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Brookline Booksmith's Transnational Series focuses on stories of migration, the intersection of politics and literature, and works in translation. For more information, contact the series director Pierce at [email protected].Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for an in-store event with translators C. Francis Fisher and Alex Braslavsky as they discuss their translations of In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour and On Centaurs & Other Poems by Zuzanna Ginczanka.
In the Glittering Maw is the first English-language collection focused on the later works of Joyce Mansour, an Arab-Jewish Surrealist poet who was exiled from Egypt in the 1950s and settled in Paris.
Mansour’s late poems chart constellations of desire, femininity, and dream. Considered by Andre Bréton to be the preeminent Surrealist of the post-war period, Mansour brings this masculine movement into a feminine realm never-before-imagined. She insists on a forgotten or perhaps vehemently denied eventuality of women’s equality: their ability to do harm, to be violent: “Why tear fire from the impalpable sky / When it already grows and smolders in me / Why throw your glove into the crowd / Tomorrow is a livid stump.” In the Glittering Maw includes a preface by eminent Surrealism scholar Mary Ann Caws.
C. Francis Fisher received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Yale Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Her poem, "Self-Portrait at 25" was selected for the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize. She has been supported by fellowships from Brooklyn Poets and the Vermont Studio Center. She curates Colloquy, an event series that provides a forum for translators to engage with live audiences in an exploration of the art of translation. In the Glittering Maw (World Poetry, 2024), a selected volume of Joyce Mansour’s poetry, is her first book of translations.
On Centaurs and Other Poems is the first selected volume in English of Zuzanna Ginczanka, a visionary Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish poet of the inter-war years whose life was cut short by the Holocaust.
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.
Alex Braslavsky is a scholar, translator, and poet. A graduate student in the Harvard Slavic Department, she writes scholarship on Russian, Polish, and Czech poetry through a comparative poetics lens. She was an American Literary Translators’ Association Mentee in 2021. Her work on Polish literature has been supported by the Jurzykowski Polish Grant and the ©POLAND Translation Program. Her poetry has appeared in Conjunctions and Colorado Review, among others. Braslavsky is the translator of On Centaurs & Other Poems (World Poetry, 2023), the Polish modernist Zuzanna Ginczanka's first selected poetry volume to be published in English.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
279 Harvard Street, 02446, 287 Harvard St, Brookline, MA 02446-2908, United States,Brookline, Massachusetts
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