Crowning this year’s celebrations of the 120th anniversary of Bruno Schulz’s birth and the 70th year since his death, the University of Chicago presents a series of discussions, film screenings and a presentation of the long-awaited new translation of Schulz’s prose in English, from award-winning translator Madeline G. Levine
The After Schulz events explore the legacy of Polish-Jewish modernist writer and graphic artist Bruno Schulz, placing an emphasis on the art and meaning of translation in a three-day meeting of writers, translators, editors and historians from Poland, Germany and the U.S. This year marks the second edition of a festival of Polish literature organised by the UIC, following last year’s celebrations of Czesław Miłosz’s 100th birthday.
Born in 1892 in the town of Drohobycz in the Galicia region, Bruno Schulz lived and studied in the Austrian Empire of Franz Jozef, and produced his art in newly independent Poland between the wars. He was murdered in 1942 in Drohobycz by a German officer during the occupation. The small, stunning body of work that he brought to the world in that short time receives increasingly full recognition as one of the most powerful statements of modern European literature, philosophy and aesthetic theory produced in his generation.
The Polish organiser of the event, Grzegorz Jankowicz, remarks that although Schulz is known to virtually all Polish readers, the immense number of critical texts, paraphrases and commentaries on his slim oeuvre can overwhelm the author’s proper voice. Jankowicz also emphasises that Schulz is an author still awaiting his discovery by foreign readers.
Schulz’s work is structured with an incredibly refined, poeticised language, and translation poses a huge challenge. His translator Madeline G. Levine, one of the festival's guests, admitted that it hovers in the "higher registers of impossibility", with the biggest problem being the complex psychology behind Schulz’s work. The newly published translation from Levine now joins Celina Wieniewska's English-language versions of Street of Crocodiles (1963) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hour-Glass (1978).
Bruno Schulz’s vision and literature emerge from the specific confluence of Jewish, Polish and German literary and cultural influences in the Galicia region in what was southeast Poland and is now part of Ukraine. As an assimilated Jewish artist in Central Europe after the First World War, Schulz brought these influences to bear in creating seminal works of modernist literature in the Polish language. The After Schulz organisers have brought together scholars and speakers to delve into the author’s historic and geographical background and explore the complex network of Schulz’s influences. The festival focuses on the intersection of cultures and languages in Galicia, and on translation extending the reach of culture and identity.
Participants include Michael Hofmann, poet and leading translator of German-language literature into English, including the works of Franz Kafka and Joseph Roth, Schulz’s Central European contemporaries, the historians Tarik Amar, on Ukrainian-Polish-Jewish-German relations in the period leading up to the Second World War, and Michael Steinlauf, specialist in Polish-Jewish history and relations, and Karolina Szymaniak, the foremost scholar of interwar Yiddish culture.
In a panel entitled The Legacy of Multiculturalism in Poland Today: Jewish Cultural Journals and Their Readership, Karolina Szymaniak and Polish-Jewish writer Piotr Paziński, both editors of Jewish cultural journals in Poland (Cwiszn and Midrasz), discuss the legacy of Poland’s multicultural heritage as expressed in the Jewish cultural revival in Poland.
Two films based on Schulz’s prose are screened at the Chopin Theatre: Wojciech Jerzy Has’ 1973 production of The Hour-Glass Sanatorium, and the 1986 film from the Quay Brothers, Street of Crocodiles.
Kraków artist Ania Kaszuba-Dębska opens an interactive installation entitled The Stiletto Project, emphasising the role of women influential in Schulz’s life.
The highlight of the final day is readings by Marek Bieńczyk (recipient of the prestigious Nike award this autumn), Magdalena Tulli and Jacek Dehnel. A conversation with the authors and the English-language translators of their work, Bill Johnston and Benjamin Paloff, explores the vitality of Polish literature today, as well as the centrality of translation to the development of cultures and of individual, hybrid identities.
The festival is crowned with an evening of food and dance to music from the Galicia region, on Wednesday the 12th of December, 2012, at 8:00 pm.
All events are free and open to the public.
For programme details, see: afterschulz.org
The festival is organised by Dept. of Slavic & Baltic Languages & Literatures from the University of Illinois at Chicago, The Polish Book Institute - Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation and the Chopin Theatre. The event benefits from the support of Chicago YIVO Society and the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland.
Editor: SRS
Source: afterschulz.org, press release