The Polish Book Institute

A translation of the correspondence between Wisława Szymborska and Kornel Filipowicz has been published on the Spanish market under the title Najlepiej w życiu ma Twój kot. Listy (”Your Cat Has the Best Life. Letters”) The publication of the translation by Teresa Benítez, Katarzyna Mołoniewicz, and Abel Murcia was supported by the Book Institute as part of the ©POLAND Translation Programme.

The book was published under the title Escribe si vendrás. Correspondencia (1967-1978)' by the Barcelona-based Las Afueras publishing house.

They spent twenty years together, but never married or lived together. The volume Your Cat Has the Best Life. Letters collects the correspondence of an unusual couple, as Wisława Szymborska and Kornel Filipowicz certainly were.An important part of their life together was the letters they wrote to each other when either of them left Krakow. In the correspondence between the poet-Nobel laureate and the master of the short prose form, we find both some intimate confessions and the most prosaic, everyday topics, both reflections on literary creation as well as stories about the people around them.

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The ©Poland Translation Programme is one of the Book Institute's flagship programmes. Its aim is to promote Polish literature around the world by providing financial support for the publication of Polish books in translation into foreign languages. Foreign publishers may use the funding grant to finance part of the work's publication costs, including, among other things, the translation of the work from Polish into another language, the purchase of copyright licences, and the printing of the book. In 2023 alone, we have subsidised 229 foreign editions of Polish books to be published by publishing houses from 46 countries, to which we have allocated almost PLN 5 million. In all editions of the programme, we have already subsidised a total of more than 3,000 translations of Polish books into foreign languages.

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