Psalms

Julia Fiedorczuk was awarded the 2018 Szymborska Prize, Poland’s most prestigious poetry award, for Psalmy (Psalms), and has received many other honors. The author of six volumes of poetry, two novels, a collection of short stories, and three critical books, Fiedorczuk is a professor of American studies and a cofounder of the Environmental Humanities Center at Warsaw University. Her poems have been translated into many languages.Bill Johnston received the 2019 National Translation Award in Poetry for his rendering of Adam Mickiewicz’s rhyming verse narrative Pan Tadeusz. His other awards include the PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award.  He teaches literary translation at Indiana University.

“A poet’s job is to write,” says Julia Fiedorczuk in the closing poem of Psalms, runner-up for the inaugural Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation. But she far surpasses that modest goal: this volume sings. Bill Johnston captures the rhythm, the cadence, and the music of Fiedorczuk’s poems for English-language readers. “Fiedorczuk is, deservingly, an international literary star who writes distinctively across genres. In this innovative, formally restless collection, the divine and bacterial, children and rivers, war and eros mix—kaleidoscopically—in unsettling poems that serve as hymns to the sacrality of life—all life, even the life of rocks. Somehow, I don’t know how, Johnston’s translation catches the music, the vowel rhyme, the staggered, restless phrasings of the originals, and Fiedorczuk’s poignant, broken tones of supplication and gratitude.”—Forrest Gander

• Krajobraz z dziewczynką / Landscape with Little GirlŚwieto grudnia / Feast of DecemberPsalm IPsalm IIPsalm IIIPsalm IVPsalm VPsalm VIPsalm VIIPsalm VIIIPsalm XPsalm XIPsalm XIIPsalm XIIIPsalm XVPsalm XVIIPsalm XVIIIPsalm XIXPsalm XXIIPsalm XXIVPsalm XXVPsalm XXVIIPsalm XXVIIIPsalm XXIXPsalm XXXPsalm XXXIPsalm XXXIIIPsalm XXXIVPsalm XXXVIIIPsalm XXXIXPsalm XCIPsalm XCII przejściowo / for now[z wnętrza cielesnej pojedynczości / From within my bodily singularity]po drodze / on the journeyPogoda / WeatherPoezja natury / Nature PoetryColdAcknowledgmentsAbout Psalms