Esther Allen wrote recently: "The English book market is the world's largest and most transnational, but the elite group of writers across the globe who can feel sure that their books will be translated into English could all fit around a medium-sized conference table (and a very interesting meeting it would be)." One of those seats would now, with the forthcoming translation of In Red for Archipelago, be reserved for Magdalena Tulli. Bill Johnston, translator of her other books Dreams and Stones, Moving Parts, and Flaw kindly answered a few questions on this intriguing writer, and his future projects.

Was the idea to do the 'complete works' of Tulli there from the beginning?

Not at all. I had already decided to try and work on Dreams and Stones before any of her other books appeared—I read it back in 1996, soon after it came out, and fell in love with it. When In Red, the second book, was published in 1998 I did some extracts for Chicago Review and elsewhere. Then, when Archipelago picked up Dreams and Stones (which, if I remember correctly, was in 2002) and published it in 2004, the other books seemed to follow naturally.

How is Tulli perceived in Poland? Her influences (Calvino, etc.) would seem to suggest she does not naturally fit into current literary trends there.

It’s definitely true that Tulli is not part of the literary mainstream in Poland. In addition, she’s a very private character and has no interest in promoting herself through PR machines—she expresses herself first and foremost through her writing. Yet she is highly respected too—many critics, including Marek Zaleski and others, have done an excellent job of bringing her to the attention of the Polish readership.

What have been the main developments in her writing style between Dreams and Stones and Flaw?

In Dreams and Stones there are practically no people, or more precisely, no characters. It’s a novel about objects and about ways of seeing and explaining. The only actual character is the narrator, whose rather pedantic voice is our only clue to his existence. (Tulli and I disagree over what kind of book Dreams and Stones actually is—Tulli claims it’s a novel, whereas for me it’s a prose poem.) In her subsequent books Tulli gradually introduces narrative, though she does so in a very tentative and self-aware way (this is why she’s sometimes accused, wrongly, of writing “meta-fiction”). In In Red she retells the story three times; the plot of Moving Parts (Tryby) also unexpectedly changes course at several moments. It’s only in Flaw that she settles into a single narrative arc that carries through the entire book.

Although the Holocaust is an obvious reference in Flaw, is there also an allusion to current political realties in Poland? Are there other references that would be lost on the non-Polish reader?

I think Flaw is intended to be read as a universal parable. While the treatment of the Jews in the Second World War is a clear point of reference, Tulli has been adamant in noting that Jews are not explicitly mentioned in the book. The refugees are simply Others, and the story resonates with numerous cases in recent history in which politicians have drawn stark lines between previously co-existing communities—whether it’s Shiite and Sunni in Iraq, Serb, Croat, and Muslim in former Yugoslavia, “Arab” vs. “African” (highly inaccurate labels, by the way) in Sudan, or whatever. For me, the power of Tulli’s prose is that she is able to distil from these highly differing contexts a simple and powerful storyline that pulls them together. To answer the first part of your question, Tulli has been very concerned at the drawing of such lines in Poland in recent years, most egregiously under the Kaczyński government but going far beyond that. The homophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, and anti-communist rhetoric one hears is a harbinger of the kind of thing Tulli describes in Flaw. So yes, present-day Poland is very definitely part of the story.

Archipelago appears to have established a viable alternative to the university presses where Polish translations tend to be found. What lessons do you draw from this experience for the future of Polish literature in English?

Obviously I’m a huge fan of Archipelago, but I’m not sure one can draw lessons here—we should simply be grateful that they’re publishing so much great literature from all kinds of languages. As a translator I’ve always striven not to ghettoize Polish literature but to get it out among its peers—to have Polish writers sit alongside writers working in other languages, and amongst books that regular readers will be interested in. Right now I think Polish literature is in excellent shape—contemporary writers like Tulli, Tokarczuk, Chwin, Stasiuk, Masłowska, and Pilch are all beginning to be published by good presses, Gombrowicz and Różewicz have had revivals, and poets like Tomasz Różycki, Anna Kamieńska, and others are appearing in good English translations. And lastly, alongside Archipelago there are several other presses doing excellent work in promoting world literature, including things Polish—I’m thinking in particular of houses like New Directions, Green Integer, Dalkey Archive, and the new Open Letter.

