Nocturnal Apparitions E-Book

Bruno Schulz

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms.Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the stories in this collection showcase Schulz's darkly modern sensibility, and his status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical.

Leseprobe

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BRUNO SCHULZ

NOCTURNAL APPARITIONS

Essential Stories

Translated from the Polish by Stanley Bill

PUSHKIN PRESS

LONDON

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CONTENTS

Title PageForewordAugustVisitationBirdsCinnamon ShopsThe Street of CrocodilesCockroachesThe GaleThe Night of the Great SeasonThe BookThe Age of GeniusMy Father Joins the Fire BrigadeThe Sanatorium under the HourglassFather’s Last EscapeUndulaCopyright

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FOREWORD

Stanley Bill

Bruno Schulz belongs to a lost world. He lived his creative life in the brief respite between the wars in the newly independent Poland of the 1920s and ’30s. In this fragile moment, he produced a small body of literary works of the most concentrated imaginative power, before the world he inhabited was destroyed—and he along with it.

Born in 1892 in the small town of Drohobycz, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Schulz and his native region found themselves in a south-eastern corner of the Polish state from its creation in 1918. Larger than today’s Poland and located further to the east, the interwar state was dynamic and diverse. Ethnic Poles dominated, but minorities—Jews, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and others—constituted a third of the population. Plagued by internal conflicts, the new country was also a place of creative ferment, from modernizing construction 8projects to bold artistic experiments. It was here that Schulz pursued his creative career, publishing two collections of short stories and exhibiting his graphic works. And it was here that he made his living as a drawing teacher at the state secondary school in provincial Drohobycz.

Schulz’s Drohobycz (today’s Drohobych in western Ukraine) was dubbed the ‘one and a half cities’—half Polish, half Jewish, half Ukrainian. His Jewish family seems to have given him a mostly secular upbringing in this mixed milieu. He knew German and probably understood Yiddish, but the main language of his life and creative work was Polish. As a schoolteacher, Schulz was a well-connected member of the local elite, though rising antisemitism created anxieties about his status from the mid-1930s. Many of his friends and acquaintances belonged to the Polish-speaking Jewish intelligentsia, though he also associated with Yiddish and Polish Catholic circles. His literary success brought him into close contact with some of the most celebrated figures of interwar Polish literature—among others, Zofia Nałkowska, Witold Gombrowicz, and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz.

In 1939, the vibrant world of the Second Polish Republic was brought to an end by the dual invasion 9of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By the war’s end, the Jewish worlds of the region had been all but annihilated under the German occupation. In 1941, the Jews of Drohobycz were confined to a ghetto in appalling conditions, and then murdered in mass shootings and gas chambers. Schulz survived longer than many, having become an essential labourer to an Austrian SS officer who admired his artwork. The officer commissioned various works from Schulz, including fairy-tale frescoes for his child’s bedroom. But this perverse protection could not last. On 19 November 1942, Schulz was shot dead on the street by another SS officer during an indiscriminate shooting spree.

In his lifetime, Schulz published only two volumes of short stories and a few other assorted stories and essays. His first book—Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy cynamonowe, 1933)—was generally very well received by literati, though some right-wing reviewers attacked it, with an antisemitic subtext, for its supposed ‘degeneracy’. His second volume—Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium pod klepsydrą, 1937)—confirmed his reputation, and a year later he was awarded the Golden Laurel prize by the Polish Academy of Literature. Schulz was an avant-garde writer rather than a bestseller, but he was also very far from being 10an obscure or unrecognized talent, as he has sometimes been portrayed.

Schulz’s literary output may be slim, but his writing stands out with the extraordinary distinctiveness and intensity of his style. In his descriptions of everyday events in the life of a family in a provincial town, all seen through the eyes of a child, Schulz created a private mythology of his own town, family, and childhood. His long sentences pile one wildly imaginative metaphor on top of another, creating a sense of excess, instability, and constant transformation, as ordinary objects undergo unexpected metamorphoses or reveal glimpses of mysterious inner lives. The plots of the stories are both easy and difficult to encapsulate: not much happens in a literal sense, while at the same time a cavalcade of fantastical events unfolds in the narrator’s imagination or in the contortions of the language itself.

