Author: Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand. Source: http://alfaomega.webnode.com/products/ryszard-kapu/ Date of publication: 2010-03-09

It was March 1979; the aeroplane was flying over the Atlantic, and above the clouds things were for the time being fairly smooth and calm; it was only before the inland stopover at Gander in the Canadian province of Newfoundland that there were to be scenes of infernal proportions: three attempts at landing — the pilot changed his mind at about half a metre above the ground, pulling the plane up again — as well as terrible turbulence that almost prevented the plane’s wheels from making contact with the landing place, a runway covered in a thick layer of snow. For the moment one could enjoy the reading of a new book. Someone among friends, just before departure, had put into my hands “The Emperor” by Ryszard Kapuściński, saying that this was the book everyone in Warsaw was reading at the moment. He added that in Poland it was then compulsory reading, interpreted as a text with a double meaning. Ostensibly about the court of Emperor Haile Selassie, but really about the red court of the Central Committee (of the Polish United Workers’ Party) or, going lower, of the Provincial Committee or the District Committee. Ostensibly about the mechanisms of servility and toadying in the imperial chambers of Ethiopia, but really about those very mechanisms in the offices and antechambers and corridors of power in the People’s Republic of Poland and about those gathered around power.

I began to read and could not tear myself away from the book — captivated by the enormously interesting history and the very original and innovative form. I noticed the possibilities of interpreting this text as an image of the contemporary reality in Poland and behind the “Iron Curtain” generally. Yet at the same time such an interpretation, such an understanding of the text, seemed to me to be only one of the possible ones, and above all probably not the most important one. My strongest impression from reading “The Emperor” then — and so it remains to this day — was that of engaging with a universal, timeless text inscribing itself into world literature and reportage at the very highest level. Alongside this impression there arose something in the nature of excitement at an unexpected discovery: the discovery of a very rare treasure, in the existence of which one was beginning to doubt — namely of a work of Polish literature that would be translatable and would have the potential of transnational resonance. Translatable in the double sense of that word: linguistic and cultural — that is, a text that would not be, as unfortunately so much of our literature is, lost in translation, most often because again the “elephant and the Polish question” perspective had come to dominate all others.

And this very problem — or complex — was at that time being experienced by me with particular intensity and unpleasantness. I was then on doctoral studies in the United States at the University of Rochester, New York, where I was preparing a dissertation in the field of comparative literature.

My literary-scholar colleagues would often ask me to recommend works from Polish literature available in English translation that would be interesting stylistically, psychologically, philosophically, etc. I then faced the problem of double untranslatability. The works I would have liked to propose were most often either untranslatable for linguistic reasons, or for cultural reasons — and most often both.

I also had behind me a brief experience of running seminars in Central European literature, including Polish, at the summer school of that university, when discussing with students such texts as Jerzy Andrzejewski’s “The Golden Fox” or Tadeusz Konwicki’s “A Dreambook for Our Time” I noticed that despite many explanations regarding the historical and political context, the interpretation of Polish works was for foreign — and especially American — recipients often so difficult as to be almost impossible. Incidentally, a kind of confirmation of this was the fact that the only text from the selected examples of contemporary Polish literature that proved clear and comprehensible to the students was Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s short story “Tatarak” — an excellent work in its own right, completely free of any historical, political, or national background.

I was therefore at that time especially sensitive to the problem of the existence or non-existence of universal literature — one with a strong enough “hard core” of transnational features — and the reading of “The Emperor” seemed to me a revelation. I decided that this book had fallen from the sky for me — or more precisely, had been realised in the sky, since flying through the sky I read it, discovered it, and it could become what I had been looking for: a book by a Polish author with a universal message, enormously interesting, keeping one in suspense, and at the same time experimenting with various literary forms and genres — fresh and intriguing also through the originality of the mode of conveyance. Kapuściński had created something at the boundary between non-fiction and belles-lettres. “The Emperor” contained reportage, but also a literarily stylised interview with a hundred-headed dragon made up of courtiers enabling and perpetuating the structures of all despotic power — a polyphonic confession and at the same time a hagiographic portrait of a descendant of King Solomon. Hagiographic of course only for those who had either had their brains so washed that they saw Haile Selassie thus, or who needed to speak thus in order to feel themselves important elements co-creating an empire lasting a few thousand years, or who out of habit used a language almost from lives of the saints, which also gave them a sense of superior value, or who expressed in this way their attachment to their king — sometimes some of everything, and all these linguistic colours the author subtly shaded, himself keeping well clear of any reverential tone.

