kochanie, today i bought bread

Uljana Wolf (trans. Valzhyna Mort)

The lyrical, imaginatively-crafted debut collection by one of Germany's most important contemporary poets explores the 'shifting of the mouth' toward the other, toward translation, toward a reckoning with historical silences.

In kochanie, today i bought bread, Uljana Wolf crosses borders from East Germany into Poland, from fairy tales to the tallying of land torn by fateful past, from women’s voices “hibernating in documents,” to Lavinia’s spilling forth of red language. Hailed by critics for its “brief strokes that open up a wide historical space in which political doom is still present,” this book is a testament that the cartography we inherit is equal parts limit and dare. Wolf’s debut collection won the Peter Huchel Prize in 2006—she was its youngest recipient. Nearly 20 years later, this bilingual edition—featuring a new introduction by Valzhyna Mort and Greg Nissan’s superbly-tuned translation—invites English-language readers into the “guest room” of poetry.

'Uljana Wolf’s first book begins with pain, a hospital, with a daughter who rebels against the controlling word of the fathers. But it goes farther. Its mouth shifts, playfully inventive, though with a dark undertone of Polish-German history, to find bread in language. Then even a mattress becomes translatable and everything connects ‘in this border trade / on my tongue.' – Rosmarie Waldrop