Schulz draws on various traditions of Jewish religion and folklore, mixing these elements and other mythological themes with the bathos of a shoddy, provincial modernity. The stories are rich in characters, painted with the vividness of a small child’s perspective. Particularly memorable is the figure of the elderly father, who shares the name of Jakub with 11Schulz’s own father: an eccentric textile trader whose illness and madcap flights of fancy progressively drag him away from the world of his family in a series of disturbing metamorphoses. Schulz’s tone is also unmistakable, combining emotive poeticization of the everyday world with an underlying irony that prevents the baroque excess of his metaphors from straying into kitsch. His style constantly teeters on this invisible border, which poses a fatal danger to would-be imitators and translators alike.

Schulz’s career in English translation was slow to develop. In 1958, a translation of a single story—‘My Father Joins the Fire Brigade’—was published in an anthology of Polish literature. The translators were the extraordinary couple of W. Stanley Moss, a British secret services officer during the Second World War, and Zofia Tarnowska Moss, a Polish noblewoman and wartime head of the Polish Red Cross in Cairo.

In 1963, a complete translation of Cinnamon Shops was made by Celina Wieniewska, born in Warsaw as Celina Miliband—a Holocaust survivor and distant relation of later British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. In 1977, her translation reached a much wider audience when Philip Roth republished it in his ‘Writers from the Other Europe’ series with Penguin 12Books. Wieniewska then translated Schulz’s second book, as Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, and the two collections were published together in a single volume in 1988.

Wieniewska’s translations have been a stunning success, flowing and faithful to the poetic irony of Schulz’s prose. It is thanks to her work that Schulz became known to English-language readers, gaining a veritable cult following among writers and artists. Wieniewska’s Schulz influenced and inspired, among many others, Roth himself, John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, and filmmakers the Brothers Quay. Yet, in more recent times, some scholars, especially in Poland, have criticized Wieniewska’s translations for their inaccuracy. Indeed, she seems to have adopted a deliberate strategy of simplification, occasionally even omitting whole phrases or sentences in the interest of comprehensibility. These complaints led to calls for a fresh English rendering of Schulz.

In 2018, Madeline G. Levine took up the challenge, publishing a new translation of Schulz’s collected fiction with Northwestern University Press in the United States. She explicitly sought to redress the imprecision of Wieniewska’s work, producing a version that hews as closely as possible to the 13idiosyncratic style and Polish syntax of the original. The result is a towering achievement and an invaluable broadening of the image of Schulz for the English-language reader.

My own rationale in accepting an invitation to embark on this new translation was first of all that great writers deserve multiple translations. Beyond this platitude, my ambition was to find a middle path between the ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’ approaches characterizing—in crude terms—the respective translations of Wieniewska and Levine. I have tried to capture Schulz’s strangeness, never seeking to tame his complexity, while still erring on the side of the natural beats and structures of the English language—a recreation of Schulz’s specificity in local conditions.

Where Schulz stretches the syntax or overloads a phrase with metaphors in Polish, I have also done so in English, but in a modified form shaped by the different tolerances and tendencies of the language. I have altered the syntax where necessary, while always striving to preserve the subtleties of meaning imparted by the original word order (Polish is more flexible than English in this regard). I have kept most of Schulz’s long sentences and sometimes jarring repetitions, only restraining them when the resulting clumsiness or 14obscurity would be intolerable in English. In the end, such choices are based on subjective aesthetic judgements and an instinctive searching for equivalent (rather than identical) forms.

I have retained the Polish versions and spellings of names, including diacritical marks, as a simple way to immerse the reader in the unfamiliar sphere of another culture in a distant time and place. Most of the names should be relatively intuitive to pronounce, but a few are slightly trickier. The following glosses give approximate pronunciations for the latter:

Tłuja: Twooya

Maryśka: Marishka

Łucja: Wootsya

Jakub: Yakoob (Jacob)

Małgorzata: Maogozhata

Szloma: Shloma

Józef: Yoozef (Joseph)

The process of selecting ‘essential stories’ for this small volume was challenging. I have sought to include a diverse range of Schulz’s works, while also giving the volume a coherent narrative arc of its own. The book includes close to half of Schulz’s total literary output, featuring many of his best known stories from his two published collections. It concludes with a novelty: a 15recently discovered story, entitled ‘Undula’, probably Schulz’s earliest work, first published under a pseudonym in 1922. Serving as a sort of epilogue to the volume, and accompanied by its own short introduction, this story gives a fascinating insight into the early development of Schulz’s inimitable style and abiding themes.

