Author Description

"One of the greatest poets of postwar Poland, Krynicki was born in 1943 in a Nazi labor camp in Austria, where his parents, Polish peasants from Ukraine, served as slave laborers. Act of Birth marked the emergence of a major voice--with Adam Zagajewski and Stanislaw Baranczak--in Poland's "Generation of '68" or "New Wave" of Polish poetry. Political and poetic rebellion converged for these poets, and the regime took notice. During the 1970s and '80s, Krynicki was at different points arrested on trumped-up charges, dismissed from work, and forbidden from publishing. Even his name was banned for a time from official publications. But to read his poetry as purely political would be a mistake. The early lyric "Act of Birth" displays the acute linguistic and ethical sensitivity at work throughout Krynicki's poetry. The very phrase, which combines the Polish term for "birth certificate" with both the poet's literal birth and his symbolic self-creation, demonstrates the distinctive combination of mysticism, compression, and wit that shapes Krynicki's work from the early dissident poems to his late haiku. Small wonder that his influences span the distance from Issa to Zbigniew Herbert, and includes Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan (who have both appeared in Polish in his splendid translations). Himself an editor, publisher, and acclaimed translator, he has won major prizes, including the Polish Poets' Award, the Robert Graves-PEN Club Award, and most recently the 2015 Zbigniew Herbert International Literature Prize."--