Jacek Dehnel - Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature – S4E9

Jacek Dehnel (b. 1980 in Gdańsk, Poland) is a Polish poet, writer, translator and painter.

His works have been translated into over a dozen languages, including two novels in English, Saturn (Dedalus Books 2013), and Lala (Oneworld 2018), translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. His poems appear in various anthologies and journals, and there is a collection entitled Aperture translated by Karen Kovacik for Zephyr Press that received an Honorary Mention in the PEN America Poetry in Translation award. Dehnel has been awarded prestigious literary prizes that include the Kościelski Award for younger writers and the Paszport Polityki, and he has been nominated for many others.

In this episode, we discuss his autobiographical novel about his grandmother who was one of his literary and artistic inspirations, Lala, we take a look at his collection of poetry recently translated into English by Karen Kovacik, and we consider his newest novel, not yet translated, The Swans, about a family scandal in the 1970s and a collection of eighteenth-century porcelain. We ask about the conflicts that might arise from having an author of family novels in the family. We discuss an issue that comes up in many of our translation-oriented episodes—how much control should the writer exert over the translator—but this time from the perspective of a writer who also translates, and we also think a bit about how the priorities might change when translating genre fiction as opposed to artistic fiction. We also think about how the responsibilities of the first translator of a work might differ from those of subsequent translators.

Learn more about this episode, and see the biography of the guest on the Polish Cultural Institute New York's website: https://bit.ly/3Xywaa5

Access the playlist of the entire series:
https://bit.ly/47Q7xHL

Bartek Remisko, Executive Producer
David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer
Natalia Iyudin, Producer