Mira Rosenthal
Associate Professor, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA (USA)
Open lecture: Zuzanna Ginczanka’s Mythology of Joy
The last decade has seen a great wave of efforts to revive ZUZANNA GINCZANKA as an important figure of literary modernism and a poet of the interwar period with a Jewish cultural background, whose work deserves wider attention. On the Polish side, these endeavours range from Izolda Kiec’s meticulous research, piecing together the poet’s biography from documentary crumbs, to works of an interpretative nature, such as Piotr Rowicki’s stage drama or Jarosław Mikołajewski’s reportage, framed from the perspective of his personal obsession. Now, with the publication of several English translations, a rediscovery of Ginczanka’s life and work is gradually taking place in the English-speaking world; a process that brings with it new questions about what restitution as an act of re-visioning actually is. Mira Rosenthal will talk about her translation project, co-created with historian Anna Müller, and the role of translation in communicating cultural values.
MIRA ROSENTHAL is a lecturer in creative writing and comparative literature at Cal Poly University in California. She is currently on a Fulbright scholarship to Kraków, Poland. She translates Polish poetry into English and has published, among others, the collection Tideline by Krystyna Dabrowska and Colonies by Tomasz Rozycki, for which she received the Northern California Book Award and nominations for the prestigious International Griffin Poetry Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
