Raised in Northern California, Mira Rosenthal received her MFA from the University of Houston and her PhD from Indiana University. Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the American Council of Learned Societies and Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry. Her first book, The Local World, won the Wick Poetry Prize in 2011. While on a Fulbright Fellowship to Poland she discovered her passion for translating contemporary Polish literature. She is the translator of two volumes of poetry by Tomasz Rózycki, most recently Colonies that received the PEN Translation Fund Award and was nominated for the Robert Fagles Translation Prize. Her poems, translations and essays have been published in many literary journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Slate, PN Review, A Public Space and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets.
Judges’ Citation
In Mira Rosenthal’s translation of this work, English-speaking readers can themselves confront the sonnet as something supple, fresh and a little bit strange.
The sonnet, or ‘small song,’ arose in 13th-century Italy. It was successfully transplanted into English, through the supple voice of Thomas Wyatt, well before the birth of William Shakespeare. In Eastern Europe, however, the sonnet flowered much later. In Polish in particular, when it finally appeared, it met both popular acclaim and stiff-necked critical resistance. So the sonnet in Polish is, or can be, even now, a contentious and lively form. Tomasz Rózycki’s sonnet sequence Kolonie (Colonies), first published in Polish in 2006, demonstrates this clearly. In Mira Rosenthal’s translation of this work, English-speaking readers can themselves confront the sonnet as something supple, fresh and a little bit strange. Rózycki’s quirky and self-deprecating humour permeates the poems. So does his sense of the fundamental homelessness of 21st-century human beings. Nine of these 77 sonnets begin with some variation on the line ‘When I began to write, I didn’t know …’ and blossom into wry and hilarious reflections on the writing life. Others exude a heart-rending nostalgia for a world that is constantly being translated from meaning into money, and thus constantly destroyed.
Selected poems
by Mira Rosenthal
When I began to write, I didn’t know
who would be waiting for it. In the window,
a curtain hangs unmoved, a mess spreads on the floor:
loose change, CDs, an unmade bed, the entrails
of night. Signs of a struggle, deserted.
Someone left traces on these cups, this carpet,
someone bled out from self-inflicted wounds,
signed his name backwards, backwards. At this mirror,
a face, a face bit someone, a world leapt
from the other side, whole, identical
but in reverse. It occupied the best
places tonight and settled back to rest,
and no one sees it’s false. Winter comes slowly,
frost pricks the window, pricks it and draws blood.
Copyright © English Translation and Introduction 2013 by Mira Rosenthal
Cannibals
the Polish written by Tomasz Rozycki
Since it is lucky you are strange and I
am strange, together we will shock the world.
Families strolling by will stare and point,
and we’ll be famous, quite mysterious.
They’ll even make up complicated plots
in films about us, all untrue. At night,
in mid-December, we will find ourselves
a hiding place where we’ll make love and have
no other worries. We were meant to meet
in such a huge world, we are singled out
by language. Stick out your tongue for me, kitten.
I’ll tell you a story. Luckily we’re
together now, but language will betray us
and kill our world, turn it to dew and ash.
Copyright © 2013 Tomasz Rozycki, © 2013 Mira Rosenthal (English translation), Colonies, Zephyr Press
Creoles, Mestizos
the Polish written by Tomasz Rozycki
I took a trip to Ukraine. It was June.
I waded in the fields, all full of dust
and pollen in the air. I searched, but those
I loved had disappeared below the ground,
deeper than decades of ants. I asked
about them everywhere, but grass and leaves
have been growing, bees swarming. So I lay down,
face to the ground, and said this incantation —
you can come out, it’s over. And the ground,
and moles and earthworms in it, shifted, shook,
kingdoms of ants came crawling, bees began
to fly from everywhere. I said come out,
I spoke directly to the ground and felt
the field grow vast and wild around my head.
Copyright © 2013
Scorched Maps
the Polish written by Tomasz Rozycki
At night three elements enjoy our bodies.
Fire, water, air. One moment you’re water
then air the next, but flame encircles all.
At night we are reduced, small bits of tar,
soot on our skins, in cups. A storm enters
the room and clouds the mirror. There are others
from far away who look on us as food,
they eat and drink. They find each orifice
and enter us. Our bodies then become
the final element of earth and turn
to ash, dust, coal, compost where insects live
and snails leave tracks you ask about at dawn.
Once, at the world’s end, I threw a stone into
the open mouth of hell; I can’t complain.
Copyright © English Translation and Introduction 2013 by Mira Rosenthal
The Storm
the Polish written by Tomasz Rozycki