Archipelago also tend not to include many notes or translator's introductions. Is this a conscious intention for the work to stand on its own?

I can only speak about my own translations with Archipelago. I’ve always tried to minimize paratext in any form, and my hope is always that a work ought to be able to stand either completely or mostly alone—this is certainly the case with Tulli, who simply needs to be read carefully. You don’t need to know a lot of Polish history or culture to “get” her, I think. For me, footnotes and so on are a major part of the ghettoization of small literatures I referred to above, and I avoid them whenever I can—they make texts look like academic treatises rather than novels to be read and enjoyed.

A significant number of authors who came to prominence in the 1990s have now made it into English. Are there any newer writers you are keen to translate?

A current project of mine is the translation of Tomasz Różycki’s brilliant 2004 epic poem Dwanaście stacji or Twelve Stations. He’s by far the outstanding poet of his generation (he was born in 1970); his lyric poetry has been (and is being) translated wonderfully by Mira Rosenthal, and I’m going to have a go at this longer piece.

You recently won the 'Found in Translation' prize for your translations of Rozewicz, and are unsusual among translators in that you work in both prose and poetry. Do you have plans to do more poetry?

Definitely. Aside from the Różycki project, I have a book of poems by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki coming out this year with Zephyr Press—he’s a superb poet from the generation that emerged in the 1990’s. He has a unique voice, and I’m delighted that he’ll be made available in English.

Bill Johnston has not only managed to become one of the country’s most prolific translators of Polish literature, he has also demonstrated an extraordinary versatility in crossing borders between epochs, styles, and genres – combining his pitch-perfect ear for Polish with a dedicated effort to make accessible to Americans and other English speakers Polish works hitherto regarded as accessible only to Poles – and thus handling with equal grace such classics as the early XIX century poetry of Juliusz Slowacki and the post-1989 novels of Andrzej Stasiuk or Magdalena Tulli. No translator-for-hire, he creatively seeks out works that he loves but are not known in the U.S. such as the poetry of Baczynski and Rozewicz. He has been a major contributor to the relatively recent and enthusiastic discovery by Americans of Witold Gombrowicz. For his extraordinary service in the promotion of Polish culture, this brilliant translator has not only been honored by the Polish government but is warmly embraced by American readers as an ambassador of Polish literature in the US.

more here. From the Quarterly Conversation:

Archipelago chose Rozewicz's collection as one of their picks for the 2007 "Reading the World" program, a three-year-old collaboration between publishers and independent bookstores that seeks to encourage readers to explore works in translation. It was a wise choice: while reading new poems, the reader is not only pulled in, and occasionally transfixed, by Rozewicz's own voice, but also becomes aware of the entire Polish literary tradition. Rozewicz is a sort of literary nexus: in poem after poem he alludes to other major Polish writers, both living and dead. Most readers will need to rely on Johnston's notes to understand the bulk of these references, but Rozewicz would need no guide to our culture, as his own knowledge seems encyclopedic. The poems contain German quotations and references to Shakespeare, they speak of contemporary European politics and the War on Terror; reading Rozewicz, one is ashamed that we have so little knowledge of his world. Either as a work in its own right or as an open door onto a hitherto unknown national literature, new poems is well worth reading.

Rarely is the writing plain or straightforward; generally he prefers the exaggerated and circuitous. Typically: All roads had now led to the end of the year, by wings above, by corridors below, their moles already sleepy, and first of all, to be sure, by streets. It doesn't always make for easy reading -- and, to repeat: Tworki is a narrative that constantly defies expectations, a story that is, on some levels very simple, and yet one in which Bieńczyk never allows the reader to simply bob along. Not easy, or easy to take, Tworki is also a powerful work of fiction. In part that is also because of the unusual -- or at least atypical -- approach(es) Bieńczyk takes, a welcome change from so much of the literature about the times. Unusual, but worthwhile.

