The Polish poet Tomasz Różycki (b. 1970) is sometimes billed as a later-generation propagator of the legacy of Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert, easily among the best-known poets to emerge from central Europe in the last century. It is a weak comparison, more the stuff of back-cover copy than serious criticism, in no small part because it elides the very real differences between Miłosz and Herbert, differences that encompass the very same peculiarities of lyric method, moral vision, and historical experience for which these poets are rightly celebrated. Różycki, too, is a peculiar talent. Anyone approaching him with the pre-formulated image of his forebears is likely to be disappointed, if not altogether confounded.

Fortunately, Zephyr Press has done us an extraordinary service by making two of Różycki’s most important books available in their entirety, and in a presentation that includes the Polish original and exacting English renderings on facing pages. This dual-language format is a signature of Zephyr’s publishing model, but for readers who routinely grapple with the publishing dynamics of central and eastern Europe, it has a benefit likely to pass under the radar of the general reader, namely, it keeps the original text in circulation long after it has disappeared from bookstore shelves in the country of origin.

Such is the case with Różycki’s 2004 masterpiece Twelve Stations (Dwanaście stacji), rendered beautifully into English by Bill Johnston and well worth the attention of all students of Polish poetry—indeed, of contemporary poetry in general. The bilingual text, coupled with Johnston’s lucid and efficient introduction, provides the reader everything needed for a casual or more scholarly encounter. Arguably the most skilled and versatile translator of Polish into English now living, Johnston situates Różycki’s book in the tradition of Polish mock epic and serio-comic storytelling and quickly glosses the major cultural touchstones of the poet’s project while also emphasizing the wider impact of a book whose linguistic drive and narrative capaciousness have given rise to numerous adaptations for radio and stage. It is a mark of the translator’s accomplishment that one could easily imagine comparable performances of the English text.

Twelve Stations dramatizes the otherwise trivial wanderings of Grandson (“Our Hero”) among older relatives in and around Opole, Różycki’s own hometown, though what he is really navigating is a dense tangle of memories, prejudices, and historical hopes rooted in a different time and place: the prewar eastern borderlands these older generations called home before being resettled into formerly German Lower Silesia (“Slower Silesia,” 3). As with any project that seeks to understand the present by mining the past of flawed and unreliable individuals, the result is by turns hilarious—many passages call Tristram Shandy to mind—and tragic, an artful demonstration of post-memory’s balance sheet of losses and gains. In this way, it invites comparison to similar reflections on the chain connecting the poet to place and place to history, examples including Bożena Keff’s genre-bending The Work of Mother and Fatherland (Utwór o matce i ojczyźnie, 2008), which has likewise enjoyed a second textual life on stage, and perhaps more distantly Seamus Heaney’s long poem “Station Island” (1984), which, like Twelve Stations, walks us through twelve deeply personal encounters with the spatial embodiment of the past. In the broad sweep of its line and attention, however, Różycki’s poem reminds this reader most powerfully of Fredy Neptune, Les Murray’s brilliant 1998 novel-in-verse. Further resonances arise from one page to the next, a strong indication of how easily this book, insistently local, could find a home in the often amorphous agglomeration called “world literature.” And no wonder: the more minute Różycki’s gestures, the more they inscribe within themselves the seed of something more expansive, the journey on foot yielding at last to a train traveling eastward and its panorama of a country just after the collapse of communism, with its attendant cycles of destruction and rebirth: “The dust irritated the eyes, making them red; the air clanged / and roared, celebrating without cease. In it you could see joy, / dance, freedom from any kind of form; you could see possibility” (227).

Twelve Stations is, after Mira Rosenthal’s 2013 translation of Colonies (Kolonie, 2006), the second time that Zephyr Press has reproduced one of Różycki’s books in its entirety. It is a model to be lauded more loudly and demanded more often. Publishers of contemporary poetry in translation traditionally offer readers a selection of the author’s work culled from across his or her career, as though every lyric project were ultimately reducible to an assembly of greatest hits. (Zephyr Press introduced Różycki into English with just such a selection, The Forgotten Keys in 2007, also translated by Rosenthal.) By preserving the integrity of the original texts in both Twelve Stations and Colonies, the editors and translators allow us to enjoy the cohesiveness of the projects themselves while also affording us a snapshot of the poet’s concerns and methods at a particular moment of life and work, as any single volume of poems does when its parts are not cannibalized into a sampling billed as representative and very often the opposite.

Yet the completism of such an endeavor also exposes the stress points that even the best lyric sequences display, as some installments, rather than drawing us into the lyric moment, simply bridge the gap between one moment and the next. There are a few such stretches in Colonies, a long sequence consisting of seventy-seven interconnected sonnets. Both translators emphasize the momentum of Różycki’s poems in their respective introductions: in Twelve Stations, the epic line gives the impression of a captivating ramble; in Colonies, enjambment and run-on sentences find their only repose in regular caesuras, so that the end-rhymes of Różycki’s sonnets leave only the faintest impression on the ear.

Rosenthal, herself an accomplished poet, has chosen to reign in Różycki’s verbal exuberance by normalizing syntax and introducing a great many full stops, with the consequence that whole stretches of the book that recycle earlier material into transformative riffs become—to quote from Twelve Stations, replete with epicurean charm—”what is known in heraldry as filling” (41). Similarly rooted in Opole and the complex histories of its inhabitants, Colonies rewards the effort it demands with extraordinary moments distributed regularly throughout the sequence, including “76: The Governor’s Residence,” a little gem of translatorial ingenuity that imagines the elusive paradise of a writer’s life: “I’d settle in a fishing hut in Greece, / and someone would bring wine and olives daily. / And day by day my fortune would increase, // and daily I’d stock up on chocolate, butter / that would sit there, for I would feel no hunger” (153).

It is our good fortune that no such fortune has befallen Różycki, a modest poet with truly immodest gifts.