Translating Zuzanna Ginczanka with Alex Braslavsky and Dr Kasia Szymańska

Monday 15 May 2023, 4:00pm - 5:30pm GMT via Microsoft Teams

All welcome – please register here.

The deadline to register is midday, May 15. Teams invitations will be sent after the deadline has passed.

The discussion will be followed by Q&A.

Join us for a special online event of the Polish Studies Working Group with Alex Braslavsky (Harvard University), the translator of the first selected volume in English of Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poetry, who will be in conversation with Dr Kasia Szymańska (University of Manchester). Alex Braslavsky will be reading from and discussing her recently published On Centaurs & Other Poems (World Poetry Books) in the broader context of Ginczanka’s life and oeuvre.

Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917-1944) was a Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish poet. Her only poetry collection O centaurach [On Centaurs] was released in 1936 and celebrated in Polish literary and cultural circles as one of the most original poetic voices of the time. You can find some of her poetry in Alex Braslavsky’s translation here.

Alex Braslavsky is a scholar, translator, and poet. She is a doctorate student in the Slavic Department at Harvard University, where she writes scholarship on Polish, Czech, and Russian poetry through a comparative poetics lens. Her translations of poems by Zuzanna Ginczanka were released with World Poetry Books in February of 2023. She received the Poland Translation Programme Grant in support of her translation of Ginczanka in 2022. She will be studying in Lublin, Poland this summer on the Jurzykowski Summer Polish Grant.

Dr Kasia Szymańska is a lecturer (assistant professor) in Translation Studies at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research lies in literary translation, multilingual writing and comparative literature — especially with reference to the East European context. Her work has appeared in PMLA, Contemporary Literature, Slavic and East European Journal, and she is preparing her book project Translation Multiples: From Global Culture to Post-Communist Democracy for publication in Princeton UP's series Translation/Transnation.

The Polish Studies Working Group (PSWG) is part of the TORCH Critical-Thinking Communities.