Read more at the Complete Review

Paper only, get your copy here, a very interesting wide ranging interview:

There was movement called Young Poland, which was mostly centered around Kraków, where there were some extremely interesting things going on. In drama, for example, there was a writer called Stanisław Wyspiański who wrote a play called The Wedding which is, after Mickiewicz’s play Forefather’s Eve, probably the most important play in the Polish theatrical canon. That was premiered in 1901. The other really huge presence in the period immediately preceding the 30’s and Modernism was a writer called Stefan Żeromski. He died in 1925, and at the time he died he was absolutely lionized.

He was like the Miłosz of his time, in terms of his stature within the country. He’d written these novels which very much addressed the nationalistic kinds of issues. He wrote some historical books, he wrote a number of books looking at the condition of the urban poor, especially. Like Zola, in a sense, you know, literature with kind of a social conscience. I think it’s interesting, coming back to Gombrowicz, that in Gombrowicz’s memoir he specifically quotes Żeromski and Żeromski’s diary. He does it in a moment where Gombrowicz has decided that he’s finally going to go and visit Kraków, this great historical city, which he’s resisted doing for a long time. When he goes there he starts thinking of Żeromski’s diaries and how Żeromski had been there. Żeromski had this kind of romantic, effusive response to the city and its buildings and Gombrowicz kind of ironizes that response, but also with a sense of his own inadequacy that he isn’t capable of that kind of a response to Polish history and these great monuments of the past and so on. So all of those things were going on and you know, Żeromski died just about 10 years, less than 10 years, before Gombrowicz’s debut, so he was a very strong influence on that generation that emerged during the period in between the World Wars.

"When I finish a book," he says, "I hope that some images will settle in my mind. I hope there are some of those in the book – powerful images for readers to take away."

Read more here. Via the The Complete Review.

Your latest book is an anthology of Polish literature from 1918 to 2000 (in press), and you have edited five earlier volumes which cover the periods from the Middle Ages to Young Poland. How do you go about selecting pieces which can represent the entire works?

In my anthologies I aim at presenting the canonical works of a given period, beginning with the Middle Ages, the formative period of Polish culture. There is general agreement in Poland concerning the canon, at least until the twentieth century. However, selection of pieces which can represent entire works is a more complicated matter. My main criteria in selecting them were the literary quality and representativeness of content, as reflected in the abundance of styles and genres. In general, I selected passages that best showed the essence of the given works. I also considered the historical importance of the texts. Thus, for example, in Medieval Literature of Poland, I found it relatively easy to choose Mother of God, considered the oldest religious poem, which became a national anthem, sung before battles and at important state and religious festivities. But when it came to Gallus’s Polish Chronicle, an extensive history of Poland written in the twelfth century, I spent some time before selecting a vivid passage about Piast, the legendary patriarch of the dynasty, another about the military deeds of Bolesław the Brave, the first king, and another about the martyrdom of Bishop Adalbert, the first patron saint of Poland.
I attempted to document the richness of Polish poetry, prose, and drama by displaying a variety of texts, e.g., chronicles, annals, lives of the saints, satires, fables, songs, epic poems, epigrams, treatises, letters, memoirs, comedies, tragedies, elegies, short stories, novels, and science fiction.

The anthologies are intended for an English speaking audience. Is it sometimes the case that the reception of certain Polish writers in a foreign context differs from the critical consensus in Poland? Are there any cases where ‘big names’ from the period, who found great public as well as critical acclaim, are no longer regarded as important?

