"I've not been without fault since I started writing in Polish"
Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki (born 1962) is a Polish poet. I picked up his Peregrinary , translated by Bill Johnston, at AWP, together with two other books by living Polish poets. I don't know much about the history of Poland but the country seems to possess the knack of throwing up gifted poets. Dycki, as the translator informs us that even Polish readers call him in short, is nothing at all like Zbigniew Herbert or Wisława Szymborska. He is himself. Maybe because he came from the border near Ukraine, from a town that mixes its tongues, before he moved to Warsaw, the literary and political capital. Maybe because he is bisexual. There is more anguish here, more tussling with death, than in the Polish poetries that I've read before. He writes short lyrics. Here's a complete poem, from his first book Nenia and Other Poems (1990), published at the age of 28: the women I spent nights with did not hide the fact that they spent nights with me and they were not ashamed when t...