Oho: Selected Poems

This collection of new translations spans the entire career of one of Poland’s greatest poets, a writer whose work is little-known in the US but whose innovative style speaks to today’s readers.

Postwar Poland produced some of the greatest poets of the twentieth century: Tadeusz Rozewicz, Zbigniew Herbert, and the two Nobel Prize-winners, Czeslaw Miłosz and Wislawa Szymborska. The poetry of Miron Białoszewski, author of the spellbinding A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, played a crucial part in this extraordinary poetic efflorescence, as those esteemed contemporaries were the first to recognize, and if he is less well-known abroad than they are it may be because his playful, gnomic, defiantly original poems have been deemed so difficult to translate. Here, however, two of the finest American translators of Polish, Clare Cavanagh and Alissa Valles, have teamed up to present the first full-length collection of Bialowszewski’s work in English, one that reflects the range of his singular achievement, from his poetry, to his short prose pieces, to the playlets that he himself produced and performed for private audiences in his tiny Warsaw apartment. The book draws on the entirety of Białoszewski’s output, from his pathbreaking first book, The Revolution of Things, through such later volumes as–and their names alone tell us something about the character of this poet’s world–A Calculus of Whims, Erroneous Emotions, Wasted, Get Lost, and Hums, Lumps, Threads.