The artist Marek Zulawski, translation & Polish-British culture

Hi,

I know I said I'd find something more cheerful than that heavy New Year's Eve excerpt last time round, but it seems my selection skills are a bit rusty... I've translated something about Marek's 1967 visit to the US. He seems to enjoy Oregon (visiting the hotel that a decade later would be used to film The Shining), but his description of New York is a little bit shocking.

But before that, a small oddly-formatted announcement:

If you know anybody who is looking for a Polish-to-English translator for family memoirs, please put them in touch with me.

I'm looking to start offering translation as a service again but with a focus on keeping family memories alive, especially for descendants who find it difficult to read the original Polish.

I can even help people publish memoirs on Amazon and other online stores.

If you know anybody who might need a service like that, just forward them this email so that they have my email address and can contact me.

Thanks!

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1967 in the US

The highway winds upwards like a serpent through the colossal pine trees. It smells of resin here — it's just like on the road to Morskie Oko, only bigger, wider, juicier.

We arrive at Timberline Lodge at dusk. A huge absurd hostel-hotel-bar-restaurant.

A chimney in the hall two-floors tall, a staircase so wide a whole regiment of soldiers could walk up it. Some wall paintings, some wooden sculptures — remnants of Roosevelt's "New Deal" at a height even higher than Gerlach's peak in the Tatra Mountains.

The lodge's warmth heats up the evening chill and the frosty night, while at dawn the snowy naked peak of Mount Hood appears, pink and regular as the breast of a sleeping girl.

I don't want to go back to New York.

New York never sleeps.

Marek Zulawski in Brooklyn, 1967

After a wonderful lunch at the Time & Life Roof Restaurant, more lifts shot us up to the top of the Empire State Building. It casts shadows on the very clouds. From above, streets looking like veins of liquid metal shimmer with light and glide somewhere in the indefinite distance. It was a sweltering September night down below - but up there it was as cool as in the mountains.

The city is both terrible and wonderful. Heaps of rubbish and squalor on the Bowery and the West Side, while on Fifth Avenue, the sky and rushing clouds are reflected in the glass and steel walls of skyscrapers.

At two o'clock in the morning, returning from a party, I looked forward to some respite in Time Square. I imagined it would be as quiet at that hour as it is in Piccadilly Circus. But having emerged from the subway, which never stops running, I found myself in the middle of pandemonium.

A crowd of thousands, sailors from all the seas of the world, under-aged girls with "Kiss me, Love me" written on their thighs in lipstick, pornographic cinemas open on 42nd Street, bars full of people. Supernaturally sized cups of coffee and hot dogs with two-metres worth of sausages fly past as if on film.

Then suddenly a high, shrill male scream — an ultimate scream. No one batted an eyelid. He was lying on his back and scratching the cobblestones in pre-mortem convulsions. His black Italian hair and low forehead were matted with sweat, and the shirt on his stomach, as white as one from a Goya drawing, was turning blacker and blacker.

Blood flowed in three directions over the cobblestones. He was dying alone. No one stopped to lean over him — the crowd passed him by and went around looking the other way.

But a moment later, sirens were wailing and they took the body into an ambulance. They sprinkled some sand where he had lain — and the crowd closed in again, just like water closing over a stone thrown into a lake.

On my return to London, I attempted to paint him. But little by little, as usual with my paintings, everything began to change. His solitude became absolute. All the details fell away from him. He became naked. Crowded Times Square transformed into a primordial wilderness and from a murdered Italian of however many years, who had lived here and there, he became Dead Man. A generality. From an observation of nature to a symbol. I guess that's how it always is in my painting.

"Dead Man" by Marek Zulawski, 1969

The next day in the New York Times, there were three petite lines. Perpetrator and motive for murder unknown. There are so many of them every day in this city.

None of my friends wanted to accompany me to Harlem. But Greenwich Village was full of smiles: the Tin Angel, Café Bizarre, posters proclaiming "Johnson for Ex-president", and the Psychedelic Theatre, where, in the demented noise of the music, people disappear into the blackness or reveal themselves by wearing green stripes. On the wall, orange shadows and blue blurs grow, change shape and fade into pearly silver.

All conversation is made impossible. Words get stuck in the throat from shouting, which no one can hear anyway, because sounds here have morphed into cannon shots. The tones coming out of the tiny harmonium played by a pale young man fill the rooms like the howls of wolves and the roars of a lion.

In the East Village, 'The Shirt' in Italian. We watch a rape take place on stage at La MaMa — or rather part of the audience floor free from tables. Afterwards, the exquisite black director admits that the rape is only sometimes faked. Steve, my native New Yorker friend, is chilled to the bones.

The Museum of Modern Art has an old Mankes. I recall his words of wisdom and indulgence — or bitterness:

"In the past you had to study, but today painters are born ready. We have expanded the scope of our perception — but so what? Every generation gets the art it deserves. Painting is what one wants it to be. A blank wall can also affect our sensitivities..."

Maybe I should just translate more comedy sketches from YouTube? This Marek guy was depressing... 😅

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Auctions for old doodles

A couple of drawings created for the programme of the opera Eros and Psyche are going up for auction later this month - you can find links here and here.

Based on an old 2nd-century story, the opera was written by Jerzy Żuławski (Marek's father and my grandfather) and Ludomir Różycki and debuted back in 1904. A new version was put on in Warsaw just a few years ago. The drawings, also from 1904, are both by well-known Polish artists and pretty cool as you can see below. The left one is by Karol Frycz, the right one by Witold Wojtkiewicz.

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

Again, if you know anybody who is looking to get some Polish memoirs translated, however long or short, please send them my way.

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Other stuff