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Flaw
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by
Magdalena Tulli
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translated by Bill Johnston
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Archipelago Books, November 2007
A single streetcar line runs around the sleepy square
of an unnamed city. One day – out of nowhere –
refugees pour from the streetcar and set up camp in
the square. The residents grow hostile and eventually
take extreme action.
“The originality of Tulli's writing is not lessened by representing a
family tree that includes Michaud, Kafka, Calvino, and
Saramago.”
— W.S. Merwin
Magdalena Tulli
has been hailed as the new Bruno Schulz by Polish
critics. Her first novel,
Dreams and Stones,
won
Poland’s
Koscielski Foundation prize in 1995. In
Red
(W czerwieni, WAB, 1998), her second book, also
received great critical acclaim in Poland and
elsewhere. Moving Parts was short-listed for the 2002 Nike Prize,
Poland’s
most prestigious literary award. Tulli has translated
the work of Italo Calvino and Marcel Proust. Born in
1955, she lives in
Warsaw,
where she works as a psychologist and translator.
Bill Johnston
is director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana
University. In 2005, he won an ASTEEL translation
prize for Tulli's
Dreams and Stones. |
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Northwestern University Press (Holocaust Series),
September 2007
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In a brief life deeply and traumatically disrupted by
two years in concentration camps as a political
prisoner, Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951) was
tragically destined to become one of the most eloquent
witnesses to the Holocaust in Poland. His
recollections and stories, the most famous of which is
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,
document in stark historical, literary, and personal
terms the experience of the camps and its cost to
humanity.
As a student in the underground educational system and
a poet published in the underground press under the
German occupation of Poland, Borowski had already
rejected the traditional Polish faith in heroic
martyrdom. He then shocked many by seeing and
describing Auschwitz as a cruel free-for-all
implicating both prisoners and guards in a meaningless
struggle to survive. He embraced Communism as the only
bulwark against the bestiality he had witnessed,
gained celebrity through his literary service to the
Stalinist regime, and then, in part through
disenchantment with that regime, gassed himself to
death before he was 30.
This volume opens with Borowski's letter to his mother
from Pawiak Prison the day after his arrest and closes
with an unsigned telegram informing his parents of his
suicide. The letters to and from family members,
friends, and literary figures offer an indispensable
picture of a totalitarian world in the wake of the
Nazis – and of the indelible stain that experience
left upon the literature,
politics, and life of Eastern Europe, in particular
upon one gifted and doomed writer.
If Elie Wiesel was the great mystic of the Holocaust
and Primo Levi was its great analyst, Borowski was its
angry young man, a pent-up vessel of pressurized fury
that could do nothing in the end but explode.
– Ruth Franklin, The New Republic Online
Tadeusz Drewnowski,
for half a century a prominent essayist, literary
critic and historian, and editor, has written highly
regarded monographs on such writers as Borowski and
Tadeusz Rozewicz. |
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The Morality of Mrs. Dulska
a
play by Gabriela Zapolska,
edited by Teresa Murjas
Intellect Ltd, November 2007
Born during the tumultuous one-hundred-year division
of Poland by Austria, Prussia, and Russia,
Gabriela Zapolska (1857–1921) was an actor,
journalist, and playwright who wrote over thirty
plays in her lifetime. In her best-known work,
The Morality of Mrs. Dulska, a tyrannical
landlady harasses, exploits, and even prostitutes
the eccentric cast of tenants who occupy her stone
tenement building. The petty-bourgeois tragicomedy
that ensues is regarded as a landmark of early
modernist Polish drama.
A cross between Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage
and Patricia Routledge’s Hyacinth Bucket,
Mrs. Dulska keeps her purse strings tightly drawn
and shows no compassion towards the sad plights of
her lodgers – until she is forced to come to terms
with her own possessive love for her son. Now
available for the first time in an English-language
edition that firmly situates the play in the context
of its performance history, Zapolska’s incisive play
is an uncompromising look at gender, class, and
relationships in fin-de-siècle Poland.
