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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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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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Zygmunt HauptA Ring Out of Paper
Zygmunt Haupt's stories have a special place in Polish literature, and at the same time they elude all attempts at their classification. They are relatively short, the longest being only twenty pages, the bulk of it comprising observations and impressions. Haupt describes landscapes, towns, and moods, melancholy glimpses onto worlds that no longer exists (Podolia before World War I, Galician cemeteries, life in the sleepy bourgeois homes of Lvov and Tarnopol of the 1920s), personalities, journeys, young love. But the point of these stories is not to effect a restoration of Poland's old boundaries, Jewish life, or pre-Socialist forms of society - i.e., all that history and brute force have taken, destroyed, or rendered inaccessible; but rather, to conduct a kind of Proustian "remembrance of things past"; to attempt to convey to language and its record segments of time and place, fragments of existence - without the pretence of objectivity. Haupt's style is lush; he is an experienced practitioner of language, an artist who documents the processes of recollection and the search for relations between things and words. There is a certain similarity between Haupt's relations to the past and to memories, and Proust's method - although his language has an entirely different character. Repetitions and enumerations, which would seem to throw the plot off-track, are typical; lyrical intensity and the regulation of nuance are figured alongside intentional awkwardnesses that enact the development of consciousness through naming. Such "fractures" are on par with the rendered and interwoven fragments of individual expressions that typify characters' ethnic affiliations, and provide these stories with a dynamic that compensates for their scarcity of action.
Zygmunt Haupt is an important writer who should be considered in the European context, too. He is distinguished not only by his exceptional power of articulation and artistic descriptions; his stories are also expressions of the essential and characteristic Modernist discourse on creative process, and on the connections between language and reality.
A Ring Out of Paper
The Wake
By morning, before I had even been awakened and managed to dress, it was almost over. The black coffin had even been taken out of the house, onto the bench in front of the black firs that screened the house from the road. In front of the coffin stood the Orthodox priest, with a great black cape thrown over his surplice with its fur collar. He was reading from a gold-edged prayer book and reaching with his aspergillum into a copper vessel held by the deacon. The front steps, the yard, the gate and the road were dark with a crowd of peasant men in sheepskin coats and women with scarves wrapped around their heads. In the very gateway stood an old gaffer gripping with both hands the high wooden staff of a banner, black and embroidered, bordered with a silver fringe. On the black background was sewn a symbol of a skull and crossbones, like the ones I knew from pirate books, where it was called the "Jolly Roger." In books, it evoked thoughts of adventures and exploits. Here, the banner that had been taken out of a corner of the sacristy at the Orthodox church fluttered in the wind when the coffin was carried to the cemetery.
The cemetery consisted of little more than a fence and hunchbacked peasant graves under the snow. A crowd of villagers was also waiting there. Small boys trying to get a better view fought over spots at the top of the little hillocks, and kept sliding off. Black soil, shoveled out by the grave digger, mixed with the snow. The Orthodox priest drawled: "Hospo-o-o-ody pomy-y-y-yluj..." and the crows took flight from the acacia trees near the church. The sky was white as milk and darkened as it declined towards the horizon over the snow-covered thatched roofs of the peasant cottages.
Then we walked back along the road and felt a sort of relief after the winter's day.
At home, it was vodka that was served first of all, on trays. Someone had uncorked the silver-topped bottle ahead of time and poured out vodka into the shot glasses. There were so many of them that they were of different sizes, and some vodka had been spilled. There was also a dish set out with sausage and forks. If you wanted to, you could take some sausage on a fork.
"Why is January such a particular month?" the fat wife of the postmaster asked Mr. Faldzinski, a geometry teacher from Taurow. Mister Faldzinski had a beard and tiny, watery black eyes. He was using a matchstick to dig bits of meat from between his rotten teeth. Looking devilishly at the postmaster's wife's bust, he said, "Because January is the wolves' mating season. Ha!"
There was a hubbub of people crowded together, and the coal stoves were overheated, but after the grim event it felt cozy and merry. Still a kid, I kept weaving among the loud guests, avoiding my father's eye.
Translated by William Brand
Zygmunt HAUPT (1907 - 1975) - prose writer, journalist, painter; in the USA after 1946; original stories and sketches in a colloquial idiom, thematically connected with his native Podolia.
Polish edition by Wydawnictwo Czarne
Zygmunt Haupt Pierscien z papieru
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There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
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