PT Data wrangler

Tag: polish

  • Playing Vietnamese

    Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

    The train to Brno is almost empty, even though the Pope is delivering mass there tomorrow (I guess most of the congregation will travel early in the morning). Opposite me sits a girl of about twenty. She’s pretty, with long hair and no make-up. She has no handbag, just a backpack. She may be going to the mass. I’ll try to catch her eye when she looks up from her book, then I’ll ask her.

    For the time being, she and I are reading.

    Both the books we’re holding have only just come out, and both make unpleasant reading for the Czechs.

    The girl is reading a widely publicized book by a nineteen-year-old Czech girl who was born in the south of the country and got nothing but A grades for Czech grammar at school, but is still regarded as Vietnamese. It’s the first proper book to be written in Czech by a representative of the Vietnamese minority, it’s called White Horse, Golden Dragon, and the author’s name is Lan Pham Thi. This autobiographical story is set in Písek, where the heroine graduated from high school and where she was beaten up by skinheads. After years of toil, her father sets up the restaurant of his dreams, which is ceremonially opened by the Lord Mayor (‘because we’re in favour of tolerance and cooperation’), who has a skinhead as his chauffeur (he beat up the author too). The Lord Mayor is a jolly Czech, whose favourite joke goes like this: A Czech comes along to a Vietnamese market stall and asks: ‘Have you got AIDS?’ ‘No,’ says the Vietnamese stallholder, ‘but I can get it by tomorrow.’ The Vietnamese dad in the book has a Czech friend in whose name he has bought a house. It has never been hard to reach agreement. The Czech friend’s philosophy is this: ‘Since the day they invented money, nobody has had to say thank you.’ The dad’s philosophy is this: ‘The main thing is to be careful not to piss anybody off.’ The reviewers were unanimous: ‘We are racists, but it makes for a good read.’

    The girl with long hair reads so fast that in half an hour she’s got through half the book without looking up once.

    *

    White Horse, Golden Dragon, the book the girl was reading on the train to Brno, won the 2009 Book Club competition for unpublished work. The book that wins this annual award gets published, and achieves impressive sales figures.

    The journalists rushed to interview the nineteen-year-old winner, Lan Pham Thi, but she could only answer their questions by e-mail, because in the meantime she’d gone to Kuala Lumpur to study IT.

    In her response to the media she said that she was still trying to resolve the dilemma of whether she is Czech or Vietnamese, but had come to the conclusion that she is a Czech with Vietnamese parents. Asked why not a single positive Czech appears in her book, she replied that she hadn’t been aware of it while she was writing.

    Despite a patently negative attitude towards the Roma in the Czech Republic, there has been an upsurge of literature by them, and the number of Roma students in higher education is probably at a record level for Europe. As a result, lots of people were quietly hoping that Lan Pham Thi was the portent of another positive development, especially as one of the government ministers for home affairs had recently suggested that the state should give money to any Vietnamese person who was willing to leave the country. The fact that thanks to the Vietnamese, almost every urban district in the Czech Republic has two well-stocked grocery stores, open every day of the year, made no impression on him.

    The author sent her signed book contract to the publisher from Kuala Lumpur. With a Vietnamese friend representing her at the prize-giving, she made her acceptance speech and apologized for her absence via a video recording.

    A couple of weeks after White Horse, Golden Dragon was published, the critic Zdenko Pavelka wrote that he was concerned about some of the details. For example, one of the verbs used to describe the scene where the heroine’s father opens his dream restaurant in the town of Písek, with the participation of the Lord Mayor. The local television is there, and Lan Pham Thi writes that the camera is ‘whirring.’ But cameras haven’t whirred for a few decades now. The skinheads who attack the heroine use sharpened razor blades. The critic checked, and found that nowadays they use very sharp knives – they stopped using razor blades in the 1990s. On top of that, the story is set in Písek, where the Lord Mayor couldn’t have come to the opening, because Písek has an ordinary town mayor, and not the equivalent of a Lord Mayor.

    From these and similar details Pavelka concluded that the book could not have been written by a Vietnamese girl at all, but must have been the work of a man, a Czech, aged at least fifty. What the critic found most annoying was that the book had been widely promoted as being by a young Vietnamese woman, as if that in itself were a literary merit.

    His article set off a major media campaign of general suspicion that Lan Pham Thi didn’t really exist.

    Two months later the campaign reached its goal, with the help of the writer who had come second in the Book Club competition, who said he knew it was a hoax (his own book hadn’t been published).

    But the competition jury announced that even if they’d been aware that the book wasn’t written by a Vietnamese woman, the man who came second still wouldn’t have won. And besides, he hadn’t come second at all – that was just his imagination.

    The author of the Vietnamese eye-opener turned out to be thirty-nine-year-old journalist and travel writer Jan Cempírek (the critic had got his age wrong).

    He publicly admitted that he had committed literary fraud in order to draw attention to the problems affecting the Vietnamese in the Czech Republic. He also wanted to find out what sort of reception a book that contained nothing but clichés and a black-and-white view of the world would get. And he wanted to show ‘what the ordinary Czech thinks a Vietnamese thinks in the Czech Republic.’

    He announced that he was donating the prize money from the Book Club competition to the publication of a Vietnamese-Czech dictionary.

    How the Vietnamese really feel and what their lives are like remain a mystery.

     *

    This is an extract from Do-It-Yourself Paradise by Polish author Mariusz Szczygieł, one of two books of reportage about the Czechs as a people. The other, Gottland – Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia, has been translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and has just been published by Melville House Books. The true stories told in Szczygieł’s reports often concern strange hoaxes and cover-ups, implying that in a Czech context, for various political and personal reasons, the truth is often subjected to manipulation.

    Do-It-Yourself-Paradise is published in Polish by Czarne.

    Gottland by Mariusz Szczygieł is published by Melville House.

    You can purchase Gottland via our partner Foyles.

  • Once I Was a Dog

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

    I am an omnivorous scavenger, I sniff every object, I trust my intuition more than my eyes, and my most highly developed instinct is to run away. And if I have to be somewhere quickly, I run. At a rate of one breath to four paces, I can run ad infinitum, for hours on end. I can eat and drink without stopping. Absolutely nothing will induce me to get into a lift if I’m not going higher than five floors. I never take the lift down. And I never get lost. My brain has its own in-built navigation system.

    I even know how to talk to dogs, though I don’t wish to chat with every dog I meet, because like all the creatures in my house I have my racial prejudices. We can’t stand pit bulls, for instance – nasty muscle-bound dogs, four-footed yobbos with brains the size of a pea. And the scavenging – it’s just a reporter’s metaphor. When I go into the field (as the old reporters say), in other words on a work trip, within Poland or abroad, to gather material for a new article, I stop to inspect every speck of dust, every detail, every scrap of information and every little story – every bit of carrion, rubbish or shit. I might not use it later on, I might not devour it, but I’m sure to pick it up and take it away with me.

    The limping dog, or ‘being on the road’ versus ‘travelling’

    All this makes me naturally equipped for travelling. Anyway, I love to travel, though I hardly ever say that. What I say is that I love ‘being on the road’, which is hardly surprising, considering that in a former life I was a stray dog.

    Please note, I didn’t say a dog ‘with no master’, but a stray dog. For what sort of pleasure is there in being a dog ‘with a master’? In having a master? So I wasn’t a dog with no master, I was just free, independent, a drifter… All right, I was eternally hungry, crawling with lice and fleas, and covered in eczema, on top of which I had cancer of the testicles – by the end of my short life they were virtually trailing along on the ground behind me, but for all that, I was a cheerful, actually a very happy dog. A disgusting mongrel with festering eyes and ears, exuding a stink like a latrine, but proud of all the vigorous, dynamic spermatozoa I’d sent out around the entire world then known to me.

