Telling the Truth: Translating Polish Reportage
'I’d like to suggest that translation is non-fiction. Just as a work of non-fiction must tell the truth about the people and events it is describing, a translation must tell the truth about the source text'.
Sean Gasper Bye, photo: Randl Bye I’m a full-time translator of Polish literature, and it has worked out that the majority of the work I translate is non-fiction, in particular, the genre of creative non-fiction or literary journalism that in Poland is called reportaż – in English, reportage (rhymes with ‘massage’). I didn’t plan it this way, but I do come by my love of reportage honestly. I’ve been a news junkie all my life and I grew up in a home where public radio was a constant, and politics and current affairs were the main topic of discussion and debate. I was always interested in international affairs and wanted to put my love of languages to use as a diplomat. So my studies before I became a literary translator were more focused on politics, international relations, even history.
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Ryszard Kapuściński, 1975, Warsaw, photo: Janusz Sobolewski / Forum
In my teens I started exploring my Polish heritage and seeking out Polish books. One of the authors I found was Ryszard Kapuściński – a journalist widely considered the father of Polish reportage. Kapuściński was for a time the only foreign correspondent of the Polish Press Service – meaning he covered literally everything, from the Ethiopian and Iranian revolutions, to independence struggles and civil wars in Latin America and Africa, to the collapse of the Soviet Union. I loved Kapuściński’s storytelling – his stripped-back, but very crafted style, which seemed to use many of the conventions of fiction writing to tell real stories. The result was a warm, personal style of journalism.
My effort to enter the diplomatic world never worked out, and as I searched for a new direction, I started exploring translation. My mentor, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, shared my love of non-fiction and helped me discover Kapuściński was not alone. Not only was there a whole world of Polish reportage, it was one of the most interesting and dynamic parts of the Polish literary scene. Reportage has been undergoing a boom in Poland in the last decade or so, with publishing houses, prizes, festivals and bookstores all specially devoted to reportage.
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Ryszard Kapuściński with a camera at a rally in Radom in 1981, photo: Aleksander Jałosiński / Forum
I discovered that warm, personal style was not limited to Kapuściński either – it’s one of the trademarks of the genre. It’s a technique known in Polish as mały realizm –- ‘little realism’ – that involves a tight focus on individuals and their lives, rather than an overarching thesis or analysis. It also involves a stripped-back prose style, letting the material speak for itself. The author is also rarely present in the narrative. These conventions arose under conditions of censorship under the communist regime in Poland – basically giving authors plausible deniability if the censors objected, by claiming not to write about overarching issues and leaving it to the reader to draw their own conclusions. The genre has not just outlasted communism, but thrived, because it’s simply a good way of telling stories.
That’s one of the reasons I love translating it so much. I want to share some of what I’ve learned from translating non-fiction, and some of the ways it’s made me think about translation itself. It may sound obvious, but the fundamental difference between fiction and non-fiction is that non-fiction is true – and the necessity to tell the truth affects a translator’s work as well.
The right voice
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Lidia Ostałowska, photo: Piotr Wójcik / AG
'Watercolours: A Story from Auschwitz' by Lidia Ostałowska, trans. Sean Bye, photo: Zubaan Books The first book I translated was Watercolours by Lidia Ostałowska (Zubaan Books, 2017). Ostałowska was a member of the generation after Kapuściński, and made her name in the period after the end of communism. She focused on marginalised communities, particularly working-class women and the Roma in Poland. Watercolours is the story of Dina Gottliebová-Babbitt, a Czech Jewish artist and Auschwitz survivor. The Nazi Germans recognised her artistic talents and forced her to work as a medical illustrator in the ‘laboratory’ of Dr Joseph Mengele, where he conducted horrific experiments on prisoners, particularly Roma. Some of the watercolour portraits Dina made of the prisoners miraculously survived the war, some of the very limited evidence of crimes committed against the Roma during the War. They also formed the subject of a decades-long legal dispute between Dina and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. In telling the story, Ostałowska shows us how memory of the Holocaust has evolved over time, and how stories of victims like the Roma have become better known.
Ostałowska’s writing is a great example of the very stripped-back style many Polish reportage writers use, with very short, plain sentences or even incomplete ones:
Text
Just before Christmas 1943, 20-year-old Dina Gottliebová stood in Birkenau facing a wooden back wall. She held paints and brushes. She was wondering what to paint.
Author
‘Watercolours’, p. 9
I spent a lot of time trying to define the narrative voice for this translation. I sensed a tension between Ostałowska’s style and Anglophone readers’ expectations of how non-fiction should sound. I thought this style, so common in Polish, would sound more marked in English. So I decided to modify it a little, sometimes stringing Ostałowska’s very brief sentences together or filling out incomplete ones. It’s a choice I don’t think I’d make now – I’m more confident in my translation abilities and more willing to challenge my readers.
Voice is not just narration, but also the individual characters who appear in the book. Reportage’s personal style means its subjects are frequently quoted, sometimes at length. Like characters in fiction, they speak using a range of registers, colloquialisms and constructions that may not translate very directly into English. When faced with this issue in fiction, I sometimes feel empowered to step away from the Polish if necessary, to make a choice that is consistent with character, atmosphere and the author’s intentions even if it’s somewhat further from the original. But in non-fiction, these are real people’s words, which were really spoken. I feel the translator is much more constrained here –- we do not have the right to put words in people’s mouths. The responsibility of truth-telling means we have to stick as close as we can to the original, while still finding a solution that works as literature.
