Firebird

Born in 1917 Kiev as Sara Gincburg, Ginczanka was executed by the Gestapo in 1944, after years dodging the Nazis in German-occupied Poland. Though she was fluent in Russian and in Yiddish, she chose to write her powerful, ironic, and inventive poetry in Polish, publishing one short volume during her life, On Centaurs, which appears here in its entirety alongside later, unpublished poems. These include her most famous, “Non omnis moriar—my magnificent estate,” written after she escaped arrest in Lvov and took shelter in a Warsaw suburb. Addressing her landlady, who exposed her in exchange for money, Ginczanka wrote: “I leave no heirs, so may your hand dig out/ my Jewish things, Chominowa of Lvov, mother of a Volksdeutscher, snitch’s wife, swift snout.” Valles’s translations are jagged and compelling: “Whetting rhyme on rhyme, sharpening verse lines grind/ —don’t trust calculations, lest they ensnare your mind/ —don’t trust your fingers like the blind,/ nor your eyes like owls without hands.” Ginczanka died shortly before Germany surrendered. The tragedy of her life and the beauty of her love for language (“pronouns are tiny little rooms/ where flowerpots grow in windows”) are brilliantly preserved in these pages. (Aug.)