Why you should visit Dukla, the town and the book

Dukla is a small town in southeastern Poland on the Jasiolka river at the foot of Cergowa mountain. It has a population of about 2,200 people, a 17th century town hall, the ruins of a 1758 synagogue, the ruins of a 16th century border tax office, the ruins of a brewery. In 1944, the Battle of the Dukla Pass left 90 percent of the town in ruins. In 1997, Pope John Paul II visited and in his sermon mentioned John of Dukla, one of the patron saints of Poland and Lithuania.

Dukla by Andrzej Stasuik is a remarkable work of literature. It is memoir, travelogue, nature writing, reportage and ethnography. It contains a short essay, a novella, and a series of brief portraits of local people or events. It was translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston, my workshop leader in a translation conference, and that connection led me to it. Stasiuk is well-known in Poland and has won the NIKE, the country's most prestigious literary prize for his collection of essays On the Road to Babadag. That book and four others of Stasuik are also available in English.

In Dikla, Stasuik says, "I always wanted to write a book about light. I never could find anything else more reminiscent of eternity. I never was able to imagine things that don't exist. That always seemed a waste of time to me, just like the stubborn search for the Unknown, which only ever ends up looking like an assemblage of old, familiar things in slightly souped-up form. Events and objects either come to an end, or perish, or collapse under their own weight, and if I observe them and describe them it's only because they refract the brightness, shape it, and give it a form that we're capable of comprehending."

As a writer, I've felt sometimes my weakness—inability perhaps—in describing the physical world. It is easy (relatively) to write dialogue, to explicate ideas, to write useful abstractions. It's not so easy to find the words that convey a vivid sense of place. Stasuik (and Johnston) seem to do it with ease:

"The shadows of early morning lie upon the earth as if the wind were blurring them. They're black yet hazy, because the dew atomizes the light and refracts it back at the edges. Even in the middle, the black is far from distinct—it rather resembles a reflection. Beyond Dynów the San touches up against the road with its crooked elbow. We have to flip down the visor, because the sun is shining directly in our eyes. It hangs there just above the road. The blacktop is peeling like old gilding. The river down below has the color of a mirror in an unlit room . . ."

In his Introduction, Johnston suggests that Dukla is "a languid prose poem." Perhaps. But few of the prose poems I've read are as engaging. Stasuik is not playing with language for the sake of language. He's not trying to create a beautiful, if impractical, object like a Christmas ornament. He's trying, I believe, to do what he says, to write about light, but also tom write about "things and places no one else thinks worthy of writing about," says Johnston. "Polish literature has preponderantly been urban in character; writing set in the countryside has traditionally involved country estates, and has concerned above all the life of the gentry. What goes on in the small towns and villages has . . . been overlooked."

The book includes a section describing the Pope's visit to town, but Stasuik says almost nothing about the Pope or the pomp. Rather, "I walk about and watch people. They all look like my grandfather, my grandmother, my mother my father, like all the people I've known and seen in my life. Their shoes pinch, they limp, they sweat in their wrinkle-proof outfits, and examine the goods for sale at the stalls, medallions, white busts, color prints, canvas beach chairs for four fifty; they sniff at the food on the grills, chicken breasts, sausage, bacon, dark glistening blood pudding. From time to time the sun comes out and captures their silhouettes in misty aureoles. Busy with their ice creams, Pepsis, mineral water, and children, they fail to notice this indifferent caress. . . "

I'm afraid that the bulk of this review is quotation from Stasuik and Johnston. I had to restrain myself or there would have been more. How else to convey the book's flavor? I can say it's a remarkable work of literature (and I did), I can urge you to find it and read it (and I do), but without the extended quotations I don't know how to let you know about it. I feel fortunate that circumstances conspired to lead me to it. It enriched my life.

If you go to Stitchings, Poland, you stay in Stitchings

Because Bill Johnston led the workshop I attended at the Bread Loaf Translators' Conference, I bought his translation of In Red by Magdalena Tulli. Johnston has published over thirty book-length translations from the Polish, including poetry, prose, and drama. He teaches literary translation at Indiana University.

Magdalena Tulli is a Polish novelist and translator and is one of Poland's leading writers. She's won the Gdynia Literary Prize and been short-listed five times for the Nike Award, Poland's most prominent literary prize. While her own novels have been translated into a number of languages, she has translated Proust, Calvino, and Fleur Jaeggy into Polish.

Tulli's novel In Red is a physically small paperback, a five-and-a-half by six-and-a-half-inch rectangle, 158 pages, around 46,000 words. More than a short story. A novella. But rich in image, rich in language, rich in vision.

It is—more or less—the modern history of a fictional Polish town somewhere on the Baltic coast, close to Sweden, but too close to Germany, too close to Russia. It begins:

"Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything, last of all should pay a visit to Stitchings. Simply take a seat in a sleigh and before being overcome by sleep, speed across a plain that's as empty as a blank sheet of paper, boundless as life itself. Sooner or later this someone—perhaps a traveling salesman with a valise full of samples—will see great mounds of snow stretching along streets to the four corners of the earth, toward empty, icy expanses. He'll see pillars made of icicles, their snowy caps lost in the dark of a wintry sky. He'll draw into his lungs air as sharp as a razor that cuts feeling away from breath. He'll come to appreciate the benefits of a climate forever unencumbered by restless springtime breezes, by the indolence of summer swelter, or the misty sorrows of autumn. He'll take a liking to frost, which conserves feelings and capital, protecting both from the corruption of decay."

