Poland
The Polish session will take place on Sunday, May 16 (2pm) at Idlewild Books, 12 West 19th Street, New York. To register for this session, send us an email at poland.nyc@europeanbookclub.orgThe Book: Fado, by Andrzej Stasiuk
Fado is a subtly constructed constellation of travel essays in which Andrzej Stasiuk, one of Poland’s most acclaimed authors, embarks on a “Slavic On the Road” to explore life in post-Communist Eastern Europe. In the first half of the book, he travels through Slovakia, the Ukraine, and Romania, to Belgrade, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania, Ljubljana; in the second half, he returns to his home in the mountains of southern Poland and trains his literary and philosophical vision on his own country. Throughout the book, Stasiuk reflects on conditions in a region whose existence, as he describes it, “is highly problematic and already resembles a literary fiction.” The title of the book comes from a magical, melancholy moment that Stasiuk describes: a Portuguese fado song heard on a radio on the shores of Lake Ohrid. And indeed, Fado plumbs the essence of this region, which inheres as much in the structure of feeling as it does in history or the vagaries of political and economic transition.
About the author
Andrzej Stasiuk has had one of the most stunning careers of Polish writers who first published after 1989. In the early 1980s, as a pacifist, he deserted the army and spent a year and a half in prison – an experience that inspired his debut novel, The Walls of Hebron. In his youth in Warsaw, he wrote mainly for underground magazines; but soon after his first book came out, he moved from the capital to a village in the Beskid mountains in southern Poland, where he and his wife, Monika Sznajderman, run the esteemed publishing house Wydawnictwo Czarne, and where he has since written over a dozen more books, including several available in English: The White Raven (2001), Tales of Galicia (2003), Nine (2007), and Fado (2009). Stasiuk has won Poland’s most prestigious literary prize, the Nike, for his collection of travel essays Going to Babadag (forthcoming in English with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); and he will be a guest of the Polish Cultural Institute at this year’s PEN World Voices Festival in New York, April 28–May 2, 2010.
About the translator
Bill Johnston is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Comparative Literature at Indiana University and Director of the Polish Studies Center there. Recipient in 2008 of the first Found in Translation Award for his translation of Tadeusz Rozewicz’s New Poems (Archipelago Books, 2007), Johnston has translated three books by Magdalena Tulli, Witold Gombrowicz’s Bacacay, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski’s The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories, and Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s poetry collection Peregrinary, and many other books. His translation of Wieslaw Mysliwski’s magnum opus Stone Upon Stone will be published by Archipelago Books in fall 2010.