Studies in Heresy: On the Intimate Translations and Translated Intimacies of Bruno Schulz

IT’S HARD TO read the short stories of Polish writer Bruno Schulz without feeling that you’ve stumbled across something that isn’t supposed to exist, like being led to some previously unknown wing of the house where you’ve lived your entire life. Like his fellow borderlanders Robert Walser and Isaac Babel (Schulz, a Polish Jew, was born and lived in Drohobycz, currently in Western Ukraine), he seems to exist in a perpetual periphery, outside the mainstreams of acknowledged canons and established tastes.

At the same time, there is something so unique about Schulz’s writing that it begs us to figure out what makes it so special—to expand our own conceptual boundaries, if only so that we can understand his achievement as something more than just an anomaly. Part of this is a matter of resemblance. A Schulz story can sound like Kafka, like Proust, like Borges—all while not really sounding like any of them. His metamorphic sentences shuffle from myth to mundanity in a way that seems to prefigure the more programmatic fabulism of magic realism, only to swan-dive at the last minute into the kind of over-the-top farce that reminds me of Beckett, or maybe Buster Keaton. The combination of registers and effects feels impossible, heretical (to use one of Schulz’s favorite words)—and yet Schulz manages to anchor it all in a voice of such undeniable intimacy that it seems as if the stories are being whispered in your ear as you fall asleep.

Rendering the ineffable is not something translation is usually good at, but Schulz has been lucky in his English-language translators. He was particularly lucky with the astonishing versions of his stories that the Polish-born Celia Wieniewska made in the 1960s and ’70s, whose hothouse vocabulary and creaky, flea-market strangeness established the sound of Schulz in English with hypnotic authority. Though not exactly bestsellers, the Wieniewska translations proved influential and lasting, creating an author who felt both sui generis and eerily familiar to multiple generations of English-language readers. Nevertheless, subsequent scholars, both inside and outside Poland, have noted that her versions achieved their tone at least partially by playing down (or even cutting out entirely) certain idiosyncrasies of the original texts, leaving the door open for Madeline G. Levine’s more rigorously literal Collected Stories, published in 2018—a version that, perhaps predictably, was both praised for its accuracy and criticized for failing to capture the mesmeric voice Wieniewska had hit on, and which English readers had gotten used to associating with Schulz himself.

Poised as it is in the shadow of these two qualified successes, Nocturnal Apparitions, the collection of essential stories released in March by Pushkin Press, and translated by Stanley Bill, aims to “find a middle path,” as Bill puts it in his introduction, between Wieniewska’s “domesticating” impulses and the “foreignizing” bent of Levine. In this way, it rehashes a debate that has shadowed translation for centuries, and especially the translation of Eastern European authors, which as a profession seems to be perpetually trying to locate itself between Victorian popularizing and a literalism so rigorous it borders on sadism. This is the conflict underlying the disagreement between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson regarding the former’s ruthless translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, or behind the grumbling debate around the more mimetic (but no less popular for that) Russian-to-English translations produced by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.  As translator Daniel Weissbort pointed out, it is really a conflict that stretches, in Western culture at least, back to the tension between the incarnational view of language held by ancient Jewish and Greek authors, on the one hand, and the self-consciously belated, rhetorically minded view of the Romans, on the other.

Bill’s introduction suggests that he is at least familiar with the outlines of this debate, so it is a relief that, after implying the traditional incompatibility between fidelity and seduction in translation, he proposes to avoid his predecessors’ impasse mostly by ignoring it, or at least pretending it doesn’t exist. Still, despite (or perhaps because of) its pragmatic adherence to a middle way, it is impossible to read Nocturnal Apparitions without feeling the two impulses—the hospitalities of the domestic versus the more rigorous estrangements of the foreign, to use Bill’s own terms—circling one another, like a pair of big jungle cats in the same cage.

Here, for example, is a sentence from the story “The Book”: “Sometimes it slept, the wind fanning it quietly like a hundred-leafed rose, as it opened its leaves, petal by petal, eyelid after eyelid—all of them blind, velvety, and drowsy, concealing an azure pupil in their depths, a peacock’s core, a screaming nest of hummingbirds.” With its verve and metamorphic vertigo, this remarkable description stilt-walks over centuries of mannerism to stand beside Ezekiel’s four-in-one angel, whose “work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel” (as the King James version put it). At the same time, its strangeness feels as if it’s fighting to remain human-sized, like a magician trying to prevent himself from transforming into yet another fabulous creature.

