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Sławomir Zubrzycki and the viola organista are conquering the world

Sławomir Zubrzycki’s concert inaugurated this year’s edition of the Conrad Festival. It was the second public presentation of the extraordinary instrument called the viola organista – reconstructed by Zubrzycki, and invented by Leonardo da Vinci – the first bowed string instrument whose description survived until this day. Today, media across the world write about the creator from Krakow! We are proud to have been able to present this unusual event to the audience.

We encourage you to read the articles:
www.huffingtonpost.com
plus.lefigaro.fr

We recommend the following video to all those who want to recall this remarkable evening:

We also encourage you to read the interview with Sławomir Zubrzycki by Jacek Ślusarczyk, featured in Tygodnik Powszechny:

 

Tom McCarthy – writer and artist, whose works have been translated into more than twenty languages – visited Krakow during the Conrad Festival. In an interview conducted by Maksymilian Lawera – Jagiellonian University student, and Katarzyna Pawlicka – Jagiellonian University doctoral student, he talked about his novel Remainder, which was published in Poland this year. We encourage you to watch the conversation with the writer.

We would like to remind you that the Writers in Motion Audiovisual Library of Writers is a project carried out by the Krakow Festival Office in cooperation with the Faculty of Polish Studies of Jagiellonian University. During the conversations conducted with authors by Jagiellonian University students and doctoral students, audiovisual profiles of Polish and international writers are created, both by those who live in Krakow and those who visit the city during its numerous literary events.

Photographs see cities in the colours of words – Iosif Brodsky’s Venice 20.11 – 20.12.2013.

Iosif Brodsky’s Watermark contains something that forces its readers to act. To abandon the place they chose for themselves. It pushes them to take a journey – perhaps the longest in their lives. All of this to make them see, to focus their attention on one detail which constantly gets blurred for the sake of things. This fluid dependency enforces change. And in almost all cases, it is a change for the better.

We would like to invite you to visit an exhibition entitled Fotografie widzą miasta w barwach słów – Wenecja Josifa Brodskiego [Photographs see cities in the colours of words – Iosif Brodsky’s Venice]. The photographs by Monika Gromala were taken during her stay in Venice in February 2013. The visitors will have a chance to see unknown corners of Titian and Tintoretto’s city, as well as to confront them with the image presented in the Watermark prose collection. Each photograph was labelled with a proper quotation from the essay.

Entrance is free of charge.

Location: Regional Public Library in Krakow (2nd floor)

Date: the 20th of November – the 20th of December 2013

Another episode of the Writers in Motion Audiovisual Library of Writers belongs to Filip Springer – reporter and photographer, a guest of this year’s edition of the Conrad Festival. The conversation was conducted in Krakow by Maria Kobielska, Jagiellonian University doctoral student. Filip Springer publishes in the national press and writes regularly for the Polityka weekly. He debuted in 2011 with a reportage book entitled Miedzianka. Historia znikania, for which he was nominated for the following prestigious awards: NIKE, the Ryszard Kapuściński Award, and the Gdynia Literary Award. Listen to the interview!

We would like to remind you that the Writers in Motion Audiovisual Library of Writers is a project carried out by the Krakow Festival Office in cooperation with the Faculty of Polish Studies of Jagiellonian University. During the conversations conducted with authors by Jagiellonian University students and doctoral students, audiovisual profiles of Polish and international writers are created, both by those who live in Krakow and those who visit the city during its numerous literary events.

Cees Nooteboom – one of the most outstanding Dutch writers, translator, poet, and traveller, listed among the candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature – is the central figure of another episode of the Writers in Motion series. The interview in Krakow, during the 5th edition of the Conrad Festival, was conducted by Aleksandra Wojtaszek – Jagiellonian University student, and Bartłomiej Woźniak – graduate of Jagiellonian University. We highly recommend it and encourage you to watch!

We would like to remind you that the Writers in Motion Audiovisual Library of Writers is a project carried out by the Krakow Festival Office in cooperation with the Faculty of Polish Studies of Jagiellonian University. During the conversations conducted with authors by Jagiellonian University students and doctoral students, audiovisual profiles of Polish and international writers are created, both by those who live in Krakow and those who visit the city during its numerous literary events.

Jakuck. A soirée with Michał Książek.

Thursday, the 21st of November, 6 p.m.

Księgarnia Pod Globusem bookstore, ul. Długa 1 Krakow

The Wydawnictwo Czarne publishing house, New Eastern Europe and the Księgarnia Pod Globusem bookstore would like to invite everyone to a meeting with writer and Siberian guide Michał Książek.