    I was lame in a back paw, so it’s probably from my dog’s life that I remember the coarse rhyme I’ve never heard in my present life. My mother says that in her childhood the lowlifes in Sochaczew (the town we’re from) used to bellow something like this at the homeless dogs to chase them away, after tying empty cans to their tails. The rhyme goes like this:

    A limping dog ran on the grass

    (Screw the fucker, screw the fucker, screw the fucker)

    Some bastard kicked him up the arse

    (Screw the fucker, screw the fucker, screw the fucker)

    Oh you fucker, booted up the bum

    (Screw the fucker, screw the fucker, screw the fucker)

    I’m grassing on you to your mum

    (Screw the fucker, screw the fucker, screw the fucker).

    It must be because of my former identity that I get such unspeakable pleasure out of reporting on the homeless – people, not dogs, because a dog can indeed be homeless too, but once he has a home he ceases to be a dog. (That’s what I thought in my previous life, but I shouldn’t be saying it now, because when my own dogs read this, I’ll be the one in the doghouse.)

    The three reports I wrote about the homeless were examples of immersion journalism. Two were researched in Warsaw, and one in Moscow. I got myself up in rags and went to live on the streets. It felt wonderful – I hadn’t the slightest doubt it was, or used to be my way of life. I was in no doubt at all that I hadn’t changed, I’d just gone back to my old identity, my old life, my old ways of getting food and drink and a bed for the night.

    Like changing the railway points, with a change of dress you get rid of your identity as a journalist, husband, father, owner, or citizen – in short, you stop being a normal person, a Muggle, and you become a tramp, who’s not ashamed to beg, piss in the park, or sleep on the grass below the statue of Adam Mickiewicz. To my excellent fellow reporter Wojciech Jagielski, who doesn’t rate this genre of reportage (or rather this method of gathering material) and says it’s just done for a lark, I reply that he is quite mistaken. The world of the homeless can only be described from the position of a piece of trash lying in the street (or of a stray dog too). You’ll never find out how people (the normal ones) regard a piece of trash that’s knocking about in the street, unless you are one.

    So, in a former life, I was a stray dog. I’m doubly fond of the Polish word wałęsać, meaning ‘to stray’ or ‘to wander’, out of respect for Lech Wałęsa. I realised this in the days of the so-called first Solidarity (from August 1980 to December 1981), when folks used to say as a joke that the government (meaning the communists) was wandering – wałęsa się – while Wałęsa was governing.

    So why do I prefer ‘being on the road’ to ‘travelling’? Because for me the most important thing is the time before I reach my destination, the before, the going, the slow transfer. When I meet my readers, I often tell them, or write in book dedications, that the most important thing about travelling is being on the road, not reaching your destination.

    The Sherpa with a grand piano, or ‘traveller’ versus ‘tourist’

    They say travelling is very simple and easy now, accessible and affordable to everyone. I have friends who go to the most far-flung corners of the world, including New Zealand, Swaziland and Patagonia. But are they travelling, even if they ride across the pampas on horseback?

    I doubt it. When I’m preparing for each trip, I read innumerable accounts of such exploits on the internet. The level of ignorance about the place the person has gone to is staggering. But does he need to know more? Of course not. People are free to do as they like. But they can’t say they’re travelling. What they’re indulging in is tourism!

    A PE teacher from Świdnik rides his motorbike solo all the way across Siberia to Magadan in Kolyma – an extraordinary exploit, but the question is, what for? For nothing. For pleasure, because he likes riding his motorbike, and here on the Eurasian continent that’s the furthest you can go.

    But he too is a tourist, as are the clients of all those adventure travel agencies called things like ‘Tingling Spine Trips’ or ‘Cupful of Adrenaline’. For these companies nothing is impossible. After all, tourists are taken up Mount Everest, or sent off to the North or South Pole. A good Sherpa can carry a grand piano up Everest. There is no limitation – not even disability disqualifies you. Sightless or legless tourists have conquered the world’s highest peak. You can sail down the Amazon on a raft, ski across Greenland, cycle over the Gobi Desert (I have this particular exploit to my credit), kitesurf across the Red Sea or swim the Bering Strait, and you’ll still just be a tourist. Because if you ask these people why they go to the Poles, they’ll reply: to conquer them.

    What for? They’ve already been conquered. So what’s the difference between a traveller and a tourist? The objective. The traveller is a geographer, geologist, cartographer, missionary, reporter, film-maker, naturalist, or glaciologist who has been commissioned to research the rate at which the glaciers are melting in the Pamir range. The traveller goes abroad for a reason. The tourist goes because he likes going, out of curiosity. And thus for no reason.

    All the travel festivals, of which we have at least a dozen in Poland, and I’ve even been to some, should be called tourist fairs, because all their participants’ incredible expeditions and exploits are frankly quite pointless.

    The bike and the estate car, or give luck a chance

    Your form of transport – that is one of the most important decisions an itinerant reporter has to make. The subject you’re working on determines the way you’re going to have to move about in the field. And vice versa – your form of transport will have an effect on the sort of material you gather.

    The rules are quite simple. The more outlandish your idea, the more likely it is to happen. Sometimes my dear colleagues at Gazeta Wyborcza’s foreign correspondence section raise an uproar, crying: ‘It’s just not possible!’ And that makes my blood boil, because I wouldn’t be going to the other end of the world if my idea were impossible; so I come up with a bicycle, hitchhiking, a canoe, or else I buy an old jeep to make the possible happen – in an ordinary way, any old way, by making something out of nothing. I do all this purely to give luck a chance, to get it to start working.

    Małgorzata Szejnert, who for many years was my boss and mentor at the newspaper’s reportage section, used to say a reporter who has no luck shouldn’t really be in this profession. So I do everything I can to improve my luck.

    And I must admit you get the most luck (or at least some) on a bike. It’s the best form of transport for a reporter. It only has one drawback, which is that it’s slow. In a country as big as China, for instance, it didn’t work for me, because I had too little time to do my job, to gather material. I was always behind.

    But apart from that, the bike has nothing but advantages. Best of all, you don’t miss anything, not a single apricot – in Uzbekistan they dry them on the asphalt. You can’t miss anything because you’re going so slowly. With full saddlebags, a tent, and some supplies of food and water your speed is at best 20 kilometres per hour. You only have to stop pedalling and put a foot on the ground, and people spring up around you. It’s always like that. Then they start asking questions, you patiently answer them, and when they ask what now, you say you have to find a place for the night. In Central Asia there has never been an occasion when somebody hasn’t shouted: “Come and stay at my place!” Can anything better happen to a reporter? Before bed, we have supper together, then we chat away half the night, if not the whole night, and by morning I’m a local. I know all about this town, village or district.

    On the other hand a car is wonderful, because it gives you an incredible sense of freedom. You can move about the entire country at the speed of light and nobody can stop you, and you also have a roof over your head. I love to sleep in my old Volvo. Of course, a reporter should have a big estate car, big enough to unroll a mattress and stretch out comfortably even though you’ve got a bike next to you in summer and a pair of skis in winter. I once wrote a long article about the Suwałki region of north-eastern Poland, but there was such a big dump of snow that I could only get about the place on cross-country skis.

    I love this dog’s life. When I’ve got a topic I can cover at home, meaning in Warsaw or somewhere in Poland, I always choose the smaller places – Łomża, Krasnystaw, Czarnków, Dzierżoniów… I love the dog’s life, hotels, roadside bars, and inns. I love being on the move, on the road.

  • Any questions for the author?

