Residency of Anna Gruver hosted by Miłosz Festival in partnership with TRANSLATORIUM Literary and Translation Festival
It was the time of new opportunities and open doors:
I had just arrived in Krakow and put my suitcase in the room of the Potocki Palace, where I was to spend several unforgettable weeks, when the organizers invited me to the poetry readings. On a hot summer evening, many people of different ages and statuses gathered in a large hall. There were so many people who wanted to listen and read poems that people stood and listened under the doors (with the doors open!), sat on the floor and there were not enough places for everyone.
Imagine my surprise when one of the organizers of the readings, Szymon, invited me to be the first to read a poem. Surprise and honour – at the opening of the Czesław Miłosz festival to read my poems about the war in Ukraine, translated by the Polish translator and poet Aneta Kaminska.
Thus began our journey.
It was a time when, thanks to the organizer Maria Swiątkowska, we held joint translation workshops with Tanya Rodionova and Yulia Didokha. I participated in poetry readings and discussions around war poetry and Milosz's work, and later we discussed each other's translation experiences with Aneta Kaminska.
But not only that. Thanks to the residency and the opportunity to work in peace and quiet in the historic centre of Krakow, I wrote and translated a lot: it was a summer filled with words and work.
My second novel, "Real Estate," is now due to be published by the Ukrainian publishing house "Laboratory," the events of which unfold in Krakow in particular: this residency inspired me to certain motifs in the book.
My translations of Aneta Kaminska's poems were published on the Ukrainian portal of contemporary poetry Litcentr, and we also compiled a book of my documentary poems "I Just Want to Share a Moment" about the civilian experience of the war in Aneta's Polish translations, currently the book exists at the project stage.
It was a fruitful time. Full of new poems and contacts. Full with introductions. Unexpected summer rain, tea and dances in the residence.
Bio
Anna Gruver, a Ukrainian writer, poet, essayist and translator, was born in 1996 in Donetsk. She is the author of the poetry book За вашим запитом нічого не знайдено (Nothing was found at your request), 2019, and the debut novel Її порожні місця (Her Empty Places), 2022. The novel has already entered the list of the best books of 2022 according to the Ukrainian PEN Center. Her poems were translated into English, French, German, Polish, Czech, Estonian, Lithuanian, Romanian and Hebrew. Gruver translates essays and contemporary poetry from Ukrainian into Polish and vice versa. Anna translated the book by Katie Ferris /boysgirls/ from English into Ukrainian (2021). At the beginning of the full-scale war, Anna Gruver worked as a volunteer in the shelter in Dnipro and in the orphanage evacuated from the Kyiv region to Lviv. In 2023 she worked as a Project Coordinator on a Ukrainian project at the Galicia Jewish Museum (Krakow, Poland). Before the full-scale invasion, Anna lived in Kharkiv. She remains at present in Kyiv.