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profile/julia-hartwig.md
Translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter
Published: Tue Jan 30 2018
Eva Lundsager, Were now like (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
AGNI 82 Print Only

Julia Hartwig (1921–2017) belonged to the great generation of Polish poets that included Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Wisława Szymborska. In Poland she achieved something of a cult status, her public appearances and readings drawing large crowds. She was awarded numerous prizes in Poland, France, and the United States, including the Jurzykowski Prize and the Thornton Wilder Prize from the Translation Center at Columbia University, and the Austrian Georg Trakl Prize for poetry. Hartwig translated many American poets into Polish. She also translated poetry by Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Max Jacob, Cendrars, Supervielle, and Henri Michaux, and published studies of Apollinaire and Gerard de Nerval.

John and Bogdana Carpenter, working together, have translated seven volumes of poetry and prose by Zbigniew Herbert, for which they received the Witter Bynner Translation Prize, the Islands and Continents Translation Award, and the Columbia University Translation Center Merit Award. They have also translated two volumes of Julia Hartwig’s poetry. Bogdana, professor emerita of Polish and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is the author of The Poetic Avant-garde in Poland, 1918–39, and Monumenta Polonica: The First Four Centuries of Polish Poetry. John is the author of Creating the World and Wall, Watchtower, and Pencil Stub, a study of wartime writings by participants in World War Two. (updated 10/2015)

John and Bogdana Carpenter’s translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s book Mr. Cogito was reviewed in AGNI 39 by Susan Miron

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