Joanna Rudniańska and ‘The Isles’ by Dorota Masłowska, are subtly comical critiques of modern society and the expectations of parents for their children – they could be set just about anywhere. In any case, the stories I have included are the tip of the iceberg, as there is no lack of examples in Polish literature all the way back to Adam Mickiewicz, whose epic novel-in-verse Pan Tadeusz is often very funny.

AD: Polish has distinctive rhythms and idioms that don’t always map neatly onto English. Were there any particular challenges or joys in translating its ‘feel’ into another language?

ALJ: As every literary translator will tell you, this is true of any language translated into any other language. Translation inevitably involves compromise, because it changes every single word of a text into a different word, while aiming not to change the meaning or the spirit of the original. Of course, you don’t just translate the words, but also the syntax, in order to reproduce the same effect on the reader. All good writing is partly dependent on rhythms, which work on the reader subconsciously.

My own technique is to listen to the original (using audiobooks where possible, or reading aloud), to hear how the author’s choice of words, whether they were aware of it or not, affects the mood of the text. Once I have a more-or-less final draft, I read aloud in English to test and adjust the tone.

Idioms often have equivalents, and some are so transparent that you can translate them as they are (such as ‘not my circus, not my monkeys’, which has caught on in English), though I often find myself admiring the elegance of Polish and feeling frustrated when English doesn’t have a perfect equivalent.

Though compromise can also mean compensation. For example, in the story ‘Birches’ by Edward Redliński, there’s a female village idiot, a grotesque object of mockery and abuse, whose nickname in Polish is Chwośka. It’s a made-up word, with no distinct meaning as far as I know (maybe it belongs to a local dialect?), but it sounds like a feminine version of the name of a disease that affects beetroot leaves (chwościk buraka), so, in the cruelly comical spirit of the text, I called her ‘Beetrot’. All translators enjoy these word puzzles that exercise our creativity.

I sometimes hear Polish people say, ‘But how can foreigners ever understand our literature?’ Of course, we non-Polish readers have grown up with a different cultural experience, but that doesn’t mean we can’t understand someone else’s. In fact, that’s just what literature does – it explains the experience that produced it to people whose experience is different, it teaches us empathy. Very often we find echoes and similarities, and recognise things from our own experience too.

Impact on English readers

AD: What do you most hope an English reader – new to Polish literature – will feel or understand after finishing this anthology?

Thumbnail — Olga Tokarczuk, 'Bizarre Stories', photo: Wydawnictwo Literackie

ALJ: I imagine that most English-language readers will not be familiar with any of these writers; they may have read Tokarczuk, possibly Lem, but no others. I hope this book will leave them entertained, enlightened, and wanting to read more work by at least one of the authors. Also with the feeling that Polish literature isn’t so far from the writing they already know, and that they can easily relate to these stories. Story collections are the ideal introduction to a literature, because you can pick and choose without feeling obliged to read the book meekly from page one to the end. In particular, I hope this book will be a resource for other translators to widen their knowledge and find inspiration in the future, just as I was inspired by Maria Kuncewiczowa’s anthology The Modern Polish Mind when I started learning Polish and wanted to explore the literature. There is so much great writing waiting to be translated.

Tokarczuk’s preface

AD: As you mentioned, Olga Tokarczuk calls the short story ‘the haiku of fiction’. How does this idea resonate with you, especially when curating Polish stories for an English audience?

ALJ: I like the phrase ‘the haiku of fiction’, but notably Tokarczuk’s own story in this collection, ‘The Green Children’ – the historical tale of a Scottish court physician to a Polish king who in a remote eastern province encounters a pair of feral children – is 9000 words long. So I think it’s an example of her talent for turning a phrase more than anything. But there are plenty of great Polish short stories, and it’s frustrating that nowadays publishers tend to be reluctant to publish them unless the author is already well established through novels. Fortunately, it’s possible to publish them in literary journals, and that can be a great way for a translator to showcase the work of a new author when they’re trying to interest book publishers.

Short stories are said to be harder to write than novels. Curiously, the one story in this collection that was written for it, ‘The Isles’ by Dorota Masłowska, was subsequently expanded into a novel built out of several cryptically connected short stories featuring the same characters, among others. Several of the authors in this anthology were masters of the short story, notably Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Paweł Huelle, and in every case there are superb works yet to appear in English translation.

AD: If readers fall in love with these stories, which authors – inside or outside the anthology – should they explore next to deepen their sense of Polish literature?

Marek Hłasko, 'Opowiadania', photo: Czytelnik

ALJ: Naturally I would recommend any of these authors whose fiction has already been translated, of whom the best represented in English are Olga Tokarczuk, Stanisław Lem, Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, Dorota Masłowska, Magdalena Tulli, Tadeusz Borowski, Paweł Huelle and Tadeusz Konwicki. But there are plenty here who are under-represented in English, such as Kornel Filipowicz, Jacek Dehnel, Marek Hłasko and Leopold Tyrmand, and far too many who haven’t been translated at all. Beyond the authors included in the anthology, I would suggest exploring Polish poetry, in particular anything by Wisława Szymborska.

But it all depends on your personal taste and mood. If you like crime fiction with a colourful historical setting and a challenging heroine, read Maryla Szymiczkowa’s highly entertaining novels, Mrs Mohr Goes Missing and Karolina and the Torn Curtain. You’ll be shocked, intrigued and amused, and will want your next holiday to be in Kraków.

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