The artist Marek Zulawski, translation & Polish-British culture

Hi,

This week I was at a yoga retreat with my family - which means a little bit of yoga but mostly messing around with kids.

Being on the trip with a Translating Marek email to write, I recalled that my father used to do yoga too. I doublechecked his autobiography for any mention of it, and was pleased to find a passage I've now translated into English below.

My father was about 71 years old when he wrote it. 

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I want to smash my shaving mirror

A hatha yoga sequence, according to ChatGPT

For the last couple of years, I've been performing exercises taken from the Hatha Yoga system.

Naturally, I do not want to do them at all and I'm always looking for an excuse not to, but I still practise almost everyday for at least half an hour. 

It's astounding how much you can improve your body just by persistently repeating the same positions. I can now stand on my head without any difficulty and I do various other exercises that are much harder, which I'd never even attempted when I was young. 

But it doesn't give me any transcendental satisfaction.

I don't know how to treat yoga as a philosophy. The philosophy behind it doesn't suit me at all. I'm not into Buddhism, which strains for non-existence via the extremely egotistical perfection of body and mind. I am a Christian. I strain for eternal life via love for the whole world.

Yoga is something I treat as exercise. Nothing more. Not even as a method for retaining my youth. Mental youth is maintained through participation, not renunciation. Curiosity, not ambivalence. Engagement in human issues, not the avoidance of life.

But the clock cannot be stopped. I look at recent photographs of me and shiver with genuine horror. I want to smash my shaving mirror. I want to forget about my crumpled face and the white hair that surrounds it.

'I thought you dye your hair grey.'

That was a nice compliment, but I don't think it was honest. I maintain what's called a 'good figure'. I weigh the same today as I did when I was 18 years old, but my face is different...

If one could at least still keep that former variety of skin, now so distant. That colouring. That cheerful look. That hope that everything still awaits us, that great things can happen, great achievements, a great career, great success...

If it wasn't for that feeling that it's not worth bothering because it's fundamentally too late to do anything. 

If it wasn't for that shivering fear that one of these days, maybe not too long, this autumn, this beautiful autumn of my life will change into winter, and the days will get shorter, while the nights will stretch into eternity. If it wasn't for that fear that there is no way out, because the Sun is hovering low on the horizon, its oblique rays no longer creating warmth, only long shadows on the ground of my garden, which itself is rocky, scabbed and frozen... 

And that nagging question: will the Sun ever get higher again, or will it fall forever behind the horizon. If one could just know something, just understand anything.

If only one could believe that roses will bloom again in one's garden, that the magnolia flowers will burst open again and that the leaves will shine with a fresh greenness.

If only one could be certain that this will all happen, that it won't all fall into an eternal darkness which cannot be called off. If it wasn't for that fear that there is no rescue and that everything one does is done in vain... That that fatal moment is unavoidable and approaches automatically with every tick of the clock. If only one could understand one's place in this system of phenomena. 

If only one could not fear death.

My father Marek Zulawski in the early 1980s

There is a great photo of my father doing a headstand in his 70s, but I can't seem to track it down at the moment. I will try dig it up and post it in the next newsletter.

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Renovating homes in Poland

In the UK, Polish builders and decorators have a good reputation - cheaper than average prices but with reliable workmanship.

So perhaps only the good decorators went overseas then, because in Poland itself, hiring a native repairman or decorator is a bit of a gamble. There's even a long-running and very popular hidden camera show exposing cowboy repairmen called Usterka (meaning 'Fault' or 'Defect').

It may be Usterka's popularity that has given rise to a new videogame in which you can play a terrible Polish handyman trying to get away with renovating flats as half-arsed and as cheaply as possible. 

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That's all for this week. Many thanks for reading. If you want to support the newsletter, please forward it to a friend or donate here.

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / TranslatePolishMemoirs.com / Other stuff

👉 Help fund the translation of Studium do autoportretu via Paypal 👈

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