Tab Article

translated from the Polish by Soren A. Gauger & Marcin Piekoszewski

Synopsis:
Poet, translator, scholar, Jerzy Ficowski is the author of "Regions of the Great Heresy" (W.W. Norton, 2003), a biography of Bruno Schulz, and "A Reading of Ashes", a collection of poetry. In the stories that comprise "Waiting for the Dog to Sleep", he weaves memory, religious ritual, daily life, and the magical, hinting at a sinister presence lurking in the distance - a trace of ruin or disintegration always present as the narrator repeatedly struggles to link some aspect of a past that has been annihilated with a present that is foreign and hostile.

Waiting for the Dog to Sleep is poet, translator, and scholar Jerzy Ficowski's only collection of prose. In these short stories and sketches Ficowski reinterprets a question posed by the writer central to him, Bruno Schulz, about the mythologization of reality. For Schulz, fiction was a way of turning the quotidian into the fantastical and eternal. Ficowski's prose seems to reinterpret this approach to address the sense of loss and bleak landscape of postwar Poland. Effortlessly weaving memory, religious ritual, daily life, and the magical, he hints at a sinister presence lurking behind these dreamlike tales—a trace of ruin or disintegration always present as the narrator repeatedly struggles to link some aspect of a past that has been annihilated with a present that is foreign and hostile.

Ficowski occupies a peculiar and unique place in Polish literature, not having belonged to any definable literary school or circle, steadily writing his poems and stories for over half a century. His only identifiable precursors might be Boleslaw Lesmian (whose Russian verse he has translated to Polish), and of course Bruno Schulz.

Soren A. Gauger is from Vancouver, Canada and lives in Krakow, Poland where he occasionally teaches English literature at Jagiellonian Univeristy, writes a regular column for the Krakow cultural monthly Miesiac w Krakowie, and is the in-house translator for 2+3 D, Poland's only design quarterly. His own writing and translations of Polish fiction have appeared in a number of publications. He is the author of the collection of stories Hymns to Millionaires (Twisted Spoon Press, 2004) and a chapbook Quatre Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus.

Marcin Piekoszewski was born in 1973 in Kluczbork, Poland. He studied at the English Departments of Opole University and Krakow's Jagiellonian University, graduating from the latter defending a thesis in American Literature. Having worked as a teacher, translator, journalist, and bookseller, he currently resides in Berlin.

Review extracts:

In this collection of 28 short, lyrical prose pieces, Ficowski, a Polish poet and scholar who participated in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, blends hallucination, reminiscence and reverie in a way that suggests but never spells out the horrors and deprivations of life in Poland during and after WWII. [...] Many pieces read like dream journals, or "recollections confused with fantasy," unraveling from reality in a style recalling the work of Borges and Calvino, and the dark, surrealist fables of Bruno Schulz, the subject of Ficowski's best known nonfiction work, Regions of the Great Heresy. But the collection contains pieces, such as the profound "Intermission," about a brief, terrifying lull during the Warsaw Uprising, that clearly touch on his own experience of war and loss. First published in Poland in 1970, this expressive collection illustrates how a suffering nation can find refuge in dreams, even if those dreams are haunted by a reality the dreamer is trying to escape.
- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

... a strange and haunting collection of short fiction
- Philadelphia Weekly

The subject of these absurd (but perhaps not so very absurd) stories by an author of such a difficult, immense, powefully complicated imagination, could well be the issue of how far the view from a distance and the view from close up can hold good for each other.
- Karin Wolff

A riddling, forbidding colloquy of fantasies fevered by war and privation, it offers only the grayest of consolation: the pleasures of a last cigarette, the aroma of a cup of coffee, the quiescence of hiding.
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