Soren Gauger for the “Kraków Culture” quarterly
Strangeness is a topic of some debate among translators: to what extent should the translation from the Polish strike us as a work by an English native speaker? The quarrel may be vain, but I believe it points to something more interesting–a division between translators who want to behave like classical actors defending the “fourth wall” on stage (i.e. nothing exists outside of the English language) and those who enjoy suggesting, however subtly, that out there behind the English text, behind the wall, there is a cosmos of which the reader knows absolutely nothing.
When a Canadian arrives in Kraków without knowing the language or any kind of particular preparation, everything is strange (of course, as a matter of fact it is the Canadian who is strange and not the whole city of Kraków, but let’s leave that thought to one side). This was doubly true in 1998, when I first arrived in this city. Poland still bore a great many traces from its half-century of communist rule and there were few things imported from other cultures. Yet the most disorienting parts were not the ones that were supposed to be different (the language, the traditions, the weather). The strangest things were the bits that I assumed would be recognizable and yet were just slightly awry. The pillows certainly looked like pillows but my head simply could not get comfortable on them. The ketchup called itself ketchup but it was mixed with curry and had a consistency that was decidedly unketchup-like. Kraków also had ice-cream trucks, but instead of pumping out Pop Goes the Weasel as do the Canadian ice-cream trucks, they blasted a cacophonous racket that most resembled an air-raid siren.
These last kinds of differences are, in my experience, the most difficult to process, they encounter the most resistance. The bigger differences, paradoxically, are easier to understand and accept. That is to say, to my mind, while the Polish language has its own logic and rhythm and appeal, the Polish ketchup will always be just a failed attempt at ketchup.
This is one way of describing why Polish interwar literature made such a powerful impression on me, because it bore no resemblance to anything I had ever seen. The discovery of Czech Cubism might serve as a curiosity, but when it comes down to it I will always prefer to go back to Picasso. These books I found in Poland, in Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and Bruno Jasieński, had no equivalent I knew of, they broke the mould. You could feel complete freedom in how these authors got down to writing a book, allowing me to see that many of the rigid conventions in the Canadian tradition did not have to be there. This was quite exciting.
Of course, after twenty-five years in Kraków the strangeness inevitably fades. That wonder and terror that initially goes hand-in-hand with the wild avalanche of new experiences and sensations gradually gives way to a bland “know-how” in the new environment and suddenly – quite out of the blue – our Canadian wakes up one day and realizes with a jolt that this Poland, once a bottomless source of riddles and beauty and frustrations, is just the place where he launders his clothes, sits in the notary office waiting room, and bickers with the old woman cutting in line at the post office. In a word: that strangeness of reality fades to nothing, becomes a predictable backdrop.
The magic of the books I mentioned, however, is that you can return to them again and again and taste a bit of the disorientation you felt all those decades ago. Places, even very beautiful and charming ones such as Kraków, become second nature with the passing of time. But every so often a book comes along that has the power to take and surprise you anew every time you come back to it.
Soren Gauger – a Canadian writer of novels, short stories, and essays, published in Polish and in English, and a translator of Polish literature and writing about art. This year he joined the jury for the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for reportage and received the Witkacy Award for promotion of Polish theatre abroad.
The text was published in the 4/2023 issue of the “Kraków Culture” quarterly.