The balance between these two poles—prophetic strangeness on the one hand, intimate daydream on the other—is difficult to sustain, and in certain phrases we can feel the language of Bill’s translation being pulled out of focus, into a middle ground that seems a kind of fluttery, art nouveau nothing, instead of the perfectly realized somethings the current running beneath it feels bent on pursuing. The repetition of “hundred-leafed rose, as it opened its leaves,” the slightly exotic “azure,” the vagueness of “peacock’s core,” which leaves us syntactically stranded between a tail feather’s eyespot and the bird’s actual heart: all of these touches pull the reader outwards, as if we are on the verge of being hurled off a merry-go-round. The overall tone is at least a few degrees more removed from its action than Wieniewska’s version, which we can see by comparison moves much more centrifugally, as if it were focusing our attention on some elusive, palpably beating core: “At other times, The Book lay still and the wind opened it softly like a huge cabbage rose; the petals, one by one, eyelid under eyelid, all blind, velvety, and dreamy, slowly disclosed a blue pupil, a colored peacock’s heart, or a chattering nest of hummingbirds.”

Reading these two sentences side by side, we get a sense of the enormous care and decision it must take to translate an author like Schulz—to translate any author, really, or at least any whose art is primarily a matter of atmosphere and mood. The tiniest change in word choice, or syntax, or punctuation can set off a depth charge, altering the meaning of the larger passage into something completely different. So, we can see how, by torquing the first clause towards the depiction of a single moment, as opposed to a repeated action (the English past simple tense is capable of implying both), Wieniewska emphasizes the specificity of the images, creating a single scene, instead of the flip-book montage Bill provides. Everything is clearly and specifically visualized, from the “huge cabbage rose” (much more tangible than a “hundred-leafed rose”), which feels like it was just plucked from a kitchen garden, to the happily singing hummingbirds. Even the sound of the sentence is more consciously considered and lyrical (for example, in the contrasting vowels of that “slowly disclosed […] blue pupil”), as if Wieniewska were doing her best to communicate, in addition to the specific adornments of Schulz’s Polish, a more general feeling of “beauty” that she found in his writing.

Her sentence is beautiful; one of the interesting things about it (and about Wieniewska’s translation in general) is the way that this rhetorical beauty threatens to overshadow the other effects of the prose, overloading it in a way that conveys, no doubt unintentionally, a certain whiff of kitsch—as if, in trying to snuggle Schulz’s language as closely as possible, she had been forced to scrub off a few of its more conflicted impulses. Here we see how the charge against overly familiarizing a translated author can have a point beyond simple editorial carelessness—that such “domesticating” can, in fact, enforce a specific reading of that author, limiting what we as readers cut off from the original text, can see.

Again, the comparison with Ezekiel’s angel is helpful. The biblical description is compelling because it is so specific, but it works because it leaves a huge amount of the imagined angel undescribed, engaging our imaginations and giving them plenty of room to maneuver into potential solutions, like a riddle. By contrast, Wieniewska’s translation of Schulz’s sentence incarnates the various images of The Book with indefatigable precision, offering a spectacle that puts us in a delighted but essentially passive position, like children watching a puppet show. The intimacy of this spectacle is compelling, even mesmerizing; but comparing it to Bill’s version (and Levine’s as well), we see that it actually misses an aspect of Schulz’s prose that is in fact quite impersonal. This is the sensation of size—of infinite repetition and enormous dimension—that the looser, significantly less torqued phrases of Bill emphasizes, as if what Schulz’s narrator was really glimpsing in The Book was a kind of pocket infinity, like the one imagined by Borges’s Aleph. There is beauty in this vision, but the image lying at the center of it is, essentially, terrifying—a Munchian “screaming nest of hummingbirds,” as opposed to the more Disneyfied “chattering nest” Wieniewska gives us. Interestingly enough, it also conveys a sense of intimacy—or at least of the kind of release in the face of enormity that Romantic poets used to feel when confronted by a thundering waterfall, and which Edmund Burke famously called the Sublime.

That intimacy can be a product of distance and estrangement is a paradox that anyone who has tried to make themselves understood in another language will probably understand. And this is another fascinating aspect of Bill’s translation: that it seems to actually take advantage of the general feeling of detachment and absence that translation creates in its reader. This shouldn’t work, of course; it especially shouldn’t work in literary fiction, which we have been told for decades depends for its success on the reader believing that she is hearing the author’s authentic, unmediated voice. Nevertheless, there is a weird way that Bill’s translation seems to create its intimacy precisely by acknowledging the separation between reader and original—as if, by admitting our necessary distance from the actual Polish words of Schulz’s stories, it was allowing us to feel a different kind of closeness to them: one that depended on our own imaginations to fill in the missing details as we unconsciously fill in the details of Ezekiel’s impossible but still miraculously present angel.

We can see the dangers of this estranging impulse when we turn from the cozy intimacy of Wieniewska to Bill’s other major forerunner in Schulziana, Madeline G. Levine, whose own remarkable translation in her Collected Stories follows the topography of Schulz’s text with a devotion that sometimes strands the reader in a space that feels not fruitful, but empty. Here, for example, is her description, from “A Visitation,” of the great figure of the father whose mania runs like a fuse through Schulz’s stories: “What remained of him was a small amount of corporeal casing and that handful of senseless eccentricities—they could disappear one day, as unnoticed as the gray pile of trash collecting in a corner that Adela carried out every day to the garbage bin.”

