For so many years nowin my entresol of wooden beamsbetween the ceiling and the hall25 watts of everlasting lightobscured by fly droppings glimmerbehind a barricade of old papersThere he is winding his watchhe doesn’t brush away the spiders he sleepsBy now he must have deciphered every wood-knothis still shadow overgrown by plastersometimes he’s not thereeven after curfewhe spends time in Hyderabadunlocks the next knotgoes back further and further into the woodToday my dreamknocked on wood for himMr. Bruno it’s all right nowyou can come downBut he waits for the unwaitforablehe cannot hear my dreamhe, nobodysaner than anybodyhe knows there’s no entresolnor lightnor me
My Unsurvivor
Jerzy Ficowski
Translated from the Polish
In memory of Bruno Schulz
Feature Date
- December 13, 2021
Series
- Translation, What Sparks Poetry
Selected By
- Ilya Kaminsky
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“My Unsurvivor” from EVERYTHING I DON’T KNOW: THE SELECTED POEMS OF JERZY FICOWSKI.
Published by World Poetry Books 2020.
Translation Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Window Left Open. Also a translator from the French and Polish, her most recent translation is EVERYTHING I DON’T KNOW, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, co-translated with Piotr Sommer and forthcoming from World Poetry. Her poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, New England Review, and in five volumes of the Best American Poetry anthology. Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, she teaches at the University of Rochester.
Piotr Sommer is the author of Continued (Wesleyan University Press, 2005) and Overdoing It (Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press, 2013). His collected poems, Po Ciemku Też, (Also in the Dark) appeared in Poland in 2013.
Storrs, Connecticut
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