A Book I Wish More People Knew About Vol. 7

K.E. Semmel compares a work of queer Polish fiction to James Joyce

Aug 09, 2023

The series “A Book I Wish More People Knew About” is premised on drawing attention to titles that don’t land on publishing’s traditional publicity circuit, an outsider position shared by many (but not all) books in translation. So I was pleased that Rochester-based writer K.E. Semmel, who knows the world of translation so well, was willing to take the microphone this week. He recommends Józef Czechowicz’s The Story of the Paper Crown—a work of queer fiction written in Polish a century ago, now available to English-language readers for the first time thanks to a new translation by Frank Garrett.

A Book I Wish More People Knew About: K.E. Semmel on The Story of the Paper Crown by Józef Czechowicz

One of the purest joys of being a translator is unearthing a long-lost, forgotten, or never-before-translated text by a writer you admire. It’s an uncommon thrill to then transform it, by alchemical means, into a new object in a new language and offer it up to new readers. This is the enviable situation translator Frank Garrett found himself in as he dug into Polish poet Józef Czechowicz’s novella The Story of the Paper Crown, published this year by the Seattle-based indie press Sublunary Editions, which in 2020 also published his translation of Bruno Schulz’s Undula.

Garrett, a philosopher and seasoned translator of numerous writers from Polish, French, Spanish, and German, is very definitely in his element. As the book’s back cover makes clear, Czechowicz (1903-39) was “one of the premier Polish avant-garde poets” of the twentieth century. He was also openly gay, a reference point that is hugely significant in this novella. With his background in Polish philology, Garrett is well positioned to uncover much of what makes this book a unique piece of literature, one that calls to my mind the youthful exuberance of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

In his excellent translator’s note at the end of the book, Garrett explains how The Story of the Paper Crown first appeared in 1923 when Czechowicz was only twenty, in the inaugural issue of a literary journal called Reflektor. Like Portrait, The Story of the Paper Crown is weighted heavily with literary allusions, mythology, and Christian symbology.

At its core, it’s about a young man named Henryk who struggles mightily with his identity, one intricately wrapped up in his sexual yearnings. Early on, he gets a visitor to his room, a boy:

He sat down next to Henryk. Silence. Henryk’s hands seek out his delicate hands. As they sit next to each other in this way a powerful current courses through their joined hands, which are the most perfect instruments of pleasure. A wildness flares up in the eyes of Henryk, who sees in the other boy's pupils the outline of his own face burning with fever.
And suddenly a blaze flared up in their trembling hands!
An impassioned whisper is heard: "I want you...I want you..."

This boy, we soon learn, is called Diadumenos. He’s young and beautiful in Henryk’s eyes, but with a name like that it’s hard not to read him as allegorical. To Henryk, he is the embodiment of male love. Importantly, Henryk sees in the boy’s eyes the fever that will consume him for much of the rest of the narrative. What’s interesting to me is Czechowicz’s use of fever or illness as a way to illustrate the internal battle that rages within Henryk: a confused struggle to live freely and openly in his desires. He’s expected to find a woman to love, such as Marysia, “the maidenly heart” who loves him, but the fear of “sinful love” as seen through the eyes of society drives him to a degree of temporary madness. You could probably say that Czechowicz was working through some shit.

In Henryk’s madness, we enter into what I would best describe as the deep part of the allegory—Henryk as king living in a palace (symbolically: his mind) that’s burning up and from which there’s no way out: “He runs in vain through the halls, an endless series of chambers.” There’s a fairy-tale quality to The Story of the Paper Crown, one lush with interpretative possibilities. What does the king stand for? Is it the nobility of man? The ideal of godly love? And what about the crown itself? Why is it made of something as flimsy as paper? This shiny diamond of a book rewards multiple readings.

What’s remarkable about The Story of the Paper Crown is not just the novelty of a new book by a master of the Polish avant-garde, though as a literary artifact that’s great too. What’s remarkable is the translation, and that’s why I think more people should read it. The book will challenge and frustrate some readers, who will doubtless wonder why Czechowicz keeps changing tenses (a tactic Garrett addresses in his translator's note, shedding light on Czechowicz’s deliberate use of time as a device). There are a lot of different characters to follow, and there are jumps and gaps. There are also a number of allusions that require a breadth of knowledge across a panoply of literatures. But it’s exactly all this that gives the book its zing. This story is now a hundred years old, and it was written for a literary audience we haven’t been in a long while, one used to multi-textual reading. If you’re interested in literature, what better way to exercise your muscles than to dive into a short book this rich and rewarding? In its way, this novella is a case study in translation and the choices a translator must make.

It's also a fun read—especially when you do so out loud—in the way of contemporaneous work like Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Garrett maintains the steady religious vibrations that hum and pulse beneath the narrative, and he does so while also keeping the book’s somewhat old-fashioned style (“But when I look out at the dark horizons, I know thence the tempest comes”) intact. You could take an older text and modernize it in a colloquial American voice, sure, making it easier for today’s readers, but that’s not the effect Garrett’s after here. Though I don’t speak or read Polish, it’s clear that what he’s doing is deliberate and smart and wholly in the spirit of Józef Czechowicz and his groundbreaking work.

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K.E. Semmel is a writer and translator. His newest translation, The World and Varvara, by Danish author Simon Fruelund, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil in October 2023. SFWP will publish his debut novel, The Book of Losman, in fall 2024.

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