My aim in this book has been to render a lively selection of Schulz’s best fiction for the general reader in a style that is both accessible and true to his complex imagination. I hope these fresh combinations of Schulz’s words in English might at least occasionally succeed in sparking what he called the ‘short circuits of sense’—the electrifying new connections of word and image that restore language’s visionary potential.

* * *

I thank Kirsten Chapman for her outstanding editorial work and for initiating the whole project, Elodie Olson-Coons for her fastidious copyediting, and the rest of the editorial team. It was a true joy to work on this volume with such engaged and professional support.

I thank Jennifer Croft and Rebecca Reich for their early advice and encouragement. I am also grateful to Jennifer, Clare Cavanagh, and Antonia Lloyd-Jones 16for teaching me so much about translation over the years, both in conversation and by example.

I dedicate this translation to Kinga, Andrzej, and Kajtek, who first introduced me to Schulz, and to all my Ukrainian friends in Drohobych and Truskavets—Schulz’s native land, once again in the shadow of war.

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AUGUST

1.

In July, my father went off to take the waters, leaving me with my mother and elder brother at the mercy of the white-hot, blinding days of summer. Dazzled by the light, we leafed through the great book of holidays, its pages glowing in the bright radiance and holding in their depths the languidly sweet pulp of golden pears.

Adela returned from the market on those luminous mornings like Pomona from the flames of the fiery day, pouring out from her basket the colourful bounty of the sun: glistening cherries bursting with juice under transparent skins; dark, mysterious morellos whose fragrance always surpassed their flavour; apricots whose golden pulp harboured the core of long afternoons. Alongside this pure poetry of fruit, she unloaded sides of meat, with their keyboards of ribs 18swollen with strength and nourishment, and seaweeds of vegetables like dead molluscs and jellyfish: the raw material for a dinner whose flavour was as yet unformed and barren; the vegetative, telluric ingredients of a meal whose aroma was wild and redolent of the fields.

Each day, the whole pageant of the summer passed through our dark, first-floor apartment on the market square: the silence of shimmering rings of air; squares of brightness dreaming their fervent dreams on the floor; the melody of a barrel organ, drawn out of the deepest golden vein of the day; two or three measures of a refrain played somewhere in the distance on a piano, over and over, swooning in the sunshine on white pavements, lost in the fire of the declining day. After her cleaning, Adela lowered the linen blinds and cast the room into shadow. The colours deepened by an octave and the room was filled with shade, as if plunged into the half-light of a deep-sea trench, still more dimly reflected in the green mirrors, while the heat of the day breathed against the blinds, which rippled gently with noontime dreams.

On Saturday afternoons, I went out with my mother for a walk. From the semi-darkness of the entrance hall, we stepped out into the sunny bath of the day. Passers-by waded through gold, their eyes 19squinting against the glare, as if sealed shut with honey, while curled upper lips exposed teeth and gums. Everyone wading through that golden day bore the very same grimace from the scorching heat, as if the sun had stamped one and the same mask on all its worshippers—the golden mask of a solar fraternity. Old men and youngsters, women and children, all greeted one another in passing on those streets with the same mask painted on their faces in thick, gold paint, grinning at one another with that Bacchic grimace: the barbaric mask of a pagan cult.

The market square was empty and yellow with the blazing heat, swept clean of dust by hot winds, like a biblical desert. Thorny acacias grew out of the desolation of the yellow square, their bright foliage seething above it in bouquets of exquisitely traced green filigrees, like the trees on an old Gobelins tapestry. It seemed the trees were simulating a gale, shaking their crowns theatrically so as to show off in grandiloquent excess the refinement of those leafy fans with their silver underbellies, like the pelts of elegant vixens. The old buildings, polished smooth by many days of wind, were coloured with the reflections of the vast atmosphere, with the echoes and reminiscences of diverse hues dispersed in the depths of the colourful weather. It seemed that whole generations of summer days had 20been chipping away at the false glaze, like patient stuccoists scraping a mould of plaster off old façades, exposing day by day with ever greater clarity the true faces of the houses, the physiognomy of fate and life that had shaped them from within. Now the windows slept, blinded by the glare of the empty square; the balconies exposed their emptiness to the sky; the open entrance halls smelt of coolness and wine.

