THE POLKA: What’s Riveting in Polish Literature by Anna Blasiak. The Chameleon That Is DANIEL ODIJA
I need to start with a disclaimer: Daniel Odija and I went to high school together. That was in a small town called Słupsk on the Baltic Coast in Poland quite a while ago, and I will spare you the stories of what we got up to as teenagers. We lost touch when we went to uni in different cities and then when I left Poland for England, but I always followed Daniel’s literary successes keenly from the sidelines, and with a lot of delight. His first novels, Ulica (The Street) and Tartak (The Sawmill), got him lots of attention in Poland and nominations to some of the biggest literary prizes. In his prose, he focuses on rather colourful characters who inhabit some clearly defined worlds – drunks, madmen, people on the margins. He writes about them without sentimentality or pity, but with sympathy and humour. And even though his writing is quite observant and realistic, he can break through this convention here and there, creating a fully-fleshed-out allegory. Because for him the places he describes are microcosms presented in a close-up. As well as Ulica and Tartak, he has written three more novels and two collections of short stories.
More recently Daniel has been increasingly breaching his previous boundaries and going beyond prose. He has written theatre plays and scripted commentaries for documentary films. He has worked on sound-and-word projects with musician Marcin Dymiter. He is also the author of scripts for a very successful tetralogy of graphic novels called Bardo (with illustrator Wojciech Stefaniec). An extract of the first one of them, Stolp, has recently been shortlisted for Trafika Europe’s inaugural Prize for Prose, and you can read it here.
But that is not all. Last year Daniel published his first volume of poetry, ale (but). I am absolutely enchanted with his poetry – these are very short snippets, snapshots of moments, skilfully captured, highly observant, succinct and haiku-like. They are so astute that it often hurts. Or they make you laugh – because, as in his prose, Daniel’s verse is not short on humour. When he writes, he often chooses as his starting point one single instant, one word even, sometimes eavesdropped, and then builds his poems from there. Here is a small sample (translated by yours truly):
I got blinded by a ray of sunshine reflected in an open window instinctively I closed my eyes afterimage of the street spread under my eyelids I took a step into the negative of the city
A few more poems from ale are soon to appear in the online magazine The High Window, as part of a presentation of the new Polish poetry. And, hopefully, that will mean that Daniel’s writing will attract the attention of more English-language editors and publishers: it definitely deserves it. His writing has already been translated into German, French and other languages.
by Anna Blasiak
Photo of Daniel Odija by Iwona Lompart
Anna Blasiak is a poet, writer, translator and Managing Editor of the European Literature Network, author of Deliverance / Rozpętanie, Café by Wren’s St James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime / Kawiarnia przy St James’s Wrena w porze lunchu and Lili. Lili Stern-Pohlmann in conversation with Anna Blasiak.
Read previous posts in The Polka series:
THE POLKA: What’s Riveting in Polish LIterature by Anna Blasiak. MAŁGORZATA LEBDA has it all
THE POLKA: What’s Riveting in Polish LIterature by Anna Blasiak. JOANNA BATOR and her bears
abdessamed gtumsila
Thank you for the article, Anna Blasiak.
Daniel Odija is a remarkable writer who combines realism and artistry in novels, poetry, and theater, and he deserves wider recognition in English literature.