A translation of Urszula Kozioł’s poetry collection Ucieczki (“Escapes”) has just been published in France. The author of the translation and introduction is Isabelle Macor.
The book Exodes, as reads the title of the French translation of the book, was published by the Parisian publishing house Lanskine in a series of Polish poetry by Isabelle Macor with a cover by the Polish poet and artist Bianca Rolando.
Escapes is the penultimate collection by one of Poland’s most distinguished poets. The collection is no less emotional than the verses from the Nike-nominated volume Klangor. For Urszula Kozioł, poetry is a tool with which she thoroughly explores loneliness after the death of her husband, the pain of passing away, and the trauma of old age – absent-mindedness, forgetfulness, the surprise of “disappearing”.
The dramatic centre of gravity of the volume is the harrowing narrative poem Escapes, in which the darkness of the trauma of war exiles covers the history of mankind from antiquity, through the Second World War, to the contemporary tragedies taking place around the coast of Europe.
The collection has been published with the support of the French Centre national du livre (National Book Centre).
Macor collaborates with several publishers (including Grèges, Caractères, Noir sur Blanc), but, for the past five years, she has been regularly publishing her translations of Polish contemporary poetry with the LansKine publishing house, where she is creating an authorial series of Polish poetry. It includes Ewa Lipska’s collections (Pogłos [“Echo”], Droga Pani Schubert [“Dear Ms. Schubert”], Miłość, droga Pani Schubert [“Love, Dear Ms.Schubert”]; Czytnik linii papilarnych [“Fingerprint Reader”]); Jakub Kornhauser’s collection Drożdżownia (“The Yeast Factory”), and Ewa Sonnenberg’s Hologramy (“Holograms”).