This polyphonic narration was arranged in a mosaic representing the fall of the last emperor of Ethiopia, but also showed the essence of what makes all authoritarian rule possible: a system that made people dependent on each other — the cowardly and the ambitious, sometimes indeed both traits coexisted in certain characters at the same time. I think that Shakespeare would have praised the author of “The Emperor” precisely for his ability to perceive and to paint the social consequences of certain psychological traits — in this case, the structure of the social fabric that becomes the ground especially susceptible to the development and flourishing of authoritarian rule based on fear, denunciation, the need for dominance, and also the theatricalisation of language and behaviour for the purpose of creating an appropriate image of the “good” ruler and “good” subjects. In Kapuściński’s text we find various forms of the masking of true intentions — including those cases in which the mask adheres to the face, changing the identity of the given person to such a degree that he himself already considers himself someone else. Surely not without reason did I recently have, at a bachelor’s seminar in the Faculty of Comparative Literature, a few papers comparing the manner of presenting the mechanisms of power in Kapuściński’s “The Emperor” and in Shakespeare’s Richard II or Henry IV.

The universality and at the same time originality of the message of “The Emperor” consists among other things in the fact that the accent was not so much on the despot himself as on the type of social fabric thanks to which that despot can for a long time — most often too long — function. If conditions of imprisoning people in fear are created, in a system of denunciations, eavesdroppings, and the promotion of servility, toadying, and duplicity, then the ruler manipulating such “human machinery” will have almost unlimited capabilities — and whether the ruler is an emperor, a first secretary, or a corporate director is of no great significance. Splendid effect is also produced by the collision of the matter-of-fact language of reportage with the stylised, at moments almost baroque, somewhat archaic in the choice of epithets, language of the courtiers. Such a juxtaposition can, among other things, make one aware of the possibility of the continued existence in the contemporary world of a system that would seem anachronistic, but is timeless — as unfortunately timeless are human ambitions, fear, weakness, or even baseness.

I probably had a reasonably good nose then, because the universality of “The Emperor”’s message was subsequently confirmed in many ways: above all by the international success of the book itself, and also by the success of the London production at The Royal Court Theatre based on it. It is also worth quoting the words of the author himself from the programme of the Warsaw production of “The Emperor” (the Royal Court Theatre appeared as a guest in Warsaw in November 1987): The set of “The Emperor”: theatre — London, director and adapter — English, actors — from Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean, author — a Pole, the action takes place at the court of the Emperor of Ethiopia, so it could take place anywhere — words that confirm precisely this universality.

But I am running ahead, so let us return to the aeroplane in which I was flying, dazzled by “The Emperor” and convinced that I had finally found what I had been looking for — and that such a pearl of psychological and sociological wisdom, an example of splendid reportorial craft and original literary beauty, had to be made available to the wide world — that is, translated.

To translate… but how to do it splendidly and without great loss — for some loss must always be there, as every honest and self-aware translator and philologist knows, traduttore traditore (translator is traitor) is one way of expressing this truth. I knew that I would not dare to do it myself — and above all that I should not dare. Into one’s own native language, that is a different matter; but into another, however familiar and domesticated since childhood, it cannot be done well enough. Even fluent knowledge, considerable reading, and a philological education cannot replace that degree of fusion and coalescence with a language — that feeling — which can only be given by being born into and growing up in the culture of that language, necessary for translating into that language, let alone a perfect translation, of the kind I dreamed.

