This interview is taken from PN Review 290, Volume 52 Number 6, July - August 2026.
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, ...
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, ...
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