Sponsored jointly by the Kraków-based Polish Book Institute and the Polish Cultural Institutes in London and New York, the Found in Translation Award is the highest distinction given annually to translators of Polish literature abroad.
The award jury brings together representatives from the three institutes and translators who received the award in the previous two years.
Zuzanna Ginczanka. Photo: PAP/Alamy/Historic Collection/Alamy Stock Photo
Anna Zaranko, the recipient of last year’s award and a member of this year’s jury, told the media: “Alissa Valles' Firebird is a vivid contribution to the growing number of Ginczanka translations. Her imaginative grasp of the challenges presented by these sensual and audacious poems produces solutions that are often breathtaking, while her ability to form powerful condensed images conveys both Ginczanka's exuberance and her defiance.”
Valles was born in Amsterdam to a Dutch mother and an American father. Raised in the United States and the Netherlands, she was educated at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the US East Coast.
She is the editor and co-translator of Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems 1956–1998 and Herbert’s The Collected Prose 1948–1998. She has also translated The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne by Anna Bikont, and a collection of poems by Ryszard Krynicki entitled Our Life Grows.
Zuzanna Ginczanka wrote her earliest poems at the age of four and started publishing at 14. In 1936, she released her first and only book, On Centaurs, which was widely acclaimed. She was arrested in Kraków in 1944 and killed by the Nazis a few days before the Soviets liberated the city on January 18, 1945.
Firebird brings together many of Ginczanka’s uncollected poems and presents On Centaurs, her sole published book, in its entirety.
Firebird was published by The New York Review of Books in its Poets series.
(mk/gs)