| About the book
Since the envoys had brought news of the arrival of the Emperor, Bolesław’s kingdom had been overwhelmed by an all-encompassing state of commotion. Aside from the settlers living deep within the deepest forests, there was probably no one who did not, in some way or other, (...)
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| | About the book
8
The phones are always going wrong, so my parents aren’t upset when there’s no dialling tone. They’re at the fortieth birthday party of a female friend from their class at high school. They say they’re going downstairs to the phone booth for a (...)
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Gustaw Herling-GrudzinskiThe Altar Wings
I have now translated three books by Herling-Grudzinski and have hoped to translate a fourth one, this time his narrative debut. This, his first book, dates from the early 1960s, and already it has all those things that we admire about his prose and that constitute his completely distinctive style. His subjects, too, are distinctive: from history, primarily Italian history, he borrows old tales, and from these tales takes specific characters - their lives, their sorrows, their loneliness. All those things that characterize people of any time, including our own. It is the drama of loneliness in particular that Herling attends to in the first three stories (Tower, Pieta dell' Isola, and The Second Coming). But for me what is equally important and captivating about this work is the descriptions of landscapes, descriptions that betray the author's passion for painting, especially that of the middle ages.
Pieta dell` Isola.
A true storm of fireworks broke on the last night of the festa. Flying from different directions, like chaotic anti-aircraft fire, the fireworks all went off at once at the same altitude, sketching a succession of new designs against the vault of heaven: now a flower, now a shower of glowing ashes, now an unfurling braid, necklaces and rings, fountains. Not a bit of the firmament was blank, and the bay shook with the cannonade. Madness swept the city - one burst of firing had barely ended when the next began. The sea sparkled like a mirror reflecting an endless number of chandeliers. All the stars had been swept out of sight and the moon peeking through the cracks of the luminescent barrage seemed no more impressive than a poor paper lamp. Streams of artificial fire poured over the Castell dell' Ovo. The old Norman and Anjou fortress burst instantly into flames, and then a black banner of smoke rose from it. People on the Island may have thought at that moment not only of the war that had ended, but also of the mourning signals from the plague year.
The Island was a few days away from the nineteenth of September and from its own holiday of the Pieta dell' Isola, which fell on a Thursday that year. At the foot of the Monte del Faro after dusk on Wednesday, without letting his three companions from Certosa know anything about it, Fra Giacomo got on board the motorboat that made the monthly supply run from the mainland to the crew of the lighthouse. Fra Giacomo had no regrets about this step, which no one except him - not those on the Island, or on Benevemento, or at the monastery near Altamura - would have been able to understand. However, he did feel some remorse over the Island itself, which sank quickly into the pure gray of the sky. And over the one person who had become his friend on the Island, although he had not known how to repay that friendship with even a single miserable word. If the young monk had known what his escape would mean to the young vagrant being sheltered at Certosa!
Translated by William Brand
Gustaw HERLING-GRUDZINSKI (b.1919) - one of the outstanding Polish writers of the twentieth century. His subjects are his own writing as well as the human opposition to various forms of nothingness (totalitarianism, religious doubt, the feeling of existential solitude, and the instrumentalization of life). During the war, he was arrested and confined in the Gulag in the Arctic, before leaving Russia in General Anders' army and fighting at Monte Cassino. He was a co-founder in 1947 and one of the original editors of Kultura. He has lived in Italy since 1952.
Polish edition by Spoldzielnia Wydawnicza CZYTELNIK
German edition (selection) by Carl Hanser Verlag: München 1996; transl. by Nina Kozlowski
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