Yesterday, Oleksandr Korotko received a letter to his personal mail, which mentioned the intention of a Polish publishing house to publish a collection of poetry, which is planned to include poems by Oleksandr Korotko and the famous Polish poet Yaroslav Mikolajski.
The letter stated:
“Dear Mr. Korotko
I am writing to you regarding a volume of poetry that we plan to publish. Our editor has prepared a selection of your poems, which we would like to include in our edition.
The book is to be published in an edition of 1,000 copies as part of the Books Without Borders program and is to be distributed free of charge to libraries in Poland. It is not a commercial project.
We invited Jaroslaw Mikolajewski to collaborate with us, and from the beginning the idea of this edition was that it would be more of a conversation between two poet-artists, moved by the war situation in Ukraine.
I realize that your poems that Dymytro sent us are a brilliantly composed volume, but under the current conditions we are unable to publish it in its entirety.
I invited a very good editor – Anna Czech, who has a great feel for the specifics of the poems, and it was she who selected these particular poems and combined them with poems by Jarosław Mikołajewski.
One spread is to contain your poem in Polish and Ukrainian, and the other a poem by Mikołajewski in Polish and Ukrainian. It is to be a bilingual, Polish-Ukrainian edition. The pdf file I sent contains a preliminary editorial version, presenting selected poems. The fine-tuning of the typesetting and translation is still to come, what is crossed out presupposes the translation of the poem into Ukrainian.
Do you agree with such a selection of your poems and publishing them in this collection?
Best regards
Katarzyna Konopka”
The author agreed to cooperate, work on the publication continues.