Lovetown
Page 27
An expression that proved impossible to translate, but that is worth explicating since it illustrates how ‘over the top’ Witkowski’s own writing can get, is the phrase ciotowski bicz, which I’ve rendered in the first instance, the title of Part II of the book, as ‘the lewd beach’ – a pun on ‘nude beach’ suggested by Antonia Lloyd-Jones – and in the second as ‘lewd bitch’, where it refers to the Apothecaress. The phrase plays on the antiquated epithet dziadowski bicz, which figuratively means ‘spoilt brat’, but literally means something like ‘beggar’s whip’ or ‘old man’s whip’, dziadowski deriving from dziad – a word for old man, beggar, or grandfather that resonates with Adam Mickiewicz’s Romantic drama Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve). The transformation here of dziadowski into ciotowski – which comes from ciota – thus literally involves a bit of linguistic cross-dressing. Adding to the complexity, the word bicz, which means ‘whip’, is an interlingual pun on the two English words ‘beach’ and ‘bitch’. Clearly, this phrase was not going to make it out of Polish, but it is worth examining anyway because it illustrates in a nutshell Witkowski’s poetics of exaggeratedly ‘queering’ language itself.
One last thing that might not be obvious to English-language readers is that with few exceptions the places mentioned in Lovetown are in the western part of Poland, that is, in an area that from the eighteenth century until the end of World War II had been part of Germany, and after the war, resettled by Poles from what is now the Ukraine, remained contested territory until the 1970s. Most of those cities and towns have a second, German name lurking in their past – for Wrocław it is Breslau, for Poznań Posen, for Lubiewo Lubau, for Legnica Liegnitz, etc. – just as Lucretia, Patricia, Jessica and the other queens all have masculine names in their papers. One might think of this double order of double names as an index for the inextricability and volatility of gender and nationality; at any rate, the real Lovetown, wherever one finds it, is a place where the order of things is quickly subverted and identity is never fixed.
Ryszard Kapuściński has written that reportage is the form of writing ‘most reliant on the collective’; but I would argue that translation is even more so. In that respect, I have been extremely fortunate to have had help with this work from its editors and outside readers and from friends. In addition to the huge debts of gratitude I owe to Andrew Wille, who localised the manuscript for British readers, and to Portobello editors Tasja Dorkofikis and Christine Lo and publisher Philip Gwyn Jones, I would also like to thank the following people for their various suggestions, insights, and support: Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Stefan Ingvarsson, Michał Witkowski, Agata Bielik-Robson, Jasper Tilbury, Joanna Niżyńska, Piotr Sommer, Błażej Warkocki, Jessie Labov, Bożena Shallcross, Kinga Maciejewska, Witek Turopolski, Justyna Beinek, Iza Kaluta, Agata Grenda, Marcin Pasek, Susan Harris, Shaun Levin, Jeremy Davies, Ilay Halpern, Christina Marie Hauptmeier, Jan Jeništa, Susan Bernofsky, Zhenya Bershtein, Sunder Ganglani, Tomasz Markiewicz, Christian Hawkey, Chris Pappas, Khary Polk, and Moshe Shushan. Extracts of Lovetown have appeared in Chroma Journal, Words without Borders, and Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2010 anthology.
W. Martin
For more background information about Lovetown, please see www.portobellobooks.com
About the Author
MICHAł WITKOWSKI was born in 1975 in Wrocław and now lives in Warsaw. He has written a doctoral dissertation in Polish philology at the University of Wrocław, and published five books, two of which were nominated for Poland’s prestigious NIKE Literary Award. Lovetown – the first of those nominees – also won both the Literary Prize of the City of Gdynia and the Polish Booksellers Association Prize; it has been translated into over a dozen languages.
W. MARTIN has published translations of work by Natasza Goerke, Marcin Świetlicki, Erich Kästner and Günter Grass. He edited the ‘New Polish Writing’ issue of the Chicago Review and co-edited its ‘New Writing in German’ issue. He is the recipient of a 2008 NEA Fellowship in Translation, and currently works for the Polish Cultural Institute in New York.
Copyright
First published by Portobello Books 2010
This ebook edition published by Portobello Books 2011
Portobello Books
12 Addison Avenue
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Copyright © Michał Witkowski 2009
English translation copyright © W. Martin 2010
Published by permission of Wydawnictwo W.A.B., 2010.
Originally published in Polish by Wydawnictwo W.A.B. as Lubiewo in 2009.
The rights of Michał Witkowski to be identified as the author of this Work and of W. Martin to be identified as the translator of this Work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
The publication of this work was supported by a grant from the Arts Council.
This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg.
The publication of this book has been subsidized by the Book Institute – the © POLAND Translation programme
A CIP catalogue record is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84627 363 6
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