I am convinced that Editor Giedroyc would be happy. Michał Książek carried out the proposal from the last edition of “Notatki Redaktora” (“Editor’s Notes”) by going on a fascinating journey following Sieroszewski’s Siberian stories and discovering this unjustly forgotten author to us. Combining linguistic and ethnographic notes with a reportorial account of his own experiences of life in Yakutsk, Książek continues the excellent tradition of Polish explorations of Siberia in a modern way. I’ll even say that such descriptions of the cold have never before appeared in Polish literature. I am genuinely impressed!

Mariusz Wilk

Edward Piekarski, exiled to Siberia in 1888, wrote a dictionary of the Yakut (Sakha) language. Wacław Sieroszewski landed in Siberia ten years earlier, and the result of his years-long exile is an outstanding ethnographic work, Dwanaście lat w kraju Jakutów [Twelve Years in the Land of the Yakuts]. Michał Książek went to the Yakutia (Sakha) Republic of his own free will. Following the tracks of his great predecessors, he travelled across this vast white land, fascinated with the customs and the language of its inhabitants. Yakutia, a country of an area nine times larger than Poland, is inhabited by just under a million people. Winter lasts for most of the year, so there are innumerable terms for types of snow and frost, and the cold is so severe sometimes that in the Yakut language, the friendly Ded Moroz (Father Frost) was replaced with the Bull of Winter. Declining Yakut words using Polish case forms, Książek writes a kind of peculiar grammar of this distant, yet close, snowy expanse.

Admission is free. Don’t miss it!

W dzieciństwie stawałam w otwartych drzwiach and PRAKTYKI – we have two poems by the winners of this year’s Wisława Szymborska Award for you.

Krystyna Dąbrowska

*** [W dzieciństwie stawałam w otwartych drzwiach]

W dzieciństwie stawałam  w otwartych drzwiach, a któreś z rodziców
przykładało linijkę do mojej głowy,
ołówkiem zaznaczało kreskę na framudze.

Później były inne drzwi, w których stawiała mnie ambicja.
Rysując ostrą krechę, sprawdzała ile urosłam.

Teraz ty mnie mierzysz, a ja ciebie.
Dwie poziome drżące kreski –
nasze ciała
wtulają się w siebie, wnikają
i nie ma wyżej, niżej, nie ma miar.

 

Łukasz Jarosz

PRAKTYKI

Krótka ulica.
Uczniowie Mechanika
z reklamówkami w rękach
wchodzą do tłustych warsztatów.
Płytko oddycha niebo.

Wyprowadziłem się.
Przez cztery dni paliłem rzeczy po sobie.
Zawstydziłem się, bo podpatrzono mnie
w trakcie modlitwy.
Mój głos ciemniał wśród gałęzi.

Teraz ta ulica.
Chłopaki odpalają papierosy,
dzielą się śniadaniem.
Żują w ustach ostry
mądry chleb.

 

The first interview with the winners of the Wisława Szymborska Award – Krystyna Dąbrowska and Łukasz Jarosz. Interviewer: Paulina Małochleb.

Where does a poem come from?

Krystyna Dąbrowska: I can never be sure which elements of what I experience and observe will change into poetry. This is why I make lots of notes, because anything may be useful – every scene I observe, each overheard conversation, a story told by someone. You are right that the sense of sight is important to me and like a painter, I sketch faces and landscapes, but I use words instead of strokes of paint. These notes are the raw material on which the poems draw – but nevertheless, when the poems come, they are always a surprise.

Łukasz Jarosz: Many works were created based on the situations, conversations, and places I noticed, heard or observed. All that is, of course, digested by the inside, the language that is sometimes, or maybe almost always, unable to face up to reality. I think that to write poems is to be on your guard all the time, to stay alert, focused, sensitive to words.

What role does translation play in your writing? Is it a completely separate occupation, unrelated to your passion? Or do you treat it as a kind of school of language and technique?

Krystyna Dąbrowska: Translation, particularly the translation of poetry, is definitely important for my writing, although I don’t think that the authors whose poems I translate have a direct influence on my poetic language. The point is that working on a translation of a poem sharpens attention, makes you listen intently to each word and pause, lets you figure out the arcana of someone’s poetical work. It’s a great technical exercise. For example, I treated the translation of W.B. Yeats’ early poems, filled with formal rigour (regular meter, rhymes) that I don’t impose on my own poems, as an exercise, but also great fun. Translating texts completely different than mine, and even though, or maybe therefore, appealing, I take a rest from my manner of speaking. Later, it is easier for me to take a new look at what I write.

What is the relationship between poetry and life? Is poetry only peripheral to writing? Or the other way round? And what place does music occupy in this hierarchy?

Łukasz Jarosz: I guess that in my case, life and poetry intertwine. To put it simply, I am not able to write a poem that does not, in a sense, have a source in my life, my family, its past, lasting. Music is very important to me. From my earliest years, I have also played the drums, it’s a great passion of mine. I record in order to listen to that, to record what I thought was missing from the musical world. Sometimes some poetical texts appear on these albums, sometimes not. Anyway, it is easier for me to write a poem than lyrics for a song; I feel more free in poetry.

