To Feed the Stone (Polish Literature) - Softcover

Nowicka, Bronka

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628973722 ISBN 13: 9781628973723

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2021

Synopsis

In her audacious debut To Feed the Stone, Bronka Nowicka offers writing that is both timeless and timely. Using the language of folk narrative, like Italo Calvino, Russell Edson and Jan Svankmajer before her, Nowicka’s prose poems take us through the stark and disorienting world of a child––a world that excavates the border of appearances in a constant search for the essence of connection. The poet reconfigures the dynamics between people and objects, cause and effect, the body and the outside world, and the tenuous boundaries between death and life. As Nowicka’s child-narrator poignantly observes after discovering the body of a dead family member: “Her head was hanging over the armrest, her mouth open wide as if, with her whole body, she was taking the last photo of this world.” An ant ground between fingers smells of vinegar. A butterfly has powder, a mole has a tailcoat. You can roll filth down your skin. Old people smell like borsch. You have butter behind your fingernails where splinters can get in. There are hunch-backed people and crazy people but not dogs or birds. Sucking on the salty knee, the child knows: the only thing that separates you from the world is the skin. Thanks to skin, you’re not swallowed up by the vastness of things. Excerpt of “Tights” from To Feed the Stone

About this title

About the Authors

Bronka (Bronisława) Nowicka is a Polish theatre and TV director, screenwriter, poet, and interdisciplinary artist. She is a graduate of the National Film School in Łódź, Poland, and the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts. Her literary debut, Nakarmić kamień (To Feed the Stone) was awarded the 2016 Nike Literary Award and the Złoty Środek Poezji (Golden Mean of Poetry) award. In 2017, she was a laureate of the New Voices from Europe project.



Katarzyna Szuster is a translator. She earned her M.A. in English studies from the University of Łódź, Poland, and was a lecturer at the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Nizwa in Oman. She has translated various Polish poets into English, such as Miron Białoszewski, Justyna Bargielska, and Bronka Nowicka. Her translations have been published in Aufgabe, Free Over Blood, Moria, Biweekly, Words Without Borders, diode, Toad Press, Berlin Quarterly, Seedings, and Tripwire.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Fork

– We used a fork to brush our hair and we cooked noodles in a kettle. If one of us, and there were four girls, didn’t brush her hair in time, she had to wait until her sister took all the noodles out of the kettle with that comb of ours. When the kettle stopped being a noodle pot, you could boil water for tea.

My doll was a rolling pin. There was no butter or sugar so the pin was useless. My aunt burned her eyes out with a wire heated over a candle. She put a rag on her head and sewed her a dress. But we didn’t have a hammer. When you had to nail a shoe together because it came apart, the doll was undressed and when naked, she was a hammer.

You waited through air raids in the tombs. The gravestones were gorgeous, like houses with basements. You had to take stairs. When one casket was bricked up, it was low and you could sit comfortably. If it was higher – because the caskets were stacked up – it was harder. But the grave digger would take us to such a grave where a mother with four kids could fit. Inside, I remember, the walls were painted blue and white. Our apartment’s walls weren’t that clean, who would think of repainting walls during the war? You didn’t paint. Women made themselves up – they did their eyebrows with coal and lips with a beet.

The neighbor comes by every day. She drinks her coffee and lets out old times that stick to her like dregs on the bottom of a glass. She pours them over for the hundredth time. The memories are getting thinner but they can still be brewed. The child likes to listen – it learns about life. It already knows: the war is when objects lose their mind. It’s afraid of eating with a fork. It keeps the fork away from its hair.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1628973722
• ISBN 13: 9781628973723
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112