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"Cyprian Kamil Norwid was, in the view of the outstanding Slavist Roman Jakobson, 'one of the greatest world poets of the later nineteenth century'. . . . The English language and English imagination . . . evidently have a place for Cyprian Kamil Norwid."
—The Times Literary Supplement
About the Author
Cyprian Norwid was born in 1821 near Warsaw. In defiance of the occupying powers that forbade writing in the Polish language, he left Poland at 21 and traveled around Europe and America, befriending Chopin among others. Dogged by financial crises, he died in a hostel for Polish insurrection veterans in Ivry, France in 1883.
Following a career in clinical psychology, Danuta Borchardt translated Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke, for which she won the National Translation Award in 2001. She has also translated two other novels by Gombrowicz, Pornografia and Cosmos. Borchardt is a writer of short stories, which are regularly published on the website The Exquisite Corpse.