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Join us for a multilingual reading (English, French, and Polish) and moderated discussion of new publications of poetry by Mireille Gansel, Joan Sidney, and Alex Braslavsky. Gansel, joined by her translator Sidney, will read from Soul House, her first book of poetry in English translation and her first book in English since the acclaimed Translation as Transhumance. Braslavsky will read from her new translations of Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish modernist Zuzanna Ginczanka. This event brings together two important European-Jewish poets whose biographies have been shaped, in different ways, by Holocaust history and remembrance. The event will be moderated by Penn professor Kevin M. F. Platt.

About the Authors

ALEX BRASLAVSKY is a scholar, translator, and poet. A graduate student in the Harvard Slavic Department, she writes scholarship on Russian, Polish, and Czech poetry through a comparative poetics lens. She was an American Literary Translators’ Association Mentee in 2021. Her work on Polish literature has been supported by the Jurzykowski Polish Grant and the ©POLAND Translation Program. Her poetry has appeared in Conjunctions and Colorado Review, among others. Braslavsky is the translator of On Centaurs & Other Poems (World Poetry, 2023), the Polish modernist Zuzanna Ginczanka’s first selected poetry volume to be published in English.

MIREILLE GANSEL has won major awards for both her translations of German and Vietnamese poets, and for some of her seven books of poetry. Her lyrical memoir, Translation as Transhumance — published in an English translation by Ros Schwartz — has contributed significantly to the field of translation studies. She received the Veu Lliure 2021 Prize from the Catalan PEN. In 2018, Mireille became the Laureate of the Great Prize of Translation Etienne Dolet-Sorbonne Université. Other awards include the Khoury-Ghata poetry prize, the Gérald de Nerval translation prize, an English PEN Award, and a French Voices Award. Gansel’s first book of poetry in English translation, Soul House (translated by Joan Seliger Sidney), will be published by World Poetry in November 2023.

JOAN SELIGER SIDNEY’s books of poetry include Body of Diminishing Motion, Bereft and Blessed, and The Way the Past Comes Back. Her translations, poems, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary journals and anthologies, including The Common and Asymptote, and have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is Writer-in-Residence at University of Connecticut’s Center for Judaic Studies and has received several fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and a Visiting Faculty Fellowship from Yale University. Her translation of Mireille Gansel’s Soul House will be published by World Poetry in November 2023.

ZUZANNA GINCZANKA (1917-1945) was a Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish poet of the interwar period. Born in Kiev, which her parents fled to avoid the Russian Civil War in 1922, Ginczanka began writing seriously as a child in Równe, Poland (now Rivne, Ukraine). She was nationally recognized for her poetry by sixteen years of age. Encouraged by a correspondence with poet Julian Tuwim, she moved to Warsaw in 1935. There she became associated with the Skamander group and the satirical magazine Szpilki, and befriended many writers including Witold Gombrowicz. Her 1936 collection, On Centaurs, was widely lauded upon its release. At the start of World War II, she moved east, living in Równe and Soviet-occupied Lviv. In 1942, after the German takeover of Ukraine, she escaped arrest and fled to Kraków on false papers to join her husband. She was arrested in 1944 and shot by the Gestapo a few days before Kraków was liberated by the Soviets. After the war, her last known poem “Non omnis moriar…” was used in court to testify against her denouncers.