in conversation with Mira Rosenthal

In conversation with her translator Mira Rosenthal

Polish writer Małgorzata Lebda and translator Mira Rosenthal discuss their new book Mer de Glace (out from Fitzcarraldo Editions in May), environmental activism, the muscle of language, growing up in small towns and locating hope in the present moment.

Mira Rosenthal: This book has an amazing genesis story of your run along the entire length of the Vistula River, which you undertook in part as a protest against the plan to build the E40 International Waterway, a transport route intended to connect the Baltic Sea (Gdańsk) with the Black Sea (Kherson) that would have devastating environmental effects, including degrading protected wetlands and dredging up radioactive sediment from the Chernobyl disaster. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on the relationship between poetry and activism. As American poet William Carlos Williams famously said, ‘It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack of what is found there’. I’m also thinking about Polish poet Czesław Miłosz’s idea (perhaps a bit ironic) that ‘poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress’. How do you view the role of poetry in relation to addressing pressing political issues?

Małgorzata Lebda: The poems in Mer de Glace are, in large part, a record of working with the body and the imagination. I wrote them during intensive physical training to be able to run more than 1,100 kilometers in less than a month. It was also a time of great change in my personal life, of moving into a house in the countryside that I considered my own home. A time of settling in, of taking stock, of new beginnings. In addition, let’s not forget, it was the pandemic, a time of isolation and reflection on a new reality. It also coincided with my own reflections on the power of poetry and its activist potential. I understand activism here as the inspiration to change the existing order of things. The very idea of setting off on a run along Poland’s longest river stemmed from a desire to combine activist, athletic and poetic tendencies. I felt that the poetic language I had harnessed for years to deal with growing up, initiation and loss was leaning towards the ‘here and now’, that I didn’t want – as a poet – to remain indifferent to the crises we find ourselves living through, including the climate crisis.

The area around the Mer de Glace glacier, which I took as my title, is a place I’ve visited many times over the course of more than a decade, and each visit has shown me how quickly it’s being lost. The Mer de Glace allowed me to talk about powerful, global things and phenomena, while at the same time saying something about small lives lived in the shadow of change. For me, the glacier is not only a metaphor for the climate crisis but also tangible evidence of loss. The book is intended as a lament for a world that is passing away, but also as a literary practice rooted in hope.

MR: I’ve never been to the Mer de Glace. But as I was translating your book, I kept going back in memory to the Athabasca Glacier that’s part of the Columbia Icefield in Canada. I was there almost twenty years ago now while in residence at the Banff Centre, and even then, I was intensely aware of how much the glacier was receding. We can measure the rate of loss; it’s tangible evidence, as you say, that helps us conceptualize the scale of loss as our small lives go on.

I often find myself wrestling with the dilemma of scale – be it either spatial or temporal vastness where change is most apparent but that’s hardest to see from where we stand in our localised existence. That juxtaposition is something that drew me to your writing, that I recognised in your poetry. Similarly, I see the work of the translator as trying to bring the faraway nearby – to echo Georgia O’Keeffe via Rebecca Solnit – which is why I believe translation has an important role to play in contending with our present ecological moment. The effects of change are not equal across the globe, and yet what happens at the local level has ramifications on a global scale. We need translators to bring us voices from elsewhere so we can see the inequalities of loss and investigate our interconnectedness. Literature has a role to play.

ML: I believe that literature, that poetry trains us readers for exceptional situations. Literature shifts or broadens the boundaries of the imagination, awakening courage inside us. That’s what happened in my case. The source of my athletic activism – or, as critics in Poland call it, my literary and poetic activism – was poetry. Poems provoked me to come up with such a daring idea as covering more than 1,000 kilometers by running.

In this context, the book Alphabet by Danish writer Inger Christensen was essential. If it weren’t for the poems in that volume, my life would be rather uneventful. The collection gave me the courage to test my limits. And when I reached for it again (for the nth time!), it occurred to me that the language in which Christensen operates has the power to inspire at the level of action, physical activist action. As I read, I felt a desire to experience first-hand everything her poetry touches on, its organicism, biodiversity, the complexity of the world, followed by reflection on – that big word – beauty. The prospect of spending a month alongside the living organism that is a river seemed appealing to me. I wanted to get to know it.

