Collected Stories - Brossura

Schulz, Bruno

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0810136600 ISBN 13: 9780810136601

Casa editrice: Northwestern Univ Pr, 2018

Riassunto

Winner of the 2019 Found in Translation Award

Collected Stories is an authoritative new translation of the complete fiction of Bruno Schulz, whose work has influenced writers as various as Salman Rushdie, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Philip Roth, Danilo Kiš, and Roberto Bolaño.

Schulz’s prose is renowned for its originality. Set largely in a fictional counterpart of his hometown of Drohobych, his stories merge the real and the surreal. The most ordinary objects—the wind, an article of clothing, a plate of fish—can suddenly appear unfathomably mysterious and capable of illuminating profound truths. As Father, one of his most intriguing characters, declaims: “Matter has been granted infinite fecundity, an inexhaustible vital force, and at the same time, a seductive power of temptation that entices us to create forms.”

This comprehensive volume brings together all of Schulz's published stories—Cinnamon Shops, his most famous collection (sometimes titled The Street of Crocodiles in English), The Sanatorium under the Hourglass, and an additional four stories that he did not include in either of his collections. Madeline G. Levine’s masterful new translation shows contemporary readers how Schulz, often compared to Proust and Kafka, reveals the workings of memory and consciousness.

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Informazioni sull?autore

BRUNO SCHULZ (1892–1942) was a Polish Jew born in Drohobych, at the time a city in Austrian Galicia. He published two volumes of short fiction during his life. Shot in the street by a Nazi officer in German-occupied Drohobych, Schulz achieved posthumous fame as one of the most influential European fiction writers of the twentieth century.

MADELINE G. LEVINE is Kenan Professor of Slavic Literatures Emerita at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her translations from the Polish include The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories by Hanna Krall, Bread for the Departed by Bogdan Wojdowski, and four volumes of prose by Czeslaw Milosz, including Beginning with My Streets: Essays and Recollections and Milosz’s ABC’s.

RIVKA GALCHEN is the author of three books, including the novel Atmospheric Disturbances. A frequent contributor to the New Yorker,the London Review of Books, and the New York Times, she has been awarded numerous prizes and fellowships and was included on the New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list of fiction writers. 

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Collected Stories

By Bruno Schulz, Madeline G. Levine

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3660-1

Contents

Foreword by Rivka Galchen, 
Translators Note, 
Cinnamon Shops, 
August, 
A Visitation, 
Birds, 
Mannequins, 
A Treatise on Mannequins; or, The Second Book of Genesis, 
A Treatise on Mannequins, Continued, 
A Treatise on Mannequins, Conclusion, 
Nimrod, 
Pan, 
Uncle Karol, 
Cinnamon Shops, 
The Street of Crocodiles, 
Cockroaches, 
The Windstorm, 
The Night of the Great Season, 
The Sanatorium under the Hourglass, 
The Book, 
The Age of Genius, 
Spring, 
A July Night, 
My Father Joins the Firefighters, 
A Second Autumn, 
The Dead Season, 
The Sanatorium under the Hourglass, 
Dodo, 
Edzio, 
The Pensioner, 
Loneliness, 
Fathers Final Escape, 
Uncollected Stories, 
Autumn, 
The Republic of Dreams, 
The Comet, 
Fatherland, 

CHAPTER 1

August

I

In July, my father left to take the waters, abandoning my mother, my older brother, and me as prey to the dazzling summer days that were white with heat. Dazed by the light, we browsed the great book of vacation, whose every page was on fire from the radiance and which contained in its depths the languorous sweet flesh of golden pears.

Adela would come back on those luminous mornings like Pomona from the fire of the blazing day, pouring from her basket the colorful beauty of the sun — the glistening sweet cherries, full of water beneath their transparent skin; the mysterious dark sour cherries, whose aroma far exceeded their flavor; apricots whose golden flesh held the core of long afternoons; and next to this pure poetry of fruit she would unload racks of flesh with their keyboards of veal ribs, swollen with energy and nourishment; seaweeds of vegetables that resembled slaughtered cephalopods and jellyfish — the raw material of dinner with a taste as yet unformed and bland, the vegetative, telluric ingredients of dinner with a smell both wild and redolent of the field.

Every day, the great summer passed in its entirety through the dark apartment on the second floor of the apartment house on the market square: the silence of shimmering rings of air, squares of radiance dreaming their passionate dreams on the floor, the melody of a barrel organ drawn from the day's deepest golden vein, two or three measures of a refrain played over and over again on a piano somewhere, fainting away in the sunshine on the white sidewalks, lost in the fiery depths of the day. The housework done, Adela would draw the linen drapes, releasing shade into the room. Then the colors dropped an octave lower, the room filled with shade as if submerged in the light of ocean depths and was reflected even more dimly in the green mirrors, and all the sweltering heat of the day was breathing on the drapes, which were billowing gently with noon-hour dreams.

