Until the Next Grave Is Dug

On Urszula Honek’s bleak debut story collection, the Booker long-listed ‘White Nights,’ newly translated by Kate Webster.

By Cory OldweilerFebruary 10, 2026

• Fiction

CONTEMPORARY POLISH POETRY is rarely translated into English, with only around 47 titles appearing between 2008 and 2024, according to Publishers Weekly. While none of Urszula Honek’s four collections are among that group, Anglophones can read a selection of her work on Versopolis, a website that highlights “emerging European poets,” including most of her 2021 collection Zimowanie, or “Wintering.” These poems, in English-language translations by Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi, generally consist of one or two lowercased stanzas built out of a succession of simple, declarative sentences reflecting on the younger years of an unnamed narrator. A fitting description of the collection can be taken from the second line of the title poem: “i stand in front of the window and watch / the panorama of the town.”

That “panorama” is sketched out across the first 18 poems on Versopolis, which are all taken from Wintering. The verses highlight aspects of the visual landscape, such as the house of Mr. and Mrs. S, which is “still the color of wet sand” though it no longer has children “hiding in the corners, trying to stifle / giggles and thrills in the cramped pantry.” And they capture intangible moments, like the bygone adolescent longing during the summer that the narrator and her friend Moniką pined for Janek and Mirek, a time they “cared more about kisses than death.” That insouciant hierarchy—kisses over death—no longer holds true, however, given the primacy these poems place on mortality, its specter lurking in a rope hanging from a lamp in an attic or in the way the narrator awaits her mother’s emergence from the darkness “as if she’s returned from the underworld.” Indeed, for many characters glimpsed in these poems, death has long since arrived, as with P., a boy who gets buried in a grain silo, or Mrs. Z, who spends her last years alone, comforted only by the “stray ginger cat” she took in to keep her company during the long, lonely weeks between her daughters’ monthly visits.

So well-considered are these lean, almost parsimonious poems that the reader feels as if Honek surely knows more than she’s letting on. And, indeed, she did have more to say about this world, because in January 2022, seven months after the publication of Zimowanie, Honek published Białe noce, a short story collection that is a natural companion piece to the poems, even referencing a few of the same characters. White Nights, as the story collection is titled in Kate Webster’s tender English-language translation (originally published in the United Kingdom in 2023 and now available in the United States from Two Lines Press), marks Honek’s first foray beyond poetry, but hopefully not her last. Long-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize, the collection comprises 13 interrelated stories about the residents of Binarowa and Rożnowice, neighboring villages in the low-altitude Carpathian Mountains, about 20 miles north of the Poland-Slovakia border. Honek grew up in that region, and though she now lives about two hours northeast in Kraków, these stories reflect her deep personal connection to both the area’s residents and its spartan landscape.

Some of the voices in these stories are speaking about the past, telling their stories in response to an unrecorded prompt from an unacknowledged interlocutor, and some of them are speaking out of the past, their deaths described or alluded to either during their own first-person narrations or in the course of testimonials given by some other character. The stories are told slightly out of chronological order, building to a funeral that occurs midway through the overarching timeline. Given the region’s isolation, it’s unclear when exactly events take place, though we’re a couple of generations removed from the fighting at the end of World War II. These are tiny, rural communities where people work trades such as butcher, baker, gravedigger, or logger. The most modern invention mentioned in the book is probably a landline telephone, and the local bar, which serves only beer, Fanta, and Coca-Cola, draws customers with twinkling Christmas lights in the windows.

Honek’s prose remains playfully lyrical in Webster’s excellent translation, which also captures the inherent melancholy of the region. Oil derricks spied “in the deep blue light” of late autumn look “like hungry horses with no muscles, about to lunge […] with their toothless mouths.” A fresh winter snowfall is not the clichéd comfortable blanket of snow but rather “a large, ironed sheet that [a girl] would like to hide her head under.” And in one of the collection’s most memorably observant images of how even the smallest things are slightly dysfunctional, we are told that the bar has a radio playing constantly because the television speakers are broken, meaning that “the girls on the TV don’t know they’re dancing to the music from the radio, and they lose the rhythm every now and then.”

The stories in White Nights focus on three trios: childhood friends Piotrek, Pilot, and Andrzej; sisters Hanna, Maria, and Zofia; and Alicja, Henia, and Dorotka (Andrzej’s mother, sister, and niece, respectively). Tragedy and sorrow are endemic to their world, with the local rivers acting as alluring avenues toward the oblivion and peace of the afterlife. Women are treated almost as disposable items, desired sexually but then traded up or discarded without explanation, even after marriage; the one man who seemingly behaves decently toward them dies from his selfless efforts. The tone of the collection is set in the opening story, told by Piotrek, the only character who successfully outruns his fate and finds a better life abroad. As he recalls his long friendship with Pilot and Andrzej, we learn that both of them died young—Pilot by falling through the ice of a pond he dug with his own two hands, and Andrzej by hanging himself after numerous failed attempts to take his own life.

Piotrek is reflective and contemplative, mentioning how “something was eating [him] up inside” when he and Andrzej grew further apart after Pilot died, but we later learn that his motivations were always selfish. He convinces his friends to take the jobs he has secured them some 20 miles away, but Piotrek has set himself up as a butcher while leaving them to cut down trees in a place that Andrzej describes as being “like a ghost town that was wiped out by leprosy or cholera, but that hadn’t been discovered yet.” Piotrek then skips out on his girlfriend after Pilot’s death, telling Andrzej to keep an eye on her, though he “can fuck her once, it’s different with you, we grew up together, you’re practically my brother.” Instead, Andrzej opts to return to Binarowa, where he resumes his occasional relationship with the “much younger” 15-year-old Eleonora until he becomes a suspect in the disappearance of her six-year-old sister Mira. In “Wintering,” the collection’s standout story, Mira’s disappearance as she “walks into the dark” is juxtaposed with Andrzej’s memories of waiting for Eleonora, the mailman’s unrequited longing for the teenager, and a policeman’s lascivious thoughts as he questions the parents of the missing girl.