In her introduction to Zapolska's seminal play,
Murjas discusses the many intriguing challenges
involved in its cultural transference, combining the
perspective of translator with that of theatre
practitioner. This book is a rare treat in a much
neglected area of modern scholarship.
– Dr Elwira Grossman, University of Glasgow
Teresa Murjas
is a lecturer in theater at the University of
Reading, United Kingdom.
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- Travels with Herodotus
- by Ryszard Kapuscinski
- translated by Klara Glowczewska
- Knopf, June 2007
From the master of literary reportage, who died in
January of 2007, and whose acclaimed books include Shah of Shahs, The Emperor, and The Shadow of
the Sun, this is his last book, published
posthumously in English – an intimate account of his
first youthful forays beyond the Iron Curtain.
Just out of university in 1955, Kapuscinski told his
editor that he’d like to go abroad. Dreaming no
farther than Czechoslovakia, the young reporter found
himself sent to India. Captivated, he discovered his
life’s work – to understand and describe the world in
all its multiplicity. From the rituals of sunrise at
Persepolis to the incongruity of Louis Armstrong
performing before a stone-faced crowd in Khartoum,
Kapuscinski gives us the non-Western world as he first
saw it, through still-virginal Western eyes.
His traveling companion was a copy of the 5th-century
B.C. Histories by Herodotus, a gift from his
boss. Whether in China, Poland, Iran, or the Congo,
the “father of history” – and, as Kapuscinski would
realize, of globalism – helped the young correspondent
make sense of events and find stories where none was
obvious. It was his great forerunner’s spirit – both
supremely worldly and innately Occidental – that
continued to whet Kapuscinski’s ravenous appetite for
the wider world.
Travels with Herodotus is a work of art: so eloquent,
so simple, that you find yourself marveling at its
prose… And you find yourself applauding such good
translation as well. The
deeper, tacit message in Travels with Herodotus is
surely that journalism now, with its celebrity roving
correspondents who jet in and out of conflicts, misses
the point. [...] Kapuscinski will be remembered for a
kind of writing and a standard seldom present in the
reportage we read today; just as he will be remembered
for a humility, a selflessness, that touched every
word he wrote.
– Tahir Shah, The Washington Post's Book World, 2007
Kapucinski saw more, and more clearly, than nearly any
writer one can think to name. Few have written more
beautifully of unspeakable things. Few have had his
courage, almost none his talent. His books changed the
way many of us think about nonfiction... When the last
page of this book is turned, note how much smaller and
colder the world now seems with Kapuscinski gone.
– Tom Bissell, New York Times Book Review
Kapuscinski fashions an elegant homage to his literary
ancestor, whom he helps us to see as the original
foreign correspondent. Educated by the atrocities of
his own time, he refuses to let Herodotus’s ancient
atrocities become distant and abstract.
– Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun
In this dramatic telling by one of modernity’s ablest
chroniclers, Herodotus stands for democracy, openness,
and tolerance. The same can be said of the equally
enigmatic, and certain to be missed, author. – Lawrence Osborne, Men’s Vogue
Personally revealing, Kapuscinski is not often
didactic and never triumphalist. His luminous
narratives are filled with odd juxtapositions and the
ambiguities of real experience. Like Herodotus,
Ryszard Kapucinski was a reporter, an historian, an
adventurer and, truly, an artist.
– Matthew Kaminski, The Wall Street Journal
Ryszard Kapuscinski,
Poland’s most celebrated foreign correspondent, was
born in 1932 in Pinsk (in what is now Belarus) and
spent four decades reporting on Asia, Latin America,
and Africa. He is the author of Shah of Shahs, The
Emperor, Another Day of Life, and The
Soccer War. His books have been translated into
twenty-eight languages. Kapuscinski died in 2007. >>>MORE
Klara Glowczewska,
one of the most distinguished translators of Polish
books into English, including several by Kapuscinski,
is Editor-in-Chief of Condé Nast Traveler
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by Stefan Zeromski, translated and with an introduction by Bill Johnston
Central European University Press; Tra edition, May 2007
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Zeromski, whose vivid, assured style is instantly recognizable, was a writer with a strong social conscience, taking up the concerns of the poor and downtrodden.