I therefore thought of an attempt to combine forces and produce the translation together with someone who would be translating into English as his native language. Concretely, I immediately thought of my husband, who combined in himself a number of qualities very necessary for the realisation of this undertaking: an English scholar and native speaker, brilliant intelligence, enormous literary culture and a feeling for the subtle differences of linguistic colours and tones, a talent for good writing — he taught students, both native speakers and foreigners, how to write well, and at a fairly sophisticated level. It seemed to me that it was worth conducting the following experiment: first I would translate from Polish into correct English, then Bill would subject this version to a thorough linguistic-stylistic processing so that it would sound natural to an anglophone ear, and finally his version would return to me to check that we had not gone too far from the original anywhere.

This is what we did, and apparently it worked, since the reviewer in the magazine “Time” wrote “translated as if there were no language barrier”, and John Updike in “The New Yorker” shared with his readers his opinion that he had not yet read any text in translation that had been written in such supple English. That supple English is certainly the credit of Bill; it was his literary claw that made it sound so splendid and read so well in English. Whereas I made it possible for him to bring the English to perfection and watched over fidelity to the original. In a word it was a unique tandem. Perhaps Bogdana Carpenter and John Carpenter had a similar idea when they were translating Herbert’s poems into English, but of course poetry and its translation is a completely different league.

Our translation of “The Emperor” was thus the fruit of joint work, and in that second and third phase it was necessary to complement each other’s knowledge mutually, to discuss, to savour individual versions so as to choose the best one. Such a luxury — the discussion and indeed the working-over of some stages of the joint translation — could only be afforded by a well-matched couple who liked each other, both on postgraduate studies perhaps not over-pampered by life, but secured in a basic way by grants, enough to devote a large part of their time to linguistic chiselling. Such philological walks across the bridge of translation had to include time for historical, political, and cultural excursions into both linguistic areas, with time for savouring.

This was especially important, for example, in matching the appropriate linguistic colour of the English version of the designations used by courtiers when speaking of the emperor (for example His Grace, His Benevolence). For the loyally-subject, servile, toadying, or simply sometimes very traditional tone in the original we had to find an English equivalent. I recall that this was one of the elements of the translation with which we struggled perhaps more than with anything else. The final result proved, however, very good (I venture to say so after twenty years since the first success of the English version of “The Emperor”, since those more intelligent and more expert than I persistently maintain this, both in the States, in England, and in Poland), and in the course of discussing this problem first between ourselves, and then also with the author himself, we arrived at some rather interesting translatological, cultural, and historical conclusions, which as a comparatist interested me greatly. Of course Kapuściński, drawing from the mouths of his Ethiopian interlocutors such and such phrases, was emphasising their attitude towards power, their mentality, their character traits. He achieved the result, but at the same time this tone for a Polish ear was much less exotic or archaic, because in Polish linguistic consciousness or subconsciousness — whether we like it or not — it largely functions still as a contemporary tone.

My hypothesis would be that this is so because the feudal or semi-feudal system lasted in our country much longer than elsewhere in Western Europe. In Western Europe the only exception, it seems to me, is Spain, which is somewhat analogous in this respect. (This is confirmed in some of my comparative considerations of Polish and Spanish literary texts, where certain linguistic expressions reflect precisely such customs.)

And so the long-lasting, then frozen by the partitions period of the feudal or semi-feudal system left clear linguistic and customary traces. These may have been overlaid by certain Eastern (Muscovite-Byzantine-Tatar) influences, which underlined through more loyally-subject expressions the distances between degrees of social hierarchy (in “The Emperor” Kapuściński describes something similar when he speaks of the extraordinarily stratified structure of degrees of access to individual ministers, let alone to the emperor himself). In Polish linguistic custom a certain form of title-mania is still often obligatory, precisely as a trace of the historical contexts mentioned. This is especially strongly felt in the area of the former Galicia, and especially in Kraków, and perhaps most of all at the Kraków University. This can sometimes be beautiful and occasionally charming, but it can also be unnecessarily pretentious and harmfully anti-democratic. How deeply we are steeped in title-mania strikes one especially after contact with other linguistic customs and behaviour in relations to academic, administrative, and other power structures in other countries. When I returned to Kraków from the States, such situations struck me much more, when a secretary tells a female student to change the word “Rector” on her application to “His Excellency”; when greeting a bishop one always uses “Eminence”; not to mention the need to use the title “Pani Magister” at the chemist’s, or the grotesque reflections of title-mania in the designations “kierowniku”, “prezesie”, or more modestly “szefie” by representatives of the spheres that one might call, literarily, roguish.

