Hi,

Before we get into this week's edition, congratulations to the winners of our recent movie box set competition!

Your prizes were sent out last week and should be with you soon if not already. Thanks for taking part, and enjoy your celluloid trophies 🏆

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Novels winning in Jerzy's name

The 2023 winners of the Jerzy Żuławski Literary Award were announced last month. The prize has been awarded every year since 2008 for three novels depicting creative alternative realities - so usually science-fiction. All the jurors have doctorates and are hardcore book geeks.

But will any of these books get translated into English? Unfortunately, Polish-language books have one of the lowest translation rates in Europe. In 2021, 3,853 English-language books were translated into Polish, while 413 Polish-language books were translated into English.

When you look at the total numbers of books in the world that are translated, translations from English tower above everything else. It's like a leftover remnant of British Empire dominance that somebody's forgotten to dismantle. It would be nice to see more going the other way!

Countless interesting works stay locked away in their original language. For example, Jack Dukaj has won 4 Żuławski awards over the years, and many more besides, but you can currently get only one of his books in English and only as an ebook (a conscious choice in keeping with the book's theme). His most famous book Łód (Ice) is in the translation works, but it's likely taking ages since it's massive.

The Nobel-prize-winning Olga Tokarczuk was one of this year's winners though, and I'm sure that her book will eventually be available. If you'd like to see what it's about, Notes From Poland have a review.

And of course, if you'd like to know why anyone would start an award in honour of Jerzy Żuławski, check this article out.

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More on Agata Bogacka

In the last newsletter, I mentioned the work of Agata Bogacka. I got a question asking more about her work, so I thought I'd translate this small 2022 summary of her career by art critic Paulina Reiter entitled Our Life is a Total Abstraction:

I'll say it bluntly: I think Agata Bogacka is a brilliant painter. Her artistic path is fascinating.

The artist, who made a career in both the world of art and in the media - as a once-favourite of glossy magazines - moved away from the figurative imagery that made her popular towards total abstraction. One might think that she had some kind of sudden breakthrough, but no - the transition from depicting relationships and tensions between people, various social frictions, to abstract paintings was a gradual process for her. Moreover, the topic remains the same. Bogacka still deals with power relations, but translates the problems of love, social and political life into the language of abstraction. Although these are tensions between gradients and colours, they are also stories about how we dominate each other, how we surrender, how we resist, how we get closer to each other and move away from each other. For Bogacka, every problem in life is a painting problem.

"I've been working with Agata since 2018," says Gunia Nowik, whose Warsaw gallery is showing Bogacka's latest paintings in an exhibition titled 'Inequality'. "Her change towards abstraction has been an amazing process. She is an artist who does not stop. Every now and then she sets herself new challenges, and goes further. When her gradient paintings aroused the admiration of viewers, she didn't stop at that stage, she took another step, another experiment. I observe her work with constant curiosity about what'll happen next."

Of course, you can laugh at this. To say that this is just adding to theories. That adding political meanings to abstractions is nonsense. You can, although the fact is that this is the creative process that the artist herself talks about - initiated by very concrete issues, like the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, like women's strikes against harsh laws depriving them of reproductive freedom, and like the resistance to constitution violations and the destruction of democracy.

But even if someone does not want to look for specifics here, these images can have an impact on them, draw them in, suck them in. They have the same quality as paintings by Caravaggio, Turner, Rothko and the light installations of James Turrell. You can stand in front of these paintings for hours, going deeper and deeper, amazed at how such light and space effects can be achieved on a flat canvas. These are paintings in which you can get lost, have an adventure, find something.

You can see more of Agata's work in this video from her London exhibition last year.

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More Marek now online

Over 40 Marek drawings have been added online to the Museum of Warsaw's website after being shown this summer during their Rising from Rubble exhibition.

Many I recognise from his 1946 visit to a ruined Warsaw (they feature in his memoirs about it), but they also have several from the 1930s when he was actually living in Warsaw. I like this one of Kierbedzia Bridge especially, since it was destroyed in WWII and looks pretty odd.

Elsewhere, in the real world, there are going to be some guided tours and workshops at CSW Toruń's big Marek exhibition. You can read about them here and here.

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

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Other stuff