The Coming Spring (Przedwiosnie), Zeromski's last novel (1925), tells the story of Cezary Baryka, a young Pole who finds himself in Baku, Azerbaijan, then a predominantly Armenian city, as the Russian Revolution breaks out. He becomes embroiled in the chaos caused by the revolution, and barely escapes with his life. Then, he and his father set off on a horrendous journey west to reach Poland. His father dies en route, but Cezary makes it to the newly independent Poland. Cezary sees the suffering of the poor, yet his experiences in the newly formed Soviet Union make him suspicious of socialist and communist solutions. He is an outsider among both the gentry and the working classes, and he cannot find where he belongs. Furthermore, he has unsuccessful and tragic love relations. The novel ends when, despite his profound misgivings, he takes up political action on behalf of the poor.
Stefan Zeromski (1864-1925) was born in the wake of a failed uprising in January 1863 against the Czarist Russian occupiers, when Poland was still partitioned by Prussia, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. The defeat was a disaster for Poland that directly or indirectly marked the rest of Zeromski’s life and work. After studying veterinary medicine in Warsaw he worked as an assistant librarian in a Polish museum in Switzerland and at the Zamoyski Library in Warsaw for about ten years, steeping himself in Polish history, developing what Milosz has called “a vocabulary of stupendous richness”, and writing some of his most important novels – The Homeless People (1900), about the gentry’s sense of guilt in the face of social injustice, and Ashes (1904), about the disenchantment of idealistic Poles who left their partitioned country to fight cruel wars under Napoleon “for your freedom and ours”. Widely regarded as “the conscience of Polish literature”, Zeromski’s qualities of intellectual integrity and social compassion are perhaps most fully expressed in The Coming Spring, which was published the year he died.
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Nine
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by Andrzej Stasiuk
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Translated by Bill Johnston.
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Harcourt, May 2007
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In his ninth book, and the third to
be published in English, Andrzej Stasiuk, one
of Poland’s most successful and internationally
acclaimed contemporary writers
–
a novelist, poet,
essayist, literary critic, and more – vividly captured
in 1998 a city in transition and the milieu of those
marginalized by the changeover from communism to a
free-market economy.
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A petty entrepreneur cannot return
money borrowed from drug dealers, wakes up in his
ransacked apartment and fears for his life. Those to
whom he turns for help, whether successful or not, are
all equally caught up in the struggle for quick
cash on the fringes of the economic transition. 10
years after Stasiuk wrote it,
Nine describes conditions that are still widely
prevalent despite remarkable economic progress since
then for most Poles, and the book has established
Stasiuk as a major voice in European literature.
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I caught a flavor of Hamsun, Sartre, Genet and Kafka
in Stasiuk’s scalpel-like but evocative writing
– Irvine Welsch, The New York Times
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For all its street-smart pace and grit, Nine is
studded with hauntingly graceful and tender passages
(Bill Johnston's translation reads beautifully).
– Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
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Like Notes from
the Underground, Dostoyevsky’s shriek of a
book, Nine –
love it or hate it – will long stick to
your mental ribs.
– John McCaffery, KGBBarLit
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Andrzej Stasiuk,
born in Warsaw in 1960, was dismissed from secondary
school, drifted through a succession of odd jobs,
joined the Polish pacifist movement, and was drafted
into the army, from which he deserted (as legend has
it, in a tank) – resulting in a year and a half in
prison, an experience which yielded the material for
a book of stories in 1992 that immediately
established him as a major literary talent. His
first full-length novel in 1995 (published in
English as The White
 Raven
in 2000) was a best-seller that established him as
one of the most successful authors in post-communist
Poland, considered by many the Polish Jack Kerouac.
