translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal

June 9, 2022

A year has now passed since visual artist Rafał Siderski and I embarked on our adventure “Reading the Water: The Wisła.” Yet I’m left with the sensation that the moment I reached the Baltic Sea—after 1,113 kilometers spread out over twenty-eight days (twenty-four running)—set in motion another circle of the narratives we tell about the river, which continue to expand, intensify, persist. The adventure goes on, perhaps—I hope—preparing us for similar forays, the next point of entry into the landscape. [ . . . ]

Summing up is strange to me. I feel an innate need to sketch, and I value the freedom afforded by the white page of a notebook and the power of a fountain pen rather than the tidiness of Excel tables. But I must stop here and consider what took place, what I experienced because of the Wisła, what I allowed myself to indulge in thanks to the river. I’m also curious to see which words written about the river stick with me as I keep going, as we keep going, Rafał and I, into the world. As we continue to show up and speak in different places and contexts, lessening the distance, we hope, between rivers and people.

The questions of my friend, dear M., who supported me with concern and care during those twenty-six marathon distances, turned out to be helpful in organizing my reflections. She asked me seemingly simple questions: “Małgosia, what have you learned about the world? What have you learned about the river, the companion rivers, as you call them? What have you learned about yourself?” I looked at her and was about to answer the way I usually answer, in one exhale, feverishly, with my whole self. But M. placed a hand on my collarbone and with that gesture halted my lips. “Don’t just answer, tell me,” she whispered. “I want to really hear, to be taken into the narrative.” And I thought, yes, I’ll tell it, how time—paradoxically—works to the advantage of what we live through in the presence of the Wisła.

I invite you, too, into the story, a story that’s connected to the things I was thinking about when I announced my run along the Wisła in the magazine Pismo in 2020. That thought read: “It’s also possible that, during my run, I won’t learn anything more than what I learn about myself and the world while circling Krakow’s Błonia meadow a few times or lying with a book in a nearby park for an hour.” I must admit, I set off on our adventure voraciously, open to what awaited me, with sharpened senses and—as best as possible—my body conditioned. I wanted to experience things, to expose myself to limits, to run and to think while I ran and to recite in my head my favorite poems by Inger Christense, Serhiy Zhadan, Tomas Tranströmer. [ . . . ]

THE LESSON OF THE WORLD

What have I learned about the world? I’ve learned the world can be good. When reality placed people and landscapes along my route that gave me strength, it was working in my favor. I’m bolstered in my belief that a poem grows out of the world, and only later does language follow experience; that there are moments when light is favorable, as when, in the first days of my run, near Zabłocie, the sun began to play on a small lake covered in duckweed, bringing comfort, courage. I’ve learned there are moments when I’m completely unafraid of the world. It’s cooperative, gentle, in no hurry to get anywhere.

Of course, the world can also be evil. September 2021 was filled with relentless news about events on our eastern border. It drove me to limitless despair. Yet I ran, and maybe that saved me from utter hopelessness. It was a movement against despair.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and it’s not the world in all its complexity that’s evil but simply one of its elements, the part capable of building a wall along the border, of paving over riverbeds, of diverting currents, the part that takes up arms and wields them against others. There are moments when I fear the world. It seems uncooperative, ruthless, in a hurry, as if unaware that it’s rushing toward disaster.

Now a year after my run along the Wisła, as I’m living in proximity to war, to Russia’s brutal aggression toward Ukraine, I cannot forget about the dark side of humanity. Maybe it’s one’s obligation not to forget. And in the midst of it all to do one’s part, stubbornly, consistently.

Over and over again, I’m convinced that I need poetry to narrate the world to me, to show me its possibilities, its weaknesses, to be an ambassador for that which does not fit into the rational. And when I don’t understand the world, I reach for poems, such as those by Serhiy Zhadan from the book Antenna
[ . . . ]

What else? In that period of time, I looked at cartography differently. This geography lesson in action proved to be stimulating, inspiring. Everything seen on maps, exchanged for the tangible, could be touched, felt in the body, compared. Experience over theory. The dipping of the feet into the river’s cool waters instead of the rote memorization of its locations or lengths. The training, the being, and the harnessing of being to physicality.

