Leaving Poland I come back to Poland

by Marek Radziwon 19-09-2005 19:31

Copyright Gazeta Wyborcza

An interview with Andrzej Stasiuk, the winner of the Nike Literary Prize for ‘Going to Babadag’ (‘Jadąc do Babadag’)

Marek Radziwon: Did you plan ‘Going to Babadag’ as a whole or did you simply travel and the book came into existence when you were travelling?

Andrzej Stasiuk: ‘Going to Babadag’ came into being just like ‘Tales of Galicia’ (‘Opowieści galicyjskie’) and ‘Dukla’; from unconnected texts, which started to make a whole with time. I think I never get down to writing with the thought of a book.
It usually comes out afterwards, when you cannot escape a topic; when I see that the subject cannot be described in a short text. ‘Babadag’ began as quite a small description of a few journeys.

Maybe it is a continuation of the same tale, which you have been spinning for years? Similar unimportant places and the same unimportant people?

Maybe. I describe a marginal reality, because my life was shaped in these kind of outskirts. I lived in Choszczówka near Warsaw in childhood, almost in the countryside, away from the city centre. Now I live on the edge of Poland and on the edge of Europe, moreover – a ‘second rank’ Europe. I am spinning the tale of a provincial.

This journey was started as a seventeen-year-old boy, who was hitch-hiking around the provinces. The Kołbie and Ryki road E-81 is mentioned in ‘How I became a writer’ (‘Jak zostałem pisarzem’).

I am an admirer of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’. I always wanted to write a Slavonic ‘On the Road’ and place it in a quite geographically limited and historically complicated space. I think, that something of my former sensitivity of a seventeen year old, who goes hitch-hiking, sleeps in ditches and generally is delighted by the world has remained in the book. In this sense the book is a Buddhist or Franciscan book – it says ‘yes’ to the world.

What is attractive in this part of Europe, which is absent in France or Spain?

I haven’t been to France or Spain and I’ve never thought about going there. I am simply interested in our part of the world, this central and eastern reality. My God, what would I be doing in France...

You write that you were in Babadag twice, but never longer than five minutes. Wouldn’t you want to slow down and touch a real person and write about them?

There is no individual, human story in this book, indeed. I wanted rather to write about geography, landscape, about the influence of material reality on the mind. Nevertheless, it is a human mind.

What does it depend on, that you stop somewhere for longer?.

‘Longer’ is only two, three days.

So why do you hurry so much?

What does ‘to stop’ mean? I’ve been to Albania every year for three years. A distant, small country, which is a certain miracle in Europe, and there is no end of my journeys in sight. I constantly think about the places I’ve been; I come back to them. On the table where I work there are always some maps of Albania, books about its history and the only Albanian dictionary in Poland, actually a phrasebook. So I ‘stopped’ there for long time. I am mentally there. The real travel takes place in the mind. You can spend a year somewhere and come back as the same fool as you were before. My wife and I came across a town Pogradec by Lake Ohrid. We came across it accidentally but it turned out to be an enchantment. We spent three days there. There used to be some of the biggest nickel mines in Europe. Today they are completely dead. The industrial ruins are left, crowds of retired miners in white shirts and straw hats on a promenade and Italo-Balkan architecture. Why we went there, why I stayed there, why do I still think about it and why would I like to go there again- I don’t know. I felt like I entered a painting or a film. Ruins of mines, palms and elegant Mediterranean villas. And a couple of pigs strolling along the main road.

We read that you collect stamps in your passport or old coins, very often from nonexistent countries, so do you take photos? And then put them in a family photograph album?

I took photos until recently, but I observed that it is harmful to writing. Once I told myself: oh, remember. And now I take a picture and I think: I have a picture so I’ll remind myself easily. In the end I am not as perceptive as I once was.

Are you interested in tourism in the normal sense?

I do not visit museums. I rather wander around the town, drink in the pubs and I try to have my eyes wide open. On the other hand, you can say after all, that Albania is one great museum: historical, ethnographical and at the same time the museum of the present time, sudden social changes.

And maybe you are disillusioned yourself by the myth you create – of unfinished, unnecessary and poor regions but sincere and natural in their helplessness.

The Balkans are a difficult love. I wouldn’t exaggerate that sincerity and especially the helplessness. On their Balkan scale they manage pretty well. Sometimes even too well. And superfluousness and poverty are the most important world problems. Of course I try to create a myth, because a myth is the essence of good literature. But I think it is never for me a myth of fairy-tale harmony. Sometimes I hate all these places, where I’ve been.

So what is it?

I don’t know. Once some young Germans came to me with the German edition of ‘Dukla’ and they said, that this book had made them visit the town. If literature has sometimes the power of forcing us to leave home and check if it is just like we read, then that’s quite a lot. Actually travel is caused by literature for me also. I succumb to the literary myth and I want to see this mythological, fictional region in reality. I go to different places described in the book and I check how the mechanisms of fiction work.
We reached Albania after journeys to Hungary and Romania. At first the thought of traveling to Albania was ridiculous to me and today I find it obvious.

Do you prepare yourself for those journeys?

Yes, but it turns out very quickly that the preparations are not worth much. Learning the country, getting to know it from books makes sense only after returning. Then I know, what I am reading about, I know what I miss. Sometimes it seems to me that the real journey starts after coming back home. In the mind, in dreams.

But you wouldn’t be pleased if ‘Going to Babadag’ was called travel literature. Because it is not the travel itself, but the encounter of another type of existence, a smell of other life and at the same time similar life?

In one of the Polish bookshops I saw ‘Dukla’ in the travel guides department. Then I thought: ‘Why not?’ ‘Going to Babadag’is fictitious and describes a boy from Poland trying to come to terms with his consciousness; about the way that another reality helps him understand and describe his own, Polish reality. And even more his own mental reality. So I wasn’t writing a reportage and I didn’t care about the truth. I rather tried to describe my own obsessions.

So another Babadag, about a journey through Poland could also be possible?

Of course. ‘Going to Babadag’ is not a book about a precise place. It is rather a tale about meditation in motion. Actually, Poland is also there. I leave it and come back to it continuously.

Many thanks to Hanna Siemaszko for the translation.