Notes on translating and writing between languages

I was born in Poland and into Polish, the language that shaped my first metaphors, my earliest silences and my grammar of belonging. Polish was not only the medium of my first poems, but also the atmosphere in which I learnt to feel. It carried the weight of family history, regional identity and inherited gestures of speech. For a long time, I did not question that this language was my natural and ineluctable home.

I now live in Prague and in Czech. The shift from one Slavic language to another might seem subtle from the outside, yet from within it has been transformative. Czech entered my life not as an inheritance but as a choice – deliberate and gradual. If Polish is the language of my origins, Czech is the language of my intentions. Over the past few years, my poetry has existed in both tongues: one I was born into and one I consciously chose as my home. Writing in Czech has required a different kind of attention – a heightened awareness of texture, etymology, fragility. It has demanded attention and patience.

Before moving to Prague, I spent nearly five years in Yerevan, Armenia. That period transpired between Armenian, English and Russian – a daily polyphony of conversations, alphabets and histories. My Armenian never became fluent enough for me to write poetry in it, yet it profoundly reshaped my understanding of language as a lived environment. To inhabit a multilingual society is to experience speech not as a transparent tool but as a layered space, marked by memory, politics and survival. In Yerevan, I became acutely aware of the physicality of language.

I have also come to understand that choosing a particular language in which to create or to share a thought can be a conscious gesture, an almost ethical or emotional positioning. Language is not only a medium; it is a stance. To write in one language rather than another may signal intimacy, distance, solidarity, defiance, longing. It may open one door while deliberately leaving another closed. Over time, I have realised that I do not merely use languages; I inhabit them differently depending on what I wish to reveal, conceal or transform.

I have also learnt that it is possible to exist fully, truthfully and freely in more than one language. This insight was not self-evident to me. I was born into a relatively homogeneous society, where one language accompanied a person from childhood through adulthood, structuring education, public life, literature and private emotion. Other languages were present, of course, but mostly as school subjects – external systems to be studied, tested and often feared. They were something foreign, something that could be learnt but never quite possessed at a native level. The implicit assumption was that fluency belonged to origin, and that origin was singular.

My years in Yerevan upended this assumption. There, multilingualism was not an exception but a condition of everyday life. I had many friends with migration backgrounds, many members of the Armenian diaspora who had grown up between countries and linguistic systems. Some spoke one language at home and another outside; some used three or four languages in a single day. Their speech shifted effortlessly depending on the context – family, work, memory, affection. For them, identity was not anchored in a single linguistic territory.

What struck me the most was that there was no clear or satisfying answer to the question of which language they truly ‘belonged’ to, or in which one they felt most fluent. The hierarchy I had internalised – native versus foreign, original versus acquired – seemed inadequate. For many of my friends, belonging was layered rather than singular. Fluency was not only a matter of grammar or vocabulary, but of emotional resonance, of shared references, of the capacity to dream, argue or mourn in a given language. Some felt equally at home in multiple languages; others felt slightly estranged in all of them, and yet fully themselves in that very in-betweenness.

Witnessing this multiplicity reshaped my own thinking. It allowed me to see that linguistic identity need not be exclusive. One can grow roots in more than one language without betraying the first. One can think, desire and create across borders without fragmenting. If anything, such plurality can deepen awareness, making each word a choice rather than a reflex, each sentence an act of navigation between histories and selves.

My Armenian may remain insufficient for literary creation, but Armenia itself taught me how to listen differently. It taught me that to ‘be in a language’ is not merely to master its grammar, but to accept its limits. It revealed how multilingual societies cultivate a heightened sensitivity to nuance, code switching and the untranslatable. This sensitivity never ceased to amaze me.

Then I moved back to Central Europe, into a far more homogeneous linguistic landscape. Not the one in which I was raised, but one geographically and culturally close to it. I moved to a language I chose, not inherited. Yet, despite my earlier reflections on multilingualism, I found myself surprised again.

In this part of Europe, the native language is often treated not simply as a tool of communication but as a value in itself, a marker of authenticity, legitimacy, even moral coherence. I should have expected this; it is, in many ways, a regional sensibility shaped by history, nation building and the long struggle to preserve linguistic identity. Still, it catches me off guard. There is a subtle but persistent assumption that one’s ‘true’ self resides most fully in the language of birth.

I encounter this assumption in conversations, sometimes casually, sometimes in literary contexts. People – including those active in literature – occasionally suggest, gently or directly, that I must be ‘more myself’ in Polish. That certain subject, especially intimate or complex ones, can only be fully articulated in the language I was born into. Some are surprised that I began writing poetry in Czech in the first place. Then there is my favourite version of this presumption: the belief that all my Czech poems must be translations. That I must have first thought them in Polish, composed them internally in my ‘real’ language, and only afterward rendered them into Czech, as though the second language could only ever be a vessel for something conceived elsewhere.

