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[ excerpt ]
Polish writing
original cover
Read more about
I Burn Paris here
Anatol Stern's Preface
also by the author:
The Mannequins' Ball
about the translators:
Soren A. Gauger, originally from Vancouver, Canada, lives in Krakow, Poland.
He is the author of the story collection Hymns to Millionaires, the translator of Wojciech Jagielski's Towers of Stone,
and co-translator of Jerzy Ficowski's Waiting for the Dog to Sleep.
Marcin Piekoszewski was born in 1973 in Kluczbork, Poland. He studied at the English Departments of Opole University
and Krakow's Jagiellonian University, graduating from the latter in American Literature. Having worked
as a teacher, translator, journalist, and bookseller, he currently lives in Berlin.
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i burn paris
by Bruno Jasienski
translated from the Polish
by Soren A. Gauger & Marcin Piekoszewski
artwork by Cristian Opris
I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland's most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization
by Henri Barbusse in 1928 in L'Humanité (for which Jasienski was deported for disseminating subversive literature).
It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris's water
supply. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, embittered Russian émigrés, French
communards and royalists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their
route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the one thread that binds all these
groups together. As Paris is brought to ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world, mixing strains of "The Internationale"
with a broadcast of popular music.
With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none
of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless
ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the
novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human and economic relationships have turned just about everyone
into a prostitute. Yet rather than cliché and simplistic propaganda, there is an immediacy to the writing, and the modern metropolis is starkly depicted as only
superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic at its core.
This English translation of I Burn Paris fills a major gap in the availability of works from the interwar Polish avant-garde,
an artistic phenomenon receiving growing attention with recent publications such as Caviar and Ashes.
Praise:
Jasienski's novel is, after all, primarily a fantastical one, combining the two most critical elements of social literature in those
restless times: Catastrophism and the belief in a miracle — in this case, the miracle of the Revolution. ... We are affected by this
visionary fantasy with the extreme, sometimes even brutal realism of its texture, its innovative literary form,
and the ambitious courage of its concept. Above all, however, the novel grips us with its eternal — forever old and forever
new — story of the human heart that dreams of a better tomorrow.
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— Anatol Stern
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This is a superb text of astonishing modernity, a veritable manifesto of the wretched of the earth
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— Marianne
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ISBN 978 80 86264 37 0
309 pp.
13.5 x 19 cm
hardcover
4 two-color etchings
fiction : novel
cover by Dan Mayer
pub. date: April 2012
available for pre-order
will ship in February
price includes airmail worldwide
or order from:
 
Amazon
Amazon UK
Amazon DE
Central Books
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