Maggie Zebracka
Photo by Chad Abushanab
Bio
Maggie Zebracka is a writer and translator. Her translations from the Polish have appeared in the Arkansas International, Asymptote, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow, and an MFA in creative writing from Vanderbilt University.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Polish of the novel Dark, Almost Night by Joanna Bator. Best known for her multigenerational sagas, Bator (b. 1968) has published six novels and three essay collections, and is arguably one of the only major women authors in Poland whose work has not yet appeared in English. Her novels share the same national scope and attention to local history as the works of Olga Tokarczuk, Elena Ferrante, and W.G. Sebald. Bator adds nuance to Eastern European history by interrogating the impulse toward nationalism and exploring Poland's complex relationship with its own erasure and marginalization of many ethnic groups. Dark, Almost Night follows the story of a journalist who has returned to her childhood home in a small mining town to report on the chilling, seemingly unrelated disappearances of three children. During her investigation, she uncovers arson and animal abuse, racially motivated violence, and the sale of human bones as religious relics to unsuspecting tourists.
A translator’s work rarely ends at the page. What begins as an urgent love of text and language can be stalled by the challenges of finding the time to translate, much less attracting a publisher and getting the book into the hands of readers. In 2015, I stumbled upon Joanna Bator’s grim fairytale of a novel, Dark, Almost Night. I read it while looking over my shoulder, half-afraid of the book’s power to conjure up invented and real terrors alike. Ever since then I have fallen headfirst into Bator’s oeuvre, championing her work to anyone who will listen—for all her critical and commercial success internationally, she has yet to appear at all in English. Like many of Bator’s novels, Dark, Almost Night is larger than life as it weaves the strands of multiple stories and timelines together to create a complex picture of an ever changing Poland. Each chapter brings the reader closer to an understanding of the social, economic, and ideological forces that continue to shape the contemporary Polish landscape and the lives of the characters. But at nearly six hundred pages long, the novel is an ambitious and time-consuming undertaking. I am incredibly grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for the focused attention their support makes possible and for giving me the confidence to continue pursuing meaningful and valuable projects.