Krasnogruda, 30 June 2015
Dear,
It is the last day of June, one hundred and four years after Czesław Miłosz was born on the borderlands. His invisible bridge was the connective tissue built between different people, between man and the other space, between "I" and "you", or perhaps, as he grew older, the latter became more "us". He would have been pleased at the news that a new book of „Invisible Bridges" is written in Krasnogruda, the book co-written by writers and philosophers from around the world, including his friends and artists whom he managed to get to know and read with appreciation.
Please accept my sincere thanks for accepting the invitation to co-create "The Invisible Bridges" I have sent similar invitations around the world, to people - witnesses to the breaking of bridges I knew about, who against all odds still care to search for the binder for coexistence and from whom I learned the art of the word that restores the ties. Almost every addressee of these letters accepted the invitation. This gives me hope that the book will meet the challenges of the time in which we happen to live, one that suffers from a progressing illness of the connective tissue.
And as I want you to get to know the group of creators you will join (the list may still change and be expanded) please find below the names and places they come from. Some of them have already contributed their texts. Some others are to send them by mid-August i.e. the time of launching the International Village of Bridge Builders in Krasnogruda. During these workshops, a laboratory of word and fiction will be organized for the practitioners of intercultural dialogue where the texts of the authors of "The Invisible Bridges' will be read and analysed. I hope that they will also become inspiration fot the stories of the bridge written during the workshops. There are also writers who promised to send their texts by the end of the year. Ideally, we would like to receive all texts so that we could focus on editorial work and translation early next year.
The group of the authors includes: Agata Bielik-Robson (Warsaw), Magda Carneci (Bucharest), Kunzang Choden (Ogyen Choling), Eva Hoffman (London), Ulla Lachauer (Stuttgart), Ruth Padel (London), Marci Shore (New Haven), Olga Tokarczuk (Wroclaw ), Yuri Andrukhovych (Stanisławów), Zygmunt Bauman (Leeds), Aleš Debeljak (Ljubljana), Ferrida Durakovic (Sarajevo), Krzysztof Giedroyc (Bialystok), Pawel Huelle (Gdańsk), Marius Ivaškevičius (Vilnius), Miljenko Jergović (Zagreb) Jaan Kaplinski (Tartu), Dzevad Karahazan (Graz), John Kasper (Wągrowiec), Chris Keulemans (Amsterdam), Fatos Lubonja (Tirana), Norman Manea (New York), Christopher Merrill (Iowa), Jaroslaw Mikołajewski (Warsaw), Arvo Pärt (Laulasmaa), Mileta Prodanović (Belgrade), Shimon Redlich (Israel), Mykola Ryabchuk (Kiev), Tomasz Różycki (Opole), Bashkim Shehu (Barcelona), Tadeusz Slawek (Katowice), Yuri Tarnawski (New York), Tomas Venclova (New Haven), Adam Zagajewski (Cracow).
I'm sending my cordial greetings
Krzysztof Czyżewski