Since there’s no real literary news today I wanted to share a bit from a book proposal I’m putting together for my translation of Mirosław Nahacz’s 2003 novel Eight Four. The numbers in the title correspond to the year the author was born, and Nahacz is keen to offer, between shroom picking, partying, and petty arguments, his evaluation of everything that went wrong with his generation. It’s a vast generalization crammed into a hundred-page novel and set in a remote village on the border between Poland and Slovakia.
But the author’s voice and the voice of the narrator draw you in. Stylistically you can compare the book to early J. D. Salinger or early Bret Easton Ellis, but without all the affected pretense. I even detect a hint of Jack Kerouac. Nahacz was eighteen years old when he wrote the thing. He would die just four years later. In that short expanse he wrote three other works: Bombel, Stork and Lola, and the monstrously labyrinthine Pynchonesque The Extraordinary Adventures of Robert Robur that was published posthumously.
Below is my translation of a story told by writer and publisher Andrzej Stasiuk, who was a nearby family friend. And if you’re a publisher who might be interested in such a book in my translation, give me a jingle.
Eighteen-year-old Mirek Nahacz arrived from a neighboring village. I thought he had dropped by like usual to borrow some book and to chat a bit about this and that, as had already happened so many times before. This time however he didn’t want any book, he wasn’t particularly talkative, and he generally looked like he had come in order to immediately head out. And that was exactly what he did. But as he was leaving he laid something on the table with such an expression as if he was returning money he didn’t want to give back at all. He left and I thought, “Oh God, let it not be poetry.” If it has to be something then let it be prose, though also reluctantly, since I no longer have the energy to read. But I still have to every day because the mail arrives regularly and unfailingly, which means about five or six manuscripts a week. That amounts to hundreds a year, and from that we’ve only published two in all these years.
So yeah, since it’s already something, it’d best be prose, and short to boot.
But if you remember someone running around in shorts and knew his father, brother, mom, then the situation gets awkward and a person begins to form in their head some cunning, convoluted psychological rejection, along the lines of “it’s too early, but everything indicates that when that time comes,” and so on…
On the other hand, a person is also curious about what the boy from the neighboring village who is remembered running around in shorts was able to think up, so he sits down at once to read. After just two hours he calls the author to express his appreciation, and the next day to propose publishing what the author had left for him on the table. After a couple of days the author brings one more thing and puts it in the same place.
A certain separate type of prose exists. Its uniqueness consists more or less in the fact that while reading it one has the impression that it wasn’t written but that somebody had dictated it to someone. Simply reading, a voice is heard. To be sure, it doesn’t belong to any concrete person, but its timbre is most vivid and practically corporeal. Such is the case of Mirosław Nahacz. Reality aspired to make a statement and to this end chose Nahacz, and he agreed to listen and to write it down. So, Esteemed People, Mirosław Nahacz is the one. In this I have absolute certainty. You just hear it. Such a thing cannot be taught because there’s no one from whom one might learn it. Most simply, one possesses it or rather is possessed by it.
I must confess that I write all this not entirely willingly and not entirely eagerly. It’s difficult for me to hold a grudge against Nahacz, but I feel that reality has let me down. After all, in its unlimited goodness, it could’ve chosen me.
—Andrzej Stasiuk, acclaimed contemporary Polish writer whose awards include the Nike Award (2005), the Gdynia Literary Prize (2010), and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2016) and founder of Wydawnictwo Czarne [Czarne Publishing House]