Yes, quite often. It also changes with time. Henryk Sienkiewicz, the1905 Nobel Prize winner in literature, may serve as an example. The best selling author in Poland, United States, and many other countries during his lifetime, he is still the most popular novelist in Poland, but almost unknown in the United States. It may be because the genre of epic historical romances lost its appeal for the modern reader. Similarly, the novels of Walter Scott are largely forgotten nowadays. Also, changing aesthetic criteria and linguistic barriers may account to a certain degree for this state of affairs. But even in the community of English language readers we find that some writers and poets, e.g., John Betjeman, the most popular and admired British poet of the twentieth century, remain virtually unknown in the States.
Two other Polish novelists, Bolesław Prus and Władysław Reymont, won public admiration and critical acclaim in the United States in the past, but are not well-known here any more. In Poland, however, Prus’s novel of ancient Egypt, The Pharaoh, and his novel of Warsaw, The Doll, sell in thousands of copies and come to life on screen. Reymont’s Peasants, a four-volume epic about four seasons, depicting the universal cycle of nature and village life as well as a the fierce struggle for land and passionate love for a woman, is admired by readers and film enthusiasts to this day. Both writers deserve to be republished in English.
I should add that many, if not a majority of Polish writers, are almost unknown to an English language audience. My goal in preparing these anthologies has been to introduce them to the readers so that they could at least be in a position to form their own opinions.

Have you retranslated the extracts for these anthologies or have you also used the translations from the period?

The six volumes of my anthology feature over 200 authors and over 800 selections, on almost 1,900 pages. All translations are mine. Many of them have been done for the first time. I have retranslated excerpts rendered into English by other translators for a number of reasons. The most important was to maintain a uniform method and style of translation, i.e., to provide faithful and philologically accurate texts, preserving at the same time metric and stanzaic regularity. In general, I endeavored to reproduce the character and spirit of the original works in the most natural language. In order to provide the context for my translations, I presented them against the historical, cultural, and literary background of the times.

For those of us outside the academy, could you tell us a little about the state of Slavic studies? Are there particular critical trends that are having impact?

Two major currents are causing changes in Slavic studies. A postwar canon imposed in Poland and other countries was based on communist ideology and political considerations. Consequently, communist propagandists, supported by obliging literary critics, censors, and publishers promoted certain mediocre books to the rank of best-sellers and instant classics, while sentencing major works, e.g., Herling-Grudziński’s A World Apart, into oblivion. In addition, writers who lived in the West, e.g., Wierzyński, Mackiewicz, and Tyrmand, were treated as non-persons, while their works were banned and practically unavailable in Poland. That political canon was rejected after 1990, bringing about a major process of literary reevaluation.
The second, much broader current, affects the ways of analyzing literature. Shifting historical, cultural, and social norms motivate scholars to engage in interdisciplinary studies and to employ new approaches to literary analysis, for example, the theories of colonialism, nationalism, and exile. By rereading literature according to these theoretical tenets, scholars contribute to the formation of a new canon.

Finally, could you tell us what you are working on next, or any particular works you would like to see translated?

I am just finishing a translation of extended sections of Mikołaj Hussowski’s Poem on Bison, a sixteenth century epic poem describing that awe-inspiring animal in its natural habitat of the European primeval forest. There is much work to be done before a general picture of Polish literature from its beginnings to the end of the nineteenth century is adequately presented. In contemporary literature, I like very much Wiesław Myśliwski’s books, e.g., Stone Upon Stone, and Jarosław Maria Rymkiewicz’s poetry. I included excerpts from their works in the last volume of my anthology, but in the future I would like to give them more attention.

Bibliography in English:

Polish Literature from 1864 to 1918. Realism and Young Poland. An Anthology. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2006

"The Virgin Mary's Crown. A Bilingual Anthology of Medieval Polish Marian Poetry." Selected, edited, and translated by Roman Mazurkiewicz and Michael J. Mikos. Krakow: Collegium Columbinum, 2002. Krakow: Collegium Columbinum, 2002.

Polish Literature from the Middle Ages to the End of the Eighteenth Century. A Bilingual Anthology. Selected and translated by Michael J. Mikos. Warszawa: Constans, 1999

Polish romantic literature : an anthology / Michael J. Mikos. Publisher: Columbus, Ohio : Slavica Publishers, c1999.

Polish Baroque and Enlightenment Literature An Anthology, edited, translated, and with commentary by Michael J. Mikos Columbus, Ohio : Slavica Publishers, c1996.