Does poetry have a chance of gaining social popularity in the contemporary world? And above all – does poetry need popularity at all?

Krystyna Dąbrowska: Poetry is in no danger of becoming widely popular these days – even the most recognised poet cannot count on being a star of the popular culture, which happens to prose authors. I wouldn’t lament over that. The niche nature of poetry protects it from trivialisation. I am, however, worried by the fact that this niche is becoming too deep: just take a look at bookstores, in which the poetry shelves are smaller and smaller, and most often crammed in some awkward corner. The distribution of poetry volumes is poor, and there is no place for genuine reviews in the press, even in literary magazines (maybe except for Literatura na Świecie).

Łukasz Jarosz: I don’t know whether poetry will become popular, I never thought about it and I don’t really care. Poetry is too intimate, spiritual to gain any kind of popularity, recognition or fame. Poems should be experienced in solitude, on your own. A poem requires too much from the reader, absorbs and involves them too much. This is not popular. Poetry forces you to be humble, it needs you and takes you whole.

Two young poets: Krystyna Dąbrowska and Łukasz Jarosz have just become joint winners of the Wisława Szymborska Award. Dąbrowska was honoured for her volume Białe krzesła (published by the Regional Public Library and the Culture Animation Centre in Poznań), and Jarosz for Pełna krew (Znak Publishing House). The winners are young poets, born in the 1970s. The path to poetry was a rather winding one for both of them. Dąbrowska is an artist, she studied graphic design at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. She compares herself to a painter who sketches faces and landscapes, but uses words instead of strokes of paint. Jarosz works as a teacher in Olkusz and plays the drums in several rock bands. He says that he is a better musician than he is a poet. Dąbrowska debuted in 2006 with a volume entitled Biuro podróży, her next volume waited two years to be published. Jarosz writes a lot and regularly publishes his works – Pełna krew is his sixth volume of verse.

This year’s winners of the Wisława Szymborska Award function beyond the literary environment, they are loners and outsiders by nature, they rarely appear at literary festivals and book fairs. Their manner of writing is completely different, though: Dąbrowska is far from expressive, she speaks with a quiet voice. Jarosz, in turn, selects expression, he tries to make the world manifest in his poems. She is withdrawn in her poetry, she hides behind the images she describes; he writes about himself, about the world, and himself in it. She is cool, transparent, polishes up her phrases. Him – expressive, immersed in experience. The contrasts are countless, but what both poets have in common is the manner of talking about the world: searching for the non-obvious, noticing the entirety of a phenomenon in a detail, focusing on everyday life. They both lean towards presenting things related to death, disease, weakness, the passing of time. Dąbrowska ponders over how to live in the line of fire, on war-torn earth; Jarosz spins his tale about the passing of time using the example of women from his own family. They both can also capture the joyful elements of life: Dąbrowska writes wonderfully about how love makes people equal, deprives them of ambitions; Jarosz devotes a brilliant text to his feelings for his daughter.

They also have extraordinary distinctiveness in common, they are strong, independent voices. The jury of the Wisława Szymborska Award distinguished just that – their sovereignty, ability to write outside of the trends, and relentless searching for their own artistic path. These qualities were highly valued by Wisława Szymborska, who invented the literary award and established the Foundation in her will.

Krystyna Dąbrowska – born in 1979. She debuted in 2006 with a volume entitled Biuro podróży. She studied graphic design at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. She publishes her works in Kwartalnik Artystyczny, Gazeta Wyborcza, Dwutygodnik, Odra, Twórczość, and Kultura Liberalna. Translator of English literature: Williams, Yeats, Hardy, and Gunn; she published her translations of poetry in Literatura na Świecie. In 2012, she published her second volume of poetry – Białe krzesła – under the imprint of the Public Library and the Culture Animation Centre Publishing House.

Łukasz Jarosz – born in 1978. Poet, musician. Drummer, singer, and lyricist for groups such as: Lesers Bend, Chaotic Splutter, Panoptikum, Katil Ferman, Mgłowce, and Zziajani Porywacze Makowców. Author of six poetry volumes: Soma (2006), Biały tydzień (2007), Mimikra (2010), Spoza (2011), Wolny ogień (2011), and Pełna krew (2012). Winner of many poetry competitions, including the Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, Rafał Wojaczek, and Rainer Maria Rilke competitions. His debut poetry book Soma was honoured with the main prize at the Witold Gombrowicz Competition for Young Creators organised by the Culture Foundation and received the Golden Means of Poetry award for the best poetry book debut (2007). His poems have been translated into Croatian and Italian. He has published his works in Tygodnik Powszechny, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Twórczość, among others. He lives in Żurada near Olkusz.

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