Within, Without

Ilya Kaminsky is a poet, essayist, and translator who is the author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa, among other books. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and teaches at Princeton University. Piotr Florczyk is a poet, essayist, translator, and critic working in English and in Polish. He teaches global literary studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, and lives with his family in Los Angeles.

"'You can’t go home again,' is the refrain in the two essays in Within, Without: On Two Cities (Seagull Books, £13.99; Tablet price £12.59). In 'There, There', Piotr Florczyk’s Kraków is not the Unesco World Heritage city of tourists eyeing up Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine, but the adjacent workers’ district Nowa Huta, now teeming with young families and trendy creatives, a development viewed with mixed feelings. In 'Silent City', Ilya Kaminsky’s Odesa is a precarious affair, his foundling father, a wartime survivor, passing his savvy on to his deaf son, his formidable mother fiercely shielding him from everyday cruelty and stupidity: 'Deafness is a theatre. Here the deaf person is the audience. Everyone else is an actor.' Talent thinks, genius sees."

• 1. ‘Silent City’ by Ilya Kaminsky2. ‘There There’ by Piotr Florczyk