Polish renaissance literature : an anthology / Michael J. Mikos. Columbus, Ohio : Slavica Publishers, c1995.

Medieval literature of Poland : an anthology / translated by Michael J. Mikos. New York : Garland Pub., 1992.

Eliza Orzeszko, the authoress of "The Argonauts" is the greatest female writer and thinker in the Slav world at present. There are keen and good critics, just judges of thought and style, who pronounce her the first literary artist among the women of Europe.

These critics are not Western Europeans, for Western Europe has no means yet of appreciating this gifted woman. No doubt it will have these means after a time in the form of adequate translations. Meanwhile I repeat that she is the greatest authoress among all the Slav peoples. She is a person of rare intellectual distinction, an observer of exquisite perception in studying men and women, and the difficulties with which they have to struggle.

Who are the Slavs among whom Eliza Orzeszko stands thus distinguished?

The Slavs form a very large majority of the people in Austria-Hungary, an immense majority in European Turkey, and an overwhelming majority in the Russian Empire; they are besides an unyielding, though repressed, majority in that part of Prussian territory known as Posen in German, and Poznan in Polish.

The Slav race occupies an immense region extending from Prussia, Bohemia, and the Adriatic eastward to the Pacific Ocean. Its main divisions are the Russians, Poles, Bohemians (Chehs), Serbs, Bulgarians; its smaller divisions are the Slovaks, Wends, Slovinians, Croats, Montenegrins. These all have literature in some form, literature which in respect to the world outside is famous, well known, little known, or unknown.

The Slavs have behind them a history dramatic to the utmost, varied, full of suffering, full also, of heroism in endurance or valor.

The present time is momentous for all nations, the future is a tangled riddle; for the Slavs this seems true in a double measure. To involved social problems is added race opposition in the breasts of neighbors, a deep, sullen historic hostility. Hence when a writer of power appears among the Slavs, whether he takes up the past or the present, he has that at hand through which he compels the whole world to listen. Sienkiewicz has shown this, so has Tolstoy, so have Dostoyevski and Gogol.

The present volume gives in translation a book which should be widely read with much pleasure. The winning of money on an immense scale to the neglect of all other objects, to the neglect even of the nearest duties, is the sin of one Argonaut; the utter neglect of money and the proper means of living is the ruin of the other.

Darvid by "iron toil" laid the basis of a splendid structure, but went no farther; he had not the time, he had not the power, perhaps, to build thereon himself, and his wife, to whom he left the task, had not. the character to do so. By neglect of duty Darvid is brought to madness; by neglect of money Kranitski is brought to be a parasite, and when he loses even that position he is supported by a servant.

The right use of wealth, the proper direction of labor, these are supreme questions in our time, and beyond all in America.

Friends have advised Madame Orzeszko to visit this country and study it; visit Chicago, the great business centre, the most active city on earth, and New York, the great money capital. If she comes she will see much to rouse thought. What will she see? That we know how to win money and give proper use to it? Whatever she sees, it will be some- thing of value, that is undoubted; something that may be compared with European conditions, something to be compared with the story in this book.

Eliza Orzeszko writes because she cannot help writing; her works, contained in forty-odd volumes, touch on the most vital subjects in the world about her. She tells the truth precisely as she sees it. We may hope for much yet from the pen of this lady, who is still in the best years of her intellectual activity.

Madame Orzeszko was born a little more than fifty years ago in Lithuania, that part of the Commonwealth which produced Mickiewicz, the great poet, and Kosciuszko the hero.

Jeremiah Curtin. Bristol, Vt., U. S. A. , September 12, 1901.

