On Centaurs & Other Poems

Zuzanna Ginczanka (trans. Alex Branzasky)

Ginczanka's surreal and mythologically-informed poetry appeared at a time in Poland when Jewish poets like Julian Tuwim were at the helm of the avant-garde in the Skamander poetic movement. Her 1936 collection On Centaurs was released to great acclaim when she was barely 20 years old. Dubbed "Tuwim in a skirt" by her contemporaries, Ginczanka's youth, gender, and Jewish background posed challenges to her career in the Polish literary world of her time. She disguised herself as Catholic, but ultimately fell victim to the Holocaust in 1945. The hybrid identities she was forced to embody seeped into her poetry, which conjoins biblical imagery to idiosyncratic geological, cosmological and botanical obsessions.

Published in a bilingual edition, with a preface by Yusef Komunyakaa and an introduction by translator Alex Braslavsky, On Centaurs and Other Poems introduces the full scope of Ginzcanka's poetic vision and prophetic voice to English-language readers for the first time.