Not knowing your audience
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Filip Springer, photo: Tomasz Adamowicz / Forum
'The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town' by Filip Springer, photo: Restless Books The second book I translated was also a work of reportage, History of a Disappearance by Filip Springer (Restless Books, 2017). Springer is younger than Ostałowska – part of the third generation of reportage writers since Kapuściński. He made his mark as a photographer and architecture writer, and now focuses on ecological themes as well.
History of a Disappearance is the story of a small copper-mining town in Silesia, formerly known as Kupferberg, then known as Miedzianka, and now not known as anything at all – it effectively no longer exists. Part of the Recovered Terriories transferred from Germany to Poland after World War II, the town’s German population was expelled and replaced with Polish refugees, themselves displaced from territories further East. After the war, copper mining gave way to uranium mining, to supply the Soviet nuclear program. Aggressive extraction hollowed out the ground under the town, which began to cave in. The town had to be abandoned, and only a few houses now remain.
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The ground caves in for the first time under the building housing Preus’s smithy and Reimann the merchant’s. It leaves a crater so large a wagon could fit inside. A crack in the walls has also opened along a row of houses – from Flabe the baker’s to Friebe the hairdresser’s – caused by the collapse of a mining drift.
Author
'History of a Disappearance’, p. 11
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A photograph from 'A Bathtub With a Colonnade: A Book of Reportage on Polish Space' by Filip Springer, photo: Filip Springer / Czarne Publishing House
As much as I enjoyed reading Springer’s book, I was very surprised to find an Anglophone publisher for it. I thought the subject matter was so niche it wouldn’t interest anyone outside Poland. When I did get to translate it, I continued thinking of it as having a limited audience –- probably of specialists, people already interested in Central and Eastern Europe, probably somewhat familiar with the language’s culture and history. What happened then was that the book was published… and my entire extended family read it, none of whom could be called area specialists. It made me question some translation choices I’d made, wondering if I should have made different assumptions.
My lesson this time was that I don’t know a book’s audience as well as I might think. It’s impossible to predict who will read a book and what they’ll make of it –- and part of the magic of translation is readers relating to a book in a completely new way. The truth-telling here, I feel, is self-directed: the only reader I can honestly translate for is myself. That means learning what I’m good and bad at, recognising my limitations, and examining my judgment. Translation is often about being presented with a range of equally good options and having to make a judgment call about which one to choose. Cultivating good judgment is, to me, one of the most important things a translator can do.
Doing your due diligence
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Małgorzata Szejnert, photo: Tomasz Adamowicz / AG
'Ellis Island' by Małgorata Szejnert, photo: Scribe US; Illustrated edition The last book I want to talk about is one of my most recent: Ellis Island by Małgorzata Szejnert (Scribe, 2020). Szejnert is a contemporary of Kapuściński’s. She was a co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s first daily newspaper after the end of communism, and headed up the reportage department there for 15 years. She served as a mentor to a whole generation of Polish journalists. She then retired from the newspaper to focus on writing books. Ellis Island, her first book to be translated into English, is a history of the famous American immigration station told through the eyes of those who worked there and made it what it was.
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Luggage handler Peter Mac in his round work cap, white shirt, and pants with suspenders (the job is so good Peter has started to show a paunch) conducts the movements of possessions transported from every corner of the globe. [...] [H]e’s used to every nation roping up its bundles differently - and knows which loops and knots were tied in his beloved Ireland [...], which in Sweden, which in Italy, and which in Switzerland.
Author
‘Ellis Island’, pp. 26 - 27
Szejnert did an enormous amount of research in the Ellis Island archive, drawing on memoirs, journals, correspondence and oral histories –- some of it published and some of it not. For the English translation, this posed a huge challenge –- much of the source material was originally in English, and I had to track it all down so these people could speak for themselves on the pages of the book. I luckily received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts which helped cover the time this took. I spent about two months in the library, and made two trips to the Island, where I got to meet some of the historians Szejnert herself had worked with while writing the book.
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Arriving at Ellis Island Abstract/medium: 1 negative : glass ; 5 x 7 in. or smaller, 1915, photo: Bain News Service, publisher/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C
The issue was not limited to quotations – I needed to understand the terminology used at Ellis and how immigration was discussed at the time to be able to make the right translation choices. These sorts of issues arise in most books – indeed, I’ve developed the habit of fact-checking books as I go. That’s not because I don’t trust my authors – it’s because a translator’s most fundamental job is to understand what is happening on the page, and fact-checking enables me to be sure that I’ve understood correctly. This need is even more pressing with non-fiction, with its obligation to truth-telling.
This research – or as I call it, due diligence – is neither incidental nor optional. It’s a major part of the work I do as a translator, part of the long list of things translators do other than take a word in one language and put it into another.
Closing thoughts
Many of the issues I’ve mentioned here apply to all translations, but I hope I’ve shown the ways they’re particularly relevant for translating non-fiction –- particularly how the responsibility of truth-telling raises the stakes for a translator. But I’d like to take this one step further, and close with a half-formed thought. I’d like to suggest that translation is non-fiction. Just as a work of non-fiction must tell the truth about the people and events it is describing, a translation must tell the truth about the source text.
In this sense, translation is a documentary discipline – like journalism or photography, which records, in a new medium, the existence of a real thing. I hope this way of thinking exposes some of the stinginess of the cliche ‘lost in translation’. Photography and journalism do not obscure their subjects – they make things visible for an audience that couldn’t see them with their own eyes. I believe translation does just the same.
