The major works by Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz were translated into Japanese in the 1960s, mainly by Yukio Kudö. I was enchanted by those Japanese texts to such an extent that I decided to ...abandon French literature and switch to Polish contemporary literature. In 1974, I came to Poland on a post-graduate fellowship of the Polish government, and I began studies in literature and the Polish language at the Jagiellonian University. During that two-year stay in Krakow, my view of Polish literature changed several times. The phase well established in the Japanese translations I had known ended quickly. Then I began to "hunt" for promising Polish authors not yet present in world literature. I thus discovered the prolific, esoteric and difficult Teodor Parnicki (1908-1988). This essay is my description of my "penetrating" the world of the Polish language at that time.
Whatever critical scalpel one selects for dissecting the literary works of Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), there will always be a certain degree of textual resistance which cannot be broken. Or in other ...words, taking off one of Schulz's many masks, one will probably never avoid the impression that a new mask has emerged. This book contributes to the three most typical critical strategies of reading Schulz's works (combinations, fragmentations, reintegrations) - being fully aware, of course, of the relativity of each particular approach. In addition, the book sets out to explore all of Schulz's creative output (i.e. his stories as well as his graphic, epistolary and even literary critical works), as one of Schulz's main goals was exactly to cross artificially set up boundaries between, among other things, different artistic media of expression. The book for the first time brings together leading Schulzologists (Jarzębski, Robertson, Sproede) and their prospective successors (Augsburger, Gorin, Kato, Suchańska-Drażyńska, Underhill, Wojda), established Polish academics (Dąbrowski, Markowski, Skwara, Weretiuk) and their foreign counterparts (De Bruyn, Gall, Meyer-Fraatz, Schulte, Zieliński), scholars primarily working on other authors (Anessi, Śliwa, Żurek) and those focusing on other art forms (Sánchez-Pardo, Watt). The editors' introduction offers an overview of seven decades of Schulzology. The book is of interest for both readers with a general interest in (world) literature and/or a particular interest in Polish and Jewish studies.
This essay uses Martin Buber's articulation of the concept "ecstatic confession" to inform a reading of Polish-Jewish author Bruno Schulz's tales of "Księga" (The Book). I argue that Schulz's ...narrator, Józef, is a visionary seeker, much like medieval visionaries of Buber's collection Ekstatische Konfessionen (Ecstatic Confessions). Revealing the distinctly Christian influence of Schulz's modernism, I show that for Schulz and the medieval writers in Buber's collection, language remains the common link between spiritual insight and sensory experience: in attempting to describe the ineffable, it becomes possible for ecstatic writers to gesture towards a sacred, communal, and primordial word.
WHAT BRUNO DREW McQUADE, MOLLY
The Iowa review,
10/2013, Letnik:
43, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
McQuade details the life of Bruno Schulz. Bruno submit a short story to a magazine for consideration in 1940, when one are forty-eight years old. In 1992, a Polish stamp is issued in honor, bearing ...the likeness of their face against a background of mustard yellow.
In The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz delineates a startling vision of his hometown of Drohobycz as a space governed by second-hand cast-offs of metropolitan modernity and posits the artist as a ...demiurge who reigns over an accumulation of matter. Seeking escape from the shabbiness and tedium of daily life, the narrator plunges into an imaginary zone of his own making, one marked by temporal distortion, spatial instability, and the superabundance of matter, trash in particular. In the province, trash—as well as other "trashy" objects (tandeta and Bylejakość)—can be put to novel creative uses. It is thus possible to speak of a poetics of trash, wherein civilizational detritus returns to the foreground as a productive mode of representation and of micropolitical resistance. It is reterritorialized in Schulz as an archive of individual longings and desires and an index of local achievement. Trash, then, both as physical tandeta and as a key component of dream-work, emerges as a unifying sign of Schulz's provincial poetics.
The paper discusses the role of (perceived) translator profile in the current promotion and reception of three competing English translations of fiction by the modernist Polish-Jewish author Bruno ...Schulz (1892–1942): Celina Wieniewska’s 1963/1978 canonical version, John Curran Davis’s ca. 2005–2010 online fan retranslation, and Madeline Levine’s retranslation, publicized since 2012 and forthcoming in 2018. Based on a para- and extratextual analysis of the discourse around these versions, combined with archive research into translator history, it explores the ways in which the translator’s profile is used to promote the translation and develop or support opinions about it. Wieniewska’s personal background, difficult to access due to the invisibility of the ‘historical’ translator, has been ignored by readers and critics, even though it would help understand her choice of translation strategy and thus make the recent criticism of her translation more informed. Conversely, in the case of Davis and Levine, not only are the retranslators visible to the extent that they actively promote their work themselves, but also judgments are passed, boundaries drawn and distinctions made based on their profiles rather than their performance: their work has been assessed to a large extent without reference to their actual translation choices. The retranslators’ lives – educational background, affiliation, professional experience – all turn out to play a major role in the critical discourse around their work, replacing the reading or, in the extreme case of Levine’s yet unpublished translation, even the very existence of the translated text.
At the close of his recently discovered 1937 essay on graphic artist and fellow Drohobyczan Ephraim Moses Lilien, Galician short-story writer Bruno Schulz spoke of Lilien's early graphic works Juda ...and Lieder des Ghetto, and at the same time of his own writing, as a “creation born of the longing of golus.” This article considers Schulz's artistic engagement with the concept of golus—understood as both diaspora and exile—as illustrated in his essay on Lilien and in the poet Rokhl Korn's Yiddish-language review of Schulz's Cinnamon Shops. Schulz's writing, in its polyphony and translinguality; in its rhetorical strategies of universalization and encryption; in its marriage of Jewish and universalist thematics; and in the choices that the author made about where and how to publish, represents both a reflection on and a textualization of the experience of diaspora. Schulz's work, within the context of the post–World War I Galician Jewish experience in a newly independent Poland, represents an affirmative diasporic cultural model that, though it was not easy to incorporate into the ethnonational narratives that have dominated in both Polish and Jewish literary studies since World War II, lends itself much more readily to the present scholarly context, with its renewed interest in diasporic, transnational, and cosmopolitan models of Jewish identity as well as its postsecularist attention to cultural projects that arise at the intersection of materialism and theology.
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