    Jacek Dehnel writes a taxonomy of the literary event attendee, including ‘the star’, ‘the obsessive’, ‘the well-meaning person’ and ‘the fixer’, all of whom keep life interesting – and strange –  for the travelling authorTranslated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-JonesI have once again been travelling the length and breadth of Poland to attend a series of meetings with the public. In big cities, in small towns, in the north, in the south, at libraries, at cultural centres, within festivals and without – all sorts of literary events.Attending literary events is a strange way of passing the time, both for the author and the audience. I deliberately wrote “passing the time” not “passing free time” because it can vary: sometimes it’s entertaining, but sometimes it’s hard work. Both for the author, I repeat, and the audience. Listening to boring, mumbled answers to boring, mumbled questions, punctuated by the author’s inept stammering as he attempts to delight with extracts from his work, even though he is scared stiff of public appearances, is torture. But it’s just as much torture to battle with a group of uninterested locals who for some reason have felt compelled to go to the cultural centre, enticed by free biscuits and coffee, or other such rewards, though of course there can be attractions on offer for the author anywhere, provided by the audience more than anyone. Recently for example, instead of flowers I was given a bottle of home-made liqueur, and that is a shining example, because flowers are quite impossible to carry home; after a long ride in a Polish State Railways train they arrive wilted, whereas the liqueur gets there in superb form and provides lasting enjoyment, all the more if it’s home-made and quince-flavour, not some shop-bought sulphate. But I was going to talk about something else, before I went off on a culinary tangent. It’s that every small town (not to mention the big cities) has its own Meet-the-Author eccentric. I don’t mean the usual boozy types (who come along, see if wine will be served after the meeting, and if not, go off in search of a private view, but if so, stay until the glasses are raised, down three or four and leave, luckily without asking any questions), but the sort of nutters who join in with the discussion. They divide into several types including: the stars, the obsessives (positive and negative), the well-meaning, and the fixers, all of whom often feature in intermediate, hybrid forms as well.The star asks a question in order to shine. He delivers a long monologue, full of digressions, duly highlighting his extensive experience of life and the depth of his meditations; quite often it also includes remarks aimed at real or imaginary enemies. Usually no actual question is asked at all, and if it is, it generally has nothing to do with the monologue. Sometimes, with the preface “But Mr Author must surely be tired by now…” the star suggests reading excerpts from the book himself, because in the third year he took drama classes, and was even going to apply for the Academy, but became a phytosociologist instead; despite protests from the audience and a lack of enthusiasm on the writer’s part he starts to read, theatrically, with emphasis on every word, but as a rule he has to stop in mid-flow, because performing his chosen extract would take far longer than the entire meeting. Other stars recite paeans of their own devising, quote their own epigrams, or even try to sing.The positive obsessive has come because he has a passion, and there’s something he loves. He wants the author to make an entry in the chronicle of the town of C., which he has maintained since 1973 without missing a single day (apart from 16 May 1984, when he had the whooping cough). No author’s entry is ever long enough, of course, and no author’s signature is ever flamboyant enough, as proof of which he shows the entry for 19 March 1992, which is by a root-sculptor and is four times as long, and the far more flamboyant signature of the Fire Chief from 2 December 2001. Or else he collects visiting cards, immediately handing over four of his own, laminated, each one featuring his own photograph (full length); on hearing that the author’s card case has accidentally remained at home, he makes a face entitled “the tragic mask” and begs to be sent a visiting card by post, but not to the address that appears on the four cards (because it is out of date), but to this one (here he pulls out a scrap of paper and writes it out by hand). Or else he is an amateur genealogist, who in one of the local parish record books has found someone with a slightly similar name, so he asks the author three times, let’s say me, whether I can be certain that “Władysław Daniel” or “Albrecht Dengel” aren’t relatives of mine, and whether I’m absolutely sure I haven’t any relatives in the Lower Burbleton area.The negative obsessive has come because he has a passion, and there’s something he hates. Here’s one I encountered in Warsaw, for example: “What do you think of Tuwim’s poetry?” So I replied that I read it and think highly of it; then I said why and even embellished my answer with an anecdote about reading Tuwim. “But do you know that Tuwim was a Jew?” the obsessive digs deeper. I say that I do, and that so were lots of Polish poets, and so on. Finally he puts his cards on the table: “Don’t you think there are too many Jews in Polish literature?” I say no, I don’t, and explain that I myself was once included in an online “List of Anti-Polish Jews” (for translating Mandelstam), by which token I meet the worst expectations of the questioner, who demonstratively leaves. Of course, negative obsessives are not limited to the so-called Jewish Question; sometimes they merely have a bone to pick with the Municipal Parks Service which has ordered the felling of a poplar “which has stood here for thirty years, sir, and never hurt a soul – on the contrary, it has adorned our city!” And they want to “take the opportunity” to “alert public opinion and those sensitive to literature” to this “ensuing fact”.The well-meaning person has come with sympathy for the author, and for literature in general, because he loves literature, and is a cultured individual. Sometimes he has trouble with his hearing and only catches every third word, and sometimes he falls asleep during the meeting, but whenever he can, he’s eager to speak up in defence of the author and of literature in general. Thus he rebuffs any question with a shadow of criticism lurking in it with a loud “harrumph!” and would be most willing to respond to them all, to save the author trouble – he’d be happy to give the questioner a good kicking while he’s about it. Instead of asking a question, he delivers an apology, but it’s always the least appropriate of the crop of potential apologies; if there happens to be some pointless argument in defence of the author or his work, the well-meaning person is sure to find it and repeat it, while looking the author straight in the eyes in the expectation of some reward, or at least a hint at a thread of understanding. If someone asks: “Why is this poem about death so sad?” he will set about proving that the poem is essentially cheerful and jocular, and if someone asks about the “L.O.” (lyrical object) in a poem, he will cry out in indignation that there is no “P.L.O.” in the poem.Finally the fixer comes along in the belief that the author is basically a pretty good guy, except that he has no idea what he’s doing. But never mind, the fixer will soon put him right. The author writes sad poems? Let him write jolly ones – Poland is hosting Euro 2012, we should be rejoicing, supporting the national effort, but meanwhile none of the poems read out today were about the new national soccer stadium. The author has written a family saga? Very nice, but it doesn’t include a relative who perished in the Gulag, or at least who did forced labour in a Siberian forest, which is a serious oversight and ca
    sts a shadow, puts a stick in the spokes or scatters sand in the cogs of the book as a whole. The author has used an imprecise rhyme? The fixer will find him a nice, smooth, perfect rhyme. The author has tossed a foreign word into his poem? The fixer has prepared for this meeting – he checked in the dictionary, and has brought along the name “German turnip” on a slip of paper, or a proper quote in Polish, not French – it looks awful in French, quite awful. There is no suggestion for improvement or rationalisation that he fails to share, although the meeting ended long ago, and the author’s train is leaving in two minutes.There is at least one of these delinquents at every such meeting, sometimes several; occasionally they talk to each other and largely take control of the entire audience. And yet without all these characters“Meet-the-Author” events would be far less interesting, duller in fact. So as I enter the room, I try to seek out the expert questioner, and with increasing frequency I recognise him at first sight; I cast him a knowing glance as I walk towards the table covered with green cloth, where the mineral water stands gleaming in its bottle.About the authorJacek Dehnel (born 1980) is a poet, novelist, painter and translator. In 2005 he was one of the youngest ever winners of Poland’s Koscielski Prize for promising new writers. He studied Polish Literature at Warsaw University then wrote his PhD thesis on the Polish translations of Philip Larkin, some of whose poetry he has translated himself. He has published four volumes of his own poetry which has been widely translated, including into English.His novel Saturn, was published in the UK in 2012 by Dedalus Books.About the translatorAntonia Lloyd-Jones is a full-time translator of Polish literature into English. Her published translations from Polish include novels by Paweł Huelle and Jacek Dehnel, short stories by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and non-fiction, most recently by Jacek Hugo-Bader and Wojciech Jagielski.Additional informationJacek will be touring the UK this November. He will also be appearing in conversation with translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones at the London Review of Books Bookshop.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A – Hanna Krall, author of Chasing the King of Hearts

    PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis interviews Hanna Krall, author of Chasing the Kings of Hearts, a book which recreates the Holocaust not as an historical event but as a terrifying shared experience. Her literary reportage about the Holocaust is unparalleled in its power and immediacy and is available in the UK for the first time

    Translated from the Polish by Tasja Dorkofikis You are a reporter and you describe your work as reportage. How do you see the role of a reporter? And how does it differ from the role of a writer? What is the essence of writing and of looking at the world from the perspective of a reporter?These two roles differ in their attitude to characters. A writer creates a character and if he wants, he can know everything about him, while a reporter has to find out and knows only as much as his subject wants to tell him. He depends on his subject and even if he finds things out, he is not always able to understand everything he is told.What are the limits of reportage and the curiosity of a reporter?Each time a reporter needs to establish the limits of curiosity. There is a difference between curiosity and prying. It’s good not to cross that boundary. The limit is the subject’s sensitivity and their privacy. One should not hurt the subject, encroach on their privacy. When I was young I thought that one can do anything for the sake of reportage, and now, with age, I try to spare people.One reads Chasing the King of Hearts with bated breath and the story of the main character, Izolda Regensberg, is incredibly dramatic. Born with looks which allowed her to pass for a Pole, Izolda was able to become Maria Pawlicka in order to save her husband, taken to Mauthausen.  She loses her entire family and via Vienna is sent to Auschwitz, and then finds herself in Berlin, passing as a German. Her odyssey continues after the war. To what extent is this book based on a real story? Chasing the King of Hearts is true, there is no fiction there. Sometimes, I allowed myself a certain degree of freedom. In the book, the heroine puts her bag on the table ‘like a Jewess’. I had to describe that bag – it was a yellow bag made of pig skin and here I allowed myself to change this bag to one belonging to my friend, the film director Izabella Cywińska. Both bags were bought in the same shop, both were authentic, it’s just that the one described in the book did not belong to Izolda.How do you look for subjects and how did you find Izolda?Izolda called me in 1988 and asked me to write about her. She thought that I knew about love and about war. We talked in Vienna, in Israel and in Warsaw. We started in 1988 and talked for years. Izolda had an incredible memory and recalled every detail. When I was in Vienna I sat in the café where she was arrested. Everything was in the same place as she described it.  The mirror, the tables, and in the mirror one could see the door, through which the Gestapo entered; and the way from the café to the Gestapo building was the same too.Izolda’s name is on the list of people transported to Auschwitz. I trust my characters, but I verify the truth if I can.Details are always very important in your books. The reader knows exactly what clothes Izolda is wearing. A meaningful pack of cards keeps reappearing. Could you tell us how you use these details and facts? How do you choose what you focus on? The world is woven from details. And a reporter needs to select those that have the power of a metaphor. An armchair, from which a paralysed old woman got up after having seen her husband killed. Marek Edelman’s red jumper.I allowed myself to shorten Izolda’s coat in the book. She was stopped by the criminal police and it turned out that they took her for a whore not a Jewess. Izolda must have been provocatively dressed, so she needed to have a short coat in order that the reader could see her long legs. So I shortened her coat. Apart from that everything in this book is authentic.In my book there is also a scene in Auschwitz, when Izolda and her friend, Janka Tempelhof, approached Mengele and said that they were nurses and they would like to join the prisoner transport. He arranged a quick exam on the spot to find out whether this was the truth. And Izolda told me that Mengele was a beautiful man, but the only thing that disfigured him was a gap between his teeth. I checked whether Mengele really had a diastema and it turned out that his diastema really intrigued him and he wanted to find out whether it was a genetic characteristic. That’s how his interest in genetics started. One could say that this diastema led him to the ramp in Auschwitz.Izolda survives the war, by chance, but also thanks to her strong will and initiative. In your view, is Izolda’s story about chance or destiny?Izolda believed in the power of destiny, in the sequence of events which led somewhere. She decided that her husband would survive. And thanks to that, she survived too. And Izolda strongly believed that only her activities and the power of her love kept him alive. She was brave, full of initiative and ideas. Only she and her husband survived out of their whole family.Is Chasing the King of Hearts a book about love?This book is about a few things, for example about love, but also about the superiority of foolishness over reason. There are two characters: Izolda Ragensberg and Janka Tempelhof. Janka Tempelhof was a model student, took only sensible decisions, was always reasonable. And out of these two women, only Izolda survived the war thanks to her foolishness.To Outwit God (first published as Shielding the Flame; Conversations with Marek Edelman) introduces the subject of the Holocaust in your work, which has since appeared regularly. Do you think that the history of the Holocaust can be expressed and described? Marcel Reich-Ranicki said about your books, that there is no ‘mercy or sentimentalism, only a hard retelling of how it was.’In my opinion the Holocaust can be described but not understood. We are all helpless facing the enormity of the past. Stories of the Holocaust are stories in which everything has been multiplied. Enormous evil and enormous good. As in the story of Apolonia Machczyńska, who hid 25 Jews in the granary of her estate near Kocko, even though she had three children and was pregnant with the fourth. The Jews were killed and Apolonia was shot by a German policeman. Then she was awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”.Christopher Browning describes the story of a group of German civilians, who are too old to go to the front, in his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 11 and the Final Solution in Poland. They create a battalion, and come to Eastern Poland near Lublin to kill Jews. And there they learn to kill. What’s more, a group of artists from Berlin come to visit them, and then join them for a day to do some killing too. This satanic evil of the artists from Berlin and the enormous goodness of Apolonia Machczyńska – these are the situations beyond our understanding. But one should try to tell these stories. Each time one reaches some mystery, something which is inexpressible.You occasionally include episodes from your life in your reportage. How do you write about yourself?I write about my own life, but always in the third person, as that allows me to look at myself as if I’m one of my own characters. Writing in the first person makes the narrative sound plaintive, and full of martyrdom.Polish reportage is well known and respected in the world. Are there any young Polish reportage writers whom you would like to recommend to British readers and publishers?Polish reportage is certainly doing well. Some time ago there was an excellent group of Polish composers, including Lutosławski and Penderecki, or a group of Polish poets with Miłosz, Szymborska and Herbert, the same way now we are going through a golden age of Polish reportage. There are many writers of reportage of the highest calibre like Mariusz Szczygieł, who writes on Czechoslovakia (as was), Wojciech Tochman on Rwanda and Bosnia and Wojciech Gorecki on the Caucasus.What do you think about the fact that your books are now on the lists of set texts in schools in Poland; in 2010 To Outwit God was one of the two A-level subjects next to Moliere?What can I think? I am pleased that my writing can be beneficial, that somebody has a use for it. About the authorHanna KrallHanna Krall was born in 1935 in Poland and survived the Second World War hiding on the Aryan side (outside the getto) in Warsaw. Her family perished in the war. She began her writing career as a prize-winning journalist. Since the early ’80s she has worked as a novelist and continued writing reportage. Since Shielding the Flame; Conversations with Marek Edelman (later published as To Outwit God and available in the US) she has started writing reportage about the Holocaust.She has received numerous Polish and international awards, such as the underground Solidarity Prize, Polish PEN Club Prize, the German Würth Preis for European Literature 2012 and the Austrian Herder Prize. Translated into 17 languages, her work has gained widespread  international recognition. In 2007 Król kier znów na wylocie (Chasing the King of Hearts) was shortlisted for the Angelus Central European Literary Award. This is her first book available in the UK, though a few of her other books are available in English in the US. About the editortasja dorkofikis photo (2)Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.    Additional informationPhilip Boehm_credit Sophie KanaouroffPhilip Boehm is the author of more than two dozen translations of novels and plays by German and Polish writers, including Nobelist Herta Müller, Christoph Hein, Bertolt Brecht and Stefan Chwin. Nonfiction translations include A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous and Words to Outlive Us, a collection of eyewitness accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto. For his work as a translator he has received numerous awards, most recently the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize (UK), the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize (US), and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also works as a playwright and theater director, and is the Founding Artistic Director of Upstream Theater in St. Louis. Read the original Polish text of the interview here. http://rcm-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=190867010X
    http://rcm-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=081011075X
    http://rcm-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=0141000422

