About
Mark Tardi is originally from Chicago and he earned his MFA from Brown University. His awards include a PEN/Heim Translation grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Translation Fellowship, a Harry Ransom Center research fellowship, and fellowships from Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. His publications include the books The Circus of Trust, Airport music, and Euclid Shudders.
His writing and translations have appeared widely in periodicals such as Denver Quarterly, The Millions, Asymptote, Aufgabe, Berlin Quarterly, Chicago Review, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere.
His translation of The Squatters' Gift by Robert Rybicki (Dalkey Archive) and Faith in Strangers by Katarzyna Szaulińska (Toad Press/Veliz Books) were published in 2021. He has also translated work by Olga Hund, Zofia Skrzypulec, Aleksandra Byrska, Kinga Piotrowiak-Junkiert, Miron Białoszewski, Kacper Bartczak, Monika Mosiewicz, and Przemysław Owczarek from the Polish.
A former Fulbright scholar, he lives with his family in a village in central Poland and is on faculty at the University of Łódź.
Featured Work
The Squatters' Gift by Robert Rybicki
The Squatters' Gift is a poetic travelogue through numerous languages and locales, both real and imaginary. Like Miron Białoszewski, Paul Celan, and Tristan Tzara before him, Rybicki excavates syllable and song, mind and muck, to invent a transnational poetry pointedly unapologetic and utterly unique. Karol Maliszewski observes that Rybicki has taken over from the Surrealists and the Dadaists: “the hero of these poems is language –– escaping from a man and suddenly returning in flashes and dazzles."
