Nothing More

Krystyna Milobedzka, one of Poland's leading and most innovative poets, was first published in 1960; her early volumes were singled out by Stanislaw Baranczak for their "dramatic ungrammaticalness", as they speak about elementary human relationships - between woman and man, mother and child - "in a language that is 'being thought'." Her prose poems, rooted in the body and earth, reveal an immediacy of expression, "seemingly uncontrolled, reporting the birth of the yet unspecified thought: a sentence broken off, a sudden mental leap, an ellipsis, a slip of the tongue." Nothing More, Milobedzka's first full-length book in English, samples her entire career. Here her kinship with the world, a unity in multitude, is reported in imperfect jottings, with "words broken in half broken to quarters". Commenting on her sparse diction, the poet explains: "I think it would be best if each writer could invent their own language to write down the very little they have to say. Only the necessary words." Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese invents her own translated language to convey Milobedzka's experimental poems into English. More 'collaborations' than translations, according to Robert Minhinnick in his introduction to this book, they are "the fruits of an exemplary literary symbiosis."