  • PEN Atlas Q&A – Hanna Krall, author of Chasing the King of Hearts

    PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis interviews Hanna Krall, author of Chasing the Kings of Hearts, a book which recreates the Holocaust not as an historical event but as a terrifying shared experience. Her literary reportage about the Holocaust is unparalleled in its power and immediacy and is available in the UK for the first time

    Translated from the Polish by Tasja Dorkofikis You are a reporter and you describe your work as reportage. How do you see the role of a reporter? And how does it differ from the role of a writer? What is the essence of writing and of looking at the world from the perspective of a reporter?These two roles differ in their attitude to characters. A writer creates a character and if he wants, he can know everything about him, while a reporter has to find out and knows only as much as his subject wants to tell him. He depends on his subject and even if he finds things out, he is not always able to understand everything he is told.What are the limits of reportage and the curiosity of a reporter?Each time a reporter needs to establish the limits of curiosity. There is a difference between curiosity and prying. It’s good not to cross that boundary. The limit is the subject’s sensitivity and their privacy. One should not hurt the subject, encroach on their privacy. When I was young I thought that one can do anything for the sake of reportage, and now, with age, I try to spare people.One reads Chasing the King of Hearts with bated breath and the story of the main character, Izolda Regensberg, is incredibly dramatic. Born with looks which allowed her to pass for a Pole, Izolda was able to become Maria Pawlicka in order to save her husband, taken to Mauthausen.  She loses her entire family and via Vienna is sent to Auschwitz, and then finds herself in Berlin, passing as a German. Her odyssey continues after the war. To what extent is this book based on a real story? Chasing the King of Hearts is true, there is no fiction there. Sometimes, I allowed myself a certain degree of freedom. In the book, the heroine puts her bag on the table ‘like a Jewess’. I had to describe that bag – it was a yellow bag made of pig skin and here I allowed myself to change this bag to one belonging to my friend, the film director Izabella Cywińska. Both bags were bought in the same shop, both were authentic, it’s just that the one described in the book did not belong to Izolda.How do you look for subjects and how did you find Izolda?Izolda called me in 1988 and asked me to write about her. She thought that I knew about love and about war. We talked in Vienna, in Israel and in Warsaw. We started in 1988 and talked for years. Izolda had an incredible memory and recalled every detail. When I was in Vienna I sat in the café where she was arrested. Everything was in the same place as she described it.  The mirror, the tables, and in the mirror one could see the door, through which the Gestapo entered; and the way from the café to the Gestapo building was the same too.Izolda’s name is on the list of people transported to Auschwitz. I trust my characters, but I verify the truth if I can.Details are always very important in your books. The reader knows exactly what clothes Izolda is wearing. A meaningful pack of cards keeps reappearing. Could you tell us how you use these details and facts? How do you choose what you focus on? The world is woven from details. And a reporter needs to select those that have the power of a metaphor. An armchair, from which a paralysed old woman got up after having seen her husband killed. Marek Edelman’s red jumper.I allowed myself to shorten Izolda’s coat in the book. She was stopped by the criminal police and it turned out that they took her for a whore not a Jewess. Izolda must have been provocatively dressed, so she needed to have a short coat in order that the reader could see her long legs. So I shortened her coat. Apart from that everything in this book is authentic.In my book there is also a scene in Auschwitz, when Izolda and her friend, Janka Tempelhof, approached Mengele and said that they were nurses and they would like to join the prisoner transport. He arranged a quick exam on the spot to find out whether this was the truth. And Izolda told me that Mengele was a beautiful man, but the only thing that disfigured him was a gap between his teeth. I checked whether Mengele really had a diastema and it turned out that his diastema really intrigued him and he wanted to find out whether it was a genetic characteristic. That’s how his interest in genetics started. One could say that this diastema led him to the ramp in Auschwitz.Izolda survives the war, by chance, but also thanks to her strong will and initiative. In your view, is Izolda’s story about chance or destiny?Izolda believed in the power of destiny, in the sequence of events which led somewhere. She decided that her husband would survive. And thanks to that, she survived too. And Izolda strongly believed that only her activities and the power of her love kept him alive. She was brave, full of initiative and ideas. Only she and her husband survived out of their whole family.Is Chasing the King of Hearts a book about love?This book is about a few things, for example about love, but also about the superiority of foolishness over reason. There are two characters: Izolda Ragensberg and Janka Tempelhof. Janka Tempelhof was a model student, took only sensible decisions, was always reasonable. And out of these two women, only Izolda survived the war thanks to her foolishness.To Outwit God (first published as Shielding the Flame; Conversations with Marek Edelman) introduces the subject of the Holocaust in your work, which has since appeared regularly. Do you think that the history of the Holocaust can be expressed and described? Marcel Reich-Ranicki said about your books, that there is no ‘mercy or sentimentalism, only a hard retelling of how it was.’In my opinion the Holocaust can be described but not understood. We are all helpless facing the enormity of the past. Stories of the Holocaust are stories in which everything has been multiplied. Enormous evil and enormous good. As in the story of Apolonia Machczyńska, who hid 25 Jews in the granary of her estate near Kocko, even though she had three children and was pregnant with the fourth. The Jews were killed and Apolonia was shot by a German policeman. Then she was awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations”.Christopher Browning describes the story of a group of German civilians, who are too old to go to the front, in his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 11 and the Final Solution in Poland. They create a battalion, and come to Eastern Poland near Lublin to kill Jews. And there they learn to kill. What’s more, a group of artists from Berlin come to visit them, and then join them for a day to do some killing too. This satanic evil of the artists from Berlin and the enormous goodness of Apolonia Machczyńska – these are the situations beyond our understanding. But one should try to tell these stories. Each time one reaches some mystery, something which is inexpressible.You occasionally include episodes from your life in your reportage. How do you write about yourself?I write about my own life, but always in the third person, as that allows me to look at myself as if I’m one of my own characters. Writing in the first person makes the narrative sound plaintive, and full of martyrdom.Polish reportage is well known and respected in the world. Are there any young Polish reportage writers whom you would like to recommend to British readers and publishers?Polish reportage is certainly doing well. Some time ago there was an excellent group of Polish composers, including Lutosławski and Penderecki, or a group of Polish poets with Miłosz, Szymborska and Herbert, the same way now we are going through a golden age of Polish reportage. There are many writers of reportage of the highest calibre like Mariusz Szczygieł, who writes on Czechoslovakia (as was), Wojciech Tochman on Rwanda and Bosnia and Wojciech Gorecki on the Caucasus.What do you think about the fact that your books are now on the lists of set texts in schools in Poland; in 2010 To Outwit God was one of the two A-level subjects next to Moliere?What can I think? I am pleased that my writing can be beneficial, that somebody has a use for it. About the authorHanna KrallHanna Krall was born in 1935 in Poland and survived the Second World War hiding on the Aryan side (outside the getto) in Warsaw. Her family perished in the war. She began her writing career as a prize-winning journalist. Since the early ’80s she has worked as a novelist and continued writing reportage. Since Shielding the Flame; Conversations with Marek Edelman (later published as To Outwit God and available in the US) she has started writing reportage about the Holocaust.She has received numerous Polish and international awards, such as the underground Solidarity Prize, Polish PEN Club Prize, the German Würth Preis for European Literature 2012 and the Austrian Herder Prize. Translated into 17 languages, her work has gained widespread  international recognition. In 2007 Król kier znów na wylocie (Chasing the King of Hearts) was shortlisted for the Angelus Central European Literary Award. This is her first book available in the UK, though a few of her other books are available in English in the US. About the editortasja dorkofikis photo (2)Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.    Additional informationPhilip Boehm_credit Sophie KanaouroffPhilip Boehm is the author of more than two dozen translations of novels and plays by German and Polish writers, including Nobelist Herta Müller, Christoph Hein, Bertolt Brecht and Stefan Chwin. Nonfiction translations include A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous and Words to Outlive Us, a collection of eyewitness accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto. For his work as a translator he has received numerous awards, most recently the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize (UK), the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize (US), and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also works as a playwright and theater director, and is the Founding Artistic Director of Upstream Theater in St. Louis. Read the original Polish text of the interview here. http://rcm-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=190867010X
    http://rcm-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=081011075X
    http://rcm-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=0141000422

  • Two stories by Sławomir Mrożek

    A special dispatch from PEN Atlas this week features two stories by Sławomir Mrożek, the Polish author and cartoonist who died last month, and who will be fondly remembered for his surreal and subversive work

    Translated from the Polish by Garry Malloy

     

    THE HOLE IN THE BRIDGE

    There once was a river with a small town on each of its banks. The two towns were connected by a road which ran across the bridge.

