Challenging mechanical descriptions of global conflict, this best known Polish poet’s latest collection uses technological archives to reclaim individual human memory from digital indifference.
Polish poet, translator, photographer and literary scholar Marta Eloy Cichocka moves instinctively between languages, cultures and artistic forms. As she prepares to return to Kolkata for the Chair Poetry Festival, she reflects on Wisława Szymborska, Raúl Zurita, artificial intelligence, war, translation and the idea of a literary homeland.
There is a striking paradox at the heart of Marta Eloy Cichocka’s recent recognition with the prestigious Wisława Szymborska Prize: she received it not for her own poetry, but for translating another poet’s work into Polish. For Cichocka, however, the distinction between writing and translating has never been absolute. “Receiving the Wisława Szymborska Prize means the world to me,” she says. “Not only because she’s the best-known Polish female poet, but also because I have a personal connection with Wisława.”
That connection is unusually intimate: Cichocka spent two years living in the same flat where Szymborska received the news that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize has also made her think more deeply about what happens when one poet enters another poet’s language. “I received the Szymborska Prize not for my own poetry, but for giving another poet a new life in Polish,” she says. “And yet, whenever I translate poetry, I inevitably bring my own poetic ear and sensibility into the process. Translation is therefore both an encounter with another voice and a way of discovering one’s own.”
Her translation of Chilean poet Raúl Zurita has made that encounter especially personal. What began as a literary collaboration has developed into friendship, with the two poets discovering affinities between Poland and Chile—countries whose histories have been marked by dictatorship, political trauma, silence and difficult memories. “Translating him was not simply a matter of transferring words from Spanish into Polish, but an attempt to carry his voice and his world across a linguistic and cultural border,” Cichocka says.
For her, that crossing is central to literary life. Her own journey has taken her through Poland, France, Spain and Latin America, while Spanish-language literature provided an early gateway into the wider world. “Poetry has continued to be my most reliable passport between cultures,” she says.
That sense of movement also explains why she sees no contradiction in being a poet, photographer, translator and literary scholar. “I have never experienced these different identities as separate,” she says. “Poetry, photography, translation and literary research are, for me, different ways of paying attention to the world around us.”
Language may change the way reality is perceived, she believes, but fundamental human experiences remain recognisable across cultures. “Love, pain, solitude and the fear of death have the same intensity whether you are Indian or Polish.” Yet poetry is also an attempt to approach what language cannot fully contain. “The essence of human existence is ultimately unspeakable and ineffable,” she says. “That is what poetry aims to reach, through words – and despite them.”
This tension between what can be seen and what can be understood lies at the centre of her recent collection, ‘Image May Contain.’ Cichocka first noticed in 2019 that images appearing on digital platforms were accompanied by automated captions beginning with the words “image may contain…”. She immediately recognised the phrase’s poetic potential, but it was the pandemic that gave the idea a new urgency. “When the pandemic started and the world we once knew began to break into pieces before our eyes (and on our screens, too), I started looking for a new idiom to express those realities of being torn apart,” she recalls.
The first poem, “Loop 6”, emerged from that search. What interested her was the unsettling contrast between an artificial intelligence system looking at an image of war, grief, a human body or a ruined landscape and describing it in neutral, almost bureaucratic language. “I began to wonder what happens when we place that language next to our own memories and emotions. Can something apparently impersonal still carry traces of human suffering? And what happens when poetry enters that space?”
She uses machine-generated descriptions not to imitate AI, but as fragments of a technological archive. “I use its language to expose the distance between seeing and understanding, between describing an image and actually experiencing what it contains,” she explains. “The machine can identify what is visible, but poetry begins where visibility is no longer enough – where memory, absence and pain enter the frame.”
That distinction has become increasingly urgent in a world saturated with images of war, displacement and humanitarian catastrophe. Endless exposure can produce a strange form of emotional numbness. “We are exposed to an enormous number of images every day, including images of suffering, and repetition can gradually turn even the most tragic reality into something we simply scroll past,” Cichocka says.
She does not see poetry as a substitute for political action. Its power is quieter: to interrupt habitual ways of looking. “It can give a name to what is difficult to name, restore a sense of individuality to what has become anonymous, and remind us that behind every image there is a person, a memory, a life.” Perhaps, she suggests, poetry’s role today is simply “to teach us to look again, to take a breath, and to be more present.”
The same impulse informs her approach to translation. Having worked on poets ranging from Calderón and Racine to Roberto Juarroz, Zurita and Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, she has encountered the perennial question of whether poetry can really be carried from one language into another. There are many strategies, from preserving the foreignness of a poem to making it sound entirely natural in the target language. Every choice entails some loss, but Cichocka rejects the conclusion that poetry is therefore untranslatable.
“On the contrary, our culture is based largely on translations, so much so that we have forgotten that many of the works we consider part of our cultural heritage were translated in the first place.”
For her, translation is ultimately an exercise in empathy. “I believe that translating another poet involves the same possibilities and limitations as trying to understand another human being,” she says. “We cannot completely understand another person, since we are unable to truly understand even ourselves—but that doesn’t mean we stop trying to understand one another.”
“That’s what translation means to me: trying to understand other people and trying to make them understandable in a different language. It is an act of generosity.”
This is also where translation comes closest to poetry itself. If a poem attempts to give language to something that resists language, then writing can already be understood as a form of translation. “Poetry comes from an ineffable source, so writing a poem is often a translation in itself,” she says. “Translation can repeat that gesture, that act of creation.”
Cichocka’s understanding of literary belonging follows naturally from this philosophy. Zurita has suggested that a writer’s homeland is not a single language but “all the words of the world.” Cichocka finds herself close to that idea. “Perhaps a literary homeland is not a territory at all, but a space made of human voices.”
Her own homeland is Polish, but her literary inheritance extends far beyond it—to Apollinaire, E.E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath and the many writers she has encountered across languages. “Literature creates a kind of homeland that can be carried with us,” she says. “When we bring a poem into another language, we allow it to acquire another home without losing its first one.”
That idea will acquire a particular resonance when Cichocka returns to Kolkata this November where she will present her work in English, but says she is arriving with a desire “both to share and to listen.” Interestingly, she believes the most productive conversations may begin where translation reaches its limits. “Some of the most interesting conversations begin precisely where translation cannot provide an exact equivalent, because that is where we have to start listening more carefully.”
It is perhaps the most fitting note on which to leave Cichocka: not with the idea of literature as a bridge that eliminates difference, but as a space where difference becomes an invitation to listen.
Murtaza Ali Khan is an award-winning cultural critic, journalist, and academic. A jury member for the 69th & 70th National Film Awards, he has covered entertainment for The Hindu, The Sunday Guardian, and The Quint since 2008, with over 2,000 TV appearances as a media expert. He is also a film festival curator, translator of Hindujas and Bollywood, and a NETqualified journalism educator.
