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10 Questions for Ewa Lipska


Corrosive times
can always happen. Forever young
old servant of morality.
Catches trout with bare hands.
A slippery salacious sin.
—from "Can Always Happen," Translated by Aga Gabor Da Silva, Volume 62, Issue 1 (Spring 2021)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
It was a text about loneliness, titled "Street. The Street Emptiness,” sort of an image from the Italian metaphysical artist and surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. The empty streets in his paintings help me relax from the current excess of humankind, but back then, when I was seventeen years old, those empty streets were symbols of loneliness and abandonment.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
It’s a hard question to answer because there have been many such authors. I have often been inspired by prose, American literature (W. Faulkner, J. Steinbeck, T. Williams, E. Caldwell, F. S. Fitzgerald), and German-language literature (T. Mann, S. Zweig, F. Kafka, H. Broch, T. Bernhard). I wandered through literature like through a transcendental forest, making friends with the characters of the books I was reading. I was haunted by one of Kafka’s protagonists who transforms himself into an insect and by Beckett’s Godot—a symbol of what’s in vain; I listened to the conversations the characters of “The Magic Mountain” engaged themselves in in the sanatorium in Davos. . .All those books have certainly had an impact on my imagination.

What other professions have you worked in?
For many years, I worked in the Krakow-based Wydawnictwo Literackie publishing house. From 1991 to 1997 I was a cultural attaché at the Polish Embassy in Vienna.

What drew you to write this piece in particular?
I lived under the Communist rule for many years and I witnessed many dramatic situations. For example, in 1968, during the anti-Semitic persecutions in Poland, I bid goodbye to my friends who were leaving abroad. Such limiting situations occur quite frequently in the history of humanity: people abandon their houses, leave their places of birth, emigrate. They often go back to their homeland after they die.

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
There have been many inspiring places in my life. Usually, however, they are connected to a certain figure: a writer, a painter, a musician, a philosopher. The landscape becomes a more or less original stage set for those places. But sometimes I make up my own “new Atlantis,” a mythical land. It’s not an ideal vision of a country and a social system, as we see in Thomas More’s famous essay Utopia, but rather a dark yet exciting, surrealistic land of Consciousness.

Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
From time to time, I like to work while listening to Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 or Philip Glass’s music. More often than not, though, I turn on Silence— a universal song.

Who typically gets the first read of your work?
Usually my ALTER EGO, who is a demanding, critical, dissident, and decisive reader… In the past, I would have my Danish translator read my work, since she had an excellent poetic ear, but, unfortunately, she’s no longer alive.

If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I could be a mathematician and I would love to have a coffee with Wittgenstein. I could be an astronomer or a physicist. I find all those professions absolutely poetic. It’s a shame that I came to this conclusion so late in my life.

What are you working on currently?
I parted ways with poetry, my correspondence with Stanisław Lem came out in 2018, my books have appeared all over the world—while I’m trying to make sense of the pandemic world, artificial intelligence, and the Large Hadron Collider, built by the European Council for Nuclear Research, and located near Geneva . . .

What are you reading right now?
Books by Emil Cioran, a Romanian-born author and philosopher: On the Heights of Despair, Window to Nothing [Fenêtre sur le Rien], and Conversations [Entretiens].

Responses translated by Aga Gabor Da Silva.


EWA LIPSKA is considered one of the most important Polish poets. She has won numerous award such as the Kościelski Prize (1973), the Polish PEN Club prize (1992), the Jurzykowski Foundation Prize (1993), and the Gdynia Literary Prize (2011). She has been nominated several times for the Nike Literary Award, one of the most prestigious awards for Polish literature, including for her 2017 volume of poetry Pamiȩć operacyjna [Internal Memory], where the poem “Can Always Happen” appeared. Collections of her verse have been translated into several languages, such as Czech, Danish, Dutch, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, and Swedish.


AGNIESZKA (AGA) GABOR DA SILVA graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studied Lusophone Literatures and Cultures. Aga also holds a Master of Arts in English Literature and Linguistics from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her translations have appeared in Lunch Ticket, ANMLY, and Columbia Journal.


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