This prose has a familiar feeling to it—one that readers of translated literary fiction will likely recognize. It’s the feeling that Bill, in his introduction, identifies as “foreignizing” but which to my mind is more usefully identified as just a translator’s devotion to following the original scrupulously, whether or not those scruples match up seamlessly with the norms of the language the work is being translated into. Frequently, this rigor produces discoveries of tone and shading that prefigure the helpful precision of Bill’s own work; sometimes, though, it leads to a literalness that is strangely withering, as if Schulz’s rich, oxygenated prose had been teleported to the surface of the moon. In the above sentence, for example, Levine reproduces Schulz’s Polish syntax exactly (including that strange and, in English at least, unmotivated dash), creating a prose that feels, ironically, both thin and padded: distracted by a lexical static that seems to rise like a fog between us and the sentence’s subject—that is, the father himself.

Unlike the more poised distance of Bill’s translation, this separation feels weirdly unconsidered. Is it something that the narrator himself feels? The author? The translator? We are not sure, and this is critical, since it is exactly this question—of the troubled, changing, ultimately hopeless relationship between the sensitive narrator and his metamorphic father—that provides Schulz’s stories with so much of their energy and conflict. Levine’s translation reads this relationship as being clinical to the point of disgust, but when we turn back to Bill’s version, we see (as we did before during the comparison with Wieniewska) the way that the distance and remove of the narrative voice can be rendered in a language suffused with fellow feeling, and even a certain amount of tenderness: “All that was left of him was a bit of bodily shell and a handful of absurd eccentricities. They too would disappear one day, as unremarked as the grey pile of rubbish in the corner that Adela swept up every morning and took out to the rubbish heap.”

Though less superficially accurate than the Levine translation, Bill’s passage is clearer and richer, suggesting via its purposeful English rhythm a commonality of experience that mellows the bitterness of the father’s “absurd eccentricities.” The narrator sees and understands his father’s tragedy, but he also understands that the forces leading to this tragedy are at least partially beyond his control—that his “disappear[ing] one day” is, on some level, not his fault. On the contrary, it is a fate that the narrator himself will most likely share as he leaves the crow’s nest of adolescence and moves into his own life as an adult—a life haunted, as the sentence implies, by the memory of exactly the same figure Levine’s less nuanced sentence tosses unambiguously in the trash.

All of this might feel like putting too fine a point on minute changes (the difference between Levine’s abrupt “they could disappear” and Bill’s resigned, generous “They too would disappear”). But that’s what translation is, or at least a part of what it is: the recognizing, and acknowledgment, of extremely fine points. Any hack with a dictionary can give us a reasonably accurate rendition of what happens in a story, but it takes an extremely sensitive and creative reader, and writer, to render what an author doesn’t say—what his words leave implicit but nonetheless present in a story, like particles hovering in the air. At his best—and with the significant advantage of the middle ground afforded him by Wieniewska and Levine—Bill shows himself to be exactly this kind of translator, one alive to the nuances of Schulz’s writing but also bold enough to incarnate those nuances in ways that accept the responsibility, not for a diluted transmission, but for achieved creation.

His pragmatic compromise, though it may not solve the age-old debate between domestication and foreignization, does lay bare the advantages both sides can offer the translator. More to the point, perhaps, it presents the reader in English with a version of Bruno Schulz whose undeniably close voice is also, in a strange way, cosmic: whispered not just to us but to the stars, to the floorboards, to everything. This is the voice we hear in “Birds”—a story that could probably be translated by a whale and still retain some of its power, but which in Bill’s version stands revealed as one of the great works of 20th-century literature:

As I approached the town, I slowed my triumphal run, changing it into a respectable stroll. The moon still hung high above. The transformations of the sky—the metamorphoses of its many vaults into ever more masterful configurations—were endless. Like a silver astrolabe, the sky opened its internal mechanism on that magical night, revealing the gilded mathematics of its cogs and gears in infinite evolutions.

This translation is not perfect English—but one of the startling things that Bill demonstrates here, as so often in Nocturnal Apparitions, is that it doesn’t have to be. A translation doesn’t have to sound like it is not a translation; on the contrary, like Schulz’s narrator himself, it can use the distance between itself and the objects it is considering as a kind of lens, focusing and intensifying the unconsummated, but ultimately enriching, relationship between the reader and what she is reading in a way that mirrors the writer’s own relationship to the world, or to literature, or to whatever lies beyond words.

Such translation suggests that, although what we are reading is only a book, we are still getting glimpses of the Book: the truth unfolding beyond us, in all its many-petaled glory. Will we ever see it directly? On this question, translators, like writers themselves, are wise to keep quiet—although as readers, I think it’s worth wondering whether, given the opportunity, we would really want to. After all, if we had the truth, why would we read anything else? Or, to pose the riddle in a key that incarnates both the comforts and the disturbances of the beautifully unclassifiable Bruno Schulz: why would we settle for the original when we could wander all night through the endless transformations of its translation?

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Josh Billings is a writer, translator, and nurse who lives in Farmington, Maine. He can be contacted at [email protected].