The artist Marek Zulawski, translation & Polish-British culture

Hi,

I've been sick, and my kids have been sick, but my wife is a picture of loveliness even though she's been sick too. 

So I thought, why not translate something from my father's autobiography that some people might consider sick in a different sense?

(And below that, a small request 🙏)

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The fact is, we don’t actually like each other

Knightsbridge, April 2020, photo by John Cameron on Unsplash

The grand living room is empty upon arrival. It has a bar where a single man is standing of average height, around fifty years old. Very elegant, he sips whisky on the rocks, casually leaning his left hand against the wall. Yet, despite the casualness, his pose is deliberate. Casually deliberate.

I'd been invited by somebody I barely knew to their French friend’s place, whom I didn’t know at all. It was in Knightsbridge — a great neighbourhood. 

Patricia and I had entered distracted by an earlier idiotic argument and mutual recriminations. The fact is, we don’t actually like each other. It irritated me that she always had a counter-proposal ready in her pocket for every plan I suggested and that I knew almost nothing about her. She appeared in my life only once a week — on Saturdays. She expected entertainment, dining out with wine, and so on. Also visits to the theatre or at least the cinema. 

But she most preferred parties where she could flirt with newly-met men, paying no attention to me at all. She loved to dance. She was entirely superficial, or maybe she pretended to be to keep me at a distance. Maybe she was guarding some secret. I was very young for my 40 years and expected something different from her. Maybe tenderness. Asking her to pose for me was to no avail. I hated roaming around cafes and restaurants. I wanted to draw her. She had a smooth throat like a dove. "I was always pretty," she said when I asked about her background. She evaded the question. 

A moment ago, she'd told me that she wanted to organise her life so that someone different took her to dinner every day of the week. 

"Seven men's enough. That’s not that many. You..." she said with an impish laugh, "I’d keep you for Saturdays." Patricia rarely laughed, so, as we enter this spacious living room with a bar, it strikes me that her theory might already be at least partially realised. 

"Shall we have a drink?" I ask as we approach the bar. Patricia first looks at the lone man and adjusts her hair. Her hair was voluminous, and adjusting it meant tossing it over half her face. She had large breasts, which she hoisted up with a bra so that they half-spilled out past her neckline. She was beautiful. Undoubtedly. But she lacked grace. At least for me.

"Nice party," she mutters ironically, glancing around the empty room.

"Whisky and soda," I tell the bartender. "Twice. On the rocks," I add, looking at the glass of our lonely neighbour. He smiles kindly and says that ice was essential in such heat. I return the smile. We drink. He likes the heatwave a lot, he says. It doesn’t bother him. He owns a coffee plantation in Brazil, almost on the equator. An excellent variety.

I don’t really care, so I don’t continue the conversation. But Patricia is interested, of course. Because she's drunk coffee in the souks of Beirut. It's strong there, served in small brass cups, and thick as tar. Completely different from ours.

"Exactly. In Europe, they use only Brazilian coffee," the man says in an expert tone.

Suddenly, a girl runs through the room in a negligée, her hair all undone, before disappearing into the open door to some hall or corridor.

Our speaker smiles amicably, not at all surprised by the phenomenon. But we stand there with our mouths open.

"The party is picking up," says the Brazilian. "It’s very crowded at the back of the flat. I came to the bar to catch my breath."

"So, there are two kinds of coffee," he says, returning to the previous topic. "Besides, it’s all about the preparation. Turkish coffee needs to be boiled three times, then you settle the grounds with a few drops of cold water..."

A naked woman bursts into the bar, her fat belly and breasts jiggling amusingly. She's followed by a middle-aged man with a crew cut, holding up his trousers.

Patricia watches them chase each other around the room with interest. From the look in her eyes, she seems inclined to think it a theatrical performance or some kind of cabaret — a floor show. After all, we had been to a striptease together in Soho.

"So, Brazilian coffee, I mean a good variety, like on my plantation," continues our new friend, "should never be boiled. It should simply be brewed like tea..."

Two dancing couples in incomplete negligées appear in the room and, without interrupting their dance, disappear into the dark corridor. The music is hidden — you could hear it everywhere, but you couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Mostly blues. 

A new group of guests enters the room. They have confident faces — regulars. A young bearded man approaches Patricia without ceremony and takes her to dance. His companion rudely positions herself between me and the coffee planter and kisses me on the mouth. 

"Has Gaston been here?" she asks. I reply that I don’t know. She takes my arm and says, "Let’s go inside." Without waiting for my consent, she leads me down the corridor. We open the first door we come to...

