On the occasion of the publication of Waiting for the Dog to Sleep by Jerzy Ficowski, Polish Writing interviews Soren Gauger, co-translator with Marcin Piekoszewski.

How did you end up living in Poland?

I was living in Vancouver, I had finished a degree in English literature and was spending all my free time doing research into inter-war Polish literature (all the more attractive because it was virtually inaccessible in Vancouver) and listening to Penderecki and Lutosławski, and was much more passionate about these things than anything Canadian (with the exception of my girlfriend, who was, luckily, just as excited about leaving as I was). Polish literature was unhinged, hermetic, and remarkably expressive, and I immediately identified with it. Canadian writing, in contrast, seemed (and often still seems) unenthusiastic, gentlemanly and provincial. The only work I could imagine doing for a living was translation, but I wasn’t particularly competent in any foreign language. I thought I’d move to Poland, learn the language, and become a translator. Well, and that’s more or less the way it went.

What do you make of the Polish literary scene - do any of the younger generation of Polish writers interest you?

Here I will admit with a slight reddening of the cheeks that I read very few contemporary writers, some exceptions being: Ismail Kadare, Jakov Lind, Peter Handke, Vladimir Makanin and Ryszard Kapuścinski (who is no spring chicken). Polish literature at present is suffering a rash of literature about the new lumpen proletariat, dissecting the life of vodka, slums, and unemployment. At the other extreme, you have a swiftly diminishing vanguard of Nobel Prize winners and their ilk writing their last books, and it sometimes feels like there is not much going on in between.

The youngest of those you mention was born in 1942(!). What do you find in them that is missing in younger writers?

Well, we’re touching upon a hypocrisy of mine as a young writer, but I have a lot of difficulty getting interested in hot young talents. This has to do with a distaste for how writing is marketed and promoted, an impatience with the lack of gravity, and a general impression that we are currently enduring a period post-stylization (to reference Wylie Sypher) in which minor art forms thrive and major ones are forced to make do with virtuosi and derivative figures. Part of the problem seems to be: there is an aspect of myth orbiting around writing I admire. Myth can build around a dead writer of intelligence. How does a living writer lend his/her work the stuff of myth?

If not the lumpen proletariat, what should they be writing about?

The problem with realism is that it seeks to side-step the question of what motivates a piece of writing, it is a ready-made solution through which the writer obviates tiresome difficulties vis a vis what is to be said. If you take an Important Societal Problem from the world around you, this more often than not substitutes for an endeavour to address a problem that is artistically serious. Furthermore, when reading a socially/politically provacative piece I feel like one of those Medieval illiterates for whom were painted the lives of the Saints so that they might understand their religion in an entertaining way. I neither need nor desire a 'dramatization' of a social problem to make me understand it or feel its import, a scholarly article will do just fine. Finally, as Bruno Schulz once said: It is the role of the author to make problems for society, not the other way around.

Your collection of short stories Hymns for Millionaires has just been published by Twisted Spoon. How much of an impact has living and working in Poland had on your writing?

Vast, mainly because Vancouver offers a fairly oppressive creative climate. It could be as well that a certain type of creative personality requires space, whether actual or imagined, to get on with the business of writing (see under: Beckett, Cortazar etc.). I’ve been exposed to a great deal of writing, theatre, cinema and visual art that I would never have encountered in Canada, and I’ve learned a great deal about artistic - and religious - seriousness (though I’m non-religious myself). Kraków has a Catholic Intellectuals’ Club, something which strikes the Canadian mind at first as a contradiction in terms.

Is globalization having an energizing or homogenizing effect on this culture?

It's hard to imagine globalization 'energizing' much of anything interesting, but the more I travel in Central Europe, the more I become convinced that the entire concept of globalization is a fabrication of the megalomaniac West. There are villages in Rumania that have no televisions, newspapers or radios and get all their information through town criers with drums and trumpets. How relevant could it be to speak of globalization in such circumstances? And this just a hair's breadth outside of the EU. Thus far Polish culture is holding its own admirably well, even in Warsaw to some extent, and I see little hope for Poland outside of Polish culture.

Is it meaningful to speak of a community of expat anglophone writers in Central and Eastern Europe?

Maybe in Prague. Kraków is a better place to live because it feels like a Polish city which has no interest in pandering to tourists, and no-one seems to be reading Hemingway with a sigh. There’s an American writer in Prague named Josh Cohen whose work I admire. That’s about as far as my ‘literary circle’ extends.

What made you decide to translate Ficowski's stories?