>>> COMPLETE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW |
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THE
DREAMING LIFE OF LEONORA DE LA CRUZ (Senny zywot
Leonory de la Cruz, slowo / obraz terytoria, 2004)
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by Agnieszka Taborska
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illustrations: Selena Kimball Smith
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translated by
Danusia Stok in collaboration with Agnieszka Taborska
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Midmarch Arts Press, February 2007, available in
bookstores on March 1
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Published with support of the Polish Cultural
Institute, New York, the Polish Book Institute,
Krakow, and the Rhode Island School of Design,
Providence, RI.
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Using a hybrid of poetic fiction and scholarly rigor,
Agnieszka Taborska has written a whimsical,
oneiric tale in the tradition of black humor about a
fictitious 18th-century visionary saint rediscovered
200 years after her death by the French Surrealists
and worshipped by them as the patron saint of the
subconscious, who saw in her dreams the future of
mankind.
The work is completed by a
scientific glossary, which explains the factual
allusions to the hagiographies and to the history of
Surrealism. The
book itself is a beauty, brought to visual life
through the 35 Max Ernst-inspired collage
illustrations by Taborska’s former student at RISD,
Selena Kimball Smith, which are works of art in
themselves. The Sleepy
Life of Leonora de la Cruz has been described by
critics as “a beautiful story told through words and
images that amuses and instructs simultaneously
– and embraces all this within a work of art”. (Gazeta
Wyborcza)
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Agnieszka Taborska’s book, with collages by Selena Kimball,
proves the ongoing power of the surrealist imagination
to alter our perceptions of reality. Though hitherto
unrecorded, the magnificent interventions of the
Spanish Carmelite Leonora de la Cruz – somnolent,
visionary, transgressive, magical – will ensure her a
place in the pantheon of surrealist women, real and
mythic, who embody poet André Breton’s insistence that
beauty “will be convulsive or it will not be.” A
stunning addition to the literature of surrealism....
– Whitney Chadwick, author of Women Artists and the Surrealist
Movement
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It is a prose poem in chapters, of haunting beauty,
exactly the kind of writing Surrealism and we devotees
of it most love. And the collages are something else:
think Ernst and think past him. Truly one of the most
amazing books I have ever had the privilege of
dreaming through.
– Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of
Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate Center, and the
author of many books on Surrealism and the arts.
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Agnieszka Taborska’s and Selena Kimball Smith’s
imagination and irony have given us something which is
in no way Post-Modernist or flashy Modernist camp. […]
Taborska’s apocryphal work – for it is absolutely
apocryphal, there being nothing other than imagination
and irony – is made up of two “layers”. The first, the
hagiography, is openly apocryphal. […] The second
“layer” is meta-apocryphal, meta-hagiographic. This
upper level of the edifice of dreams raised by Leonora
was inhabited by the Surrealists.”
– Nowe Ksiazki (New Books)
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The Sleepy Life… is a splendid tale, saturated with
scholarly details, about that reality on the other
side of the mirror, which, by various means,
somnambulists and visionaries under the banner of
“convulsive beauty” aspired to attain. […] fans of
literary and intellectual games will abandon
themselves to reading this book with flushed cheeks.
– Eksklusiv
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Agnieszka Taborska has furnished her penetrating work
with highly interesting annotations. She has
introduced in them the most important figures in
Surrealism, explained Surrealism’s terminology,
described the daily life of the Surrealists and many
significant episodes in the movement’s history. […]
The fact that Leonora is an entirely fictitious
character, who owes her existence entirely to
Agnieszka Taborska’s untamed Surrealist imagination,
will not put anybody off. Let us prize this remarkable
poetic joke created by an author with charming
erudition and literary sense.
