The works of the outstanding Polish poet, writer and playwright Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz have been repeatedly published and staged in Latvia. The most recent was staging of Iwaszkiewicz’s story "The Maidens of Wilko" at the New Riga Theatre by Alvis Hermanis in 2000. For film lovers both in the world and in Latvia, Iwaszkiewicz was made known by film director Andrzej Wajda, who in 1979 produced an excellent screening of the same story.
The collection consists of two parts. The first incorporates the most chrestomatic of his works, the poetic story "The Maidens of Wilko", written by Iwaszkiewicz in Syracuse in 1932, during his first trip to Italy. It was once published in Latvian (translated by Irēna Birzvalka, 1993), but as Ingmāra Balode points out in the introduction to the book, "translations become obsolete, while works that haven’t become outdated deserve new interpretations".
The second part of the selection gives an insight into the work which is less familiar to Latvian readers – Iwaszkiewicz’s poetry, or more precisely his later poems, compiled under the title “Travel Poetry”.