The Argonauts by Eliza Orzeszko full text in html

From Marie Busch's introduction to Selected Polish Tales translated by Else C. M. Benecke and Marie Busch:

My friend the late Miss Else C. M. Benecke left a number of Polish stories in rough translation, and I am carrying out her wishes in editing them and handing them over to English readers. In spite of failing health during the last years of her life, she worked hard at translations from this beautiful but difficult language, and the two volumes, _Tales by Polish Authors_ and _More Tales by Polish Authors_, published by Mr. Basil Blackwell at Oxford, were among the first attempts to make modern Polish fiction known in this country. In both these volumes I collaborated with her. ... My share in the work has been to put Miss Benecke's literal translation into a form suitable for publication, and to get into touch with the authors or their representatives, to whom I would now tender my grateful thanks for their courteous permission to issue this volume, viz. to Mme Glowacka, widow of 'Prus', to the sons of the late Mr. Szymánski, to MM. Zeromski, Reymont, Kaden-Bandrowski, and to Mme Rygier-Nalkowska, all of Warsaw.

Many thanks to Eric Eldred & Marvin A. Hodges & the Gutenberg team for making this available to the world.

On the occasion of the publication of Waiting for the Dog to Sleep by Jerzy Ficowski, Polish Writing interviews Soren Gauger, co-translator with Marcin Piekoszewski.

How did you end up living in Poland?

I was living in Vancouver, I had finished a degree in English literature and was spending all my free time doing research into inter-war Polish literature (all the more attractive because it was virtually inaccessible in Vancouver) and listening to Penderecki and Lutosławski, and was much more passionate about these things than anything Canadian (with the exception of my girlfriend, who was, luckily, just as excited about leaving as I was). Polish literature was unhinged, hermetic, and remarkably expressive, and I immediately identified with it. Canadian writing, in contrast, seemed (and often still seems) unenthusiastic, gentlemanly and provincial. The only work I could imagine doing for a living was translation, but I wasn’t particularly competent in any foreign language. I thought I’d move to Poland, learn the language, and become a translator. Well, and that’s more or less the way it went.

What do you make of the Polish literary scene - do any of the younger generation of Polish writers interest you?

Here I will admit with a slight reddening of the cheeks that I read very few contemporary writers, some exceptions being: Ismail Kadare, Jakov Lind, Peter Handke, Vladimir Makanin and Ryszard Kapuścinski (who is no spring chicken). Polish literature at present is suffering a rash of literature about the new lumpen proletariat, dissecting the life of vodka, slums, and unemployment. At the other extreme, you have a swiftly diminishing vanguard of Nobel Prize winners and their ilk writing their last books, and it sometimes feels like there is not much going on in between.

The youngest of those you mention was born in 1942(!). What do you find in them that is missing in younger writers?

Well, we’re touching upon a hypocrisy of mine as a young writer, but I have a lot of difficulty getting interested in hot young talents. This has to do with a distaste for how writing is marketed and promoted, an impatience with the lack of gravity, and a general impression that we are currently enduring a period post-stylization (to reference Wylie Sypher) in which minor art forms thrive and major ones are forced to make do with virtuosi and derivative figures. Part of the problem seems to be: there is an aspect of myth orbiting around writing I admire. Myth can build around a dead writer of intelligence. How does a living writer lend his/her work the stuff of myth?

If not the lumpen proletariat, what should they be writing about?

The problem with realism is that it seeks to side-step the question of what motivates a piece of writing, it is a ready-made solution through which the writer obviates tiresome difficulties vis a vis what is to be said. If you take an Important Societal Problem from the world around you, this more often than not substitutes for an endeavour to address a problem that is artistically serious. Furthermore, when reading a socially/politically provacative piece I feel like one of those Medieval illiterates for whom were painted the lives of the Saints so that they might understand their religion in an entertaining way. I neither need nor desire a 'dramatization' of a social problem to make me understand it or feel its import, a scholarly article will do just fine. Finally, as Bruno Schulz once said: It is the role of the author to make problems for society, not the other way around.

Your collection of short stories Hymns for Millionaires has just been published by Twisted Spoon. How much of an impact has living and working in Poland had on your writing?

Vast, mainly because Vancouver offers a fairly oppressive creative climate. It could be as well that a certain type of creative personality requires space, whether actual or imagined, to get on with the business of writing (see under: Beckett, Cortazar etc.). I’ve been exposed to a great deal of writing, theatre, cinema and visual art that I would never have encountered in Canada, and I’ve learned a great deal about artistic - and religious - seriousness (though I’m non-religious myself). Kraków has a Catholic Intellectuals’ Club, something which strikes the Canadian mind at first as a contradiction in terms.

