In case you missed it, yesterday, Andrzej Sosnowski’s “Morning Edition” (as translated by Benjamin Paloff) was featured on Poetry Daily.

Here’s the full poem:

Garrulous mornings, dynamic
departures from the take-off of night,
mouths filled with words that snap
like a parachute behind the fighter
pilot landing on an aircraft carrier. Stop,
I think you misheard that. I think
it’s an Eastern European high pressure
area working on my nerves with signs
of sun beneath the still-closed
sluice of day, as the machinery
trembles before the grand opening
and the sun maneuvers toward the gates
already ready to enter, soar up, sail out
over the city with the dazzling pomp
of a heat wave. The rooks that spend
the night in the poplars in front of the house
have already flown to the fields,
but in sleep their dark racket was so very
talkative that I imagine it might be
possible to chat with birds
at some wild frequency,
head over heels, at daybreak,
because they run the same missions
at night as in the morning, so to hell
with the goggles and flight suit, let’s
file classified reports on the position
of enemies and friends on the Ocean
of Storms and the Sea of Vapors, the Sea
of Dreams and Crises, on the Sea
of Tranquility. How did the moon
get in here? And enemies? Let’s talk about
you instead: so what if you’re lousy
on the jump? You glide right off
the edge, where there is no end,
and it’s a long way down? Now
leapfrog: surely that umbrella
is a parachute? Sometimes
I’m afraid of this mumbling,
these words with missed connections,
from nowhere to nowhere, as if
my head shone ominously with lights
from a pinball machine, but under
whose control? Yours, or his there?
And do you remember Kloss? Ingolf
Mork! The inrun, take-off, flight
and landing: I go to the bathroom,
cold water, shower, splashes
of water like snow from under skis
and the head blown off the pint
into the faces of gawkers. I’d like
to jump that well, too. But something
doesn’t want to pass my throat
after the landing: could it be
that the night is dumbstruck, dazed
within me, speechless? Let’s
go get a beer.

Any poem is a good poem that ends with “Let’s go get a beer.” Speaking of . . .

Last month, Open Letter published its first work of poetry in translation:¹ Andrzej Sosnowski’s Lodgings, translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff. It recently received a very nice review by E. C. Belli in Words Without Borders:

With Lodgings, translator Benjamin Paloff has made an important contribution to the body of Polish poetry currently available to readers in English. Complete with a translator’s note, a conversation between Sosnowski and Paloff, and poems that span Sosnowski’s entire career to date (1987-2010), Lodgings offers an unusual glimpse into a polyphonous, expansive, and chameleonic strain of Polish poetry. The poems included are pulled from nine of Sosnowski’s collections (including Life in Korea, A Season in Hel, Lodgings, and the most recent poemas), and they are presented, with two exceptions, in their original order.

In an interview that appeared in the Chicago Review in 2000, Polish poet and translator Piotr Sommer called Sosnowski “maybe the single most exciting younger Polish poet” for “breathtaking and very innovative” work that displays a “rich cross-fertilization of influences.” Sommer also explains that the New York School poets and OULIPO were “an important part of [Sosnowski’s] literary tradition and reading experience.” And indeed, what American readers of Lodgings will find is a poet openly in conversation with myriad writers—French ones, such as Mallarmé, and Roussell, but more importantly with Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, John Berryman, James Schuyler, and Elizabeth Bishop. [. . .]

It is a daunting task to carry over into English Sosnowski’s language, which is a language marked by abrupt shifts in register and suggests an obsessive and ongoing rumination on various literary influences. Paloff has rendered a superb, tonally consistent volume, and has effectively stretched the barriers of his own language.

So, to celebrate this release—and excellent review—we’re giving away 5 copies to the people who “Like” us on Facebook. To enter yourself in this drawing, simply click here and either “Like” or comment on the post about giving away copies of Lodgings . . .

(And let this serve as a very soft sell for Wednesday’s RTWCS event featuring Piotr Sommer and Bill Martin, who will be discussing Polish poetry in translation. More info tomorrow.)

¹ We are planning on doing one work of poetry every year. Next up: The Smoke of Distant Fires by Eduardo Chirinos, translated from the Spanish by G. J. Racz.