Interest in Zuzanna Ginczanka in the Anglophone world has reached unprecedented levels in recent months, with one translation of her poems in press and three in preparation. This follows a decade or so of scholarly publications, exhibitions, and new editions of Ginczanka's poems in Polish, spurred, in part, by the centenary of her birth in 2017 and a general interest in Polish Studies in looking beyond patriarchal and ethnonationalist visions of canonicity.
Born in 1917 to a Russian-speaking Jewish family, Ginczanka gained national recognition at the age of seventeen with her submission to a poetry contest organized by a prominent literary magazine. The poet, who chose to write in Polish, quickly became a sensation in the literary salons of Warsaw and moved there in 1936, participating in the social and literary life of the capital. She moved to L΄viv at the beginning of World War II, where she went into hiding following Nazi Germany's occupation of the city. Denounced by her Polish neighbors, she fled to Kraków, where she was eventually arrested and killed in 1944 in the Płaszów concentration camp.
Some of the recent explorations of Ginczanka's life and work have pushed her into a national framework. Commenting on this appropriation of otherness, Agata Araszkiewicz and Bożena Keff suggest Ginczanka has become the subject of a “struggle over meaning” and accuse her Polish biographer of domesticating the complicated identity she cultivated as a “double other” (a woman and a Jew) in the literary circles of pre-war Poland (2023).
At the core of many of these discussions surrounding the figure and work of Ginczanka is her last poem, “*** (Non omnis moriar)” (1942), which names the person who denounced her to the Schutzpolizei in L΄viv. The poem, which was later used in court against the Polish denouncer, can also be read more broadly as a renunciation of Polish culture, a culture Ginczanka had embraced voluntarily. The text also performatively hides the poet's Jewishness, referring to “rzeczy ż.” (J. things). This gesture by the author should not be mistaken for an assimilationist impulse, coming at a time when hiding her otherness was a desperate attempt at survival.
Yet despite the gesture of effacement it contains, the poem is a testament to Ginczanka's lifelong, defiant, if ultimately pained embrace of hybridity, a key characteristic of Ginczanka's poetic voice, which brings together a sense of alienation with a mastery over language. As a poet, she is both the stateless Polish-Jewish poet from Rivne, sending poems to literary competitions, and the confident voice of a female poet entering the literary salons of Warsaw, with the toxic, sexist atmosphere she faced there, able to challenge and engage it in an assertive way.
Ginczanka's assertion of her own hybridity comes through clearly in Alex Braslavsky's translation, whether through very localized choices, when Ginczanka echoes discourses she faced as a young woman poet in Warsaw (for instance, rendering “babskie” as “womanish,” 158–59) or more generally, as in the challenge to the objectifying male gaze in the titular poem of the collection, “On Centaurs” (152–53). Sometimes, where the repeatedly impersonal phrasing of the original signals Ginczanka's distancing from her chosen language, especially in her early poetry, the translator's decision to use the impersonal “you” minimizes this effect somewhat.
Because of the attention given by scholars and critics to Ginczanka's final poem, there is a weight of expectation facing any translator approaching this particular text. Braslavsky's version rises to the challenge and makes for a powerful conclusion to this collection. The translator skillfully preserves the painful tone in Ginczanka's examination of her relationship with Polishness, sometimes aptly heightening the sense of pain and state of conflict, like in the choice to add an object to the verb “reminded,” not present in the original:
My dears—
I pass on no lute, no empty name.
I remember you, just as you, when the Schupo came,
Thought of me. Even reminded them of me (245).
This is surely just the beginning of a broader fascination with Ginczanka's work in English, opening up the conversation to comparative contexts and moving the poet outside the Polish national framework. Ginczanka's poetry is accessible to general audiences in Polish and Braslavsky's translation does the text justice in carrying that accessibility over into English. It will also doubtlessly be of interest to scholarly readers working on issues of identity and memory.
