by Ryszard Krynicki, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh (Poland, New Directions)

To write so that a hungry man
might think it’s bread?

bq., First feed the hungry man,
Then write so that his hunger
won’t go in vain.

          “How to Write?,” Ryszard Krynicki

Auden’s line that “poetry makes nothing happen” is not the programmatic cudgel it is often taken to be. Despite his loss of faith in poetry as an agent of concrete political change, Auden never doubted its survival or its ability to effect internal, intangible change. Ryszard Krynicki, a poet of extreme and elegant concision and occasional translator of Auden’s poetry, is a master of nuanced irony and skilled in undercutting definitive pronouncements with skepticism. In his terse poem, “At Least,” his final reservation places poetry in an ambivalently subservient position to history.

A misprint, a lapsus linguae
may change the course of history
—or at least of poetry.

And perhaps through poetry, in turn, the course of history?

The poems collected in Magnetic Point and impressively translated by Clare Cavanagh—some together with Stanislaw Barańczak—are especially tonic given the erosion of language and discourse in our tub-thumping age. The poem “Truth?” cajoles and goads the reader into examining his or her own assumptions and the self-evidence with which claims of veracity are put forward and instrumentalized.

What is the truth?
Where are its headquarters?
Where is its board of directors?
Where is its legal team?
Where are its bodyguards?
Where is its marketing?
Who are its overseers?
Who handles follow-up?
Who are its media sponsors?
How does it sell?
Has it gone public?

What are its shares going for?

Heavily censored and even banned from publication for a time, Krynicki certainly witnessed the manipulation of ‘truth’ on multiple levels. He was a prominent figure, with Barańczak and Adam Zagajewski, of the “New Wave” of Polish poetry, a group of poets who wrote against the state’s subversion of language. Unlike them, however, he remained in Poland. Although he has referred to himself “unfit for exile,” his sardonic poem “This Country” acknowledges the fact that fitness has nothing to do with exile.

In this country? Yes, I stayed in this country.
Exile comes in many shapes

and places.

Born in a Nazi work camp in Austria in 1943 to parents who were Polish peasants deported as slave laborers from Western Ukraine, Krynicki, along with his mother, was later forcibly resettled from their home in what had become the Soviet Union to former German territories awarded to Poland after the war. He compresses the geo-political maelstrom of his personal history into a three-line poem titled Folk Etymology.

I was born in Austria during the war
so my village schoolmates from Poland called me Kangaroo.
But usually for them I was Russky, Kraut, Jew.

For his classmates, indifferent to finer points of geography, Austria might as well be Australia. Their sense of superiority is captured concisely and exquisitely in the italics of from Poland since they themselves were no doubt also relocated, not from the suspect areas like the Ukraine, the Soviet Union, or the former German Reich, but from “real” Poland—justification enough to turn on the “foreigner.”

Although written under specific historical conditions, Krynicki’s poetry transcends its particular situation, raising the political to the metaphysical. You’re All Free details no less than the human condition.

You’re all free—says the guard
and the iron gate shuts

this time from the other side.

Language, connection, and communication, fragile and tentative as they are, are rare defenses against internal and external restrictions.

Selected from six poetry collections published between 1969 and 2010, Magnetic Point also includes touching love poems, poems of mysticism and spirituality, and haiku that is sparked by, as Clare Cavanagh states in her illuminating introduction, “his relentless, ethically charged attention.” Because of the richness, elusive irony, and compactness of Krynicki’s poems, it is tempting to quote them in full one after the other. I will end only by urging you to pick up a copy of Magnetic Point right away—it will help you whether or not you are in an hour of need. After all, help, like exile, comes in many shapes and places.

Poor moth, I can’t help you,
I can only turn out the light.

          “I Can’t Help You,” Ryszard Krynicki

But! There are awesome people who work at HMH—Drenka, Andrea Schultz, Sal Robinson, Ron Hogan, Jenna Johnson, others I’m sure I’m forgetting—and I just got their new catalog, which has way more international works that I ever would’ve expected. Granted, a lot of these are big-name, long-time HMH authors, but still, to lead off the catalog with two translations back-to-back is pretty bold for a press that’s also publishing Perfect One-Dish Dinners and Philip Roth’s new novel.

