„Ryzykowny interes”. O przekładach wierszy Jerzego Ficowskiego na język angielski
‘Risky Business’. On Translations of Jerzy Ficowski’s Poems into English

Summary/Abstract: The author of this article examines previous translations of Jerzy Ficowski’s poems into English, traces their reception and compares the translation strategies adopted by the translators. The reason for taking up the chosen topic is the conviction that it is necessary to re-evaluate Ficowski’s place in the canon of Polish post-war poetry. Despite the growing number of works on Ficowski’s poetry in recent years and the interest shown in him by critics and other poets, he still remains an artist who is widely unknown and underestimated by readers both in Poland and abroad. While for the first group, it is difficult to clearly indicate the reason for Ficowski’s omission, the poet’s absence from the consciousness of foreign readers has its source in the small number of translations (the exception is A Reading of Ashes, which has been translated many times, also into English, a volume collecting works on the Holocaust written over many years). One of the reasons for the lack of interest on the part of the translators was, in turn, probably the exceptional difficulties posed to them by the language of Ficowski’s poems. After years of the writer’s residual presence in English, which was also influenced by the non-inclusion of Ficowski’s works in Czesław Miłosz’s Postwar Polish Poetry, only the recent publication of a selection entitled Everything I Don’t Know (2021), prepared by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, has opened up the possibility for readers to take a closer look at the poet’s work. The research carried out, based on an analysis of Ficowski’s texts and their translations, as well as on a comparison of translation strategies, shows that although the translations often simplify the poet’s language, the translators sometimes manage to preserve certain features of Ficowski’s poetic imagination, such as his typical tendency to question the prevailing hierarchies.

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