Zofia Bałdyga

- Poland, Czech Republic, -

Zofia Bałdyga (b. 1987, Warsaw) is a poet, translator, intercultural mediator, and social counselor working with migrants in the NGO sector. Her creative life unfolds between languages, geographies, and shifting political landscapes. Her trajectory as a writer is inseparable from her biography: educated in South and West Slavic Studies at the University of Warsaw, she later settled in Prague, where she completed her studies in social and pastoral work at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Charles University. She is the author of four poetry collections in Polish—Passe-partout (2006), Współgłoski (2010), Kto kupi tak małe kraje (2017), and Klimat kontynentalny (2021)—and one in Czech, Poslední cestopisy (Fra, 2023), which was nominated for the Magnesia Litera award for poetry. As a translator, she has introduced a generation of Czech and Slovak poets to Polish readers, including Milan Děžinský, Kamil Bouška, Jana Bodnárová, Marie Iljašenko, Yveta Shanfeldová, Jitka Bret Srbová, Marie Šťastná, Jan Škrob and the two anthologies Sąsiadki. 10 poetek czeskich and Sąsiadki. 10 poetek słowackich. She has also translated from Armenian, drawing on her years spent in Yerevan between 2013 and 2017. In 2021 she received the Literatura na Świecie award in the “New Face” category for emerging translators. Her sustained engagement in projects supporting refugees and migrants—first in Poland, later in the Czech Republic—has left a profound imprint on her work, infusing it with an acute ethical awareness.

 

 


For Bałdyga’s early collections, Passe-partout and Współgłoski, language is not only a medium but also a protagonist. These books are marked by a sensitivity to rhythm, to the physicality of sound, and to the semantic instability of words. The poems are often spare, elliptical, and intimate, testing the limits of expression, marked by her attention to spatial relations—how a poem occupies the page, how it interacts with silence—and a fascination with what happens when a word is lifted from its expected context and placed elsewhere. This linguistic attentiveness becomes a defining feature of her later work, where it serves not just aesthetic ends but also an ethical imperative: to approach the stories of others with precision and care. A decisive shift occurs with her third collection, Kto kupi tak małe kraje (Who Will Buy Such Small Countries), published in 2017 by Staromiejski Dom Kultury. The book originates in Bałdyga’s work between 2010 and 2013 in Polish reception centres for refugees. Written partly during that period but published after several years of reflection, it bears the marks of both immediacy and distance. The poems are arranged as thirty-three numbered stops along “Ulica Improwizacji” (“Improvisation Street”), a conceptual frame that invites the reader to walk from door to door, from story to story. Each text becomes a room entered by way of language, a space in which the poet stages fragments of testimony: “Trzymasz mnie za rękę i idziemy na zachód. / Nie mam nic wspólnego ze słońcem.” The use of the second person, the insistence on shared movement, creates an intimacy that is never merely observational; the speaker is implicated in these journeys. The ethical stance of the book lies in its refusal of aestheticise suffering while also refusing the opposite trap of purely documentary plainness. Bałdyga employs her metaphors sparingly but effectively, often letting an image hold the complexity of experience: “Z lotu ptaka nie widać granic / słychać je tylko w szeleście obcych zdań.” In this way, the boundaries between nations are rendered not so much visually as sonically, as aural dissonances. The collection interrogates what it means to belong, to be in transit, to live within a geography that treats certain countries as too “small” to matter. Yet its political charge is carried less by declarative argument than by the careful arrangement of voices, rhythms, and silences—its activism is embedded in the craft of the poem itself.

 

In Klimat kontynentalny (Continental Climate, WBPiCAK, 2021), Bałdyga’s focus broadens. The collection is structurally divided into Klimat kontynentalny ostry (“sharp”) and Klimat kontynentalny łagodny (“mild”), a formal polarity that mirrors a shift from panoramic to close-up, from geopolitical space to personal topography. The first section reads like a cartography of change: cities are palimpsests where languages overwrite one another, old street names fade beneath new ones, and façades are stripped to reveal unfamiliar layers. In one poem, the lyrical subject warns, “zdrapać nieaktualne fasady tak, / by się nie zadrapać, / by nie poparzyło nas parujące wewnątrz jądro”—a striking image of the danger of erasing history too hastily, of the heat that still radiates from events buried underground. The second section adopts longer, more narrative forms, closer to prose poetry. Here the body emerges as a site of inscription, as contested as any territory: “Czuję, jak jestem opowiadana, jak miękną kontury.” The shift from external landscapes to the internal climate of the self allows Bałdyga to explore the intimate consequences of broader political and historical processes. Migration here is not only a matter of crossing borders but of inhabiting multiple selves, each shaped by different linguistic and cultural contexts. Throughout the collection, cycles of erosion and renewal suggest a worldview attuned to impermanence, but also to the possibility of reconfiguration.

 

With Poslední cestopisy (The Last Travelogues, Fra, 2023), Bałdyga makes a radical linguistic and creative move: writing entirely in Czech, a language she has gradually made her own. This choice is more than pragmatic; she makes an artistic statement about belonging and estrangement. The title evokes the travelogue as a genre, yet the journeys chronicled here are often inward, defined by subtle shifts in perception rather than by physical distance. The style is notably pared down—short, declarative sentences, minimal ornament, a conscious stripping away of poetic excess. This restraint does not signal detachment; on the contrary, it heightens the emotional charge, as small changes in tone or rhythm become all the more resonant. The thematic core of Poslední cestopisy lies in states of liminality—places where one belongs and does not belong, languages that anchor and estrange simultaneously. The lyrical subject’s attention is on movement that is often imperceptible: the slow redrawing of borders, the migration of words between tongues, the shift in light that alters a familiar street. In its quiet way, the book engages in a politics of noticing, mapping transformations that larger narratives tend to overlook. Writing in Czech, Bałdyga stages a self-translation of identity, allowing her poetics of crossing to permeate not just the subject matter but the very language of the text.

 

Taken together, Bałdyga’s work can be read as an ongoing inquiry into the ethics of voice and the architectures of belonging. Her poetry refuses to separate the aesthetic from the social: formal innovation is inextricable from the ethical demands of representation. She listens as much as she speaks, making space for the voices of others without erasing the situatedness of her own. Whether in Polish or Czech, her language is deliberate, her metaphors hard-earned, her silences as meaningful as her words. At a time when borders are being both dismantled and reinforced, when migration is framed in terms of crisis and threat, Bałdyga’s poetry offers an alternative: a patient, attentive mapping of the fragile and mutable geographies—political, linguistic, emotional—that shape human lives. It is perhaps in this dual commitment—to precision and to openness—that her significance consists. By crafting poems that are at once rooted in the urgencies of the present and attuned to the timeless human need for connection, Bałdyga has created a body of work that resists easy categorisation. Hers is a writing that insists on the dignity of “small countries,” whether they are literal homelands or the intimate territories of a life, and that treats the act of crossing—not just borders, but languages, histories, and selves—as a form of art in itself.

 

 

Essay written by Aljaž Koprivnikar

 
More about the poet

Poetry

  1. every morning in the same river / každé ráno ve stejné řece

  2. self-portrait with a critical gaze / autoportrét s kritickým pohledem

  3. last travelogues / poslední cestopisy

  4. last travelogues (II) / poslední cestopisy (II)

  5. a soundtrack / border crossing / zvuková stopa / hraniční přechod

  6. a different kind of animal / Jiný druh zvířete

  7. every day I write down what I'm grateful for / Každý den si zapisuju, za co jsem vděčná

  8. night connection / noční spoj

  9. journey of a private moon / putování soukromého měsíce