During your research, did you come across anything that surprised you or fundamentally changed your understanding of Poland's past? Rhian Sasseen The Books of Jacob is a historical novel following the real-life Jacob Frank, the founder of the heretical Frankist sect in eighteenth-century Poland. My questions, and Tokarczuk’s answers, were translated into Polish and English by Croft. We discussed national borders, the Polish hard right, writing about women, and how the internet has changed our approach to literature. In December, I corresponded with Tokarczuk over email in anticipation of the release of the English translation of the The Books of Jacob. (The page numbers move backwards-from 965 to 1-a nod to Hebrew books, which are read from right to left.*) Though the novel ends in the Enlightenment, Tokarczuk’s portrayals of both Christian anti-Semitism and the Frankists’ internal power dynamics raise deep questions about Polish history, feminism, and the nature of religious faith that remain relevant today. Based on the real-life historical figure of Jacob Frank, an eighteenth-century Polish Jew who declared himself the Messiah and went on to found the heretical sect of Frankism, which mixed Kabbalah mysticism and Catholic trinitarianism, the book is at once a portrait of a complicated man and a study of Central Europe’s vexed relationship with modernity. It’s a monumental book, one that took Tokarczuk around ten years to write and Croft nearly five to translate. The imminent publication of Croft’s translation of Tokarczuk’s magnum opus, The Books of Jacob, will allow English language readers to appreciate the work that the Swedish Academy cited specifically in their awarding of the Nobel Prize. When the Swedish Academy named Tokarczuk the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, her longtime translator Croft wrote, “Olga is the Nobel Laureate. In Primeval and Other Times (2010), translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, a Polish village watched over by angels endures the wars of the twentieth century in Flights (2017), which was translated by Jennifer Croft and won the 2018 Booker Prize, the settings range from a modern airport to a stagecoach carrying the composer Frédéric Chopin’s disembodied heart. Born in 1962 in Sulechów, Poland, Tokarczuk writes what she calls “constellation novels,” blending memoir, fiction, and lyric sketches into a single narrative. Olga Tokarczuk approaches fiction in a way uniquely suited to the fragmentation of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, collapsing boundaries among time periods and countries.
0 kommentar(er)