The Anglo-Saxon linguistic custom is exactly the opposite — in it one can clearly see the pronounced traces of a fairly long and well-established democratising tendency, shortening and simplifying. The matter is moreover even more complex, since onto this tendency there is also layered the fondness for understatement, which is enormously important for the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon manner of expressing one’s thoughts and feelings — again the reverse of the southern, but also Slavic, tendency to dramatise linguistic expression.

And so for translators rendering from Polish into English — when dealing with expressions concerning the emperor and expressing precisely this tendency to emphasise the distance between the strata of subjects — we encountered a serious barrier of untranslatability.

It was impossible to overcome it completely, but we apparently managed to reduce it to a considerable degree, and this thanks to the fact that we were both immersed in old literature professionally and out of inclination. I was then reading a great deal of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and early-eighteenth-century English, Spanish, and French texts, and Bill was steeped in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century English works and writings, so he had in his ears, so to speak, the tone of English in which one could render, for example, more deferential-towards-power expressions. And I, also knowing this register from my reading, could suggest something to him, or correct or fully accept his suggestions. Perhaps if we had been more experienced translators it would not have turned out so well. Paradoxically, the fact that it was our first translation — without any routine — meant we were open to various attempts and relied more on our linguistic-literary intuition. Of course we had many doubts, but at least some of them were resolved when we were able to show the author the fruits of our labour and share our reflections with him. Ryszard Kapuściński read excerpts of the translation with us with great joy and even delight when we finally managed to meet — and most importantly he bestowed on us his trust and enormous goodwill. And specifically, in the matter of the emperor’s designations as well, he expressed his approval of the words we had chosen and of the whole tone. Happily all three of us agreed that catching the right tone to a great extent intuitively was what mattered most. I recall how much I liked it when Bill, already tuning into that proper frequency, added to one interlocutor’s speech the phrase “His August Majesty” when that interlocutor was speaking of Haile Selassie — even where that interlocutor had already exhausted his supply of complimentary and deferential titles with which he was bestowing the ruler. Pan Ryszard too was delighted and said that he trusted us completely and that what we had done already pleased him greatly and would certainly be splendid — and he gave us the green light, wishing us further good luck and expressing the hope that we would have fun with it. I think this further lifted our spirits in the work to come.

I write here about the translation of “The Emperor”, but afterwards there were other books. Such enormous goodwill and cordiality were all the more precious in that we were meeting for the first time. Before that there had been of course a written correspondence and a few telephone conversations. And everything — as regards our personal meeting and acquaintance with Ryszard Kapuściński — began with a letter I sent in April 1980 to the address of the Czytelnik publishing house. In it I wrote that I considered “The Emperor” an enormously valuable book, I told him about myself and about the idea of translating together with my husband. After a relatively short time I received a letter from Ryszard Kapuściński in which he enthusiastically agreed to my proposal, although I had written honestly and sincerely that until then we had never translated a whole book. He wished us success and asked to be kept informed of how our experiment was proceeding — and we of course passed on news both from the translation front and from the search for a publisher, which Bill undertook. We remained in contact, but it was only in spring 1981 that we managed to meet in Kraków, where we were living at the time. He enchanted us with his cordiality, his personal charm, his knowledge of the world, but also his wise concern for those who have least bread and freedom.

