The BURIED Book Club discussion

Polish post-war surrealist and social conscience Tadeusz Konwicki has the distinction of being a favorite as both a director and as a novelist. His books are somewhat less buried than his films, with A Minor Apocalypse and The Polish Complex both maintained by Dalkey, and an old Writers From the Other Europe edition of A Dreambook for Our Time. But his catalogue quickly drops off into buried oblivion with far more untranslated novels than translated. For instance:

Ascension (1967): "a grim, poignant, menacing, surreal image of the metropolitan reality. The protagonist of the novel finds himself under a tram viaduct, most likely the victim of some accident, with a large hole the back of the head, and his hair is stuck together with blood. Unable to remember anything, haunting nocturnal Warsaw, meeting people from the margins: pimps, drunks, prostitutes and swindlers, visiting mysterious premises, taking part in a bank robbery, etc."

Nothing or Never (1971): still looking for an intelligible synopsis for this, but it sounds like it might concern WWII partisans and maybe vampires?!

Chronicles of Love (1974): First love and nostalgia in the 1939 Lithuania of Konwicki's youth.

Underground River or maybe "Underground river, underground birds" (1984): Seems to be another novel based on war recollections.

Czytadło (1992)

I don't know why it is, but I think it of utmost importance (perhaps it is self-evident) to bring titles untranslated to the attention of readers. The knowledge that the three or four translated works is but the visible iceberg of an invisible ocean of books, well, that knowledge just glistens. And, too, the book-in-translation market in the USofA is a shameful bit of evidence of how little we read in this country, and of how little we bother with the existence of life in countries which are not the USofA; I mean, that books-in-translation, we need more of them, and we should know how much remains not within our English-only reading capacity (a second difficulty of our cultural isolationism).

Thank a Translator Month. All year long.

I entirely agree. I mentioned the Dedalus anthologies in the publishers thread, and this is one of their extreme merits: I looked up everything I liked in the Dutch Fantasy volume and nearly none of the authors included had been translated outside of a story or two. How are English-language readers barred from these? Of course, good translation is an epically difficult task, it seems, requiring mastery of two languages as well as the interpretive insight yet restraint to convey an author's underlying impulses without forcing a reading on them.

Nate D wrote: "Of course, good translation is an epically difficult task, it seems, requiring mastery of two languages as well as the interpretive insight yet restraint to convey an author's underlying impulses without forcing a reading on them. "

Talent and craft and discipline. It is also extremely difficult to craft a chair from a tree, a chair one would want to sit upon.

Just realized that French readers have a few more options here. For instance, Ascension. I think there's a lot more Jahnn out in france, too, for that matter...