Just before the run, a friend gave me another book, Alice Oswald’s book-length poem Dart, and her story about that river was a true discovery. I was captivated by the multitude of voices she immortalises. It occurred to me that a river could make for a great narrative thread, a story that practically flows on its own. I wanted to feel it – literally – for myself. I’m keenly aware that everything that came out of that inspiring experience, everything I’ve written and am writing, is already immersed in the rhythm of that experience, in the aura of my unique and personal pilgrimage.

MR: Now you have me thinking about rhythm and action and language, how Polish enacts thought with different grammatical mechanisms and a different music than English does, and yet I love the dilemma of trying to capture a tonal equivalent – the aura of your unique experience, as you say. One aspect that strikes me about the poems in this book is that they’re rooted in somatic experience and the connection between physicality and language. You say in the poem ‘From the Body: Three’ that ‘muscle work / resembles a good poem’. What is the connection between muscle and writing, between landscape and language for you?

ML: Once at an event, someone asked me: ‘Małgosia, how is it possible for a woman, and a poet no less, to run such a distance?’ The question struck me as telling; it revealed the patterns and stereotypes that diminish women. I like proving that women can do big things. Whether in writing or undertaking physical challenges, what matters to me is the way we treat nature and the kind of attitude we cultivate towards it. For me, it’s essential to consider whether we’re focused solely on taking from nature, or whether, conversely, we’re giving something back. What matters to me is exchange. I gave the Vistula a month of my life, preceded by two years of training, and in return she gave me beauty, allowed me to draw near, let me describe her. This wouldn’t have happened without physically embarking on the adventure. My body was in service to the river, in service to the narrative, the encounter at the human–nature divide.

Returning to your question: for me, running and poetry are closely related, both are inspirational, both allow for testing limits, for the discovery of new things within the self. Thanks to such activities, I’m becoming braver, stronger, more attentive to the world. And my running disposition is such that I start running best after 30 kilometres, the longer the better, so I knew I’d be able to do it and wanted to experience it. In the best moments of the run, I felt harmony within myself, the kind I feel when reading poems that move me.

MR: More attentive to the world… That thought really fits my experience of reading Mer de Glace, the kind of space it opens and holds for us. There’s a way in which your poems call on us as readers to participate. I’m thinking here of our discussion with Rachael and Joely, our wonderful editors at Fitzcarraldo, about the poem ‘From Anhui Province’. I would call it a kind of resistant ekphrastic poem that invokes but does not describe Yongzhi Chu’s famous photo of a chained monkey being trained for the circus. Instead of giving us details of the photo, the poem presents a moment in which you show the photo to your students, who fall silent in shock, until one of them can’t take it anymore and blurts out: ‘Ouch!’ I think it was Rachael who suggested maybe adding a bit more description, to which you rightly responded that you were trying to move away from ekphrasis and embrace minimalism. To me, the poem invites us to participate in that stunned silence instead of overwhelming us with image or explanation.

At the same time, I found the minimalism of your poems challenging while translating the book. I kept having to resist my own habits of lyricism and image and elaboration in an effort to capture the directness and spareness of your poems. I also found myself thinking about the differences between the Polish and the American traditions, how the later suffers from the ‘show, don’t tell’ mandate found so often in the creative writing classroom in the US. What does minimalism do for you as a poet?

ML: I think of it as moderation, reduction, precision. Precision allows me to avoid overwhelming the reader with chatter, to speak boldly, taking responsibility for it. This was true when working on Mer de Glace and also on my newest book Dunaj. Chyłe pola, a poetry collection that’s very important to me personally. Without precision in writing, I wouldn’t have the courage to speak so directly about loss, pain, grief. I also believe in the reader, believe that the less I overwhelm them with the poem, the more space there is for them, for their own experiences, which they can compose in their thoughts alongside mine and – as I heard from one reader in the context of the book Dunaj – to lean their grief against mine, to be together with it, to seek in togetherness comfort, connection, a kind of – as Jon Fosse would say – ‘grace’.

