​​Bronisław Maj

Translations from the Polish by Daniel Bourne

Free Verse Editions
Edited by Jon Thompson

Information and Pricing
978-1-64317-457-0 (paperback, $17.95); 978-1-64317-458-7 (PDF, $9.99); 978-1-64317-459-4 (EPUB, $9.99). © 2024 by Parlor Press, 122 pages in English translation from the Polish original

Bookstores: Order by fax, mail, or phone. See our "Sales and Ordering Page" for details.

Perhaps the most interesting political poetry to emerge out of the last generation of Polish poets to come of age during Communism is the work of Bronisław Maj—not because it explicitly references the historical trauma of 1980s Poland during and after the period of Martial Law, but because Maj’s poetry addresses the integrity of the poetic gaze itself. In these poems, Maj both celebrates his beloved city of Kraków as well as mourns its ongoing physical and spiritual deterioration, all the while grappling with the vulnerability of past and present lives—and how we are always at the mercy of whatever future might be “reading” our fragile stories. Fittingly, decades later, the lyrical and philosophical power of these poems stirringly remain. These translations by American poet Daniel Bourne—who lived in Poland from 1985 to 1987 on a Fulbright Fellowship and started working with Bronisław Maj in translating his work during that period—have been published in numerous literary journals such as Salmagundi, Field, Boulevard, Plume, and Seneca Review. These poems are now gathered together in Extinction of the Holy City to share with American readers the elegiac but also redemptive harvest of a writer whom William Heyen describes as “a poet of desperate faith in the poetic act,” a poet deserving of being read more than one generation later, and in lands and languages beyond his own. 

What People Are Saying

“This world goes on / between two gulps of air,” writes Bronisław Maj.” And whether he is watching pigeons in Kraków’s Market Square or listening to neighbors arguing in the adjacent apartment, worrying about how, if called upon to do so years later, to describe “these times,” Maj  strives to capture both the concrete and the ineffable, his attempt to name, with prismatic precision, all the things of this world. But he is no mere chronicler or urban impressionist. “There are words / which demand a mouth,” he writes in another poem, both as a lyric poet and someone who bore witness to decades of political oppression in communist Poland. And at long last, we have Bronisław Maj’s words to cherish in English, to read quietly and aloud. Maj’s poems shine in Daniel Bourne’s exquisite translation.” —Piotr Florczyk, Winner of the 2017 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award 

“Bronisław Maj’s Extinction of the Holy City, in Daniel Bourne’s adept translation, offers the luminous moments that make up a life. By turns ecstatic, conflicted, or mournful, Maj’s first-person speaker tunes into the self, his adopted city of Kraków, or the seasons again and again. It’s a secular meditation, an agnostic book of hours—the perfect antidote to our world of distraction.” —Karen Kovacik, poet and translator, including Agnieszka Kuciak’s Distant Lands: An Anthology of Poets Who Don’t Exist

“ For many years I was the self-appointed inspector on snow-storms,” Henry David Thoreau writes in Walden. He’d not be the last writer with such rare dedication—and an equally rare eye directed towards the world around him. In poem after radiant poem, Bronisław Maj revels in the mutable minutiae of a city—his holy city of Krakow. He is an appraiser of ants & a surveyor of city barges. He watches as “the small star / of a snowflake burns out” in his gloved hand. I’m in awe of Maj’s superb observations, and I’m grateful to Daniel Bourne for capturing them in English. These two poets remind us that ‘we live in the frailest of eons,’ but that our earth is ‘surrounded by the warm cloud of human breath.’” —Derek Mong, author of The Identity Thief

“The stark grittiness of these poems hits one as if punch-pressed onto the page. Judiciously translated by Daniel Bourne—an American poet who experienced firsthand the rise of the Solidarity Movement, the trauma of Martial Law, and the final collapse of communism—these poems certainly recorded the country’s peril with brilliance in a poem like “Without Pathos or Metaphysics,” where “Anesthetized workers, / drinking since dawn, demolish a townhouse built / when Poland still existed.” —Leonard Kress, poet and translator of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poem Pan Tadeusz

“Bourne, himself a poet who never flinches, never forgets our participation in the mysteries of iniquity, voices Maj in fear, trepidation, admiration, and deepest brotherhood for us all.” —William Heyen, author of the National Book Award Finalist Shoah Train and Nature: Selected & New Poems 1970–2020.

About the Author

Bronisław Maj, born in Łódż, Poland, in 1953, since the 1980s has taught contemporary Polish literature at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. The author of several poetry collections, he has won major literary awards, such as the PEN Club Award for poetic achievement in 1995. During the mid-to-late 1980s, Maj was also the editor/director of Na Głos (Out Loud), a reading series in Kraków which served as one of the few “legal” literary forums available to the many Polish writers who chose not to belong to the government-controlled Polish Writers Union during the post-Martial Law period in the last decade of Communist Poland. The poems in this selection were originally published in Polish in the 1980s and 1990s in several books, starting with Taka wolność (Such Freedom). But it was Maj’s next two collections, Wspólne powietrze (The Same Air) and Album rodzinny (Family Album)—also published as Zagłada świętego miasta (Extinction of the Holy City)—that established Maj as perhaps the most significant poet of his generation, a reputation that continues to this day despite the fact that Maj has not published extensively in recent years.  His work has also been translated into several languages, including in English in the literary journals Salmagundi, Field, Seneca Review, and North American Review.

Photograph of Bronislaw Maj by Silar. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

About the Translator

Daniel Bourne is the author of three books of poetry: The Household Gods (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1995), Where No One Spoke the Language (CustomWords, 2006), and Talking Back to the Exterminator (Regal House, 2024). His poems have also appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Guernica, Conduit, Salmagundi, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Field, Michigan Quarterly Review, Plume, Yale Review, and others. The founding editor of Artful Dodge, and the translation editor for its current online incarnation The Dodge, since 1980 he has lived off and on in Poland, including 1985–1987 on a Fulbright for the translation of younger Polish poets, and most recently in 2018 and 2019 for work on an anthology of Baltic Coast poets. His translations of Bronisław Maj and other Polish poets have appeared in a number of journals, including Field, Colorado Review, Partisan Review, Plume, Salmagundi, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boulevard, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner. He also published a collection of selected political poems and essays of Tomasz Jastrun, On the Crossroads of Asia and Europe (Salmon Run Press), in 1999. The recipient of four Individual Excellence in Poetry Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, he taught in the English Department and Environmental Studies program at The College of Wooster from 1988 until 2020.

Photograph of Daniel Bourne. © Daniel Bourne. Used by permission.