In the critical introduction to his presentation of Tytus Czyżewski's work, Charles S. Kraszewski states that his translations are “unencumbered by the exigencies of scholarship” (p. 43), and on this he and I agree. In this lengthy preamble, Kraszewski makes questionable claims about Czyżewski's politics, Czyżewski's connection to the literary/dramatic canon, literary theory broadly, and translation theory in particular. The translations themselves are stiff, often utilizing unusual English words that, while they may approximate the original Polish, do not function well in the target language. Likewise, the translations of the dramatic texts would not function well onstage, though they might be serviceable for scholars without Polish who wish to get a sense of Czyżewski's plays.Near the beginning of the introduction, Kraszewski asserts that Czyżewski's texts are “basically apolitical” (p. 9). Breezing past the fact that all art is political and reading Kraszewski's comment as generously as possible, I can only assume that he means Czyżewski's texts were not directly commenting on the politics of the day. However, two of contemporaneous Polish political preoccupations are frequently implicitly or explicitly invoked in Czyżewski's writings: the role of Jewish Poles in society and misogynistic concerns about women. For example, in the poem “Dozing in the Café,” what for Kraszewski is a modernist stream of consciousness includes the lines, “The mumbling of four profiteers / On sugar shipments it appears” (p. 150). “Profiteers,” especially those attached to the underworld as the original, “paskarzy,” indicates, is a dog whistle for an antisemitic portrayal of Jewish Poles. At the time of the poem's writing, moreover, Jewish Poles were heavily associated with the nation's beet sugar industry, much to the chagrin of right-wing nationalists—in whose press organs, like Prosto z Mostu, Czyżewski sometimes published. This poem ends with an image of a “drained Poland” (p. 151), which fits the nationalist concerns of a weakened Poland, “drained” by those, such as Polish Jews, who did not fit the right-wing nationalist views of strong Polish stock. Additionally, in The Death of the Faun, a play from 1907, the titular character is a human-looking creature with horns on its head, a fondness for vice, and an out-of-control sex drive that looks to rape a chaste Catholic girl. This description is evocative of right-wing nationalist commentaries concerning the sexual danger of Jewish Poles, but the comparison becomes even more clear when the “Lord of the Manor” calls the Faun “a guest from foreign parts,” which was the polite term for Jewish Poles at the time. The fact that this play ends with the Catholic Poles killing the Faun and leaving him to rot in the forest, in this context, creates, at best, an uneasy political resonance that Kraszewski does not address.Similarly, Kraszewski ignores Czyżewski's generally misogynist portrayals of women that are often infused with a concern about urbanization, sexuality, and about who belongs in the public sphere. For instance, consider these lines: “One girl sits at a cinema register/ Another rolls cigars throughout the day/ A third's out hawking the Evening Courier/ A fourth one walks the streets to earn her pay” (p. 37). In this poem, Czyżewski's verse conflates employed women with prostitutes. Again, these preoccupations align Czyżewski with those in the nationalist right-wing who feared women's new professional roles in urban settings. Thus, while Czyżewski's writings may not directly address politics, many of his themes certainly suggest a sympathy to his day's right-wing politics. Additionally, Kraszewski elides Czyżewski's explicit references to politics by ignoring the fascism of Bolesław Piasecki, one of Czyżewski's muses, and by excluding Czyżewski's 1936 poem “Zaragoza, Zaragoza” from the volume.While he may obscure the political valences of Czyżewski's texts, Kraszewski attempts desperately to connect Czyżewski to the larger literary and dramatic canons. Reading through the introduction is like walking through a rain of canonical artists—Wyspiański, Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Schulz, Gombrowicz, Kantor, and more from Poland as well as European artists as diverse as Apollinaire, Hardy, and Auden. In his enthusiasm to demonstrate Czyżewski's relevance, Kraszewski frequently utilizes phrases such as “Czyżewski's influence on Kantor is unquestionable” (p. 40). Alas, that influence is questionable, and Kraszewski does not make a compelling case. It seems clear that Kantor must have known Czyżewski given their connections at university and via the first Cricot theatre, but when Kraszewski wants to declare that Czyżewski is “the source of Kantor's fascination with mannequins” (p. 42), it seems much simpler to believe Kantor, himself, when he discusses Schulz as the inspiration for Dead Class's setting and performing objects. In fact, while Kantor explicitly references Witkiewicz, Schulz, and Gombrowicz in pieces like Dead Class, and in his writings about Dead Class, I am unaware of Kantor dedicating much verbiage to Czyżewski. Likewise, the more clear connection between the Cricot and Cricot 2 theatres is Maria Jarema whom Kraszewski barely mentions. In the quintessential collection of materials about Kantor's work, A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944–1990 (1993), edited and translated by Michal Kobialka, Czyżewski is a mere footnote in the section discussing Kantor's staging of Wyspiański's The Return of Odysseus. Thus, Kraszewski fails to martial evidence compelling enough to counter Kobialka's treatment.Additionally, Kraszewski contradicts himself about whether Czyżewski is a Futurist, although this tact would be the most straightforward