I was also left with questions. Here are a few. What was it that woke us up late at night near Stary Duninów with a poignant, at times frightening sound? Was it a howling fox? A barn owl? A feral cat? And another—did the angler we met near Zła Wieś really exist? Or was he the work of my imagination? An illusion, a Fata Morgana? No, not possible. After all, I remember the cool silver of fish scales and how, stunned by the sight, I instinctively reached out to touch them. It was an innocent touch. I pressed my fingers to the dead so childishly, with curiosity but also—in the end—with disgust. Did it exist? And finally the big questions. How does the word even exist? Where does everything come from? The beautiful and the ugly? Which one are we closer to?

COMPANION RIVERS, SISTER RIVERS, BROTHER STREAMS

“What have I learned about the river, the companion rivers?” I’ve learned rivers are organisms that resemble us humans, that resemble animals; rivers are thinking organisms, and their waters carry a poem if you only look, dip your hand or foot in, wash your face; I became familiar with the names of companion rivers, names that in their own right resonate, that make up a verse: Nida, Koprzywianka, Opatówka, Chodelka, Radomka, Bzura, Skrwa, Wda . . . I found that rivers can rock you to sleep, and in the morning they cooperate with linnets, goldfinches, cormorants to wake the sleepers, inviting them to the day; but at night the river changes its character, becoming thick black lava dusted with the silver of the moon, and if you stare into its surface, you’ll be lost to yourself, the river hypnotizing you, making you lose track of what’s real and what’s not. I also learned the river knows how to get its way, take back land that belongs to it, occupy an old channel, use its own memory, spill over once again into terrain we appropriated as we elbowed our way into the world.

I’ve learned people love and hate rivers, and in the way we talk about them both are apparent—awe and fear. I passed by houses, apartment buildings, towns that faced the river so that, stepping out onto a porch or a veranda, the residents could observe the surface of the water, take in its beauty, live alongside it. There were also places that stood as if offended, facing away, distant. Perhaps, I thought, they’ve experienced something about the river that makes it difficult for them to look at it, something that forces them to look away. Some of the human settlements, those close and those distanced from the river, seemed straight out of the prose of Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk or Skoruń by Maciej Płaza.

I’ve also learned that rivers are strong, that they dictate the terms, that the route we plan is only a projection, a line for running that is determined by the Wisła and companion rivers flowing into it, sister rivers, brother streams.

I’ve been strengthened in my belief that you cannot possess a river, you can only—and only so far—accompany it. And I’ve come to understand that anthropomorphizing rivers carries risk, but also that it’s necessary for many people in order to feel closer to their presence, to sense a kinship.

Don’t laugh, but I tried reading poems to the rivers. In such moments, I learned more about the rivers than about poetry. Still, I needed words to get me closer to the current, to try to tame it, to read following the rhythm of the waves, the refractions of the surface, leaves and sticks swirling on it. I tried to imagine the words continuing on with the current, toward the Baltic, along the way mixing with the waters of the Dunajec or the San. And when I read Inger Christensen to the Wisła, this poem from the book Alphabet (translated by Bogusława Sochańska into Polish, here translated by Susanna Nied into English)—

                 early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
                 seclusion and angels exist;
                 widows and elk exist; every
                 detail exists; memory, memory’s light;
                 afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
                 junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
                 eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
                 exist, and the future, the future

—I was certain the river was listening, that it would carry the words further into the future, the future.
[ . . . ]

THE LESSON OF THE SELF

What have I learned about myself? I’ve learned memory for me is sensitive, akin to a sniffing animal rooting around in space, in landscape, picking up details, flickers, the composition of light, aromas, to feed on them. The work of memory in particular—as I had guessed—speeds up in moments when I push my body to its limits, when I expose it to intensive, mantra-like movement, which is exactly what happens when running.

Those twenty-eight days on the Wisła, next to the body of the river, in a process that—as I think of it—was a kind of offering of my own body and exertion to the river, helped me discover that I have a child inside of me who is overcome by awe, who is capable of emotion—yes, who cries at the smallest things. That child is also recalcitrant and refuses to accept loss. And perhaps this was the biggest lesson for me, that here, in addition to all the other contexts (activist, poetic, athletic), I was running in order to observe myself, to study myself, conduct participatory research. It involved exposing myself to the full range of emotions in an attempt to look directly at what had been accompanying me for years.

