N.N. (the truly "gray," anonymous John Doe of the Communist Polish People's Republic), awakes one day in a dingy hotel room with a nagging question: Who am I? Having existed ("lived" would be an exaggeration) through thirty-three years, N.N. faces an ontological crisis of such dimensions, that he finds himself unable even to go outside, to enter the quotidian reality of the drab rounds of totalitarian oppression, which kills not by showy, dramatic thrusts, but by grinding down the souls of its citizens under the slow, inexorable mill wheels of conformity. N.N. spends his day not only reflecting on his own life, but also on the reality of his nation, and how that reality is packaged for consumption via the state-controlled media. In the bitterly punning verses that make up Artificial Respiration, Stanisław Barańczak creates a critique of propaganda that lays bare the totalitarian deconstruction of meaning. Words cease to have any referent to objective significance, and mean only what the people in power want them to mean, for their own advantage.
As evening falls, N.N. makes a dramatic decision: life is not worth living in this humid, unhealthy bell-jar. He climbs out on the ledge, and spreads wide his arms in an image that suggests the Crucifixion. To Polish readers, his decision also alludes to another "great soul": Konrad, from Adam Mickiewicz's Romantic drama Forefathers' Eve. That great Messianic character wishes to embody his entire nation, and lead it to a happiness greater than what God provided it with. But here N.N. embodies his Communist society all too well: deprived of a voice, deprived of an individual existence, the suicide of such a man would have no salvific sense for anyone who witnessed it; indeed, no one would even hear about it; it would be quietly swept under the rug, like all other attempts at protesting the totalitarian Moloch. In the end, N.N. cannot even "save" himself. He breaks down in tears, returns to his room, falls crosswise on his bed and sobs. Initially circulated in Poland in samizdat, Artificial Respiration was first published in book form in 1978, in London. One of the most stirring texts of modern Polish literature, it is the (anti-)epic of Solidarity.
Flash Fiction | Poland | Polish
November, 2012Poland's Borgesian bibliophile, publisher, and writer Jan Gondowicz considers Agnieszka Taborska's series of short reflections and vignettes in The Whale, widely reviewed in Poland, as "found objects," reflecting Taborska's long interest as a scholar and a writer in surrealism. She collects these brief works reflecting the idea of "objective chance" as they appear to her, and she says that they appear in waves. She may go several months without writing anything in this form, and then suddenly the appearance of one flash fictional found object orients the mind for the reception of new stories. They come from life, but from an enhanced awareness of "objective chance," capturing the coincidences, absurdities, and barely perceptible rules hidden behind the marvelous surprises of everyday reality as she moves between Europe and the United States.
For the second year in a row, InTranslation is partnering with the New Literature from Europe Festival to present samples of translated work by the festival's featured authors.
Novel (excerpt) | Poland | Polish
November, 2011Sandomierz is a picturesque town full of churches and museums. Early one morning in spring, a woman's naked body is found outside a former synagogue. Someone has slashed her throat open--and it looks as if it was done with the enormous razor found lying nearby. Quite by chance, Public Prosecutor Teodor Szacki just happens to be on the scene. How come? Six months earlier he broke up a gang of sex traffickers who had a drop-off point in this town. On a wave of short-lived fame, Szacki decided to move there permanently from Warsaw. But a few months after separating from his wife and daughter, and leaving the big city behind, he knows he has made a mistake. The cadaver outside the synagogue is a chance to put an end to his small-town ennui. Szacki conducts the investigation with the help of an aging policeman and a reluctant lady prosecutor. Gradually he discovers the subtle ins and outs of local society and history. In his efforts to solve the mystery he investigates a love triangle, an ancient Jewish ritual, and some Nazi symbols. In this latest detective novel from Zygmunt Miłoszewski, the author takes us to the Polish equivalent of Twin Peaks, where the scenery is colored by present-day emotions and desires, as well as events from the seemingly distant past.
Novel (excerpt) | Poland | Polish
November, 2010The title Runners is taken from a nineteenth-century religious sect in Russia, extremists who believed the only way to remain free of the devil's influence (embodied by the established church and state) was to remain ceaselessly on the move. The book, made up of interwoven fragments of narrative and essay on a wide variety of distinct topics and set in a wide variety of periods and places, revolves around the ways in which all people are always attempting to escape something by never being fully at rest. Preoccupied with the workings of the human body, the mechanism of death, and how people connect with and disconnect from each other, Runners is an unsettling, thought-provoking, and elegant work. Another excerpt from Runners, also translated by Jennifer Croft, recently appeared in eXchanges.
Anna Piwkowska (b. Feb. 3, 1963) is a Polish poet, novelist, and essayist. The Dye Girl (Farbiarka) is her eighth published book of poetry, which revolves around meditations on love, death, mothers, and mythologies. Piwkowska graduated from the University of Warsaw with a degree in Polish language and literature, and her poems have been published in numerous leading Polish literary journals. She has received numerous prizes for her poetry and prose, most recently having The Dye Girl acknowledged with the 2009 Warsaw Literary Prize. She has also published a novel, and a nonfiction book about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Though much of her poetry has been translated into German and Russian, most of it remains untranslated in English. Piwkowska currently lives in Warsaw.
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
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