    One day a hole appeared in the bridge. The hole needed to be patched up, and this was the general consensus of the residents of both towns. A dispute arose, however, about who should do it. The inhabitants of one town considered themselves to be more important than those of the other, and vice versa. The people on the right bank were of the opinion that the road led, above all, to their town and therefore the town on the left bank should repair it, because they rely on it more. The town on the left bank considered itself to be the goal of every journey and thus the repair of the bridge lay in the interests of those on the right bank.

    The dispute lasted, as did the hole in the bridge. And the longer the hole remained, the more the mutual dislike between the little towns grew.

    One time an old bloke fell into the hole and broke his leg. The residents of both towns urgently began questioning him to ascertain if he was coming from the right bank to the left or indeed from the left to the right, in order to see which town should accept responsibility for the accident. He did not remember, however, as he was drunk on the evening in question.

    Some time after that, a traveller’s carriage was travelling across the bridge when it fell into the hole and broke an axle. Because the traveller was passing through both towns, that is to say travelling neither from one town to the other, nor vice versa, the inhabitants of both towns treated the accident with indifference. The enraged traveller got out of the carriage and asked why the hole hadn’t been patched up and, having found out, declared:

    ‘I wish to buy this hole. Who owns it?’

    Both towns simultaneously declared their ownership of the hole.

    ‘Either you lot or you lot. The side which owns the hole must prove it.’

    ‘How do we prove it?’ chorused the representatives of both communities.

    ‘It’s simple. Only the owner of the hole has the right to patch it up. I’ll buy it from whoever repairs it.’

    The townsfolk from both sides got to work, while the traveller smoked a cigar and his coachman changed the axle. In a flash they repaired the bridge, after which time they came to collect their payment for the hole.

    ‘What hole?’ asked the astonished traveller, ‘I can’t see any hole here. For a long time now I’ve been looking around for a hole to buy, I’m prepared to pay a handsome sum for one; however, you don’t have a hole for sale. Do you take me for a fool?’

    And with that he got into his carriage and rode off. Both towns were meanwhile reconciled. Now the residents of the towns agree to keep watch on the bridge, and whenever a traveller approaches they are sure to stop him and beat him up.

     

    THE HORSE

    ‘I’ll take that one,’ said the buyer in English, pointing to a stallion.

    ‘He says he’ll take that one,’ I told the stable manager, in accordance with my role as interpreter.

    ‘Impossible. That one has already been sold.’

    ‘I most certainly have not,’ said the horse in our mother tongue.

    ‘What did he say?’ asked the buyer.

    ‘Doesn’t matter,” said the manager. ‘He talks nonsense sometimes.’

    ‘That one or none at all,’ insisted the American. ‘He’s a fine horse and, what’s more, he can talk.’

    The stable manager took me aside.

    ‘I can’t sell that particular one, because it isn’t a horse.’

    ‘Well what is it then?’

    ‘Two intelligence service agents disguised as a horse. From before the revolution. Whenever our Generalissimo wanted to go for a ride on horseback, he would hop up on them, or rather, on it.  His personal bodyguards.’

    ‘Well what are they still doing here?’

    ‘They’re hiding. You understand that now, since the revolution ended, former intelligence service agents don’t have an easy life.’

    Meanwhile, this pantomime horse had drawn up to us.

    ‘Quit fooling around,’ it said to the manager, ‘this is our only chance of getting into America.’

    ‘Does that horse speak Romanian?’ asked the American, approaching our group.

    ‘No, only Polish. Why do you ask?’

    ‘I represent an organization which provides financial help to Eastern European countries. We’d send him to Romania for breeding purposes, to improve the stock there.’

    ‘Erm…I don’t think so,’ said the horse and trotted off.

    ‘What did he say?’ the American asked me.

    ‘That he’ll be back in a minute,’ I lied. Ultimately, these matters are for us Poles to decide.

     

    These stories were published 1996 in Opowiadania 1990–1993 (Stories 1990–1993) by Noir sur Blanc, Warsaw. By arrangement with Diogenes Verlag. Translation © 2012 by Garry Malloy. All rights reserved. 

     

    About the author

    Photo_Slawomir MrozekSławomir Mrożek (29 June 1930 – 15 August 2013) was a leading Polish dramatist, writer and cartoonist.  In 1963 Mrożek emigrated to Italy and France and then to Mexico.  In 1996 he returned to Poland and settled in Kraków.  In 2008 he moved back to France.

    Sławomir Mrożek reigned as the preeminent playwright and satirist of Eastern Europe for the past half century.  He debuted in 1958 with a play Policja (The Police). Mrożek’s plays, now considered  classics, were welcomed immediately by both stage directors and the public.  He gained world fame in 1964 with the play Tango.

    Mrożek was a sharp critic of all oppressive systems during the Cold War. Bordering on the absurd with its combination of humour, wit, and the grotesque, his work transgressed political and economic systems, revealing both their universality and their nonsensical aspects.

    About the translator

    Garry_pic4Garry Malloy studied Polish philology under Dr Elwira Grossman at the University of Glasgow, and graduated in 2003. In 2011-12, he was mentored by award-winning translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones as part of the first full mentoring programme run by the British Centre for Literary Translation and the Translators Association. Garry’s translation of Tadeusz Pankiewicz’s haunting Holocaust memoir “The Krakow Ghetto Pharmacy” was published in May 2013 by Wydawnictwo Literackie. He has also translated a number of texts for the Polish Book Institute and the Miłosz Festival in Krakow. He currently lives and works in Warsaw.

    Additional information

    The-Elephant-

    For information on an exhibition about Sławomir Mrożek, please see this link.

    “I picked on Mrozek because, to be honest, I’d never read him and felt I should. I’m very glad I did: for the 42 stories here, some of them less than a page long, offer varied experiences which you won’t find anywhere else. They are absurdist parables, by turns hilarious, unsettling and enigmatic.” Short story collection The Elephant by Sławomir Mrożek, reviewed in the Guardian. For more, please see this link.

    You can purchase the book The Elephant via this link.

    http://rcm-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=0141193042

  • No offence meant

    Award-winning translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones experiences extreme reactions to the latest crime novel she has translated on a recent trip to Poland…Here she tells the PEN Atlas of her time in Sandomierz, where she visits the setting of the novel by Zygmunt Miłoszewski.

    I recently translated a crime novel, A Grain of Truth, by Polish author Zygmunt Miłoszewski. The story is set in the city of Sandomierz, famous for its picturesque, seventeenth-century Old Town, set on a high hill above the modern city. The book makes use of historical facts about the city’s insalubrious past as the scene of pogroms against the Jewish population in the eighteenth century. It also refers to a ‘small town’ mentality, and implies that some people there would still fairly readily express anti-Semitic feelings. Knowing that in Poland reactions to fiction can be extreme, personal and literal, Miłoszewski was keen to take me to Sandomierz before the book was published, to show me the places featured in it before he became persona non grata.