A little gang of tramps, sheltering from the fiery broom of the heat in a corner of the square, had besieged a little stretch of wall, attacking it over and over with tosses of buttons and coins, as if the true mystery of the wall, marked with the hieroglyphs of cracks and scratches, could be read like a horoscope from those metal discs. The square was empty. One half-expected to see the Good Samaritan’s donkey being led in by the bridle under the shade of the swaying acacias to a vaulted entrance hall lined with winemaker’s barrels, and that two servants would tenderly lift the sick man down from his feverish saddle and carry him carefully up the cool steps to a first floor fragrant with the Sabbath.

And so my mother and I strolled down the two sunny sides of the market square, dragging our broken shadows over all the buildings, as if across a keyboard. The little squares of the cobblestones passed slowly 21under our soft, flat steps: some of them pale pink like human skin; others gold and blue; all of them flat, warm, and velvety in the sun, like sunny faces trampled by many feet into anonymity, into blissful nothingness.

At last, on the corner of Stryj Street, we entered the shade of the pharmacy. In its wide window, a great pitcher of raspberry juice symbolized the coolness of balms that could soothe every ailment. Only a few buildings further on, the street could no longer keep up its urban decorum—like a peasant returning to his native village, steadily stripping off the trappings of metropolitan elegance along the way to turn back into a ragged bumpkin.

The little suburban houses were drowning, plunged right up to their windows in the luxuriant, tangled growth of their gardens. Forgotten by the vast day, all manner of plants, flowers, and weeds proliferated luxuriantly, glad of this respite, through which they could slumber on the margins of time, on the frontiers of the infinite day. A gigantic sunflower, hoisted up on a thick stalk and apparently afflicted with elephantiasis, waited in yellow mourning through the last, sad days of its life, bowed beneath the excess of its monstrous corpulence. Naïve suburban bluebells and calicos stood helplessly by in their starched pink and 22white shirts, vulgar little flowers uncomprehending of the sunflower’s tragedy.

2.

A tangled thicket of grasses, weeds, bushes, and thistles ran riot in the fire of the afternoon. The garden’s afternoon nap buzzed with a swarm of flies. Golden stubble roared like red locusts in the sun; crickets screamed in the heavy rain of fire; seed pods exploded quietly like grasshoppers.

Close to the fence, a sheepskin of grass rose in a hunchback mound, as if the garden had turned on its side in its sleep, its broad peasant shoulders inhaling the silence of the earth. Upon those garden shoulders, the slovenly, womanish fertility of August was magnified in a quiet hollow of giant burdocks, which ran wild in furry sheets of leaves and exuberant tongues of fleshy green. The bulging effigies of the burdocks spread out like old crones seated on the ground, half devoured by their own frenzied skirts. Free of charge, the garden gave away its cheapest groats of elder, thick kasha of plantain reeking of soap, wild aqua vitae of mint, and all manner of the worst trash of August. But on the other side of the fence—beyond this summer 23nursery, where the idiocy of the crazed weeds proliferated—was a rubbish heap wildly overgrown with thistles. No one knew it was there that the August of that summer performed its great pagan orgy. On the rubbish heap, leaning against the fence and overgrown with elder, was the bed of the imbecile girl, Tłuja. For that is what we all called her. The bed stood on a pile of refuse, old pots, scraps, slippers, rubble and debris, painted green and propped up on two old bricks in place of its missing legs.

The air over the rubble had run wild in the heat, intersected by lightning flights of glistening horseflies driven mad by the sun, crackling as if with invisible rattles, which whipped everything into a frenzy.