Andrzej’s return to the village is, at least initially, also an attempt to support his sister Henia, who gave birth to her first child, Dorotka, while he was away. The girl is fatherless, possibly the result of her mother’s rape, since Henia explains that Dorotka “didn’t come from the kind of love I’d have liked, that I dreamed of at night and didn’t want to wake up from. But that’s all I’ll say about that.” Dorotka and her young friend Anielka, who don’t interact in the book, are the two voices that most clearly display the many virtues of Webster’s translation. Dorotka can be sweet, as when she “lifts and kisses” each paw of the family’s 17-year-old dog Pepper, before telling the deaf and blind animal that they are “best friends forever.” And she can be blithely cruel, as when she blacks out the teeth of a model on a magazine cover and then parrots the kind of criticisms she’s grown up hearing, telling the woman in the photo, “You got what was coming to you. Go pig out and throw up.”

Anielka also loves animals but has more of a silly heart, introducing herself as being “three foot seven and weigh[ing] as much as an imported lamb.” Her first-person narrative is concerned with two things: her family’s new wood paneling and her father’s death, the latter conveyed by the almost mantra-like repetition of “Daddy in a ditch.” Through it all, the girl remains lighthearted. She talks about the family dog, Mongrel, and their little lamb, Teddy; Whiskers the cat and Ears the bunny; and even “our sow Luisa, who is now a sausage ring on the communion table.” And despite English not having the trailing declensions of Polish, Webster retains countless end rhymes in Anielka’s speech, such as “Me and you are rubber and glue, you’re the one who stinks of poo” and “Doctor, doctor, come here quick, because the cat is very sick.” These echoes of whimsical nursery rhymes crop up throughout the book, as with a longer one in Hanna’s chapter: “Not a glimpse, not a peep, something’s stirring while you sleep, maybe it’s coming for you today, or maybe it’ll get lost along the way, little girl, watch what you say.”

Hanna also tries to break away from the region, heading to the “big city” to pursue her education. The oldest and prettiest of her sisters, she’s the only one of the three to travel farther than the local market, nine miles away. She returns home dejected for reasons never explained and then later, three months before her sister Maria’s wedding, walks into the river with her pockets full of stones in an unsuccessful attempt to drown herself. Hanna gives perhaps the best explanation of the affliction dogging the locals: “They’re not consumed by sorrow in a single moment but throughout their lives, little by little, until suddenly they have nothing to breathe, they collapse, and for a while, it’s ‘He died, pity,’ or sometimes not even that—everyone goes home, waving goodbye, until the next grave is dug.”

Her sisters’ lives are also marked by loss and tragedy. Maria’s husband abandons her soon after they get married, and she becomes haunted by the spirits of the dead. And after Zofia’s lover, Franek, dies trying to rescue two girls from a burning house, she wanders around “searching for her dead fiancé” while continually miming the knotting of a hangman’s noose above her head as she teeters on her tiptoes.

Zofia’s tragedy illustrates how Honek slowly parcels out biographies over the course of several stories. We are first told that Zofia stops speaking in “Anielka,” where the title character explains, in her childlike way: “That’s what happened to her when they told her that her fiancé wasn’t coming back, because one day he went to sleep and he never woke up—so says Grandma.” Two stories later, in “Zofia,” the heartbroken young woman speaks for herself, letting on that she knows Franek is dead “cuz his head’s covered with earth,” but she doesn’t grasp what that means, explaining how she went around to visit him only for his father to “come at” her with boiling water before screaming, “If you want, you little tramp, you can go to cemetery hill in Rożnowice, if you dig around a bit you’ll find Franek there.”

In the subsequent story, “First the Hair Caught Fire,” an unnamed gravedigger recounts how “the earth burned” and Franek rushed into the Płaczek home, where 12-year-old Eleonora and her infant sister Helenka were trapped, “only he must have gazed at [Eleonora] too deeply, because a few weeks later he died in his sleep, and he was healthy, nothing wrong with him.” (It’s slightly confusing that White Nights has two distinct Eleonoras—the 12-year-old who dies in the fire and the 15-year-old who is sleeping with Andrzej.) Finally, in “The Funeral,” the girls’ mother, Agnieszka, recalls seeing Franek emerge from her burning home “carrying a log,” which becomes a deeply haunting image when we learn that Helenka’s coffin is empty because her body was never recovered. Honek’s collection Zimowanie includes poems titled “Helenka” and “Eleonora,” but unfortunately, neither is translated on Versopolis.

All this sadness makes clear why so many of these characters are determined to escape their region or at least find love as a lifeline in the darkness. We are also repeatedly shown and told that these efforts are futile, as when Maria hears “the cries of mothers, fainter, and the running of children, racing against something that will catch them anyway.” Or when Andrzej says that “you settle down when you remember that you came here not to live, but to die.” Staving off death for as long as possible is helped by avoiding the silence that traps you with your thoughts, even if you’re a kid like Dorotka, who puts “her hands over her ears just to hear the hum.” When Piotrek thinks back on “the day and the hour that they were putting Pilot in the grave,” he says that he “turned up the car radio as loud as it would go, so I wouldn’t hear that fucking silence.” Perhaps he was remembering a chronologically earlier funeral that he did attend, the one for Helenka and Eleonora that concludes White Nights on an incredibly powerful image—the dead girls’ devastated mother asking everyone in the procession to sing for her lost children, drowning out the silence together before it swallows them each individually.