Jacek Dehnel

He is a poet, writer and translator. He has recently published a zombie thriller about a group of Polish patriots who rise from the dead Ale z naszymi umarłymi [But with Our Dead]. He was born in 1980 in Gdańsk. He currently lives in Warsaw.
Obligations
Art + Stories
Experiences

Obligations

Jacek Dehnel
On the far side of the lake, the shattered pane of an ice floe,
closer in waves like soft streaks, one by one
docking near the shore,
then setting out from shore.
Later I watched as a heron skimmed over that icy pane,
doubled, mirrored,
both real and reflected,
reflected and real:
that day I did nothing,
yet I did everything necessary.



Author’s commentary:
The poem is pretty self-evident. Let readers take it in and figure out what’s going on. But beneath what’s universal in it, there’s something more prosaic and individual. When, for a long period, I was unable to finish a book of poems, another poet encouraged me—since I had a fellowship to Berlin—to work on poetry there instead of prose. I had always believed that poems come when they want to, but this time it was a matter of attitude, of making a habit of observing reality. In a month’s time, I had more than a dozen poems, including this one, and that Berlin notebook filled out my collection Najdziwniejsze (The strangest).
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De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
Art + Stories
Art

De revolutionibus orbium coelestium

“I was eight or nine when knowledge’s two sides, / both ends of the telescope, resolved in my heart.” A poem by an award-winning Polish poet, novelist and translator.
Jacek Dehnel
Four Fine Fellows
Art + Stories
Fiction

Four Fine Fellows

In this short story based on true events that took place in Kielce in 1946, we join a militiaman, a baker, a cobbler and a caretaker in a pub, as they talk about honesty.
Jacek Dehnel