The English Are Coming
Nov 09, 2023 11:31 am
Hi,
First off: a quick reminder that the big and very cool Marek Zulawski exhibition is still on at Toruń CSW.
Here is a recent Instagram post about it from photographer Anna Litwin. Below is a translation of what she's written there:
"In his paintings, he remained faithful to figurative and ethically committed art, the central theme of which was man. Żuławski's humanism proclaimed the dignity of man as a social being, a fighting and loving man, an oppressed and persecuted man."
Secondly, I'm going to start formalising the structure of this newsletter. Each issue will have some sort of translation in it, ideally of Marek (I guess the name of this newsletter may just be affecting me... 🤔), along with an external link, ideally something contemporary, and some thoughts about it.
I've enjoyed writing the longer pieces, like this one about Stefan Knapp or this one about Polish shops, but I need to apply some constraints to streamline how I make these emails. If you have any thoughts, complaints or suggestions, just reply to this email and let me know. I love and appreciate hearing from you all.
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Remembering Jacek Żuławski
It's November right now. In the last few years of his life, November would be when Marek would think about the passing of his cousin and close friend Jacek. Jacek Żuławski passed away in November 1976, nearly 50 years ago. (Yes, all these dudes are so 20th-century).
It's been 3 years since Jacek's death. He died in November 1976 of lung cancer. He was my best friend from my youth. What has happened to him? It can't be possible for that sum of sensitivity and intelligence to simply stop existing. Where are you, Jacek? I call out to you often when I think about the mountains or the sea... But you never answer.
Like Marek, Jacek was also an artist with a love for the mountains. But for much of his life, he lived at the other end of Poland and was an important part of the Gdańsk art community. He and his wife Hanna, also an artist and art professor, have their faces immortalised in the city centre as gargoyles
In Marek's autobiography, there is a lot about Jacek and one particular section is quite moving but long. I will translate it in full at some point and post it on TranslatingMarek.com, but for now, here is an excerpt from when they were both in their late 60s:
Then came that last spring in 1976 and my exhibition in Warsaw.
Jacek came to the opening dressed in the most elegant finery. I had never seen him dress with such thought. It was a gesture, and I truly appreciated it.
On the last evening of my stay in Poland, he invited me to dinner at his studio. Hanka was in Gdańsk. I arrived on time at 7 and found the table beautifully set.
Jacek was an excellent cook. Although he ate very little himself, he liked to cook. So there were great appetisers, marinated mushrooms, an amazing broth, two types of meat, two different sauces and salads, white wine and red wine, a top quality liqueur, coffee, cognacs and desserts, glass, silver and porcelain of the highest class — and all of it was arranged with the utmost care, a painterly understanding, like Chardin's still lifes.
We ate slowly, taking our time with the different flavours, and drank in moderation.
I felt that our friendship from our youth had returned — that sense of complete understanding and harmony that exists only between people who give each other absolute trust, who know for sure that no matter what happens, they will always be able to correctly interpret the motives of each other's behaviour.
The past years, like a movie played in reverse, passed before our eyes in all their pompous glory.
We talked about our childhood, about climbing and sailing, about the apocalypse of the war years, about love and painting.
I returned home late that night with a feeling of strange lightness in my soul. What I had subconsciously wanted after many years of separation had happened — Jacek was back in my life.
Early the next morning, a few minutes before leaving for the airport, the phone rang. It was Jacek.
"I just wanted to tell you," he said, "that yesterday with you was one of the happiest evenings of my life."
I was deeply moved.
"Why don't you come to the airport?" I suggested. "I'd like to see you again before my departure, because, because... I was also very happy yesterday."
“No,” Jacek replied firmly. "One shouldn't demand too much from life. Goodbye."
And we never saw each other again.
In 2002, there was an impressive joint Jacek-Marek retrospective in Gdańsk, but I cannot find a single trace of it on the Internet, sadly. That means that by 21st-century standards, it's hard to say it even happened 🙃. At least Jacek has the surreal honour of a short biography on Olympics.com.
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English continues its march to become language overlord
Translating books into another language is not only a pleasure to do, but also a service to all those people who find the original language inaccessible.
But, according to this article in The Bookseller, it turns out the appetite for English around the world is starting to affect the translation business. More and more people are ordering the English original if they want to read a book rather than wait for a translation to come out.
It's certainly good to be ambitious about reading in a foreign language, but it does mean demand for translations is going down. And apparently, you can blame TikTok for this - the insanely popular #BookTok hashtag is getting foreign readers overly excited about English books during their initial launch. They don't have the patience to wait half a year or more for a version in their native language.
These are the perils of modern marketing and instant global messaging. It reminds me of the problem popular movies and TV shows have when they don't have a simultaneous global release - they just end up getting pirated.
The Bookseller story, combined with the inevitable improvement of AI translation over the next few years, does make you wonder how much of the art of translation is going to simply disappear...
Let's not even get into how Spotify is already testing instant voice translations of podcasts 😵
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That's it for this week. Thanks so much for giving me a few minutes of your time. I know that it's precious.
Adam
Adam Zulawski