By Ben Koschalka
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is probably best known as one of the two translators who have brought the work of Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk into English. Throughout a prolific career, she has introduced readers to many more of Poland’s greatest writers, including Jacek Dehnel, Paweł Huelle, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Zygmunt Miłoszewski.
A two-time recipient of the Found in Translation award, in 2018 she was also awarded the Transatlantyk lifetime achievement prize for services to promotion of Polish culture abroad. “Nobody has done more for Polish literature in this field,” said Stanley Bill, Notes from Poland’s editor-at-large, at the ceremony. “She is simply an entire, one-person embassy of Polish culture in English-speaking countries.”
We spoke with Lloyd-Jones about the challenges of translating Polish books and promoting Polish culture, as well as her tips on some of the undiscovered gems of Polish literature awaiting readers outside the country.
Ben Koschalka: Poles often seem amazed by foreigners who have learnt their language. Do you still get the “why Polish?” question?
Antonia Lloyd-Jones: People assume I have Polish roots and grew up speaking Polish. They can’t imagine that I might have learned it out of interest.
Some Poles are probably horrified by my mistakes, because they’re not used to hearing a foreigner speak in Polish. But it’s not my job to be perfect. After one event with the crime writer Zygmunt Miłoszewski, a woman complained to him, “How can you have that woman as your translator? She doesn’t know Polish properly!” He replied, “It’s her English I’m interested in.”
I’m often asked how long it takes to learn Polish. How did you get started?
I had little formal teaching, but I already knew Russian, which has some similarities, when I started to learn Polish. I also studied classical languages and have always loved grammar and syntax. Everyone learns languages in their own way, and mine is to sit down with grammar books. I also read a lot of books in parallel, comparing the original and the translation. But even now I make funny mistakes, and I’ll be learning it for the rest of my life.
Time picks "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead" by Polish Nobel winner Olga Tokarczuk (and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) as one of its best books of 2019 https://t.co/z7g5cceObT
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) November 23, 2019
Is it hard for Polish culture to be recognised abroad?
The language barrier is difficult to overcome. Even if the Iron Curtain has gone, we’re still pushing through a barrier, trying to show that there’s another world out there. Even with Poland in the European Union, and a large Polish presence in the UK, the British still don’t know much about it.
I originally learnt Polish to become a journalist – I wanted to tell my compatriots what was happening in Poland. I had good friends in Wrocław, and went to stay with them during martial law [under communism in the 1980s]. I was lucky because my friends’ father had fought with the Home Army [the Polish WWII resistance] as a teenager, and this family educated me about what had happened in Poland from the war onwards.
I had a missionary feeling that I wanted to tell the world, which has since been redirected into literature.
Has the pandemic made that task even harder?
Yes. Last year I couldn’t go to any literary festivals. They’re my chance to catch up with the latest in publishing, to meet the authors and the best reviewers, who are the ideal source of advice about new books. There are many excellent events in the summer, such as the Literary Heights Festival in Nowa Ruda. There’s also the Miedzianka festival, which takes place in the middle of nowhere, and focuses on reportage.
My favourite is the Polish Language Festival, held, aptly enough, in Szczebrzeszyn. The first time I went they made me say the tongue twister (“W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie”) on Polish radio.
These events can also be good for selling Polish literature. When the translator Sean Bye was working at the Polish Cultural Institute in New York he brought some American publishers over to the Conrad Festival in Kraków. We were able to spend days bombarding them with ideas for Polish books, which resulted in some new publications.
Is it harder to interest publishers in literature from some countries than others?
It’s Sisyphean work whatever language you’re translating from, because it’s mainly small, independent publishers that are interested in translated literature. Most big, wealthy publishers find it too uncommercial.
One of the reasons why Polish literature isn’t a fixture in British minds is that none of its major classic authors were widely read in English when first translated – although now that Adam Mickiewicz’s entertaining and brilliant verse novel Pan Tadeusz has been superbly translated by Bill Johnston, perhaps it’s finding a new audience.
But Polish is difficult to translate, and being stuck behind the Iron Curtain didn’t help.
Another problem for Polish literature in translation is that many people find Polish names unpronounceable and unmemorable, even a relatively straightforward one like Tokarczuk. But this may be true for foreign literature in general.
On the positive side, the whole landscape of literary translation has changed during my career, and thanks to the efforts of individuals as well as organisations working together, there is far more happening now than 30 years ago.
Did Olga Tokarczuk winning the Nobel Prize in Literature affect perceptions?
Absolutely. It has increased awareness of Polish literature. Her winning the Man Booker International Award for Flights was also a huge breakthrough. But we still have a big backlog of her work to translate. The next publication will be in November, Jennifer Croft’s translation of the historical epic The Books of Jacob. It took Olga eight years to research and write, and of course Jennifer has had to follow in her footsteps and do the same research.
What is the hardest thing about translating from Polish?
Polish takes a completely different approach to expressing yourself verbally. The grammar and inflections offer different possibilities compared with English and its rather inflexible word order.
It’s almost like a Magic Eye picture, which looks like a complex pattern, until you hold it at a particular angle and you see… a unicorn or whatever.
It’s difficult not to get seduced by the Polish text and stick too closely to what’s on the page. But as a literary translator you need to make a mental leap, to “if this person were writing in English, how would they write that?” Sometimes that means changing the structure and balance of the sentence, while still reproducing the author’s intention. That takes endless practice, and reading in English is also crucial to developing your skills.
