Patryk Pufelski

Aug 27, 2024 | wordswithoutborders.org | Małgorzata Gorczyńska |Olga Tokarczuk |Georgi Gospodinov |Patryk Pufelski

“Poets are just as smart as generals and more dangerous.” —Danilo Kiš I. Czesław Miłosz apparently once said that the main difference between a Western and an Eastern European intellectual is that the former has never had a good kick in the ass. This rather blunt aphorism, referred to in Witold Gombrowicz’s 1953 Diary,1 sprang to mind when I saw the poem “Clay” by Tomasz Różycki in English translation in the New York Review of Books.

Apr 8, 2024 | wordswithoutborders.org | Binoy Majumdar |Patryk Pufelski |Uttaran Das Gupta |Alexander Aguayo

In these poems, written during a stay in a psychiatric hospital, Bengali poet Binoy Majumdar gives instructions for creating new birds, fruit, and trees. What I’m about to write, readers, is hard to write in verse. So I will write in prose. You are a sound god yourself you have seen how sound gods look. Say your name is Arindam. You have seen how the word Arindam looks. A long time ago I created the word ngungu the same way, the word was printed too.

Mar 20, 2024 | wordswithoutborders.org | Patryk Pufelski |Batool Haidari |Alexander Aguayo |Fatema Haidari

I could see her white hands and long, thin fingers among the green stems and huge leaves of the cucumber plants. Her hands looked unusually beautiful. It was the beginning of Asad and extremely hot. She was dripping all over with sweat. Her forehead was unusually wet, as if she were washing her face. Her cheeks were red, though she looked pale as yogurt from dehydration. We were given only a one-and-a-half liter bottle of water per day.

Oct 30, 2023 | wordswithoutborders.org | Souhaib Ayoub |Alex Aguayo |Patryk Pufelski

May 20, 2015They’ve taken me on at the Kraków Zoo. I can still barely believe my eyes—I’ve pinched myself like thirty times, but it keeps being true!(Walking to my interview with the Director of Breeding, I saw some pygmy hippos just as they were going to bed. And later, I lied that I’m not afraid of heights.)May 25, 2015On the first day of my new job, I discovered that:—I work in the Hoofed Animal Section, which is further divided into smaller units, called allotments (that’s zoo jargon for you).

Oct 23, 2023 | wordswithoutborders.org | Patryk Pufelski

Dawid Mobolaji (b. 1996) is a Polish-Nigerian literary translator, writer, and physician based in London. He works between English and his native Polish. In 2023, he completed the Emerging Translator Mentorship program at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich, UK. He was selected as a 2023 ALTA Travel Fellows. He feels most drawn to fiction and poetry with suspenseful and surreal elements, as well as narratives from marginalized voices.