“I wish you were here,” says the speaker of Tomasz Różycki’s poetry collection To the Letter (Archipelago Books, November 2023), translated from the Polish by poet Mira Rosenthal. This phrase recurs throughout the book, addressing many figures—a lover, the self, a god, an absent hero—as the speaker seeks to make sense of the despair and communal losses weathered by eastern Europeans during the past century. Różycki wrote the book in 2015, when Poland’s right-wing populist political party won a majority in Parliament; Rosenthal committed to translating the book in 2017, when she felt similarly authoritarian forces rising in the United States. The poems are intimate and wry, philosophically complex, and charged with metaphors for absence and language itself. Rosenthal discussed the path to publishing her English translations of poems from…
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Poets & Writers (Digital) - 1 Issue, November/December 2023