In the orange twilight, on two huge mattresses pushed together — naked bodies. They look like they're dying in convulsions. Sometimes there's a soft moan, sometimes a short cry. They roll over each other and change positions like wrestlers in a judo match. La lutte amoureuse. The smell of sweat, the smell of nudity.

'Enkidu Wrestling with Gilgamesh' by Marek Zulawski, 1979

My companion strips naked in seconds with a squeal and throws herself into this mass of people, soon disappearing under some enormous buttock. I don't know how to join in. What hinders me most — enchantment. I'm captivated by this pulsating pink mass, from a painter’s perspective. Unfortunately. I am a voyeur. Maybe my reactions are delayed. I sit on the edge of the mattress and plunge my hands into all the undulating, trembling flesh. Male and female — without distinction. At the same time, I wonder what's happened to Patricia and whether her bearded dance partner was already lying on top of her in another room. The thought spoils the fun for me.

So after a while, I return to the bar. Patricia is gone. The bearded young man is drinking whisky with the coffee planter and talking about Brazilian coffee. I hate him. "Where’s Patricia?" I ask abruptly. 

"Oh, you mean the girl you came with? She didn’t even want to undress," he shrugs, and adding with a hateful wink, "I did my best to keep her, but she ran off. She said she was going home."

I don’t wait any longer. I jump into the car and speed through the empty streets to Holland Park Avenue, where she lives. I make it just in time. I see her walking back in high heels — furious — on foot. As I park, in my agitation, I scrape the wing against a tree. God damn it.

She starts yelling at me from a distance, that I didn’t warn her what kind of party it was. That I tricked her into going. Nevertheless, with a gesture, she invites me inside.

We enter. I explain along the way that I didn’t know exactly what awaited us either. She doesn’t believe me.

"I don’t make a habit of stripping on command," she says, pulling her dress off over her head in one swift motion.

"And anyway, sex disgusts me," she says, yanking off her panties and tearing off her bra. The pink glory of her body obscures the room for me.

"And if you prefer other women to me," she says, "I don’t know why you’re even here. You should've stayed — you must've had a great time..." she says through gritted teeth, as she smothers me on the bed with her enormous breasts.

The night that followed was unlike any other night in my life. We made love with an unrestrained brutality that was no different from hatred. 

We searched for each other. Her body was hot and moved like the sea. Monstrously aroused by the unfulfilled, abandoned orgy — consumed by the frustration — she opened up like a treasure chest. She bit me. Her teeth clinked against mine. From time to time, separately and seemingly without connection — because the connection was drowned in the stream of sensation and the panting of copulation — some disjointed words fell. Everything she wanted to do but had denied herself at that orgy, she now did with me. And I took my revenge for the insult and devoured her body. 

For the first time in our lives, we were honest with each other.

The pale dawn found us completely exhausted from the love battle. When we fell asleep, the city had long been rumbling along with its daily routine, the growl of buses in the distance.

Marek aged 43, posing in front of his mural for The Festival of Britain

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I need your help

The Translating Marek newsletter has been going strong fortnightly since October 2022.

Publishing all these little vignettes has helped keep me accountable during a very long-term project - the full translation of my father's autobiography Study For A Self-Portrait. 

From what I can tell, I've translated maybe 20% of its 180,000 words so far (starting with several longer pieces around 10 years ago for TranslatingMarek.com).

I do tend to pick the juicier bits for you, admittedly - and also shorter passages that seem reasonable for the length of a newsletter. 

But I think the whole book is worth translating into English, especially since Marek lived in Britain most of his life and his artwork can be found in many countries around the world. A record of his thoughts and life is worth being accessible to those who've heard of him but are not intimate with the Polish language.

I'd like to get it translated in full quicker, but need more support to do so. 

How you can support me

There are two things you can do if you think this project is worthwhile: 

1. Please forward this email to anybody you know who might be interested (and assure them the book's mostly not about orgies😅). 
2. Send me a tip via PayPal

The more newsletter subscribers there are, the more I can argue for outside funding to translate the whole book in a much shorter time than 20 years (pretty sure that's my current pace). And in the meantime, donations will enable me to translate more than what I do for the newsletter.

Who do you know who might be interested? 

• Poles
• British Poles
• People who like art
• People with Polish connections
• People who like autobiographies
• People who like tell-all naughty books
• People who appreciate the art of translation
• People who like learning the real stories behind public figures
• People who give money to translators to write books 

That's the main one, that last one 🤔

But yes, forward this to whomever you think might appreciate such a translation. And that link to PayPal again is here.

I can't do this without you! Thank you! 🙏

Oh, and finally, just to assure you all that I am a real person, here is a recent photo of me in Poland's Tatra Mountains with some mountain goats:

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That's all for this week. Many many thanks for reading.

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / TranslatePolishMemoirs.com / Other stuff

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

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