– Zwierciadlo
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It is both a work of Surrealist art and a commentary
on the work of Surrealists. […] The significance of
women in this avant-garde movement constitutes one of
the most important threads in the book.
– Czas kultury
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Agnieszka Taborska
(b. 1961), art historian and writer, teaches 20th
century European art and literature at the Rhode
Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island.
Her main area of interest is French Surrealism,
the significance of women in the movement and the
impact Surrealism has on contemporary art.
She translated French literature into Polish,
including books by Philippe Soupault and Roland Topor.
Taborska has published numerous books and essays in
Poland, among them a literary reportage on America
entitled Love Country Music: The Diary of an
American Journey, and a “linguist” fairytale for
children and adults entitled In Raspberry
Jam.
Her works of children’s fiction have been translated
into German, Japanese and Korean and have received
literary prizes in Germany. Her last book, the
surrealistic novel The Dreaming Life of Leonora de
la Cruz, with collages by Selena Kimball
Smith, was published in Poland in 2004 (Slowo/Obraz/Terytoria,
Gdansk) and in the US (Midmarch Arts Press, NYC 2006).
It will be published in France in the fall of 2007.
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Selena Kimball
is a native of
Maine.
She graduated with a BFA from the Rhode Island School
of Design in 1997. Her work has been shown in group
and solo exhibitions in the U.S., Canada, Great
Britain, and Poland. A solo show of her paintings was
held at the Museum Taratului in Bucharest. In
addition, she has collaborated with writers and
filmmakers, and her animations have been screened at
film festivals internationally. She lives with a
library of old books, collected for over a decade,
which are carefully destroyed to make her collages.
She is currently an MFA student at Hunter College and
lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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>>> BOOK SIGNINGS AND EXHIBITION |
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WAITING FOR THE DOG TO SLEEP: SHORT FICTION
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by
Jerzy Ficowski
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translated by Soren A. Gauger & Marcin Piekoszewski
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Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, May 2006
The much admired poet, translator, and scholar Jerzy
Ficowski's only collection of prose. In these short
stories and sketches Ficowski reinterprets a question
posed by the writer most central to his work, Bruno
Schulz, about the mythologization of reality. For
Schulz, fiction was a way of turning the quotidian into
the fantastical and eternal. Ficowski's prose seems to
reinterpret this approach in addressing the sense of
loss and the bleak landscape of postwar Poland.
Effortlessly weaving memory, religious ritual, daily
life, and the magical, he hints at a sinister presence
lurking behind these dreamlike tales—a trace of ruin or
disintegration always present as the narrator repeatedly
struggles to link some aspect of a past that has been
annihilated with a present that is foreign and hostile.
The late Jerzy Ficowski (1924 – 2006) was
Poland’s most distinguished expert on Roma culture and
history and its foremost authority on the work of poet
and painter Bruno Schulz. He was a translator who worked
in several languages, including Yiddish, Roma, and
Russian. His ca. 20 books of poetry include A Reading
of Ashes, a moving account of the Holocaust.
Ficowski is perhaps most widely known for his landmark
work on Schulz,
Regions of the Great Heresy
first published by the Borderland Foundation in 2002 and
then in English by Norton in 2003. Ficowski also edited
The Collected Works of Bruno Schulz.
Born in Warsaw, Ficowski fought in the Home Army during
the German occupation, and in the 1970s joined the
dissident organization KOR (Workers’ Defense Committee).
His passionate research in Roma culture resulted in the
book, Gypsies in Poland: History and Customs. On
his 75th birthday in 1999 Ficowski was the first to be
awarded the title of Borderlander by the
Borderland
Foundation, which has published several volumes of
his work, most recently Mistrz Manole i inne
przekłady (Maestro Manole and Other Translations) in
2004, a comprehensive collection of his translations of
Romanian folk poetry, Russian poems of the Polish poet
Bolesław Leśmian, Jewish poetry, poems of Federico
Garcia Lorca, love-poetry from Dubrovnik, and the poems
of Papusza - a Polish Gypsy singer. In 2005 Ficowski was
honored by "Literatura na Świecie" magazine (World
Literature) for his life’s work in translation. The news
of his death on May 9 came almost simultaneously with
the publication of Waiting for the Dog to Sleep.
