Triangular Pentagon
Tymoteusz Karpowicz was a prominent Polish poet who lived from 1921 to 2005. Born and raised near Vilnius, Poland, a town that would later be occupied by Nazis, Karpowicz relocated to Szczecin in 1945, the end of World War II. Though Karpowicz received many awards for his work, he never received any official literary awards in Poland. Wikipedia states that this was due to his “stance as a political dissident.” During the Nazi occupation of Vilnius, Karpowicz was a member of the Polish underground resistance movement. Triangular Pentagon is a translation of five of Karpowicz’s poems from Polish to English. Translated by Frank Kujawinsk, Triangular Pentagon is a pentagonal box that opens into five triangular flaps, each printed with a poem. Included is a round booklet of the original poems in Polish. On the verso of this book object, Frank L. Vigoda of Vigoda Press says about Karpowicz’s poetry: “This unresolved tension between opposites: the captured and the escaped, the finite and the infinite, is according to Karpowicz, the driving force of all human labors in the world. It appears in every single act, even the minutest or most banal. We may intuitively know that we are unable to grasp the world, but never cease to try.” Triangular Pentagon was printed in an edition of 34.
Tymoteusz Karpowicz, translated by Frank Kujawinski. Triangular Pentagon. Riverside: Vigoda Press, 2013.