Tłuja sits crouched in yellow bedding and rags. Her large head bristles with the rough bale of her black hair. Her face is scrunched up like the bellows of a concertina. Every so often, a grimacing sob crumples it up into a thousand intersecting folds, before astonishment stretches it back out again, smoothing out the folds and exposing the slits of little eyes and moist gums with yellow teeth below a snoutish, fleshy lip. Hours pass by, filled with heat and boredom, while Tłuja mutters to herself under her breath or dozes off, whimpering and grunting. Flies settle all over her motionless form in a thick swarm. Then suddenly the 24whole heap of dirty rags, strips, and sheets begins to move, as if animated by a scuttling nest of rats breeding inside it. The flies start with alarm and rise in a great whining swarm, filled with furious buzzing, flashing, and shimmering. And as the rags fall to the ground and scatter over the trash heap like frightened rats, the heart of the mass begins to unwrap itself, digging itself out, stripping away the husk to reveal the core of the pile. The half-naked, tanned idiot girl slowly drags herself up, like a pagan idol rising onto short, childlike legs; a bestial shriek erupts from a neck bloated with a rush of anger, from a reddened face darkening with rage, as arabesques of swollen veins bloom like barbaric paintings—a hoarse shriek ripped out of the bronchi and pipes of a half-animal, half-divine breast. The sunburnt thistles scream; the burdocks puff themselves up and flaunt their shameless flesh; weeds slobber with glistening venom; and the idiot girl, hoarse with the screaming and in wild convulsions, thrusts her fleshy loins with frenzied violence against the trunk of an elder tree, which creaks quietly under the assault of her wanton lust, exhorted by that whole impoverished choir into a degenerate, pagan fertility.

Tłuja’s mother hires herself out to housewives to scrub their floors. She is a small woman, yellow as 25saffron, leaving her saffron traces on the floors, fir tables, seats, and sleeping benches she cleans in shabby rooms. Adela once took me to the house of that old Maryśka. It was early in the morning when we entered her small room, whitewashed a shade of blue, with its beaten earth floor bathed in bright yellow sunshine amidst a morning silence punctuated only by the dreadful rattle of the peasant clock on the wall. In a chest on some straw lay the imbecile Maryśka, white as a sheet and quiet as a glove from which a hand has just slipped out. As if to take advantage of her slumber, the silence chattered away to itself—a yellow, garish, malicious silence conducting loud monologues and disputations with itself, vulgarly spinning out its maniacal soliloquy. Maryśka’s time, a time imprisoned in her soul, emerged from within her, terrifyingly real; it rampaged about the room in a pounding, diabolical fury, rising out of the clock-mill in the bright silence of the morning like cheap flour, loose flour, the moronic flour of the insane.

3.

In one of those little houses, behind a brownish fence and drowning in the luxuriant greenery of the garden, 26lived Aunt Agata. When we paid her a visit, we came in past the coloured glass balls on little poles in her garden: pink, green, and violet globes in which bright, luminous worlds had been magically sealed like idyllic, happy visions enclosed within the incomparable perfection of soap bubbles.

In the semi-darkness of the entrance hall, with its faded oleographs devoured by mould and blind with age, we smelt the familiar odour. That faithful old smell contained the whole life of these people in a strangely simple synthesis, an alembic of their race, the species of their blood, and the secret of their fate, imperceptibly distilled in the everyday passing of their own separate time. A wise old door whose dark sighs had let them in and out—a silent witness to the comings and goings of mother, daughters, and sons—opened noiselessly like the frame of a wardrobe, and we entered their life. They sat as if in the shadow of their own fate, defenceless, betraying their secret to us from their first awkward gestures. Were we not, after all, bound to them by both blood and fate?

The room was dark and velvety in gold-patterned, navy blue upholstery, and yet the echo of the fiery day still flickered even here in the brass of the picture frames, door handles, and golden skirting boards, filtered through the dense greenery of the garden. 27Aunt Agata loomed against the wall, large and luxuriant, her pale, plump flesh dotted red with a rust of freckles. We sat down with them, as if on the very brink of their fate, a little ashamed of the defencelessness with which they told us everything without compunction, sipping water with rose syrup, a most peculiar drink in which I found the deepest essence of that scorching Saturday.

My aunt lamented. This was the basic tone of her conversations, the voice of that white and fertile flesh bursting beyond the borders of her person, only loosely kept within the bounds of an individual form, and even in this form already swollen and ready to disintegrate, branch out, and disperse into the family. It was a fertility of an almost self-generating kind, a pathologically luxuriant and unbridled femininity.