Tag Archives: Polish literature
Foreign to Literature: Humor, Allusion, and Exophony in Aleksandra Lun’s “The Palimpsests,” Translated by Elizabeth Bryer
By Patrick Powers When I first read Elizabeth Bryer’s translation of Aleksandra Lun’s debut novel, The Palimpsests, back in January, I didn’t like it very much. I didn’t know what to say about it, so I didn’t write anything. After a few months, having left for and returned home from Russia after the onset of the global pandemic, […]
A Tale of Two Women: Dorota Maslowska’s “Honey, I Killed the Cats,” Translated from Polish by Benjamin Paloff
By Magdalena Kay Dorota Maslowska’s novel Honey, I Killed the Cats takes us on a fast-paced journey through psychological and physical space. Set in an off-putting contemporary city, we are never sure where we are, again neither physically nor psychologically. Although its neighborhoods and streets have British names, this metropolis is anywhere and nowhere—there is […]
Nothing to See Here: Wioletta Greg’s “Accommodations,” Translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft
By Benjamin Paloff After reading Wioletta Greg’s Accommodations, one can be forgiven for wondering whether the novel—not this short novel in particular, but the novel as such, as a literary form—might have exhausted its possibilities. That is no slight against this pleasant, if forgettable, little book, just a pertinent observation about a text in which […]
Time and the Elastic Object in Piotr Paziński’s “THE BOARDING HOUSE,” Translated from Polish by Tusia Dabrowska
By Judith Vollmer Time is the muse and director of Piotr Paziński’s novel The Boarding House, in which a grandson returning to the site of childhood visits to his grandmother enters a claustrophobic journey into a broken world. The Time-muse, though austere, also exercises a seductive presence, advancing the sinuous pace of the novel in […]