by Ewa Lipska
Translated from the Polish by Robin Davidson and Margret Grebowicz
Published: Tue Jan 30 2018
Diego Isaias Hernández Méndez, Convertiendse en Characoteles / Sorcerers Changing into Their Animal Forms (detail), 2013, oil on canvas. Arte Maya Tz’utujil Collection.
AGNI 58
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Private Property
Born in Kraków in 1945, Ewa Lipska is one of Poland’s most recognized living poets. Since 1967 she has authored over twenty books of poems, and volumes of her selected works have appeared in thirteen languages. In the 1990s she served as cultural liaison between Poland and Austria through her role as First Secretary of the Polish Embassy in Vienna. She has received numerous awards in Poland and abroad, including two from PEN and, in 1995, the Award of the City of Kraków, where she has returned to live. (updated 8/2009)
Robin Davidson is associate professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown. Her poems and translations have appeared in 91st Meridian, AGNI, Literary Imagination, Paris Review, Tampa Review, Words Without Borders, as well as the Polish journal Fraza. She is co-translator, with Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska, of The New Century: Poems from the Polish of Ewa Lipska (Northwestern University Press). Davidson has received, among other awards, a Fulbright professorship at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship. Her most recent work on Lipska’s poetry appears in the fall 2012 issue of Common Knowledge (Duke University Press). (updated 8/2012)
Margret Grebowicz is a native speaker of Polish from Lódz. Her translations have appeared in Quarterly West, Literary Imagination, AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, Two Lines, and elsewhere. She is associate professor of philosophy at Goucher College, author of numerous articles, co-editor of Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan, and editor of two critical anthologies, Gender After Lyotard. (updated 4/2011)