October 9, 2025 / Poetry and Memory: A reading and conversation with Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
When: Thursday, October 9, 2025 6:10 PM - 7:40 PM
Where: Humanities Quadrangle 136
This event will showcase poetry created by Grzegorz Kwiatkowski during the first half of his residency at the Yale's Fortunoff Archive. Translated by Peter Constantine, whose translations of Kwiatkowski’s acclaimed collection Crops have helped Kwiatkowski’s work reach international audiences, these new poems draw on Holocaust testimonies to explore themes of violence, remembrance, and human rights.
The event will feature a reading of Kwiatkowski’s new poems, followed by a discussion with Kwiatkowski, Peter Constantine, moderated by Peter Cole, Yale. The conversation will address critical questions: Why do we need poetry to engage with Holocaust testimonies? How can literature ethically represent unimaginable horrors? What are the boundaries writers must not cross? And how does such poetry contribute to memory and human rights today? Using poetry as a starting point, the conversation will help illuminate literature’s role in confronting history and shaping a more ethical present.
Bios
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
Kwiatkowski is a distinguished Polish poet, musician, and activist, is known for his minimalist style that confronts the ethical and aesthetic challenges of representing historical trauma. His work has been celebrated at universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, UC Berkeley, and the University of Oxford, where he co-hosts the “Virus of Hate” workshop.
Peter Constantine
Constantine is professor of translation studies and director of the program in literary translation in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. He is the publisher of World Poetry Books and the literary magazine World Poetry Review. His translations include works by Rousseau, Machiavelli, Gogol and Tolstoy for Random House, Modern Library. He co-edited A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900–2000, and the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present, which W.W. Norton published in 2010. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of two NEAs, and was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. His translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel received the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation. A heritage speaker of Corinthian Arvanitika, he is involved in translation and documentation efforts for this severely endangered language. His current project at the Humanities Institute is to complete a monograph titled Indigenous Language Reclamation, in which he investigates strategies used by indigenous communities throughout the world to reclaim their extinct heritage languages.
Peter Cole
Poet and translator Peter Cole has been affiliated with Yale since 2006 and currently teaches classes each spring in the Comparative Literature Department and Judaic Studies. His literary translation workshops are cross-listed with the English Department and Creative Writing. He is the author of five books of poems, most recently Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations (FSG).
Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the Association of American Publishers’ Hawkins Award for Book of the Year, the PEN Translation Award for Poetry, the American Library Association’s Brody Medal for the Jewish Book of the Year, and a TLS Translation Prize. He is the recipient of a 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007 was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is currently a co-editor of Princeton University Press’s Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation, and divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven.
This event is supported by English Department, Program in Jewish Studies, Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, Orville H.Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights, Yale Law School and Russian East European and Eurasian Studies at Yale.