There are cultural issues too, because Polish literature is highly self-referential. So you need to know, for instance, if something’s a quote from a song that everyone knew in the 1940s. I try to do what I call “smelling a rat”, where I think “I wonder if that’s a reference…?” and then I investigate, but I’m sure some things pass over my head.
I was working recently with Konrad Zieliński on Malina Prześluga’s Pustostan – Vacant Lot in English. It’s a surreal, abstract play about a family celebrating Wigilia, the traditional Christmas Eve dinner– something we don’t have in British or American culture. It features sharing the opłatek (the holy wafer), laying a place for an unexpected guest, and carp as the main dish. Plus the language is very clipped, and the set is almost bare, so how do you convey that?
We’ve been trying to smuggle things into the dialogue, and also discussing how much you can rely on the viewer’s intelligence, and the extent to which the directors and actors will know how to get things across.
I also sometimes worry, living in Poland, that I’m losing touch with the way English is spoken.
Languages never stop evolving. The variety of forms of English and the ways it is spoken in different countries and generations are actually a gift to translators. But at 59, I doubt I could translate something written in the voice of a modern teenager, so I should leave that to somebody else.
What else have your former mentees been working on?
I encourage them to look for emerging authors and editors and build relationships. Sean Bye, a wonderful translator, picked up my interest in Polish reportage, which not many people have translated. Reportage is a genre unique to Polish literature, using economical, sparse writing to present a ground-up view of a country or society through the eyes of ordinary people. It’s different from the factual reporting or travel writing that exists in English.
One year in Szczebrzeszyn he met Mikołaj Grynberg, who specialises in stories of people with the legacy of Holocaust survival, and the result is a translation of his short fiction, Rejwach, which will be called I’d like to say sorry, but there’s no one to say sorry to.
Open Letter Books in the United States have bought four amazing works of reportage, two of which Sean is translating – Remigiusz Ryziński’s Foucault in Warsaw and Cezary Łazarewicz’s Gorgonowa, about a famous murder trial from 1931. I’ve translated one by Wojciech Tochman about the aftermath of the genocide in Cambodia, and Mark Ordon has translated Katarzyna Boni’s Ganbare! about the 2011 Japanese earthquake.
As a mentee, Zosia Krasodomska-Jones, showed me some excellent Polish children’s books, which I’ve always loved. We translated a middle-grade novel together called Clementine Loves Red by Krystyna Boglar. She’s also done fantastic work on a writer called Justyna Bednarek. Now she’s moved into reportage too, and we have co-translated Mud Sweeter Than Honey by Margo Rejmer.
Scotia Gilroy translated The Touch of an Angel by Henryk Schonker, which is an important Holocaust memoir. Kate Webster’s just done The Map by Barbara Sadurska for a new publisher, Terra Librorum. Eliza Marciniak originally worked on Hłasko, but has since translated Marian Orłon’s Detective Nosegoode series for children, and Wioletta Greg’s rites-of-passage novel Swallowing Mercury.
Does Polish literature have the problem of being stereotyped about only being about misery and suffering? What are the other areas where it has potential?
There is so much more than gloom and doom, but inevitably Polish literature often comes across as depressing because Poland’s historical experience has been so bad.
It has also been steeped in misinformation, in the communist era and more recently. When I was first there in 1983 I immediately felt that the Second World War was still relevant. Under communism a lot of things couldn’t be said, so literature still has an important role in processing the country’s devastating experience of the war, while in western Europe we’ve been able to move on.
Something I love is the fantastic, often surreal, ironical, or black central European form of humour, which you also see in Czech writers including Bohumil Hrabal. It’s there in Gombrowicz, Mrożek, Lem, and even some of Tokarczuk’s work too.
Tadeusz Konwicki is one of the best examples. His A Minor Apocalypse is a shocking-but-funny story about a man tasked with self-immolation as a political protest, who wanders around Warsaw with a can of petrol, having bizarre adventures.
I’m working on a translation of his Czytadło – “Pulp fiction” or “Potboiler” – the whole story is a surreal nightmare set just after the end of communism. It’s a brilliant portrait of Polish society in that era through the adventures of this hapless narrator, but it’s also more universal – about being at the point in life when death is never far from your thoughts.
Poland has a superb tradition of illustrated children’s books that has endured despite some commercialisation. My favourites include author/illustrator Paweł Pawlak and author/translator Michał Rusinek, also the middle-grade and YA novelists Justyna Bednarek and Marcin Szczygielski.
Some so-called “classics” are yet to be translated. Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz is one of the best 20th-century writers who’s been mostly overlooked, though I translated one selection many years ago. But there are new publications, of classics such as The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz from 1932, translated by Megan Thomas and Ewa Malachowska-Pasek. This is a glorious black comedy, about an idler who through pure cunning becomes very successful – a theme in eastern European literature from Gogol onwards.
Memoir of an Antihero by Kornel Filipowicz, who has been championed by the translator Anna Zaranko, is a superb Camus-style novella. So there are signs of life, largely thanks to dedicated translators like Ursula Phillips, who translated Zofia Nałkowska’s Choucas into English, and Bill Johnston, who is working on Maria Dąbrowska’s saga, Nights and Days.
Do you read Polish literature for fun or is it just work?
I do read for pleasure – Dyzma being an example – but decades ago I turned my hobby into my job, so it’s all fun. But I always have a big stack of books waiting for me and wish I had a year, two, three, just to read.
Main image credit: Wrocławski Dom Literatury/Facebook
Ben Koschalka is a translator and senior editor at Notes from Poland. Originally from Britain, he has lived in Kraków since 2005.