When I reflect on the success of not only “The Emperor” but of Kapuściński’s whole writing, it seems to me that among various reasons it is worth mentioning the presence of empathy. His books can be numbered among a kind of littérature engagée in the best sense of that term, and at the same time his writing is completely free of the fatal traits of such literature — naivety and sentimentalism — and, what is perhaps still more important, not only has none of the dull, crudely stitched propaganda form, but has an original, interesting, new form combining various kinds of communication into an attractive mosaic. A mosaic in which there is room for swift action and the narration of dramatic events; the voices transmitting information are often various, so we can see these events in different lights; they are filtered through the feelings of people of diverse fates; there is also room for reflection, for conveying a lazily flowing afternoon, for humour, for sadness, for philosophical wisdom and the wisdom of simple people — but behind all this there pulses the co-feeling of the creator of this mosaic. If one were to compare the word-painted image that Kapuściński gives us as a gift to a beautiful carpet (in “Shah of Shahs” there are passages about the Persian love of carpets), then the beauty of this prose arises from the diversity of colour and composition, from interesting experiments in combining various genres and styles ("Travels with Herodotus"), and at the same time these are not literary prestidigitatorial tricks. His books pulse with the living heartbeat of the author’s engagement — and having known Ryszard Kapuściński personally, one has no doubt that this is warmth flowing from his sensitive heart, excellently controlled by a precise mind and a capacity for foresight and historical imagination.

In a word the author of “The Emperor” took the best elements from two epochs and combined them in one: from the 1970s — social engagement, the need to remedy what is unjust and cruel in the world, the dream of a better world without racism and poverty; and from postmodernism — new forms of expression and narration. As regards postmodernism, he did not so much take as he precursorially applied certain eclectic procedures, renewing literature and non-fiction, mutually fertilising each other. In this way he avoided the lack of ideas and spirituality from which a considerable part of fashionable contemporary literature suffers, parading its inventive formal games — and he made a certain variant of littérature engagée attractive through formal innovation.

Whether this crossroads of epochs really mattered to readers of Kapuściński’s writing all over the world, I do not know; it is only a hypothesis of mine — perhaps the déformation professionnelle of the literary historian speaking through me. But as regards the high degree of social sensitivity and empathy distinguishing Ryszard Kapuściński as writer, journalist, and human being, of that I am certain. Let us not forget either that he was acquiring his reportorial spurs as a correspondent in Africa and Latin America at the time when the myths of such figures as Lumumba and Che Guevara were being formed, when it was still possible to hope that, despite difficult and dramatic events, the so-called Third World would emerge from poverty and liberate itself from all forms of colonialism. And although many dreams from that epoch proved to be complete illusions, Kapuściński drew the appropriate conclusions, but never lost his sensitivity and empathy with regard to the sufferings of people — perhaps especially of those continents. He himself spoke of this many times in meetings with readers, students, and in interviews, frequently noting that his own childhood experiences during the war contributed to heightening his sensitivity to hunger and various physical and psychological sufferings. Such sensitivity is always necessary — and especially today, when in the contemporary world the gap between the sated and the hungry, of whom there are ever more, is growing ever faster. The necessity of remembering this and acting to change it Kapuściński emphasises at every step. It seems to me that such an attitude on his part is also translated into the universality of his books’ message, and this in turn into success — and of the very highest quality.

I began my reflections by recalling the moment when I came upon the idea that “The Emperor” was worth translating. I was speaking of my searches for works by Polish authors that would be universal (while at the same time unique) and comprehensible to recipients outside Poland’s borders.

At this moment, 23 years later, when “The Emperor” in our translation is being published by Penguin Books in the Modern Classics series as the book of the only Polish author to have been recognised as a classic of contemporary world literature, I am glad that my husband and I were able to contribute to this. And I think that moment on the aeroplane over the Atlantic was a good, happy moment.

Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand

born 1950, is a literary historian, translator, and academic teacher in the Faculty of Comparative Literature at the Jagiellonian University’s Polish Studies Department (with a background in French, English, and Spanish studies).

She is the daughter of the outstanding English scholar Professor Przemysław Mroczkowski. She has known the English language since childhood (as a seven-year-old girl she spent a year at a boarding school in England). She worked for four years (1977–1981) in the USA at the University of Rochester, where she obtained her doctorate.

First English translator (jointly with William R. Brand) of Ryszard Kapuściński: “The Emperor” (1982), “Shah of Shahs” (1985), “Another Day of Life” (1986). Author of the book “The Theatrum Mundi Metaphor in Spanish and English Drama 1570–1640” (Universitas, Kraków 1993) and numerous articles and essays in literary history.

source: kapuscinski.info