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[ excerpt ]
Polish writing
Read more about
I Burn Paris here
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
Published in 1929, this novel got Jasienski deported from France. 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 a deadly virus.
With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, American millionaires and a
host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape while Russian
soldiers patrol the streets. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the
one thread that binds all these groups together. Paris is brought to ruin, all attempts at escape are thwarted, and
Jasienski, a committed communist later murdered by Stalin, issues a rallying cry to the workers of the world montaged with a broadcast of popular music.
Regardless of any ideological component, the novel
is an exquisite example of Futurism in literature and retains an extraordinary strength and vitality. Jasienski's
attraction to the grotesque and catastrophic (he was a leading figure in Poland's short-lived Catastrophist movement)
is evident in the filthy degenerated world he presents, a world where factories and machines have replaced the human. But far
from cliché and simplistic propaganda, Jasienski gives these elements an immediacy that lets us see the city as
essentially hostile and animalistic.
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 strikes 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
14 x 20 cm
softcover with flaps
fiction: novel
cover by Dan Mayer
publication date: 2011
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