On Saturday afternoons Mother and I would go for a walk. From the semidarkness of the vestibule one stepped immediately into the sunny bath of the day. The people walking past, wading in gold, had their eyes half closed from the heat, as if glued together with honey, and their retracted upper lips exposed their gums and teeth. And everyone wading in this golden day had that grimace of scorching heat as if the sun had placed upon its followers one and the same mask — the golden mask of the sunshine brotherhood; and all who walked along the streets today, who met one another and passed by, old men and youths, children and women, exchanged greetings in passing with that mask painted in thick golden paint on their face, grinned that Bacchic grimace at one another — the barbaric mask of a pagan cult.

The market square was empty and yellow from the heat, swept clean of dust by hot winds, like a biblical desert. Thorny acacias that had grown out of the golden square's emptiness were seething above it with their bright foliage, bouquets of nobly articulated green filigrees, like the trees in old Gobelins tapestries. The trees appeared to be commanding a gale, theatrically agitating their crowns to demonstrate in their pathetic contortions the elegance of their leafy fans with their silvery underbellies like the furs of noble foxes. The old houses, polished by the winds of many days, took on the reflected colors of the great atmosphere, the echoes and memories of hues diffused in the depths of the colorful weather. It seemed that entire generations of summer days (like patient stucco workers chipping off the mildew of plaster from old facades) were hammering away at the deceitful glaze, extracting from one day to the next the ever more clearly authentic countenance of the houses, the physiognomy of the fate and life that formed them from inside. Now the windows, blinded by the radiance of the empty square, were sleeping; the balconies confessed their emptiness to the sky; the open vestibules smelled of coolness and wine.

A throng of urchins who had survived the fiery broom of sweltering heat in a corner of the market square besieged a section of a wall, throwing buttons and coins at it to test it, as if it were possible to read from the horoscope of those metal disks the true secret of a wall etched with the hieroglyphs of scratches and cracks. In any event, the market square was empty. One expected the Good Samaritan's donkey, led by the bridle, to arrive under the shade of the swaying acacias at the vaulted entranceway with its wine merchant's barrels and two servants to cautiously lower the sick man from the burning saddle in order to carry him carefully up the cool stairs to the floor above, fragrant with the Sabbath.

So, Mother and I strolled down the two sunny sides of the market square, leading our broken shadows across all the houses as if across piano keys. The pavement squares passed slowly under our soft, flat steps — some of them pale pink, like human skin, others golden and dark blue, all of them flat, warm, and velvety in the sunshine like the faces of sundials trampled by feet until they are unrecognizable, unto blissful nothingness.

Until finally, at the corner of Stryjska Street, we entered the shade of the apothecary shop. A large show globe with raspberry juice in the broad apothecary window symbolized the coolness of the balms with which all suffering could be soothed there. A couple of houses more and the street could no longer maintain its urban decorum, like a fellow who, returning to his native village, sheds his city elegance along the way, slowly changing into a ragged peasant the closer he gets to his village.

The bungalows on the city's outskirts were subsiding along with their windows, sunken in the luxuriant, jumbled blooming of their small gardens. Forgotten by the great day, all the herbs, flowers, and weeds multiplied luxuriantly and silently, gladdened by this pause that they could sleep through outside the margin of time, on the borders of the endless day. An immense sunflower, held up on a powerful stem and sick with elephantiasis, awaited in yellow mourning dress the final, sad days of its life, sagging beneath the excess growth of its monstrous corpulence. But the naive suburban bluebells and the modest little muslin flowers stood there helpless in their starched pink and white little shirts, with no understanding of the sunflower's great tragedy.

II

The tangled thicket of grasses, weeds, wild plants, and milk thistles is blazing in the fire of the afternoon. The garden's afternoon nap buzzes with a swarm of flies. The golden stubble cries out in the sunshine like a red locust; crickets scream in the torrential rain of fire; seed pods explode softly, like grasshoppers.

