Polish Writing interviews Benjamin Paloff on translating Snow White and Russian Red by Dorota Masłowska:

Polish Writing: How did you become interested in Polish literature?

Benjamin Paloff: I was seventeen when I first started reading Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert, and it wasn't long before I had made my way to other Polish poets, as well as to the extraordinary richness of Polish poetic prose (Bruno Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz). In college I majored in Slavic literature, and I am currently at work on my doctoral dissertation, a comparative study of Russian, Polish, and Czech literatures between the World Wars.

Much as I love Polish literature for its own peculiarities, that interest has always been connected powerfully to other literatures, both in Europe and in North America. I came to Slavic literature through contemporary American poetry, finding when I was in high school that my favorite poets frequently wrote about and promoted writers in Central and Eastern Europe who seemed wondrously exotic. I began reading these other poets--among them Vasko Popa, Osip Mandel'shtam, and Miroslav Holub--and was so entranced that, by the time I got to college, I had decided that this was a pretty amazing way to spend my time. Since then, reading Slavic literatures has inevitably infected how I read English and American literatures, and vice-versa.

Do you keep up with contemporary literature from Russia and the Czech Republic? Do you observe similar trends in the three countries?

I try to keep abreast with developments in contemporary literature in Russia and the Czech Republic, and especially in the United States, which is inevitably the alpha and omega of my literary interests, however far my professional engagement with Eastern and Central Europe draws me afield. Needless to say, staying informed about new writing in the US, Russia, Poland, and the Czech Republic, while also maintaining a healthy curiosity about world literature in general, is nearly impossible. Much as the Internet and the availability of print media ease one's efforts to engage new writing abroad, literature remains at the center of living culture. As such, I think that one has to be on the ground--reading the journals, hearing the word-of-mouth, attending the readings, speaking the language--in order to get a good sense of what's going on. In recent years, I've been fortunate to spend at least a few weeks a year in each of these countries. That's not always adequate, but it's a start. The only solution is to live everywhere at once.

Masłowska offers us a tragicomic novel in which the intercultural conflicts of globalization become intertwined with the less monumental, though no less serious, personal crises of adolescence. There are certainly other novels that have approached similar topics in contemporary Eastern and Central European literature, but I haven't come across any that have done so as persuasively or with as much linguistic energy. Of course, the authors in Russia and the Czech Republic who actively engage "postmodern" themes are inevitably older and more experienced than Masłowska. Among these, the Russian novelist and short-story writer Viktor Pelevin is well-known in English, though for my taste his pop-culture references and metafictional maneuvers have grown increasingly dull. Another Russian author, Boris Akunin, has enjoyed extraordinary popular success, despite almost total obscurity in English. But he is less interested in representations of modern-day conflict than in genre games; his two series of clever turn-of-the-century detective novels have been particularly well-received. The postmodern literary trends are also different in the Czech Republic, where Jiri Kratochvil and Daniela Hodrova--an extremely accomplished literary theorist as well as a novelist--are exploring fiction as a vehicle for theory, or perhaps the other way around. In all this, it may be possible to say that Masłowska is sui generis.

How did you get the task of translating Snow White and Russian Red?

At the time, I had just published a translation of Witold Gombrowicz's story "The Rat." Amy Hundley, the marvelous editor at Grove/Atlantic who spearheaded the effort to bring Maslowska to an English-speaking audience, contacted me to see if I would be interested in taking a stab at the novel. Maslowska was already quite the sensation in Poland, and I admit that I had had some skepticism about the book, since the journalistic tendency had been to focus on the author's youth and on the relentless vulgarity of her language, and therefore to skip over her deft narration and the remarkable originality and skillfulness of her prose. After having spent a little time with the book, however, I was hooked. I translated a small sample for Grove, which I believe was considering several translators for the project, and I was fortunate to have been awarded the contract.

While Maslowska appears to fit in the tradition of bleak portrayals of working class life, there's a very playful side to her writing - is she in fact playing with the genre itself?

Maslowska's novel is certainly playful, at least insofar as she energizes her prose with an extraordinary mix of linguistic registers, occasionally bending a sentence to the breaking point of sense. In a single line, we can identify street slang, legalese, advertising slogans, and more. With due consideration for the originality of Maslowska's writing, however, we can place her strategies within a continuum of achievements in twentieth-century Polish fiction. Most notably, she bears comparison to Witold Gombrowicz, whose language games did not diminish, but deepened the philosophical import of his prose.

Is she in some way satirising the more gloomy realism of many contemporary Polish Writers?

Yes, I think so, though one must also note that Maslowska is necessarily poking fun at herself, at her entire generation's peculiar dance between ravenous consumerism and pre-fab rebellion. Her narrator/protagonist is a rebel without a cause, and his hare-brained political rants make for some of the novel's most amusing and ridiculous passages.

The way she inserts herself as a character in the book also seems to indicate a lack of literary gravity - is this conscious postmodernism or something else?

The fictionalization of oneself in the literary work is not exclusively postmodern or, for that matter, necessarily lighthearted. Again, it is something one sees repeatedly in Polish modernism (again, Gombrowicz's self-referential fiction makes an excellent example). And while Maslowska seems to find genuine pleasure in mixing the sacred and the profane--in language, as well as in her treatment of culture--one cannot ignore the seriousness of this play. The notion that Poland is perpetually caught between East and West picked up its greatest momentum in the early nineteenth century, when Adam Mickiewicz declared Poland to be the "Christ of nations," crucified by foreign powers that occupied and partitioned the country. I think that there was a strong sense in the 1990s that, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the establishment of an independent and democratic Poland (now a member-state of the European Union), this feeling of being torn in all directions would evaporate from Polish cultural discourse. Maslowska's novel reminds us that this is not the case.

In your essay for Words Without Borders you write that she can be compared to Zadie Smith or Jonathan Safran Foer - does that extend to showing influences of these or other young international writers?

This is difficult to say. Both Smith and Foer are translated into Polish, but I do not believe that they had been by the time Masłowska wrote her novel. The reading that she describes in her interviews is quite varied, from the popular press to Bruno Schulz to Henry Miller. She is certainly engaged with contemporary literature, perhaps especially with writers who came to public attention in the 1990s; in Poland today, these poets and novelists frequently write for magazines and newspapers and, in this way, remain within the public eye, as Masłowska has herself.

She has been so feted so soon in her career, is she in danger of becoming the next Manuela Gretkowska, where the writer seems now to have overshadowed the writing?

Far be it from me to speculate on the future productivity of another writer. Literary history is littered with writers who may have been destroyed by their own notoriety, though there are at least as many examples of writers who were energized by it. This is an extremely accomplished and timely novel, and as readers and writers we should probably be grateful that it has received the attention it deserves.

I notice the design for the English version will be the same as the Polish. How much did the packaging contribute to the book's success?

Grove Press has decided admirably to preserve many of the design elements from the Polish edition, including Krzysztof Ostrowski's wonderful illustrations. Whether people actually do judge books by their covers, who knows? But I'm glad that this book has come out so beautifully.

How did you go about arriving at equivalent registers in English for the range she uses in the book?

I will admit that this was the most challenging translation project I have ever undertaken, and it is precisely because Maslowska jumps nimbly between linguistic registers, often blending bureaucratic language, garbled teen-speak, professional jargon, and commercial clichés in a single utterance. To call this admixture "slang" would be to diminish its idiosyncrasy and surprise, though it would also offer due credit to the author for making her artificial language sound so natural.

In the process of translating, revising, and editing Maslowska's novel, I tried to be especially careful to avoid normalizing the language. This can be a very difficult task, since translation itself is a process of normalization, of naturalizing cultural and linguistic elements that will be incomprehensible to an attentive anglophone reader. In a certain sense, I found myself deliberately resisting my own impulses to clarify and smooth out the more frenetic passages. Soon enough, I was having a lot of fun trying to replicate Maslowska's sense of whimsy, which often required me to work word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase, seeking out the English words and phrases that hit the same registers as the Polish original. Then I would go back and compare the Polish sentence or paragraph to my version, adjusting the latter if the dynamic interplay between the words struck me as off-target. Needless to say, there were times when the going was very slow, but it was always a delight.

Did you end up Americanizing any of the pop culture references?

In the earliest stages of working on the book, I did experiment with "cultural" translation, anglicizing the Polish names and replacing some of the popular references with American equivalents, but I quickly abandoned that. While the novel's title refers directly to a tension between Poland and "Russia" (which covers, in fact, any influence from the East), it is equally concerned with the anxieties of Western influence in Central Europe. The novel's protagonist feels like he's being crushed between "Russkies"--whom he sees as petty criminals--and low-level Western businessmen, whom he sees as criminals in nicer suits. Tampering with the cultural references would have upset this tension and, in my view, diluted some of the novel's most interesting virtues.

There were a couple instances, however, when things had to change. The most significant is the hero's nickname, Silny, which means "strong" in Polish. It doesn't work as a tough-guy name in English. There were a couple weeks early in the process when my desk was scattered with names of old-time gangsters, and I was looking for something that would convey the sense of the original but also ring true alongside "Lefty," the hero's friend. "Nails" won out, because this protagonist strives to be "tough as nails," and because "Nails and Lefty" is very pleasing to my ear.

Youth culture can date very quickly. Do you think SWRR will still be read in 10, 20 years time?

Yes, I think this will remain a meaningful work. While it reflects certain aspects of contemporary Polish youth culture, the novel is more fantasia than social drama, and what it has to say about cultural conflict will remain interesting and relevant for a long time. Plus there's the fact that it's exceedingly funny in a way that will not date easily.

Who are you planning to work on next?

I'm currently in the thick of my dissertation, but there are some new projects on the horizon, including translations from contemporary Czech poetry, Polish prose from the 1960s, and Polish literary theory. We'll see what pans out.