Jerzy Ficowski - Everything I Don’t Know
Jerzy Ficowski
Everything I Don’t Know
Translated from Polish by
JENNIFER GROTZ AND PIOTR SOMMER
$16.00
Bilingual Edition
192 pages
September 14, 2021
ISBN 9781954218994
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
JERZY FICOWSKI was born on September 4, 1924 in Warsaw. During the occupation he was a soldier in the Home Army and took part in the Warsaw Uprising. After the war, he studied journalism, philosophy, and sociology. One of the most original Polish poets of the 20th century, he published fifteen volumes of poetry, beginning with Lead Soldiers in 1948. His wanderings with Polish Roma at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s resulted in the monograph Gypsies on Polish Roads (1965) as well as translations from Romany of the poet Papusza. His interest in Jewish history and culture resulted in an anthology of folk poetry of Polish Jews, Raisins with Almonds (1964). He also translated into Polish poetry from the Romanian, Spanish, and Russian. His life-long fascination with the writings of Bruno Schulz began during the occupation. He later researched and collected materials about Schulz, finding and publishing many of his unknown manuscripts, prints and drawings. Ficowski's pioneering biography and analysis of Schulz's work is Regions of the Great Heresy (1967). In the '70s and '80s Ficowski was banned from printing and published in underground editions. His last volume of poetry, Pantareja, appeared in 2006, a few months before his death.
JENNIFER GROTZ is the author of three books of poetry, Window Left Open (Graywolf Press), The Needle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Cusp (Mariner Books) as well as translator of two books from the French: Psalms of All My Days (Carnegie Mellon), a selection of Patrice de La Tour du Pin, and Rochester Knockings (Open Letter), a novel by Hubert Haddad. She teaches at the University of Rochester and directs the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences.
PIOTR SOMMER is a Polish poet, the author of Things to Translate (Bloodaxe Books), Continued (Wesleyan UP), and Overdoing It (Trias Chapbook Series). He has published poetry collections, books of essays on poetry, and poetry translations (Ashbery, Berryman, Cage, Koch, Lowell, O'Hara, Reznikoff, Schubert, Schuyler). He has won prizes and fellowships, and has taught poetry at American universities. He lives outside Warsaw and edits Literatura na Świecie, a magazine of foreign writing in Polish translations.
Jerzy Ficowski
Everything I Don’t Know
Translated from Polish by
JENNIFER GROTZ and PIOTR SOMMER
Winner of a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, Everything I Don't Know presents for the first time in English translation the poetry of Jerzy Ficowski, WWII-resistance fighter, ethnologist, translator of Roma poetry and Jewish folklore, biographer and editor of Bruno Schulz’s writing, and Polish dissident.
“Thanks to these brilliant, careful, inspired translations, we can now read Jerzy Ficowski, one of Poland’s best kept secrets. This book is a marvel in its weird clarity and extraordinary range of styles and subjects, from the perfectly unassuming paradox of the title, all the way through to its final poems about bumblebees and Satie and mother nature, who scratches herself and “shudders / with a tsunami.” How fortunate we are to have the unassailable evidence that all along, there was yet another genius of 20th century Polish poetry.” —Matthew Zapruder
“What good luck to finally have in English the writings of the brilliant Jerzy Ficowski, the poet who lived at least seventeen lives, fighting in the Warsaw Uprising, and later traveling for years with the Roma people through the roads of Poland, opposing his government, and watching the authorities ban his poems, a poet who translated from Spanish and Romanian and Yiddish and Roma, but most of all from the tongue of silence...Beautifully translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, these poems also document the tragedy of the Holocaust with a direct and uncompromising voice that recalls Różewicz and Świrszczyńska while remaining his own. Read a piece such as 'I was unable to save / a single life' in a bookstore, and I guarantee you will want to take this book with you, to keep it for the rest of your life.” —Ilya Kaminsky
“The atrocities of the Holocaust linger in these pages and are explored through Ficowski’s direct but light touch [...] These surprising, clear, and appealing poems are to be enjoyed again and again, marking Ficowski as a poet readers won't want to miss.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The stories Ficowski wishes to tell are not part of the official narrative; instead, they are the unheard ones. [...] Ficowski forged ahead, documenting human folly with pain, empathy, and lyrical intelligence. His tone may have changed, turning quieter, more reserved, especially as the poet began to grow old, but not his drive to question and examine, to think aloud, inviting us, his readers, to take note, to keep looking in the proverbial mirror. This book includes many fine poems that speak to that difficult obligation.” —Piotr Florczyk, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Everything I Don’t Know is a sprawling and generous sampling of a life’s work, and Ficowski’s deft prose documents more than a review could ever hope to fully catalog…Ficowski was a poet of the quotidian, a post-war poet, a lyric poet, a careful observer of both the mundane and those things which are most grave. His work is worth reading, re-reading, canonizing…” —Zoe Contros Kearl, Action Books Micro Reviews
BIOS
JERZY FICOWSKI was born on September 4, 1924 in Warsaw. During the occupation he was a soldier in the Home Army and took part in the Warsaw Uprising. After the war, he studied journalism, philosophy, and sociology. One of the most original Polish poets of the 20th century, he published fifteen volumes of poetry, beginning with Lead Soldiers in 1948. His wanderings with Polish Roma at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s resulted in the monograph Gypsies on Polish Roads (1965) as well as translations from Romany of the poet Papusza. His interest in Jewish history and culture resulted in an anthology of folk poetry of Polish Jews, Raisins with Almonds (1964). He also translated into Polish poetry from the Romanian, Spanish, and Russian. His life-long fascination with the writings of Bruno Schulz began during the occupation. He later researched and collected materials about Schulz, finding and publishing many of his unknown manuscripts, prints and drawings. Ficowski's pioneering biography and analysis of Schulz's work is Regions of the Great Heresy (1967). In the '70s and '80s Ficowski was banned from printing and published in underground editions. His last volume of poetry, Pantareja, appeared in 2006, a few months before his death.
JENNIFER GROTZ is the author of three books of poetry, Window Left Open (Graywolf Press), The Needle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Cusp (Mariner Books) as well as translator of two books from the French: Psalms of All My Days (Carnegie Mellon), a selection of Patrice de La Tour du Pin, and Rochester Knockings (Open Letter), a novel by Hubert Haddad. She teaches at the University of Rochester and directs the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences.
PIOTR SOMMER is a Polish poet, the author of Things to Translate (Bloodaxe Books), Continued (Wesleyan UP), and Overdoing It (Trias Chapbook Series). He has published poetry collections, books of essays on poetry, and poetry translations (Ashbery, Berryman, Cage, Koch, Lowell, O'Hara, Reznikoff, Schubert, Schuyler). He has won prizes and fellowships, and has taught poetry at American universities. He lives outside Warsaw and edits Literatura na Świecie, a magazine of foreign writing in Polish translations.
PRESS
Reviewed by Zoe Contros Kearl for Action Books Micro Reviews
Reviewed by Piotr Florczyk for Los Angeles Review of Books
SPD Bestseller List from October 2021 to May 2022
Bilingual Edition
192 pages
September 14, 2021
ISBN 9781954218994
Distributed by Small Press Distribution (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