Before WWI, Stitchings' three main industries were Loom & Son, merchant and manufacturer of ladies' corsets, Strobbel's porcelain factory, and Neumann's phonograph-record factory. During the war, an enemy plane managed to bomb both Strobbel's and Neumann's warehouses. Although the colonel in charge of the town's defense emptied his pistol at it, "the airplane taunted the colonel. Time and again it appeared out of the blue, only to soar upward at the last minute, before the very noses of the artillerymen. The cannon was hurriedly reloaded and fired again. The aircraft, its undercarriage in shreds, went spinning halfway across the sky, trailing clouds of smoke as black as pitch, and crashed into the black rotunda of the municipal gas works. There was an explosion, and gas lighting went out across the entire town."

After the war, Neumann's works convert to manufacturing radio sets; Strobbel's porcelain factory—now Slotsky & Co—begins producing commodes and sanitary appliances; and Loom, which had survived the war on military contracts manufacturing shoddy uniforms, becomes a munitions plant.

Aspiring writers are told (I was told; I tell aspiring writers): Read the best stuff you can get your hands on. Read In Red because it demonstrates how much can be said with relatively few words. It opens possibilities for fiction. We learn about the town; we follow its history through the war and into the post-war period; we meet a number of vivid characters: Emilka, the Loom daughter who refuses to die properly; her suitor, Kazimierz, the town counselor's haughty son; Felek Chmura, Kazimierz's orderly, who returns from the war to become the town's leading citizen; Madam at the bawdy house that services both the town's leading citizens and the sailors from the port; Natalie Zugoff, a chanteuse so imperious, so extraordinary. and so captivating she can fill Jacques Rauch's theater night after night, and more and more.

Toward the end of the novel, Tulli writes, "Whoever wishes to leave Stitchings can avail himself of two methods. If he is an outsider—for example, a traveling salesman of his own virtues, obliged to compete for a favorable market, or a collector of experiences whom life has taught humility—without a second thought he ought to ascend at dawn in a passenger cabin suspended beneath a dirigible balloon. For it's easy to sail among the clouds, where the sun casts its pink rays over the cranes of the port and the docks, over the roofs of the banks, over the stock exchange . . ." If this person wishes to leave by ship or train, "he'll quickly realize that the desire to leave bears no relation whatsoever to the calendar or the clock. The right moment never comes at any time." Without a balloon, we are stuck in Stitchings forever.

What I did on my summer vacation

What do you do at a translators' conference? If it's the week-long Middlebury Bread Loaf Translators' Conference, from which I have just returned, you work your buns off.

Classes, lectures, and social events during the translators conference were held in The Barn
on the Middlebury Bread Loaf campus in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

You can start with an hour-long yoga session at 6:30 a.m., (I started with breakfast at 7:30) and end with readings and socializing at 10:30 p.m. In between there are lectures, workshops, talks, and meetings. To be admitted, every one of the fifty or so translators at this year's conference submitted a translation and its original. Translations of literary fiction and poetry, and the underlying assumption is that the translator knows the language well enough to understand the original. You don't—for the most part—try to re-translate a work.

For one thing, who could? My workshop leader was Bill Johnston who teaches literary translation at Indiana University, who has published over 30 book-length translations from the Polish, including poetry, prose, and drama, and who (by the evidence in our workshop) has a reading knowledge of French and German. The workshop to which I was assigned did have translations from French and German, but for the rest we were pretty much on our own.

Our workshop considered two translations from Japanese (mine was one), two from French, two from Spanish, and one each from Swedish, Vietnamese, and German. Each translator read a paragraph or so from the original to give the group a sense of the sound of the piece and then discussed any problems/questions/issues she/he was having with the translation. Some of us—and I include myself—felt that the work we'd submitted was relatively polished. It did not read like a translation.

I was mistaken. By the time Bill and the group had finished discussing my prose, my first page and a half were covered with red edits. One key lesson learned last week: When you're having a problem with the English, the solution is not to return to the original but to spend more time, thought, tears, and sweat on the English. As one of my fellow translators said, "Take it all the way to English."

So the translation workshop turned out to be as much a writing workshop as a discussion of translation. What makes a good translation? How close should you be to the original? Not so close that the English sounds clunky or unnatural. Not so close that the dialogue sounds as if spoken by aliens (unless of course the characters in the work are aliens).

There is an argument to make it "translatorise" so a reader can follow along with the original, but how many readers what to do that? It's hard enough to find readers for a translation at all—Elena Ferrante, Steig Larsson, Haruki Murakami being exceptions—why make a reader work? And anyway the translations of Ferrante, Larsson, and Murakami are engaging English novels.

In my next post, I'll talk about some of the practical issues surrounding literary translation. I.e., how do you get published?