Geography

Małgorzata Lebda
Translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal

It’s the job of the senses to transition into words.They tend to be those like: chestnut, cardamom, chalk,fuck; they can also be names of rivers: Belaya, Ob.For years the names of rivers have brought us order. A refrainabout moisture, a science of neglect, of language, or a whisperthat speaks the dialect of maps: Mer de Glace, Carpathians,Cluj-Napoca, Bolechowicka Valley, Wrzeszcz, Wolski Forest,Lea Street—but there’s no order, no restraint, don’t bother searching.Just this: tectonics, geography of what yields to erosion, whatchanges state, what finds itself affected, this, right here.               Hey, look—a hand traces               circles on skin; bark; fur,               and never gets enough.  GeografiaRzeczą zmysłów bywa przechodzenie w słowa.One bywają jak te: kasztan, kardamon, kreda,kurwa; bywają też nazwami rzek: Bieła, Ob.Nazwy rzek od lat przynoszą nam ład. Refren o wilgoci,naukę o zaniedbanym i o języku, a ten bywa też szeptem,który posługuje się dialektem map: Mer de Glace, Karpaty,Kluż-Napoka, Dolina Bolechowicka, Wrzeszcz, Las Wolski,ulica Lea—nie szukaj, nie ma w tym porządku, umiaru.To: tektonika, geografia tego, co ulega erozji, tego,co zmienia stan, też tego, co dotknięte, co tu.               Ej, patrz—dłoń, która krąży               wokół skóry; kory; futra,               i nigdy nie ma dość.

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Małgorzata Lebda is a Polish poet, fiction writer, mountaineer, ultramarathon runner and photographer. She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including the award-winning volumes Queen Cells and Dreams of the Uckermärkers. Her recent volume, Mer de Glace, from which this poem comes, received the prestigious Wislawa Szymborska Prize. In 2023, she published her prose debut, Voracious, which won the “Empik Discovery” Award and the Literary Award of Greater Poland. The novel was sold to numerous countries shortly after its release, and work on a film adaptation is underway. Lebda holds a Ph.D. in Literary Theory and Audiovisual Arts and teaches in the creative writing department at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including English, Spanish, Czech, Italian, Ukrainian, and Danish. She lives in a small town in the Beskid mountains, where she grew up.

Mira Rosenthal is an American poet and translator of Polish-language writers such as Tomasz Różycki, Małgorzata Lebda, and Krystyna Dąbrowska. Her work has been nominated twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize as well as for the Derek Walcott Prize, the National Translation Award, and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Różycki’s To the Letter won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Found in Translation Award for the best book translated from Polish in 2024. She is the author of Territorial, a Pitt Poetry Series selection and finalist for the INDIES Book of the Year award, and The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Northern California Book Award, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Jan Michalski Foundation. She has taught creative writing, literature, and translation at various universities, including as a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College and as a Fulbright Scholar at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. 

Poetry Northwest

Volume XIX | Issue 2

Everett, Washington

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Keetje Kuipers

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