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Other works available in English by Jerzy Ficowski
include:
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The collected Works of Bruno Schulz (editor, Feb.
2003)
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Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz – a
Biographical Portrait (Nov. 2001, Nov. 2002, Apr.
2004)
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Drawings of Bruno Schulz (Nov. 1990)
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Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz: With Selected
Prose (Nov. 1988, Jun. 1990)
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Sister of the Birds and Other Gypsy Tales (Aug. 1976)
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The Gypsies in Poland: History and Customs
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Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles (Introduction
and translation, Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics,
Mar. 1992)
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They Don’t Ring at the Bernardines’, in: Chicago
Review, December
31, 2005
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Window to the World, in: Chicago Review,
December 31, 2005
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Intermission, in: Chicago Review,
December 31, 2005)
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MERCEDES-BENZ
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From Letters to Hrabal
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by Pawel Huelle
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translated by Antonia
Lloyd-Jones
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Serpent's Tail, London, February 2006
Mercedes-Benz
is both an autobiographical novel illustrated with family photographs, and a
captivating homage to Bohumil Hrabal, written in the form of a letter to the
late Czech writer. In the expressively visual style of Hrabal himself, Pawel
Huelle tells the stories of three generations in Poland, from its pre-war
independence through the communist years to the free-market uncertainties of
Huelle's youth – all through the idiosyncratic lens of automobile ownership.
Writing as if to Hrabal, he describes his adventures learning to drive in
the early 90s, and within that framework tells the young lady instructor
engaging anecdotes about his grandparents and their Mercedes before the war,
when chasing hot-air balloons by car seemed great fun until anti-aircraft
fire burst the bubble, the Soviets confiscated the Mercedes, and his
grandfather was sent to Auschwitz. A good-natured critique of some of the
ambiguities of Poland’s post-war and post-communist progress.
“Quirky, thoughtful and often poetic, it opens a subjective and fascinating
window on to the recent past."
– The Times of London
“Gritty, graceful stories
of a war-blasted generation”
– Boston Globe
“Tender,
beautiful written and puzzling” – The New York Times
Pawel Huelle
is a
novelist, playwright, journalist, and a
columnist for Gazeta Wyborcza. His fiction draws on autobiographical
elements and especially pays homage to his hometown of Gdansk, where he has
lived most of his life. He is the author of two collections of short stories
and two novels, one of which,
Who
Was David Weiser?, was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction
Prize and has been turned into a film. His latest
novel Castorp was published in Poland in 2004.
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COSMOS
by Witold
Gombrowicz
translated by Danuta
Borchardt
Yale University Press,
September 2005
Published in 1965, Cosmos is the last novel by
Gombrowicz (1904–1969) and his most somber and multifaceted work. A dark,
quasi-detective novel, Cosmos follows the classic noir motif to explore the
arbitrariness of language, the joke of human freedom, and man’s attempt to
bring order out of chaos in his psychological life. Cosmos is
translated here for the first time directly from the Polish by Danuta
Borchardt, translator of Ferdydurke. A student needing a quiet place
to study and his friend in need of a break from work find a perfect rural
retreat, but one that draws them gradually into a highly ambiguous mystery.
"Sly, funny, absorbing... The two neurotic detectives
single-mindedly interrogate the meaning of their surroundings, seeking in
the most mundane objects and events the solution to a mystery only they can
see, their suspicions growing and growing until we begin to fear for their
sanity - or ours…. The insight in these remarkable pages is creatively
captivating and intellectually challenging."
— Neil Gordon, New York Times Book Review
Cosmos
is translated here for the first time directly from the Polish by Danuta
Borchardt, translator of Ferdydurke.