And over near the fence a sheepskin coat of grasses rises like a protuberant hillock-hump, as if the garden has turned onto its other side in its sleep and its thick peasant shoulders are breathing the silence of the earth. On these shoulders of the garden the slovenly female fecundity of August expanded into dense hollows of enormous burdocks, proliferated in lobes of shaggy sheets of leaves, in luxuriant tongues of fleshy vegetation. There, those bulging burdock bodies goggled like lolling gorgons, half consumed by their own frenzied skirts. There, the garden was selling at no cost the cheapest groats of wild lilac, a coarse porridge of plantain, stinking like soap, wild firewater of mint, and all the worst August trash. But on the other side of the fence, behind this lair of summer in which the imbecility of demented weeds had spread, there was a garbage dump wildly overgrown with milk thistle. No one knew that it was precisely there, during that summer, that August was celebrating its great pagan orgy. On this garbage dump, propped against the fence and overgrown with wild lilac, stood the bed of Tluja the idiot girl. That's what we all called her. On a pile of garbage and scraps, old pots, shoes, rubble and trash, stood a green-painted bed, supported, in place of a missing leg, by two old bricks.

The air above the rubble, gone wild from the heat, slashed by the lightning flashes of glistening horseflies, enraged by the sun, crackled as if from invisible rattles, exciting one into a frenzy.

Tluja sits there, squatting amid her yellow bedding and rags. Her large head bristles with a mop of black hair. Her face is contractile, like the bellows of an accordion. Every moment or so a grimace of weeping folds the accordion into a thousand transverse pleats, then amazement opens it up again, smooths out the pleats, reveals the slits of her tiny eyes and the moist gums with yellow teeth beneath a snoutlike, fleshy lip. Hours filled with heat and boredom pass during which Tluja babbles under her breath, dozes, grumbles quietly, and grunts. A thick swarm of flies settles on the immobile girl. But suddenly this whole pile of dirty tattered clothes, of rags and scraps, begins to move, as if animated by the rustling of rats breeding inside it. Startled, the flies wake up and rise in a great, roaring swarm full of furious buzzing, flashes, and flickering. And while the tattered clothes slip onto the ground and scatter across the garbage dump like frightened rats, the heart of the dump digs its way out from them, the core slowly unwraps itself and emerges from its shell: a half-naked, dark imbecile slowly rises and stands there, looking like a little pagan idol on short, childlike legs, while from her neck, which is swollen with an influx of fury, from her flushed face growing dark with rage, on which the arabesques of swollen veins resembling primitive paintings are efflorescing, a bestial shriek escapes, a throaty shriek, produced from all the bronchi and pipes of this half-bestial, half-godlike breast. The milk thistles, burned by the sun, are screaming, the burdocks puffing up and flaunting their shameless flesh, the weeds drooling glistening poison, and the imbecile girl in a wild convulsion, hoarse from her shrieking, with frenzied passion thrusts her fleshy groin against an elderberry trunk that, bewitched by this whole beggars' chorus to perverted pagan fecundity, creaks softly beneath the urgency of dissolute lust.

Tluja's mother hires herself out to housewives to scrub their floors. She's a small woman, yellow as saffron, and she also seasons with saffron the floors, fir tables, benches, and fold-down beds that she cleans in the homes of poor people. Once, Adela took me to that old Maryska's house. It was early in the morning; we entered a small room whitewashed with a bluish tint, with a tamped-down clay layer on the floor on which the early sunlight lay, brilliant yellow in the morning quiet that was measured out by the frightful clanging of the peasant clock on the wall. Stupid Maryska was lying on straw in a chest, as pale as a communion wafer and as silent as a glove from which a hand has been withdrawn. And as if taking advantage of her sleep, the silence chattered away, yellow, glaring, evil silence, it soliloquized, quarreled, loudly and vulgarly carrying on its nonsensical, maniacal monologue. Maryska's time, the time imprisoned in her soul, emerged from her terrifyingly real and walked by itself across the room, raucous, roaring, infernal, rising in the glaring silence of the morning from the noisy mill clock like bad flour, powdery flour, the stupid flour of madmen.

III

In one of these cottages, surrounded by brown palings and drowning in the lush greenery of the garden, lived Aunt Agata. Going in to see her, we passed in the garden colored glass balls perched on top of slender poles, pink, green and violet balls, in which entire luminous, glowing worlds were spellbound, like those ideal, happy pictures enclosed in the matchless perfection of soap bubbles.

In the dim vestibule with its old oleographs eaten away by mold and blind from old age, we would discover a familiar smell. In that reliable old odor the life of these people was contained in a marvelous simple synthesis, a distillation of race, the blood type and secret of their fate, enclosed imperceptibly in the quotidian transience of their own distinct time. The old, wise doors, whose dark sighing admitted these people and let them out, silent witnesses to the comings and goings of the mother, daughters, and sons, opened noiselessly like a wardrobe's doorframe, and we entered into their life. They sat as if in the shade of their own fate and did not defend themselves; in their initial awkward gestures they revealed to us their secret. Were we not related to them by blood and fate?

