How do we explain the remarkable international prestige achieved by Polish poetry in the last half-century? Why the Russian Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky learned Polish in order to read what he called “the most extraordinary poetry” of the twentieth century in the original? What would American poets and critics do without Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska – both Nobel Prize Winners - Adam Zagajewski and Zbigniew Herbert?

Award-winning translator and scholar Clare Cavanagh will talk about what modern American writers have found—and lost—in post-war Polish poetry in translation.

Clare Cavanagh is the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.   An acclaimed translator of contemporary Polish poetry, she is currently under contract to write the authorized biography of Czesław Miłosz.