And, at last, I understood it was grief. The discovery was, for me, that my grief has two sources, that it’s based on two kinds of loss: personal and collective. The first concerns the loss, the physical loss, of loved ones. The second—the loss of a world in the form I used to know it, a world I grew up in, a world I used to be certain of. So, I ran in mourning for my loved ones and for the world. I was already aware of this even in the first days of my Wisła foray. And I allowed myself to run into it. And it was liberating, good, a relief. [ . . . ]

I’ve also learned that the season of fall helps keep me calm; that my hands, after a month being outside and exposed to air, rain, and sun, begin to resemble the hands of my father who worked the land his whole life; that I’m not afraid to run at night through a misty forest; that my body is grateful when I remember to breathe through my nose; that poems I read before sleep might appear in my dreams; that in moments of panic poetry can come to the rescue (it frees the breath); that I often do something first and only later think of the consequences; that I want to be needed; and also that I was running to be closer to you, to everyone.

Of course, questions remain. Fundamental questions, important questions that can lead to new ideas for moving through the world: Where does my stubbornness end? Where does my strength end? And limits? Have I reached them or maybe exceeded them? Have I even come close? I don’t know. But in order to find the answers, I must keep moving.

ACCOMPANYING THE RIVER

To accompany. And once again I must confess—when I reached the mouth of the Wisła, I wanted to keep running. Yes, I know adrenaline and endorphins were doing their work, that I was on an emotional high. But when I stood there on the concrete embankment designed to assist the Wisła’s entry into the Baltic, when I was convinced it wasn’t possible for me to run any further, seeing as I’d either have to swim or be able to walk on water, I felt sad. It’s difficult to accept the fact that the journey, in its physical installment, has limits, that it must come to an end, that everyday life takes over again. [ . . . ]

And so it goes, and for this I am grateful to the river, to the rivers and the people who accompanied me, sustained me, who wanted and want to listen to my, to our, narrative about the river. We are not its voice, we have no right to it; we are an echo, a reflex, we transfer what we’ve seen and experienced into words and images.

We accompany.

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Małgorzata Lebda is a Polish poet, fiction writer, mountaineer, ultramarathon runner, and photographer. She is the author of six award-winning poetry collections, including Mer de Glace (Warstwy, 2021), which received the prestigious Wislawa Szymborska Prize. In 2023, she published her prose debut, Voracious (Linden Editions, 2025; translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), which won the “Empik Discovery” Award and was a finalist for the Angelus Central European Literary Award, the Nike Literary Award, and the Conrad Prize. The novel has been translated into Spanish and English, and there are translations into Czech, Serbian, French, German, Ukrainian, and Dutch currently underway, as well as a film adaptation. Lebda holds a PhD in Literary Theory and Audiovisual Arts and teaches in the creative writing department at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including English, Spanish, Czech, Italian, Ukrainian, and Danish. She lives—along with her herd—in the Jaworzyna Krynicka Mountains.

Mira Rosenthal is an American poet and translator of Polish-language writers such as Tomasz Różycki, Małgorzata Lebda, and Krystyna Dąbrowska. Her work has been nominated twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize as well as for the Derek Walcott Prize, the National Translation Award, and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Tomasz Różycki’s To the Letter (Archipelago Books, 2024) won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Found in Translation Award for the best book translated from Polish in 2024. She is the author of Territorial (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), a Pitt Poetry Series selection, and The Local World (Kent State University Press, 2011), winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Northern California Book Award, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Jan Michalski Foundation. Her essays, poems, and translations appear regularly in such journals as Poetry, The New York Review of Books, Threepenny Review, Harvard Review, and A Public Space.

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This essay is part of the eleventh installment of our “Literature and Democracy” series. This quarterly column, curated by NER international correspondent Ellen Hinsey, presents writers’ responses to the threats to democracy around the world, beginning with a focus on Eastern Europe. You can access the rest of the feature here.

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