The room was dark and velvety from the navy-blue upholstery with its gold pattern, but here, too, the echo of the flaming day trembled in the brass on the picture frames, the door handles, and gold moldings, although filtered through the dense greenery of the garden. Aunt Agata stood up from beside the wall, huge and luxuriant, her flesh round and white and spotted with the red rust of freckles. We sat down near them as if on the shore of their fate, a little embarrassed by the defenselessness with which they revealed themselves to us without reservation, and we drank water with rose syrup, a most peculiar drink, in which I discovered what seemed to be the deepest essence of that sweltering Saturday.

My aunt complained. That was the basic tone of her conversations, the voice of that white and fecund flesh, already expanding lushly as if beyond the boundaries of her person, only loosely controlled in concentration, in the constraints of individual form, and already multiplied even in this concentration, ready to distend, to disintegrate, to discharge into a family. It was an almost self-generating fecundity, femaleness deprived of brakes and pathologically rampant.

It seemed that the very scent of masculinity, the smell of tobacco smoke, a bachelor's joke, could stimulate this inflamed femaleness to a depraved parthenogenesis. And truly all her complaints against her husband, against the servants, her worries about the children were only the capriciousness and sulking of unsated fecundity, a continuation of the surly, irate, and tearful coquetry that she visited, in vain, upon her husband. Uncle Marek, small, hunched over, with a face drained of sex, sat in his gray bankruptcy, resigned to his fate, in the shade of the boundless contempt in which he seemed to rest. The garden's distant glow, spread wide-open in the window, smoldered in his gray eyes. Occasionally, he would attempt to register a reservation with a weak motion, to put up resistance, but the wave of self-sufficient femaleness thrust that meaningless gesture aside, moved triumphantly past it, flooded with its broad stream the feeble convulsions of masculinity.

There was something tragic in this untidy and unconstrained fecundity; it was the abjection of a creature struggling on the border of nothingness and death, it was a kind of heroism of femaleness triumphing with its fecundity even over a deformity of nature, over the insufficiency of the male. But the progeny demonstrated the rightness of that maternal panic, that frenzy for giving birth, that exhausted itself in unsuccessful creatures, in an ephemeral generation of phantoms without blood or faces.

Lucja came in, of average height, with a full-blown head too mature for her childlike, plump body with its white, delicate flesh. She gave me her doll-like hand that seemed to be only now putting out buds, and immediately her whole face blossomed, like a peony overflowing with rosy repletion. Unhappy because of her blushes that spoke shamelessly of the secrets of menstruation, she half closed her eyes and flushed even more under the touch of the most neutral questions, since every one of them contained a secret allusion to her oversensitive maidenhood.

Emil, the oldest of the cousins, with a light-blond mustache and a face from which life seemed to have wiped away every expression, paced back and forth in the room, his hands in the pockets of his pleated trousers.

His elegant, expensive attire bore the stamp of the exotic countries from which he had returned. His faded, opaque face appeared to forget about itself from one day to the next, to become an empty white wall with a pale net of veins in which, like the lines on a faded map, the dying memories of this stormy, wasted life were entangled. He was a master of card tricks, smoked long, elegant pipes, and gave off the strange smells of foreign countries. His gaze wandering over distant memories, he told the strangest anecdotes, which, at a certain point, would suddenly break off, disconnect, and disperse into nothingness. I gazed at him wistfully, yearning for him to pay attention to me and to rescue me from the torment of boredom. In fact, it did seem that he winked at me as he went into another room. I followed him. He sat sunk low on a small couch, his knees crossed almost at the level of his head, which was as bald as a billiard ball. It seemed as if it were his clothing alone lying there pleated, crumpled, tossed over the seat. His face was like the breath of a face — a streak that some unknown passerby had left in the air. In his pale hands, with their light-blue glaze, he was holding a wallet in which there was something he was looking at. The bulging white of a pale eye emerged with difficulty from the mist of his face, enticing me with impish winking. I felt an irresistible attraction to him. He took me between his knees, and shuffling photographs before my eyes with skillful hands, he showed me images of naked women and boys in strange positions. I stood there, leaning against him, and looked with distant, unseeing eyes at those delicate human bodies, while the aura of vague agitation with which the air had suddenly grown thick reached me and ran down me as a shudder of anxiety, a wave of sudden understanding. But at the same time that faint mist of a smile that had sketched itself beneath his soft, beautiful mustache, the germ of desire that was as taut on his temples as a pulsing vein, the tension holding his features in concentration for a moment collapsed back into nothingness and his face departed into absence, forgot about itself, dissipated.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Collected Stories by Bruno Schulz, Madeline G. Levine. Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Northwestern Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0810136600
• ISBN 13: 9780810136601
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 269
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile