Classically "Rye"—you will say, and it will be wide "The fields"—you will say, and they will be vast, the bumblebees will be winging their way, the reeds will rustle on the river shore— toward shadows—smooth, creeping, sluggish, toward glows—glassy, steel and strong— "bright"—you will say, and it will be bright "warm"—you will say, and it will be in a bad way, and when you see the sun through the honeys and with a bee-loving playfulness midst the apiaries you will whisper softly—"gardens", you will whisper quietly—"Czarnolas village" Romantically We will sneak away, we will say goodbye with a secret sign, a northern slogan When the moon bewitched with a silver spell—white roses of a nightingale’s spring— when in the swirling depths the dawn sisters have drowned— —and when our mourning is over: this night dark as dark magic, we will be reconciled to you with a poetic idyll like the name: Claudia and on the lips of sad lovers making love in a singing voice we will put enchanted roses—white roses of spring nightingales— Positively Oh, that the full ears would bring forth a harvest of miles— oh, that the fruit would ripen when it perishes with a flower —and that birdcherries are blooming somewhere—it’s the aged matter of pollination, after all, one does not sigh without seeing future mothers; in the garden the sun’s warmth will bring the sorrel aboveground, it will not fit into our springs "youth, you above levels!…" too great are your words for our little affairs A house plain and gray from care is our spring home—
Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917-1945) was a Polish-Jewish poet of the interwar period. Her first and only collection, On Centaurs, was widely lauded in Poland upon its release in 1936. She was killed by the Gestapo no more than a few days before Kraków was liberated by the Soviets on 18 January 1945. She died at the age of twenty-eight.
Alex Braslavsky is a graduate student, scholar, translator, and poet. She writes scholarship on Russian, Polish, and Czech poetry through a comparative poetics lens. She has been an American Literary Translators Association mentee and her translations of poems by Zuzanna Ginczanka are forthcoming with World Poetry Books in Spring of 2023 and appear in Asymptote, Exchanges, and EcoTheo Review.