Maybe I’m just easily impressed, or maybe it’s because I’m (surprisingly) in a really cheery mood this morning, but, well, I just want to make up for (some) of the (occasionally) unfair criticisms I’ve lobbed at HMH.¹ Y’all are doing good work. And as a way of trying to make up for this, here’s a list of all of HMH’s forthcoming international works:

by Jose Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.

In 1551, King Joao III of Portugal gave Archduke Maximilian an unusual wedding present: an elephant named Solomon. The elephant’s journey from Lisbon to Vienna was witnessed and remarked upon by scholars, historians, and ordinary people. Out of this material, José Saramago has spun a novel already heralded as “a triumph of language, imagination, and humor” (El País).

by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak.

A new book of poems by Wislawa Szymborska is a rare and exciting event. When Here was published in Poland, reviewers marveled, “How is it that she keeps getting better?” These twenty-seven poems, as rendered by prize-winning translators Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, are among her greatest ever. Whether writing about her teenage self, microscopic creatures, or the upsides to living on Earth, she remains a virtuoso of form, line, and thought.

by Gunter Grass, translated from the German by Krishna Winston.

(This is the book I’m most excited about.)

In an audacious literary experiment, Günter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives. Memories contradictory, critical, loving, accusatory—they piece together an intimate picture of this most public of men. To say nothing of Marie, Grass’s assistant, a family friend of many years, perhaps even a lover, whose snapshots taken with an old-fashioned Agfa box camera provide the author with ideas for his work. But her images offer much more. They reveal a truth beyond the ordinary detail of life, depict the future, tell what might have been, grant the wishes in visual form of those photographed. The children speculate on the nature of this magic: was the enchanted camera a source of inspiration for their father? Did it represent the power of art itself? Was it the eye of God?

by Carsten Jensen, translated from the Danish by Charlotte Barslund with Emma Ryder.

Carsten Jensen’s debut novel has taken the world by storm. Already hailed in Europe as an instant classic, We, the Drowned is the story of the port town of Marstal, whose inhabitants have sailed the world’s oceans aboard freight ships for centuries. Spanning over a hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War, and from the barren rocks of Newfoundland to the lush plantations of Samoa, from the roughest bars in Tasmania, to the frozen coasts of northern Russia, We, the Drowned spins a magnificent tale of love, war, and adventure, a tale of the men who go to sea and the women they leave behind.

by Young-ha Kim, translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim.

Spanning the course of one day, Your Republic Is Calling You is an emotionally taut, psychologically astute, haunting novel that reveals the depth of one particularly gripping family secret and the way in which we sometimes never really know the people we love. Confronting moral questions on small and large scales, it mines the political and cultural transformations that have transformed South Korea since the 1980s. A lament for the fate of a certain kind of man and a certain kind of manhood, it is ultimately a searing study of the long and insidious effects of dividing a nation in two.

by Rana Dasgupta.

(Not a translation, but international in scope and background, and it sounds interesting. Although I have to say that I’m not entirely buying David Mitchell + Alexander Hemon, but if that’s accurate, well then, this must be awesome.)

With an imaginative audacity and lyrical brilliance that puts him in the company of David Mitchell and Alexander Hemon, Rana Dasgupta paints a portrait of a century though the story of a hundred-year-old blind Bulgarian man in a first novel that announces the arrival of an exhilarating new voice in fiction.

In the first movement of Solo we meet Ulrich, the son of a railroad engineer, who has two great passions: the violin and chemistry. Denied the first by his father, he leaves for the Berlin of Einstein and Fritz Haber to study the latter. His studies are cut short when his father’s fortune evaporates, and he must return to Sofia to look after his parents. He never leaves Bulgaria again. Except in his daydreams—and it is those dreams we enter in the volatile second half of the book. In a radical leap from past to present, from life lived to life imagined, Dasgupta follows Ulrich’s fantasy children, born of communism but making their way into a post-communist world of celebrity and violence.

¹ Apologies aside, your website still sucks.