'A Similar Universality of Voice'

I reproach my younger self for being lazy and not seriously studying languages other than English. I dabbled in Latin and German and retain a smattering of vocabulary and little grammar. If I were to study another language today my first choice would likely be Italian in order to read Dante, Leopardi, Lampedusa, Montale and Svevo, among others. Next would come Polish. As Adam Zagajewski says in an interview: “We have had an extraordinary generation of writers like [Witold] Gombrowicz, [Czeslaw] Miłosz, [Aleksander] Wat, [Zbigniew] Herbert, and others.” These are among my favorite modern writers. Zagajewski continues: 

“I think [Gombrowicz] is much more successful in his Diaries than in his novels. In Diaries, he speaks with the voice of a free man. He seems to achieve it easily. Gombrowicz performs a gesture of liberation in Polish literature, and he is not the only one. Miłosz achieves the same or a similar gesture of liberation. Jerzy Stempowski accomplishes it in his essays, but his writings are not well known abroad. It is too bad that he is not widely known outside Poland. It is good that Miłosz is read extensively in the West. It is unfortunate that Stempowski has not been discovered there, but it does not change the main perspective. Wat and other writers from the same generation achieve a similar universality of voice.”

 

In English, Stempowski is more of a rumor than I writer. Based on three translated essays, I’ve written about him here and here. Otherwise, I rely on scraps of information, like fragments of Sappho on papyrus. Benjamin Ivry writes of him in a 2012 essay published in Salmagundi devoted to the Rumanian aphorist E.M. Cioran:

 

“In a 1961 essay, ‘Rubies from the Orient,’ about Emil Cioran, whose centenary was commemorated in 2011, the Polish author Jerzy Stempowski wrote that Cioran is an ‘unmatched master of speech. Not for a long time have we encountered such prose which is simultaneously as concise as it is intelligent. . . . Decked out in superb French, Cioran transmits to the West certain elements of ancient wisdom from his homeland.’ Stempowski likened Cioran’s aphorisms, published in a series of books from Les éditions Gallimard in Paris, to gems which retain their value and are easily portable, ‘so that we can take them with us when the catastrophe hits.’”

There’s a tough-mindedness among writers from the former Soviet bloc. It’s fair to say they are less naïve about human nature than their cousins in the West, less likely to indulge in soft-headed optimism. How I wish some translator from the Polish would gave us Stempowski in English. Each time I trip over his name I feel that familiar pang of ignorance. Stempowski writes in his essay “The Smuggler’s Library”:

 

“A wartime reader must rely first and foremost on his memory. At the end of the road he will be left only with what he remembers.”