14 October 2011 Jacek Dehnel’s Rubryki strat i zysków

Jacek Dehnel's book Rubryki strat i zysków has just hit the bookshop shelves. It is a selection of Dehnel's poetic series and poems written through 1999-2010, as well as a few as-yet unprinted pieces. The author himself expounds on the title of the latest collection as follows: "Writing is a kind of loss in many ways. One could do something else instead of writing. (...) However, each of those losses (...) can be 'reverted': it's true, one could use the time for writing in a better way but it could also be used much worse. This balance is never closed, these are just columns on both sides, not quite trustworthy."

Jacek Dehnel will be a guest of this year's Festival, attending the meeting entitled Poetic Transformations. Three Polish poets (Dehnel, Marcin Kurek and Joanna Wajs) have been invited to participate in the meeting with three Swiss poets (coming from country's three linguistic zones). At the meetings with the audience on the 5th of November at the Pałac Pod Baranami, they will present the results of this cooperation and tell us what creating and translating poetry is to them. The day before (on Friday, the 4th of November), in the Regional Public Library, the author of Lala will also host a 'Reading Lesson' devoted to Philip Larkin (1922-1985), an English poet and novelist recognised as one of the greatest British writers, whose works have been translated by Dehnel. In 2008, a collection of Larkin's poems translated by Jacek Dehnel was published in Poland. In his review of Dehnel's translation, Jakub Winiarski described Larkin's work as follows:  "Larkin - the killer of sentimentality. Larkin - the suspicious philosopher of culture. Larkin - the provocateur. Larkin - the subtle documentarian. Larkin - the joker, cynic, ironist and self-ironist. Perhaps one could also say: Larkin - the sage." We can undoubtedly recommend it even now!