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of Poland anthologies. They were translated by my daughter Kalina and the late Marek Mar- ciniak, director of the foreign language college in Sieradz. Kalina has been living abroad since 2007 – first in Graz, then Lausanne, Singa- pore, and now Vienna. She has a PhD in molec- ular biology, but she has the soul of an artist. She’s been writing scientific papers in English for years. She translated most of the works included in my latest collection, Wiersze wy- brane / Selected poems. Five pieces translated Ela Kotkowska, who lived in the US for many years and is a professional literary translator, and another five - Agnieszka Jankowska, who works at the University of Cambridge. One piece was translated by Tomasz Jarmołkie- wicz, a bard and English teacher.
Why did I make this choice? For several years, I had been planning to publish at least some of these translations, scattered in various plac- es, in one volume. I attend international liter- ary festivals and have contact with poets from several countries. English is a universal lan- guage, so thanks to this collection, my poems can reach readers in other countries. Publishing poems and books is like throwing a message in a bottle into the sea – you never know who would find them and what could come out of it. Last year, two situations motivated me to pub- lish this collection. Piotr Spottek interviewed my favourite composer, Andrzej Zarycki, for the Pod Wielkim Dachem Nieba (Under the Great Roof of Heaven) radio program. Spottek then sent him my three collections in PDF. Zarycki real- ly liked the poems and asked for a paper ver- sion. But I no longer had any Polish-Lithuani- an volume, so in order to send it to him, I had to buy a copy myself via online portal. Then, at the last year’s 31st International Poetry Festi- val “Maj nad Wilią”, Stanisław Zawodnik, who
Marlena Zynger and Maria Duszka
lives in Switzerland, became interested in my poetry. I borrowed him the Polish-Lithuanian volume, and instead of partying with us in the evenings, he copied my poems into his note- book. He showed them to me on the last day at the Ponas Tadas hotel restaurant in Vilnius. I photographed the manuscripts as a souve- nir. For what could be more pleasant for a poet than someone copying his poems by hand for themselves?
You’ve been running the Anima Literary Cir- cle for 23 years, and you also co-create the Pod Wielkim Dachem Nieba (Under the Great Roof of Heaven) radio program...
The Anima Literary Circle “rolled“ to me itself. It was founded in 2002 in the basement of the hospital in Sieradz, because that’s where the library I worked at was located at the time. It was truly underground. I wasn’t looking for poets, instead, they found me there. They
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