“We translate in order to differ”: Kaja Gucio in Conversation with Jerzy Jarniewicz

Jerzy Jarniewicz is a Polish poet, translator, and literary critic, who lectures in English at the University of Lodz. He has published thirteen volumes of poetry, sixteen critical books on contemporary literature and literary translation, and has written extensively for various journals, including The Poetry Review, The Irish Review, and The Cambridge Review. He has translated the work of many novelists and poets, including James Joyce, Raymond Carver, Seamus Heaney, Philip Roth, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and Edmund White. His most recent works include two anthologies: Six Irish Women Poets and Women Poets from Britain, which he selected and translated. A collection of his poems in English translations, Landless Boys, was published in the United States in 2023.

Kaja Gucio is a Piotrków-born, Łódź-educated, Warsaw-based translator, following a career path set by fate and choice in equal measure. She leads a precariously vicarious life through the characters of the books she translates. Thus far, in her translatorial capacity, she has tackled Nobel, Pulitzer, and Booker Prize winners, as well as authors who have not won anything, which is sometimes a pity, and sometimes not so much. With titles such as Morrison’s Beloved and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea under her belt, she tends to get anxious about future endeavours; fortunately, however, an awful lot of brilliant new books get written each year. She reads most of them, and then translates some. A firm believer in the “sine cat non” principle, she lives and works under constant supervision of her cat Ciri, a highly critical and detail-orientated feline. Other than that, she does some knitting.