Is globalization having an energizing or homogenizing effect on this culture?

It's hard to imagine globalization 'energizing' much of anything interesting, but the more I travel in Central Europe, the more I become convinced that the entire concept of globalization is a fabrication of the megalomaniac West. There are villages in Rumania that have no televisions, newspapers or radios and get all their information through town criers with drums and trumpets. How relevant could it be to speak of globalization in such circumstances? And this just a hair's breadth outside of the EU. Thus far Polish culture is holding its own admirably well, even in Warsaw to some extent, and I see little hope for Poland outside of Polish culture.

Is it meaningful to speak of a community of expat anglophone writers in Central and Eastern Europe?

Maybe in Prague. Kraków is a better place to live because it feels like a Polish city which has no interest in pandering to tourists, and no-one seems to be reading Hemingway with a sigh. There’s an American writer in Prague named Josh Cohen whose work I admire. That’s about as far as my ‘literary circle’ extends.

What made you decide to translate Ficowski's stories?

My first translation idea was Ludwik Sztyrmer, a 19th-century Polish writer who lived in St. Petersburg and wrote a series of novellas falling somewhere between Lawrence Sterne and Jan Potocki. I sent 30 pages around to a few publishing houses, and was basically told it was unpublishable. So I set my sights on something a bit more pragmatic, and sought out a living writer whose sensibilities I admired, and who would present a challenge. I came to Ficowski via Bruno Schulz, and was excited to find his stories fascinating literature unto themselves.

Ficowski first came to prominence collecting roma gypsy stories - there is a description in Izabel Fonesca's 'Bury Me Standing' of his involvement in education programmes and failed attempts to settle them in places like Nowa Huta. How do you see him in terms of his place in Polish literature compared to the writers of the former underground/opposition?

Ficowski’s place has nearly always been fairly peripheral (except at one point during the 70's, when he wrote a novelty hit pop song about a gypsy wagon - a memory which causes him no small degree of embarrassment at present). It seems he got on badly with Miłosz, and his name was not even given a footnote in the latter’s History of Polish Literature, which seems, to say the least, a curious oversight. But his eightieth birthday was a cause for some hoopla in Warsaw recently, and his poetry is quite well represented in English-language anthologies (even more so than Polish ones, it seems).

He is best known as biographer of Bruno Schulz - how detectable is his influence in Ficowski's work?

This is a complicated question. The one time I met with Ficowski, he told me that Schulz had no successful literary heirs (I think a point can be made for Danilo Kis, but this by the by). Ficowski’s own stories are a compelling argument for the impossibility of Schulzian purity post-Holocaust. Whereas Schulz’s childhood and Drohobycz form a core for his unique mythological expansion of reality, Ficowski’s stories time and again veer into the Holocaust or a post-Holocaust landscape, no matter how divergently they begin. What fascinates me is Ficowski’s apparent powerlessness... The course of his narratives reads as less pre-meditated than helpless before memory, helpless before History. The results are manifold. Schulz I think of as a writer with a sense of and belief in the tragic, however absurdly it manifested itself. He was writing myth, the fabric of which the Father character’s transformations do not rupture but confirm. Ficowski’s characters are often also in various stages of reverse evolution, but they are turning into objects of maximum insignificance, rubble or stones, they are observers or victims of slow and monotonous decay. ‘Inertia’ is a word that crops up more than once. It is hard to speak of tragedy in such circumstances, except perhaps in a universal sense.

What difficuties did/do you encounter in the translation? What methods do you use to resolve these?