What this assumption overlooks is the autonomy of thought within each language. When I write in Czech, I do not translate myself. I think in Czech. The rhythm emerges in Czech; the metaphors are born within its syntax; the associations are shaped by its sounds. Of course, my linguistic past is always present – no language exists in isolation inside a person – but presence does not mean hierarchy. Writing in Czech is not a derivative act; it is an original one. The poem does not stand behind a veil of prior articulation.

At times, I sense that what unsettles others is not my linguistic competence but the idea that identity itself might be less fixed than expected. If a poet can create authentically in more than one language, then the comforting equation of origin with essence begins to loosen. The notion that language determines the boundaries of the self becomes harder to sustain.

Yet for me, writing in Czech has never felt like a departure from who I am. It feels like an extension of the space in which I can exist. Polish remains the language of my earliest formative years, dense with memory and emotional sediment. Czech, however, offers a different angle of light, a slight distance that allows certain themes to surface with unexpected clarity. Each language opens particular corridors of thought, and neither invalidates the other.

Perhaps what continues to surprise me is how persistent the myth of singular linguistic belonging can be, even among those who dedicate their lives to literature, an art form built precisely on the elasticity and transformation of language. My experience has taught me that authenticity does not reside in origin alone. It resides in attention, in commitment, in the willingness to inhabit a language fully, whether it was given to us at birth or chosen later, consciously, as a home.

In addition to being a poet, I am also a translator. I translate Czech poetry – and occasionally Slovak and Armenian – into Polish. For the past few years, I have been trying to translate one poem a day. The success rate varies, of course, depending on time available, work and life’s practical demands, but I keep returning to the attempt. Recently, it has been working surprisingly well.

I am far more disciplined as a translator than as a poet. With my own poems, I wait. I do not try to summon them or force their arrival. If they fall silent for weeks or months, I let them. I have learnt not to chase them when they disappear. Translation is different. It is a daily practice, almost physical in its regularity. It keeps me grounded. It keeps me in touch with language in a conscious, attentive way.

I consider both writing and translating to be art forms, but they are not the same. Writing feels like stepping into the unknown without a map. Translation feels like walking a narrow mountain path already traced by someone else, where each step still demands balance and care. In one, I generate the voice; in the other, I listen for it and rebuild it elsewhere.

I am often surprised by how many people compare these two practices simply because I work in two languages. Writing bilingually and translating are not interchangeable experiences. In my own poems, I am responsible for silence as much as for words. In translation, I am responsible to someone else’s silence. That difference changes everything.

For me, translation is not secondary to poetry. It is not an exercise or a substitute. It is a parallel discipline. If poetry is a form of solitude, translation is a form of dialogue. And I need both.

Another aspect that fascinates me is the way we perceive translation between languages that belong to the same family, that are close, somewhat similar. There is a common assumption that such translation must be easier, almost automatic. After all, the vocabulary overlaps, the grammar seems familiar and the historical roots are shared. From a distance, the two languages can look like variations of the same landscape.

However, similarity does not make the work simpler. On the contrary, it often makes it more delicate. When languages resemble one another, the challenge lies in the subtleties – in the false friends, in the slightly different emotional temperatures of words, in the subtle differences in syntax. A phrase that sounds completely natural in Czech may feel faintly archaic, too soft or too harsh in Polish. A syntactic structure that seems transferable may disturb the balance of the receiving language in ways that are almost invisible yet deeply perceptible.

The closer the languages, the more attentive I have to be. It is tempting to lean on resemblance, to accept the first equivalent that comes because it ‘almost’ fits. But poetry does not tolerate ‘almost’. The smallest shift in register, the slightest change in connotation, can alter the inner architecture of a poem. What appears transparent may conceal the hardest of decisions.

That is why, when I say that translation is a dialogue, I mean something quite specific. Translation between related languages is not a loud debate, but a quiet, highly sensitive negotiation. It takes place in the space between words that look identical from afar but reveal differences when scrutinised. The dialogue becomes more intricate. It is no longer just a conversation between two texts, but a negotiation between two closely related systems.

Even if I chose to translate my own poetry, it would never be comparable to translating someone else’s. I have done it several times, just to see how it feels. Working with another person’s voice is fundamentally different from expressing my own, even when I write multilingually. My own voice grants me freedom. The responsibility feels lighter. I can shift images, adjust rhythms or reshape lines without the sense of betraying anything. It becomes a variation, a kind of freestyling, a playful performance that results in a second original rather than a strict translation. It is recreation more than a transfer.

Translating someone else, however, demands precision, discipline and careful thought. The responsibility is heavier because I am accountable to a voice that is not mine. Although the outcome may appear similar – a text in a language different from the one it was first written in – the process is entirely different. And that difference is precisely where the beauty lies.