One of the great transnational cultural conversations took place between Polish and American poetry during the Cold War. Piotr Florczyks new book, Dialogue and Influence: Essays on Polish and American Poets, shows how this conversation continued in the following decades, deepening and broadening through the works of poets such as Julia Fiedorczuk, Ewa Lipska, Piotr Gwiazda, Charles Bernstein, Jorie Graham, and Jacek Gutorow, among others. His study illuminates the myriad forms the exchanges tookthrough criticism, translation, and translingual practicesgiving us new ways to read both Polish and American poetry but also prompting us to wonder where one ends and the other begins. As he remarks, this is a good problem to have. Its arguably the right problem for us all to have if were interested in the art and traditions of poetry.
Justin Quinn, University of West Bohemia, author of Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry (2015)
For Anglophone readers, Polish poetry, when not merely ignored, is often defined and distorted by the frames of the Holocaust and the Cold War. An accomplished translator and poet, Piotr Florczyk provides a bracing corrective. Florczyk both demonstrates and embodies the connections and discontinuities between Polish poets and American poets. In a series of cogent, compelling essays, Dialogue and Influence: Essays on Polish and American Poets analyzes transcultural relations and translations. I cannot imagine a more informed, passionate, and trustworthy guide to this subject than Piotr Florczyk.
Steven G. Kellman, author The Translingual Imagination and Nimble Tongues
Piotr Florczyks Dialogue and Influence: Essays on Polish and American Poets is a long-due inquiry into the creative conversation among American and Polish poets and translators that reveals both the complexity of their lyrical and affective engagement and their concrete response to one another. The author brings to our attention the distinct, individual poetic worlds and integrates them into a continuous creative exchange. In so doing, he reconstructs and redefines the polyphony and adds his own voice, resonant with enthusiasm and insight.
Boena Shallcross, The University of Chicago
