The first complete English translation of Ewa Lipska’s exciting “Dear Ms. Schubert” poems
Ewa Lipska is one of Europe’s most compelling and important poets, but relatively little of her recent work has been translated into English. A Polish-English bilingual edition, Dear Ms. Schubert is the first complete collection of her remarkable poetic postcards addressed to “Ms. Schubert,” a mysterious contemporary European everywoman.
Written by a certain Mr. Schmetterling (“Mr. Butterfly”), these brief, intimate poems are by turns philosophical, political, and playfully erotic. Combining subversive wit and surrealist imagery, they slowly reveal the contours of a shared secret life played out against a turbulent historical backdrop—a relationship that strikes a precarious balance between deep cultural skepticism and authentic love.
Featuring the original Polish text and the English translation on facing pages, Dear Ms. Schubert is a highly original and appealing book from a poet who richly deserves a wide English-language readership.
Dear Ms. Schubert : Poems by Ewa Lipska
Description
Author Description
Ewa Lipska was born in Kraków, Poland, in 1945. She is the author of more than thirty books of poetry and has won many awards, including the Polish PEN Club’s Robert Graves Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. Her poems have been translated into more than fifteen languages. Robin Davidson is a poet, translator, and professor emeritus of literature and creative writing at the University of Houston–Downtown. Twitter @RobinDavidsonr Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska is a poet, short-story writer, and translator who lives and teaches in Kraków. Davidson and Nowakowska are also the translators of a previous collection of Lipska’s poetry, The New Century.