    In fact, we ended up going to a meeting with the deputy mayor and the publicity people from his publisher, because the deputy mayor had read the book. She loved it, and was planning to host a book launch and a special edition. So that was a relief. However, forgetting that the beginning of the book had just been published in the Polish edition of Newsweek, Zygmunt then rang the man who runs the archive – central to the plot of the book and housed in the former synagogue – to ask if he could bring me there to show me around. “You might not remember me,” he said politely. “How could I forget you?”came the answer. “I’ve had calls from colleagues all over the country asking how I could let anyone spend all night in the archive!” Something that only happens in the novel, of course. We were told to be there in the next five minutes. It really is a small place, where you keep bumping into the same people, so we were there in no time.

    We were met at the door by the archivist, a gaunt man with white hair and a drooping white moustache. As I looked around, I understood why the author wanted me to see this building – it is an extraordinary place, a library housed inside a fine old hexagonal prayer hall. Many of the original features are still there, including an incredible Zodiac painted on the ceiling (with a crocodile for Scorpio and a crayfish for Cancer), gryphons and Hebrew writing on the walls. But the entire space is bizarrely filled with metal shelving on several levels, a sort of scaffolding, crammed with fat parish record books which miraculously survived the war. At the top level of the scaffolding, special gantries, like miniature drawbridges on pulleys, can be lowered to reach the high-up windows, set deep into the building’s thick walls.

    As I took photos, the man said to Zygmunt, “So what does a big-city goodbye look like, then?” Zygmunt was puzzled. “There’s an extract from the book on your publisher’s website where it says, ‘The waiter tossed him a small-town goodbye’. People are sensitive about that sort of thing, you know.” “Er, er,” said Zygmunt, “that’s just on the website, not actually in the book.” “And our cleaning lady is very upset,” said the man.

    At the start of the book, which was in Newsweek, there is a crucial scene that sets off the whole intrigue and draws the reader inexorably into the plot. The genealogist doing his research in the small hours becomes unnerved by the creepy atmosphere of the archive, and the tension is compounded when he hears a loud crash; it’s just that one of the window gantries has fallen. As he tries to raise it again, he thinks he sees something outside, and approaches the window for a better look; it’s dirty, he can’t see properly, so he opens the window to look out, and sees a ghastly, bloodless corpse shining in the moonlight.

    “The window has to be dirty in the book for the purposes of the plot, so the character opens it and looks out,” said Zygmunt. “You’ll have to explain that to Mrs Janeczka!” We were duly marched to a cubby hole under the stairs. The tall man knocked at it importantly. “Mrs Janeczka, it’s the writer fellow from Warsaw!” Out came a small woman in a blue pinny and plum-coloured hair. Without a word, she defiantly pointed her chin at Zygmunt, her stare so stony that he visibly aged down from thirty-five to five. Stammering like a school boy, he tried to explain. “It’s just fiction, I never meant to imply… to cast aspersionson your no doubt impeccable cleaning skills…” “But it’s gone out into the world,” she said.

    “Book launch at the Town Hall, reception at the bar, author’s public execution in the Marketplace!” I said as we ran off. Later we learned that a local primary school teacher, who just happened to have the same (not unusual) name as one of the characters in the book, had insisted that the publisher must withdraw and pulp the entire first edition – the pupils had cottoned on to the book character’s nickname: “piczkazasadniczka” – “the principled pussy”. Before the book launch could happen, it was abruptly cancelled; allegedly the bishop had been offended by the book’s criticism of the Catholic church, and the mayor was offended by its suggestion of scams run by the city administration. “But no one was offended because I dragged up the city’s anti-Semitic past,” says Zygmunt. “Perhaps, because I did my best in the novel to point out the path of common sense, to show that both anti-Semitism and mad political correctness are built upon the same hatred.”

    Needless to say, it was a bestseller at the local independent bookshop (which features in the book), and eventually Miłoszewski got a reprieve. His author’s event in Sandomierz happened and was very well attended, a huge success and a happy occasion – with no need for the discreet bodyguard offered by his publisher.

    Antonia_Lloyd-JonesAbout the Author

    Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a full-time translator of Polish literature. Her published translations include fiction by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists, including The Last Supper by Paweł Huelle, for which she won the Found in Translation Award 2008. Her translations of non-fiction include reportage, literary biographies and essays. She also translates poetry and books for children, including illustrated books, novels and verse. She occasionally takes part in translation conferences, reads her work at public events, and interprets for the writers whom she translates at literary festivals. Last year she participated in Translation Nation, a project to teach primary school children the value of knowing languages. She recently mentored a younger translator within a project run by the British Centre for Literary Translation, and initiated by the UK Translators Association, of which she is currently a committee member.

    A Grain of Truth, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones is published by Bitter Lemon Press.

    Entanglement, by Zygmunt Miłoszewski, translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones, was published in 2010.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A – Artur Domosławski, author of Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life

    PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis talks to Artur Domosławski, author of the controversial and popular biography Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life. Artur Domosławski will be touring the UK from 19 – 26 September. You can find the full events schedule here.The Polish version of the text can be read here.Why did you decide to write a biography of Kapuscinski? Because he had a fascinating life – he lived through a few historical events in several parts of the world, was a witness to so many crucial events in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America that one could parcel out his experiences to several reporters and writers. He was also the most important journalist of his time in Poland, and one of the most important in the world. He was close to me, personally and intelectually, and we shared a similar view of the world. Also, because despite his fame we knew very little about him; and what he had to say about the world – despite admiration for his literary talent – was not understood and considered in Poland.Did the fact that you were friends with Kapuscinski make writing his biography more difficult?Sometimes it helped, sometimes it made it more difficult. It helped, because I talked to him intensely during the last nine years of his life, and soaked up his way of thinking. It hindered when I encountered events which – I thought – some readers might take as negative, though I didn’t necessarily see them as such myself. Then I was faced with a challenge: how to describe these events honestly, but at the same time with empathy and understanding. Each author of a biography, who knows his subject, and was friends with him or her, has to confront such difficulties, I am not an exception.Was Kapuscinski, according to you, an outstanding writer as well as an outstanding reporter? Yes, he was both. Some of this books are strictly journalistic – but also in those he was an outstanding writer. One of the most wonderful descriptions, both journalistic and literary, is, for example, the scene describing the wooden city of crates departing from Luanda with all the possessions of the  Portuguese leaving Angola when it gained independence.  This is one those moments when reportage becomes great literature.But amongst Kapuscinski’s works there are also books which were treated as reportage, but were –  even though they had the element of reportage – in the strict sense of the word,  literature. I think that this is the case with The Emperor, which is an outstanding treatise about power based on the motif of the Haile Sellasje’s court, but also, above all, great literature. In the 70s Poles read this book as a metaphor for the court of Edward Gierek. One of Kapuscinski’s friends said once that The Emperor is the greatest Polish novel of the 20th century. I think that Kapuscinski wouldn’t have anything against such a classification.Do you think that the fact that Kapuscinski wrote from behind the Iron Curtain sharpened his imagination as a reporter?I think that the place of birth and the part of one’s life which has not been freely chosen can give some additional sharepened vision. But I don’t think that life behind the Iron Curtain could equip anybody with any particular wisdom not accessible to  others. It simply gave Kapuscinski a lot of experiences, which he was able to transform into literature.Which elements of Kapuscinski’s writing have made him so popular? I am sure that there are a few elements. One of them is being able to evoke emotions understood by readers of various ages, education and experience. Secondly, his seductive style and the melody of his sentences. And thirdly, relating complicated world events: power, revolutions, issues often excluding the public, through images, and stories and not through abstract, analytical concepts.Why do you think Kapuscinski was beyond criticism in Poland?I think that in Poland we like having blameless heros, saints, we like turning them into statues, and then worshipping them. That happened with Kapuscinski. He was admired superficially, though certainly in an authentic way – as a compatriot, who was successful abroad. Unfortunately, his reflections about the world haven’t been taken seriously in Poland, and what he had to say has been ignored. Because one does not debate the merits of a saint, one does not criticise a saint. This has consequences – paradoxically, Kapuscinski is not well known, understood and taken into account in Poland.What subjects would Kapuscinski write about nowadays? Which subjects would he consider most important?I think that he would be fascinated by the Arab Spring. Kapuscinski described mass movements for liberation – both political and social.  Rebellion against dictators in the Arab world would certainly be his subject. Though he might not have much energy to travel at his advanced age. Maybe not. He had a few ideas for other books, which he didn’t have enough time to write: about Bronislaw Malinowski, about Latin America, about his childhood town – Pinsk.Do you think that Kapuscinski has successors in Poland? Who would you recommend to British readers and publishers? I think that Poland has very good reportage, but it would be hard to nominate successors. I will leave this to readers and publishers.