I was intrigued by what you said about your ‘resistance’ in the context of translating Mer de Glace. Am I right in understanding that it was an effort of reduction for you, too, as it was for me in writing, a striving for precision that demands examining each word from every angle?

MR: Writing poetry always involves such striving for me. It wasn’t so much that I was resisting a search for precision but that I was struggling with the reduction you’re talking about. Minimalism provides fewer opportunities for all the other ways poems make meaning beyond words. I’m thinking of opportunities for a line break to play with expectation or isolate an additional unit of meaning, or sonic texture that enacts ideas, for example – as would be fitting in your poems – a string of assonance that sounds like a dog’s howl as it catches from one muzzle to the next and echoes down the canyon. I wouldn’t call myself a maximalist poet, but I’ve never written an eight-word poem! And I find the shorter a poem, the harder it is to write, as I have fewer tools to rely on. Speaking of tools, I’m curious what you think of ecocriticism, which is well codified by now, and if you consider yourself an ecopoet.

ML: I see myself first as a reader, then as a writer, a poet, but I don’t like to be pigeonholed. Thinking of myself as an ‘ecopoet’ would paralyse me. I’ve always written about nature, ever since my first book that came out over twenty years ago, when there were no such categories in the language to describe this kind of poetry. It’s a coincidence that the principles of ecopoetry align with what I’ve been practising for years. I’m part of it not in theory but in lived experience. Literally, through my rural upbringing, I’m a person of the earth, the soil, the forest… And if I didn’t perceive the Vistula as a living being, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to do the run.

I grew up in a village by a small stream in the Beskid Sądecki mountains, unfortunately treated by the locals as a place to dump trash or drain blood from the slaughterhouse. And once I became an adult, I realized that when the media writes about the river, it’s always in a negative context. That she overflowed her banks, that she destroyed something. ‘River floods pizzeria’ – I once read a headline like that. It sounded like the river launched some kind of attack, intentionally! I kept thinking we need narratives that bring hope, light, showing that the river exists at other times besides when she overflows – and as a matter of fact, she usually overflows because people have trapped her in concrete. I wanted a narrative in which the river doesn’t flood a pizzeria but is something alive, fascinating, friendly. I wanted to describe her with a feeling of sisterhood. I think of my body of work as the art of participation. Maybe if I’d been born in Warsaw or some other place, my writing would be different. But I grew up close to nature, so for me it’s natural that my writing is focused on it. I don’t want to say that I find it easy to write about, but I have an affection towards it.

MR: One of my students asked me recently how I go about researching all the names of plants that show up in my poems, and I didn’t know what to say. Then it occurred to me what a gift my back-to-the-lander parents gave me, all those names I grew up knowing, how naming was – to use your wording – an affection toward the natural world I encountered in the small town where I grew up. Knowing names and distinguishing between species arose out of living alongside the Manzanita and the Madrone, the Gravenstein and the Pink Pearl. (I’m mentioning specifics here because I know you also love to name different varieties in your poems, and I’m remembering how fun it was to learn of them while translating). I probably should have told my student to go take a bite of Pink Pearl and see how the flesh blushes instead of going to the library to do research.

ML: It’s true that, for sad reasons, nature has become a ‘fashionable’ topic. But it bothers me when someone talks about the newly emerging trend of ecopoetry and mentions only a few contemporary names, including mine. It’s as if we’ve appeared out of nowhere. And yet, before us there were – to name a few from the broad range of my inspirations – Bolesław Leśmian, Jan Kochanowski, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Tadeusz Nowak, Krystyna Miłobędzka… And of course there was Miłosz, who grappled with the environment throughout his entire body of work. In my opinion, the most beautiful poems about rivers belong to him.

Those of us writing today come from a tradition. It’s wonderful that recently we’ve been given tools to analyse literature and poetry with a sensitivity to issues of the environment, of nature, allowing us to elucidate and emphasise certain concrete themes. But I also get the sense that some people in Poland are under the impression that ecopoetry or writing connected to mindfulness towards the environment and nature is an issue of the last few years, maybe because the concept of ecocriticism has been in use during this time. However, literature centred on nature and animals, focused on empathising with them, is after all not merely a phenomenon of recent literary history.