Apart from Ficowski’s incredibly rich vocabulary, which from time to time stumps even my erudite and invaluable co-translator (Marcin Piekoszewski), Ficowski has a weakness for rare plant and insect names (he has devoted time to studying entomology) and words affiliated with Judaism (he has translated from Yiddish, in addition to Russian and Roma), a penchant for neologisms, and a propensity to build a Polish sentence so that it seems to flip inside out, aiming to defamiliarise the Polish reader, i.e. by not sounding exactly ‘Polish.’ Replicating this too faithfully in English makes for sentences that simply read like bad translations. The fine line is in maintaining the stylistic integrity of the text without making a fool of myself as a translator. Finally, Ficowski once told me that he sometimes chooses words for their sound more than their significance (only one way in which Ficowski the fiction writer reminds us that his day job is writing poetry), because they are beautiful as words. Obviously, their English equivalents are not always so attractive.

Translated literature is widely perceived as being progressively squeezed out of the market. Do you agree with this, and if so what can/ should be done about it?

Was it ever hot on the market? Sadly, there’s no conning people into having a sense of adventure when choosing what to read. And foreign cultures can be so pretentious (N.B. there is currently a harmful misunderstanding afoot between the terms ‘pretentious’ and ‘intellectual’). It’s so much pleasanter and more sociable to let book clubs do the deciding for you.

Who else would you like to translate?

I've been enjoying the futurists and catastrophists a great deal lately, Wat's essays and 'My Century' (the English translation of which was butchered to half-size), Bruno Jasienski, who is entirely unknown in English and whose "I'm Setting Fire to Paris" has some of the most magnificent passages I've read for a while, and Julian Tuwim's "Ball at the Opera" (which is probably untranslatable). If I had my way, I'd compile and translate something of a "Jasienski Reader," with some of his poetry and fiction. Jozef Weyssenhoff's "The Life and Thoughts of Zygmunt Podfilipski," written at the end of the 19th century, has a strange "Pale Fire"-esque appeal to it and deserves to be known.

Salt Monody is available from Zephyr Press.

Copyright © Marzanna Bogumiła Kielar , translation copyright © Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese, reproduced by kind permission of the author

***

low shore of the night before us; cold; wet dunes
are coming closer; black in the gusts of rain,
as if light were finally freeing
itself from matter. The lane cuts its curved runner
into the dusk, as into a shoal of embers,
cooled; broken to lumps, the element
rolls over the beach, scatters, throws dust
into the air niche;
we’re not switching the lamp on. Silent, stunned;
our bedroom like an empty resort, a blind shell,
as in the sea rumbling opposite

***

sun setting in August: a drop
revives the night

with the tip of my tongue to touch
this moisture

Telephone

you were burning dry branches and weeds
– I heard fire rustle in the receiver, your whistle when the dogs
once again tried to get at the mole-hills where yesterday

we picked plums from among the rampant grass;
evening drew near – the wind blew breath
into its puppy muzzle.

The sticky prunes, we ate them for supper.
I was leafing through a book on water gardens, photographs
of marsh plants – I wanted to memorize their names: marsh marigold,

sedge, floating pond-weed –
when suddenly you said, “I would like to die
before you.”

In your country house, yesterday, I watched you fall asleep
reading – sleep like a backwash
sewed up the oar of your body.

I took the book out of your hands, switched off the light.
The rib of night
was shining in the branches

***

we ran into harsh shadow of an oak, with our dog, in February full moon.
And we were like magpies

in a burnt-out air hole, like trout
thrown into crushed ice

Thaw

as if the weight of a snapping branch stripped off the bark, revealed
the pulp of a living tree –

daybreak; flat splinters enter the thawing pond,
strew the gate and roof of the empty greenhouse.
The bark on the trunk of the night dries out
and bursts – from the ground to the crown’s base,
and touchwood lights up.
But the colors deepen, gain brilliance, clarity,
as if life were yet to begin.
In the snow, veins open up, full of clotted grass, sand,
burgeoning silt –

crows drink from them

The Hawk

water fabric creased by a cold wind, marine-blue, heavy,
torn; the wing-flutter, impetuous,
far from shore – in the sun the lake glints,
a steel blade;

blood, materia prima. Headlong it combs through
the abyss that engulfs,
throttles it