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Winner of the PEN Translation Prize A “sweeping . . . irreverent” masterpiece of postwar Polish literature that “chronicles the modernization of Poland and celebrates the persistence of desire” (The New Yorker) Hailed as one of the best ever books in translation, Stone Upon Stone is Wieslaw Mysliwski’s grand epic in the rural tradition—a profound and irreverent stream of memory cutting through the rich and varied terrain of one man’s connection to the land, to his family and community, to women, to tradition, to God, to death, and to what it means to be alive. Wise and impetuous, plainspoken and compassionate, Szymek recalls his youth in their village, his time as a guerrilla soldier, as a wedding official, barber, policeman, lover, drinker, and caretaker for his invalid brother. Filled with interwoven stories and voices, by turns hilarious and moving, Szymek’s narrative exudes the profound wisdom of one who has suffered, yet who loves life to the very core.
Our hero and narrator is the aging caretaker of cottages at a summer resort. A mysterious visitor inspires him to share the story of his long life: we witness a happy childhood cut short by the war, his hiding from the Nazis buried in a heap of potatoes, his plodding attempts to play the saxophone, the brutal murder of his family, loves lost but remembered, and footloose travels abroad. Told in the manner of friends and neighbors swapping stories over the mundane task of shelling beans—in the grand oral tradition of Myśliwski’s celebrated Stone Upon Stone—each anecdote, lived experience, and memory accrues cross-stitched layers of meaning. By turns hilarious and poignant, A Treatise on Shelling Beans is an epic recounting of a life that, while universal, is anything but ordinary.
First published in Warsaw in 1816, Malvina, or the Heart's Intuition has been largely—and unjustly—ignored by the Polish literary canon. Ingeniously structured and vividly related by a Tristram Shandy-esque narrator, Maria Wirtemberska's psychologically complex work is often considered Poland's first modern novel. This splendid translation by Ursula Phillips should restore Wirtemberska to her rightful place in the literary pantheon while providing fertile new ground for the study of the international development of the novel. The romantic story of the young widow Malvina and her mysterious lover Ludomir, Malvina combines several literary styles and influences—from the epistolary to the...
The novel in Europe in the early twentieth century took a decidedly inward turn, and Choucas (1927) is an intriguing example of the modernist psychological tradition. Its author, Zofia Nalkowska (1884–1954), was a celebrated Polish novelist and playwright. She rose to prominence in interwar Poland and was one of a group of early feminist writers that included Pola Gojawiczynska, Maria Dabrowska, and Maria Kuncewiczowa. Choucas is set in the Swiss Alps in the mid-1920s in a sanatoria village near Lake Geneva. The book has an international focus, and the narrator, a polish woman, profiles a motley collection of visitors to the village and patients at the sanatorium and their interactions wit...
Into our Labours explores the literary representation of work across the globe since 1850, setting out to show that the literature of modernity is best understood in the light of the worlding of capitalism. The book proposes that a determinative relation exists between changing modes of work and changes in the forms, genres, and aesthetic strategies of the writing that bears witness to them. Two aspects of the ‘worlding’ of modernity, especially, are emphasised. First, an ‘inaugural’ experience of capitalist social relations, whose literary registration sometimes makes itself known through a crisis of representation, as the forms of space- and time-consciousness demanded by life in c...
Hen's memoir about growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in Warsaw during the 1920's and 30's through the first few months of the German occupation.
In volume 1 of Trafika Europe, Andrew Singer gathers choice offerings from the first year of the quarterly journal of the same name. These fourteen selections-from seven women and seven men, seven poets and seven fiction writers-represent languages across the Continent, from Shetland Scots and Occitan, Latvian and Polish, Armenian, Italian, Hungarian, German, and Slovenian to Faroese and Icelandic. With some of the most accomplished writing in new translation from Europe today, this volume opens a window onto some emerging contours of European identity. Former ASCAP director of photography Mark Chester complements the writing with sumptuous black-and-white photos. The contributors are Vincenzo Bagnoli, Ewa Chrusciel, Christine DeLuca, Mandy Haggith, Stefanie Kremser, Aurélia Lassaque, Wiesław Myśliwski, Jóanes Nielsen, Edvīns Raups, László Sárközi, Marko Sosič, Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Nara Vardanyan, and Māra Zālīte.
"Acclaimed as a classic of contemporary Polish literature and a major achievement by Polish literary critics...a profound and haunting novel, The work of one of Poland's finest contemporary writers. Deep in the Polish countryside, a magnificent palac
No one can resist Victoria Leung. She’s beautiful, brilliant, and fearless. Since leaving the fraud department of the Hong Kong Police, she has enjoyed her new status as senior detective at Pegasus, an international security firm based in London. She climbed the ladder by taking down Sun Hung Kai Properties’ Kwok Brothers, a real estate empire, and earned the nickname “The Flying Dragon” in the process. On an otherwise typical morning, Victoria receives a panicked message from her close friend Diana Yu asking for help: Diana’s ex-lover, Henry Chang, is in grave danger. Bertrand Wilmington, head of the derivative trading desk of a global bank, has fallen from a window of the twenty-...
This volume explores the relationship between literature and translation from three perspectives: the creative dimensions of the translation process; the way texts circulate between languages; and the way texts are received in translation by new audiences. The distinctiveness of the volume lies in the fact that it considers these fundamental aspects of literary translation together and in terms of their interconnections. Contributors examine a wide variety of texts, including world classics, poetry, genre fiction, transnational literature, and life writing from around the world. Both theoretical and empirical issues are covered, with some contributors approaching the topic as practitioners of literary translation, and others writing from within the academy.