I often bring up a poet who was extremely important to me, Tadeusz Nowak, who in writing poetic psalms in the sixties and seventies described slaughterhouses, giving voice to a dog on a leash by its kennel. Or there’s Tadeusz Śliwiak and his devastating Poem about the Municipal Slaughterhouse. This literature is and has always been important, and now we’ve been given concrete tools that facilitate critical discussion. It’s simply not the case that poets heard about the existence of ecopoetics and began writing poems about nature. Criticism is always late to the poem. It only tentatively follows what’s happening in the language and is sometimes incorrect. I’m curious what discussions about ecopoetry are going on across the pond. How does ‘nature writing’ relate to ‘ecopoetry’? Or have you already moved past it?

MR: Absolutely not! Poets in the US are very engaged in what it means to be writing from an ecological perspective. To name just a few of my favourite contemporary writers, I would point to Craig Santos Perez, Sarah Vap, dg nanouk okpik, CAConrad, Tommy Pico and Clare Wahmanholm. I think you’d love Wahmanholm’s book Meltwater, which shares affinities with your own concerns about water systems and the melting of the glaciers. Or there’s the fact that our last Poet Laureate just edited the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, and our current Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze, is deeply rooted in ecological thinking – I love reading his work for the way it names and teaches me about plants and animals of New Mexico. I’m not sure I see this as trendy but, rather, a result of what we’re living through. All poets writing today are ecopoets in as much as they’re living through and thus bearing witness to the changes. But I think it’s important to distinguish between those informed by the pastoral mode of the past and those pushing into a new relational understanding.

You mention the need to situate contemporary writers within a tradition, and I find ecocriticism really helpful in this regard. I’m so thankful to people like Camille Dungy who, in her anthology Black Nature, is asking questions about the traditional context of the nature poem in the Western intellectual canon and calling for a broader inclusiveness and historical breadth. I’m also personally indebted to the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht for the concept of solastalgia, the ‘homesickness one gets when one is still at home’ but aware of the local environment passing away. And the whole discussion around the post-pastoral, anti-pastoral, and necro-pastoral gives us great tools – kind of like therapy gives us tools to understand and cope with our emotional responses. Like you, along with lament, I’m looking for ways to find hope.

Is there any hopeful news about the outcome of your protest? What’s the status of the E40 waterway?

ML: Fortunately, the E40 waterway is currently in a phase of stagnation and strategic review due to political circumstances and strong environmental opposition. However, the threat of construction and paving still looms over the Vistula and other rivers. Yesterday (as of February 2026), I read in the news that, following the failure of a canal project through Belarus and the Czech Republic’s withdrawal from investing in the Danube-Oder canal, a Romanian expert proposed a new route connecting the Baltic Sea with the Black Sea – via the Vistula, San, Dniester, and Prut rivers. The cost of the project could reach as much as 100 billion zloty… I believe it won’t come to that, but the mere awareness that amidst a climate crisis and hydrological drought (in recent years, the water level of the Vistula in Warsaw during the summer has sometimes dropped to just a few centimetres!) such acts of violence against nature are even being contemplated is both shocking and deeply disturbing.

In Poland, there’s undoubtedly something I would call a ‘turn towards rivers’ – an ‘aquatic turn’. It manifests as a heightened awareness of the nature of these ecosystems and a realization of just how profoundly dependent we are on our rivers. I closely follow the work of activists, and I am deeply moved when I see some of them physically chaining themselves to rivers in need of protection. Knowing they’re standing guard brings me a greater sense of peace regarding the fate of our rivers. Reports from around the world offer hope – such as the news from March 2023 that Albania’s Minister of the Environment, Mirela Kumbaro, established the Vjosa Wild River National Park, which encompasses the entire stretch of the Vjosa that flows through Albanian territory (along with its tributaries: the Drino, Bënçë and Shushicë). Prior to that, there was the news from 2017 that the New Zealand Parliament granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River. And then there is the Magpie River in Canada, to which local authorities granted legal personhood in March 2021. I await similar decisions here in Poland.