way to connect Czyżewski to the European canon. In one instance, Kraszewski disapprovingly notes that “literary historians, in their mania to classify, associate [Czyżewski] with Futurism” (p. 33). Later, Kraszewski seemingly contradicts himself, writing of Czyżewski's poem “Vision II” that “here, futurism is very interestingly paired with the ‘primitivism’ of sound-poetry” (p. 33). Thus, after distancing Czyżewski from Futurism, Kraszewski explicitly connects him to it. I am unclear why Kraszewski hesitates to connect Czyżewski firmly to the Futurist tradition, unless it is part of Kraszewski's desire to not engage with the underlying right-wing politics of Czyżewski's writing. Perhaps Kraszewski hesitates to designate Czyżewski a Futurist because of the writer's fascination with “primitivism”? If so, that should not be a problem given the connections between Surrealists (like Czyżewski's hero Apollinaire), their admiration for primitivism, and Futurism's links to Surrealism. Instead, however, Kraszewski seems uncomfortable labeling Czyżewski a Futurist or Surrealist, although he notes connections to each, and, instead, Kraszewski unsuccessfully attempts to shoehorn Czyżewski into the avant-garde Polish tradition embodied by Kantor.Indeed, Kraszewski has a strangely temporal definition of “avant-garde,” suggesting, “for most historians of art, the term is particularly appropriate when applied to the artists and ideas emanating from Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century” (p. 39). This ignores the origins of the term in the Swiss journal L'Avant-Garde (1878) and scholarly works such as Christopher Innes's foundational text, Avant-Garde Theatre, 1892–1992 (1993). In it, Innes suggests that what connects the avant garde is not stylistic similarities, though they certainly exist, but, instead, an ideological through line in which artists position themselves as opposed to the modern and, instead, search for first principles. In that sense, Kantor is avant garde in his creation of an autonomous theatre based in ritual. Czyżewski's tendency to value the new and the mechanical, while at the same time venerating the “primitive,” again seems to align him more with a right-wing Futurist ideology.The final aspect of Kraszewski's introduction to note is its lack of connection to translation theory in general, and dramatic literature translation theory, in specific. Kraszewski mentions the dynamic translation theory of Eugene Nida, a Biblical translator from the mid-twentieth century, but nothing more contemporary, such as Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation (2014) or, specific to translating dramatic text, Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film (2nd ed., 2013), edited by Katja Krebs. Kraszewski goes so far as to write that “the ‘demarcation’ between what is poetry, and what is a ‘dramatic work,’ is . . . arbitrary” (p. 43). This ignores the simplest delineation between a poem and a dramatic work: a script—while it may contain poetry—is meant to be performed onstage. To be sure, Kraszewski must understand that, but when he calls the differences between poetry and drama “arbitrary,” he demonstrates that he has not given thought to the particular issues facing a translator of scripts. For instance, in Daniel Smith's introduction to his co-translation of The Serpent Lady (La Donna Serpente) by Carlo Gozzi published in The Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation Review (vol. 5, no. 3), Smith argues convincingly that translating for the stage is akin to adaptation. This is because, in addition to finding words in the target language, the translator must be thinking about design, acting, and production elements from the beginning, rather than as an afterthought. In fact, the published script of The Serpent Lady features contributions by the design team and actors. Though not every translator will have the good fortune to be translating a play that is also being produced, that is the level of engagement necessary to successfully translate a script. Kraszewski's translations of Czyżewski's dramatic works read more as poems than plays. In that sense, they feel more like “literal translations,” even though Kraszewski is enamored of dynamic translation. The words may have been rendered to get across Czyżewski's meaning in the target language, but the script has not been rendered to get across the staging in the target theatrical tradition.Taking Kraszewski's translation of Czyżewski's The Death of a Faun from 1907, for example, shows a style of production that feels a century old. In one instance, a crowd of villagers stand onstage “not seeing” the Faun who also stands onstage. This convention is rarely used anymore, and thus feels dated. If Kraszewski wanted to create a translation of the play in the style of dynamic translation, ideally, he would have also thought through how to produce a text on the page that demonstrated its onstage dynamism. Instead, it feels like a poem—that is, words on a page that could be spoken, but that do not necessitate performance.In all, it seems that Kraszewski laid his cards on the table when he wrote that this book is “unencumbered by the exigencies of scholarship” (p. 43). The introduction's arguments are not convincing, and they do not properly situation Czyżewski's writing into its contemporaneous politics. Czyżewski's work may well be worth translating, but the case is not made here, nor are the dramatic texts ready for the stage. However, the translations are such that one can get a feel for Czyżewski's writings and make a judgment about them independently of the introduction; that may be the book's biggest strength.
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Apr 22, 2024
Agnieszka Piotrowska 
Open Access