My first translation idea was Ludwik Sztyrmer, a 19th-century Polish writer who lived in St. Petersburg and wrote a series of novellas falling somewhere between Lawrence Sterne and Jan Potocki. I sent 30 pages around to a few publishing houses, and was basically told it was unpublishable. So I set my sights on something a bit more pragmatic, and sought out a living writer whose sensibilities I admired, and who would present a challenge. I came to Ficowski via Bruno Schulz, and was excited to find his stories fascinating literature unto themselves.

Ficowski first came to prominence collecting roma gypsy stories - there is a description in Izabel Fonesca's 'Bury Me Standing' of his involvement in education programmes and failed attempts to settle them in places like Nowa Huta. How do you see him in terms of his place in Polish literature compared to the writers of the former underground/opposition?

Ficowski’s place has nearly always been fairly peripheral (except at one point during the 70's, when he wrote a novelty hit pop song about a gypsy wagon - a memory which causes him no small degree of embarrassment at present). It seems he got on badly with Miłosz, and his name was not even given a footnote in the latter’s History of Polish Literature, which seems, to say the least, a curious oversight. But his eightieth birthday was a cause for some hoopla in Warsaw recently, and his poetry is quite well represented in English-language anthologies (even more so than Polish ones, it seems).

He is best known as biographer of Bruno Schulz - how detectable is his influence in Ficowski's work?

This is a complicated question. The one time I met with Ficowski, he told me that Schulz had no successful literary heirs (I think a point can be made for Danilo Kis, but this by the by). Ficowski’s own stories are a compelling argument for the impossibility of Schulzian purity post-Holocaust. Whereas Schulz’s childhood and Drohobycz form a core for his unique mythological expansion of reality, Ficowski’s stories time and again veer into the Holocaust or a post-Holocaust landscape, no matter how divergently they begin. What fascinates me is Ficowski’s apparent powerlessness... The course of his narratives reads as less pre-meditated than helpless before memory, helpless before History. The results are manifold. Schulz I think of as a writer with a sense of and belief in the tragic, however absurdly it manifested itself. He was writing myth, the fabric of which the Father character’s transformations do not rupture but confirm. Ficowski’s characters are often also in various stages of reverse evolution, but they are turning into objects of maximum insignificance, rubble or stones, they are observers or victims of slow and monotonous decay. ‘Inertia’ is a word that crops up more than once. It is hard to speak of tragedy in such circumstances, except perhaps in a universal sense.

What difficuties did/do you encounter in the translation? What methods do you use to resolve these?

Apart from Ficowski’s incredibly rich vocabulary, which from time to time stumps even my erudite and invaluable co-translator (Marcin Piekoszewski), Ficowski has a weakness for rare plant and insect names (he has devoted time to studying entomology) and words affiliated with Judaism (he has translated from Yiddish, in addition to Russian and Roma), a penchant for neologisms, and a propensity to build a Polish sentence so that it seems to flip inside out, aiming to defamiliarise the Polish reader, i.e. by not sounding exactly ‘Polish.’ Replicating this too faithfully in English makes for sentences that simply read like bad translations. The fine line is in maintaining the stylistic integrity of the text without making a fool of myself as a translator. Finally, Ficowski once told me that he sometimes chooses words for their sound more than their significance (only one way in which Ficowski the fiction writer reminds us that his day job is writing poetry), because they are beautiful as words. Obviously, their English equivalents are not always so attractive.

Translated literature is widely perceived as being progressively squeezed out of the market. Do you agree with this, and if so what can/ should be done about it?

Was it ever hot on the market? Sadly, there’s no conning people into having a sense of adventure when choosing what to read. And foreign cultures can be so pretentious (N.B. there is currently a harmful misunderstanding afoot between the terms ‘pretentious’ and ‘intellectual’). It’s so much pleasanter and more sociable to let book clubs do the deciding for you.

Who else would you like to translate?

I've been enjoying the futurists and catastrophists a great deal lately, Wat's essays and 'My Century' (the English translation of which was butchered to half-size), Bruno Jasienski, who is entirely unknown in English and whose "I'm Setting Fire to Paris" has some of the most magnificent passages I've read for a while, and Julian Tuwim's "Ball at the Opera" (which is probably untranslatable). If I had my way, I'd compile and translate something of a "Jasienski Reader," with some of his poetry and fiction. Jozef Weyssenhoff's "The Life and Thoughts of Zygmunt Podfilipski," written at the end of the 19th century, has a strange "Pale Fire"-esque appeal to it and deserves to be known.