    *

    Additional InformationArtur Domosławski writes on international politics for the weekly review Polityka and for the Polish edition of Le Monde diplomatique, and for two decades reported for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. In 2010 he received Poland’s prestigious Journalist of the Year Award. A Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 2005-2006, he is the author of five books and is currently working on a book about contemporary Latin America.Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life is translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, a full-time translator of Polish literature. Her published translations include fiction by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists, including The Last Supper by Paweł Huelle, for which she won the Found in Translation Award 2008. Her translations of non-fiction include reportage, literary biographies and essays. She also translates poetry and books for children, including illustrated books, novels and verse. She occasionally takes part in translation conferences, reads her work at public events, and interprets for the writers whom she translates at literary festivals. Last year she participated in Translation Nation, a project to teach primary school children the value of knowing languages. She recently mentored a younger translator within a project run by the British Centre for Literary Translation, and initiated by the UK Translators Association, of which she is currently a committee member.Ryszard Kapuściński: A Lifehttp://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=184467858X
    Recent Polish reportage available in English: The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord Resistance Army by Wojciech Jagielski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, (Old Street, 2012)http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=1908699086
    White Fever by Jacek Hugo-Bader, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, (Portobello Books, 2011)http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=1846272696
    Like Eating a Stone by Wojciech Tochman, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, (Portobello Books, 2009)http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=184627088X

  • PEN Atlas Q&A – Artur Domosławski, author of Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life

    PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis talks to Artur Domosławski, author of the controversial and popular biography Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life. Artur Domosławski will be touring the UK from 19 – 26 September. You can find the full events schedule here.The Polish version of the text can be read here.Why did you decide to write a biography of Kapuscinski? Because he had a fascinating life – he lived through a few historical events in several parts of the world, was a witness to so many crucial events in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America that one could parcel out his experiences to several reporters and writers. He was also the most important journalist of his time in Poland, and one of the most important in the world. He was close to me, personally and intelectually, and we shared a similar view of the world. Also, because despite his fame we knew very little about him; and what he had to say about the world – despite admiration for his literary talent – was not understood and considered in Poland.Did the fact that you were friends with Kapuscinski make writing his biography more difficult?Sometimes it helped, sometimes it made it more difficult. It helped, because I talked to him intensely during the last nine years of his life, and soaked up his way of thinking. It hindered when I encountered events which – I thought – some readers might take as negative, though I didn’t necessarily see them as such myself. Then I was faced with a challenge: how to describe these events honestly, but at the same time with empathy and understanding. Each author of a biography, who knows his subject, and was friends with him or her, has to confront such difficulties, I am not an exception.Was Kapuscinski, according to you, an outstanding writer as well as an outstanding reporter? Yes, he was both. Some of this books are strictly journalistic – but also in those he was an outstanding writer. One of the most wonderful descriptions, both journalistic and literary, is, for example, the scene describing the wooden city of crates departing from Luanda with all the possessions of the  Portuguese leaving Angola when it gained independence.  This is one those moments when reportage becomes great literature.But amongst Kapuscinski’s works there are also books which were treated as reportage, but were –  even though they had the element of reportage – in the strict sense of the word,  literature. I think that this is the case with The Emperor, which is an outstanding treatise about power based on the motif of the Haile Sellasje’s court, but also, above all, great literature. In the 70s Poles read this book as a metaphor for the court of Edward Gierek. One of Kapuscinski’s friends said once that The Emperor is the greatest Polish novel of the 20th century. I think that Kapuscinski wouldn’t have anything against such a classification.Do you think that the fact that Kapuscinski wrote from behind the Iron Curtain sharpened his imagination as a reporter?I think that the place of birth and the part of one’s life which has not been freely chosen can give some additional sharepened vision. But I don’t think that life behind the Iron Curtain could equip anybody with any particular wisdom not accessible to  others. It simply gave Kapuscinski a lot of experiences, which he was able to transform into literature.Which elements of Kapuscinski’s writing have made him so popular? I am sure that there are a few elements. One of them is being able to evoke emotions understood by readers of various ages, education and experience. Secondly, his seductive style and the melody of his sentences. And thirdly, relating complicated world events: power, revolutions, issues often excluding the public, through images, and stories and not through abstract, analytical concepts.Why do you think Kapuscinski was beyond criticism in Poland?I think that in Poland we like having blameless heros, saints, we like turning them into statues, and then worshipping them. That happened with Kapuscinski. He was admired superficially, though certainly in an authentic way – as a compatriot, who was successful abroad. Unfortunately, his reflections about the world haven’t been taken seriously in Poland, and what he had to say has been ignored. Because one does not debate the merits of a saint, one does not criticise a saint. This has consequences – paradoxically, Kapuscinski is not well known, understood and taken into account in Poland.What subjects would Kapuscinski write about nowadays? Which subjects would he consider most important?I think that he would be fascinated by the Arab Spring. Kapuscinski described mass movements for liberation – both political and social.  Rebellion against dictators in the Arab world would certainly be his subject. Though he might not have much energy to travel at his advanced age. Maybe not. He had a few ideas for other books, which he didn’t have enough time to write: about Bronislaw Malinowski, about Latin America, about his childhood town – Pinsk.Do you think that Kapuscinski has successors in Poland? Who would you recommend to British readers and publishers? I think that Poland has very good reportage, but it would be hard to nominate successors. I will leave this to readers and publishers.

    *

    Additional InformationArtur Domosławski writes on international politics for the weekly review Polityka and for the Polish edition of Le Monde diplomatique, and for two decades reported for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. In 2010 he received Poland’s prestigious Journalist of the Year Award. A Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 2005-2006, he is the author of five books and is currently working on a book about contemporary Latin America.Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life is translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, a full-time translator of Polish literature. Her published translations include fiction by several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists, including The Last Supper by Paweł Huelle, for which she won the Found in Translation Award 2008. Her translations of non-fiction include reportage, literary biographies and essays. She also translates poetry and books for children, including illustrated books, novels and verse. She occasionally takes part in translation conferences, reads her work at public events, and interprets for the writers whom she translates at literary festivals. Last year she participated in Translation Nation, a project to teach primary school children the value of knowing languages. She recently mentored a younger translator within a project run by the British Centre for Literary Translation, and initiated by the UK Translators Association, of which she is currently a committee member.Ryszard Kapuściński: A Lifehttp://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=184467858X
    Recent Polish reportage available in English: The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord Resistance Army by Wojciech Jagielski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, (Old Street, 2012)http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=1908699086
    White Fever by Jacek Hugo-Bader, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, (Portobello Books, 2011)http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=1846272696
    Like Eating a Stone by Wojciech Tochman, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, (Portobello Books, 2009)http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=enpe-21&o=2&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=184627088X