“Borchardt’s graceful, powerful, and inventive translation is a great gift
to all lovers of Witold Gombrowicz’s quirky prose.” — Jaroslaw Anders
>>>MORE ON GOMBROWICZ
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MOVING
PARTS (Tryby)
by Magdalena Tulli
translated
from the Polish by Bill Johnston
Archipelago Books, October 2005
A
feckless, comical narrator struggles against all odds to tell a story
for which he is responsible, but which he neither controls nor understands.
His characters multiply, repeat, and go astray; his employer is paying
no attention, asleep in a drunken stupor. The increasingly desperate narrator
clambers over rooftops and through underground passages, watching helplessly
as his characters reappear in different times and settings and start rival
stories against his will. This brilliant, wryly humorous work tells of
the sadness of the world and of the inadequate means that language and
storytelling offer for describing and understanding it. Yet it does so
in Tulli's characteristically clear, concrete, gorgeous prose. This extraordinary
work, unique in both form and message, shows a European master at the
height of her powers and constitutes a major contribution to a new century
of European literature. A wildly inventive page-turner.
“Language glides toward the inhospitable future as it stumbles over the
cluttered past, but grammar’s structures cannot hold back the forces of
personal loss, war, and whatever it is that is known as ‘the human condition.’
The moving parts of time/verb/image/story/character shift below our feet,
endlessly rearrangeable in a terrifyingly prolific machine. As Tulli demonstrates
with a quick swish of the knives, ‘story’ can keep peeling off from itself
and regenerating, like a snake with ever renewable skin.”
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Eleni Sikelianos
“Magdalena Tulli's taut novel follows a daring path through the maze of recent European
history - from its whimsical postmodern opening to a far more complex
inquiry into the enduring legacy of World War II and the nature of human
destiny itself. A genuine tour de force that grows more fascinating with
each surprising turn.”
- Lynne Sharon Schwartz
“The
originality of Tulli's writing is not lessened by representing a family
tree that includes Michaud, Kafka, Calvino, and Saramago.”
- W.S. Merwin
“Just
when you fear fiction may have no more turns left to take, along comes
Magdalena Tulli.
Picking up on the experiments of Oulipo and Robbe-Grillet, she leads us
into a dazzling maze out of which we emerge with our wonder and our delight
retooled.”
- Askold
Melnyczuk
Tulli’s snapshot vignettes — of trains covered with “bright zigzags of
graffiti,” of “a fur that gives off the oppressive smell of mothballs,”
of a hobo who “rakes cigarettes out of his hair” — can be read as lapidary,
Cubist poetry or a word collage that’s amorphously if resonantly evocative.
- Kirkus Reviews, September
15, 2005
Magdalena
Tulli
has been hailed as the new Bruno Schulz by Polish critics. Her first novel,
Dreams and
Stones
(Archipelago, 2004), won Poland’s Koscielski Foundation prize
in 1995. In Red (W czerwieni, WAB, 1998), her second book,
also received great critical acclaim in Poland and elsewhere. Moving
Parts (Tryby) was short-listed for the 2002 Nike Prize, Poland’s most
prestigious literary award. Tulli has translated the work of Italo Calino
and Marcel Proust. Tulli was born in 1955. She lives in Warsaw,
where she works as a psychologist and translator.
Bill
Johnston’s
translations include Tulli’s Dreams and Stones (Archipelago, 2004),
Witold Gombrowicz’s Bacacay (Archipelago, 2004), Gustaw Herling’s
The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories (New Directions, 2003),
Jerzy Pilch’s His Current Woman (Northwestern, 2002), and Stefan
Zeromski’s The Faithful River (Northwestern, 1999). He received
the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation
(1999-2001). Johnston teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington, where
he is Director of the Polish
Studies Center.
Bill Johnston has
just been awarded
the first prize of AATSEEL
(American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages)
for his translation of Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones (Archipelago
Books, 2004). |
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