Featured authors include Maria Dąbrowska, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz, Stanisław Dygat, Jerzy Andrzejewski, Marek Hłasko, Tadeusz Różewicz, Sławomir Mrożek, Leopold Tyrmand, Miron Białoszewski, as well as such living writers as Dorota Masłowska and Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk.
Their works have been grouped under headings such as ‘Couples’, ‘Children’, ‘Surrealists’, ‘Survivors’, ‘Soldiers’, ‘Misfits’, ‘Women Behaving Badly’, ‘Men Behaving Badly’, and ‘Animals’.
The 580-page anthology has been edited by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who was also a member of the 12-strong team of translators, which comprised Tul'si (Tuesday) Bhambry, Stanley Bill, Sean Gasper Bye, Jennifer Croft, Bill Johnston, Madelaine Levine, Eliza Marciniak, W. Martin, Jess Jensen Mitchell, Ursula Philips and Anna Zaranko.
Lloyd-Jones told the PAP Polish Press Agency: "I hope the book will prove a good introduction to Polish literature for English-speaking readers and will encourage other translators to discover more Polish writers and translate their works".
Lloyd-Jones is one of the most acclaimed translators of Polish literature into English. Her output includes Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Paweł Huelle’s Cold Sea Stories, Jacek Dehnel’s Saturn, Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s A Grain of Truth, Artur Domosławski’s Ryszard Kapuściński, A Life, Wojciech Jagielski’s The Night Wanderers, and Janusz Korczak’s Kaytek the Wizard.
Last year, an anthology of short stories set in the Polish capital was published by the Oxford University Press in her translation under the title Warsaw Tales.
(mk)