Anna Nasiłowska’s History of Polish Literature is the first to appear in English (albeit published originally in PolishFootnote ¹ ) since the second edition of Czesław Miłosz’s.Footnote ² A hard act to follow, and though the title of her volume may be more modest, Nasiłowska’s ambition is just as grandiose: a history of Poland’s entire literary tradition in a single volume, from its earliest traces in the twelfth century to 1989, and the work, no less, of a single author. We should be grateful, though, for her hutzpah.

Nasiłowska, a professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and herself a poet and novelist, offers no surprises or innovative propositions as far as her scheme of Poland’s literary history is concerned—nor should she in a book written for “the reader who is largely unfamiliar with the subject” (xv): ten chapters covering the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism and Positivism, Young Poland, the Second Independence, literature of the Second World War, and literature after the war; then another five chapters (about one quarter of the volume) devoted to poetry, drama, and prose after 1956, and finally literature after 1980 until 1989 (and a bit beyond). Sensible, too, is her focus, at least in those first ten chapters, on the “life and works” of canonic authors. These she supplements with often detailed background information of a sociopolitical nature so crucial for understanding a literary tradition conditioned more than most by traumatic historical events. At the same time, Nasiłowska conscientiously situates developments in Polish literature within a wider European as well as transatlantic context, which allows her to highlight—often with bracing frankness—what was derivative and what was innovative in that tradition.

This said, her history is far from being a dryly dutiful chronicle of literary movements and schools, writers and their works. Nasiłowska is rarely shy when striving to humanize her subjects, as when she notes, for instance, Jan Andrzej Morsztyn’s treasonous work on behalf of the French or Stanisław Trembecki’s perpetual indebtedness or Józef Czechowicz’s homosexuality. Her synopses of their works are critical in the best sense of the word, mixing analysis with honest assessment and, often enough, wry understatement: apropos Franciszek Dionizy Kniaźnin’s “amusing rococo ode” to the Polish moustache, she observes that both Józef Piłsudski and Lech Wałęsa sported moustaches, but so too did Iosif Stalin, hence “it is hard to consider it a symbol” (146); although she finds Anna Stanisławska-Zbąska’s autobiography in verse interesting, “her poetry,” she opines “is unremarkable, therefore [she] is not spoken of as the first Polish [female] poet, but is rather termed a rhymester” (88); and as for making sense of Słowacki’s late mystical work, she gives up, noting that it “constitutes quite the interpretive challenge for the rational mind” (considering that “the poet might have assisted his imagination with narcotics,” 233). She also never misses an opportunity to register the existence of a film adaptation of a given work, a strategy that might otherwise seem a misguided stab at relevance were it not for the fact that subtitles may be the only (semblance of) translation of that work into English.

More often than not, though, Nasiłowska expresses her critical druthers by means of selection, which in a narrative this capacious is unavoidable in any case. But unavoidable, too, are the questions some of her decisions raise. It is not at all surprising that as editor of the anthology Body and Text: Feminism in Literary Studies (2009) Nasiłowska should highlight the work of women writers, especially such less familiar figures as, say, the eighteenth-century poet Teofila Glińska or the interwar novelists Helena Boguszewska and Irena Krzywicka. It is surprising, then, not to find among them names that are, arguably, more canonical, like Konstancja Benisławska or Stanisława Przybyszewska, whose play The Danton Case (1929) was, moreover, made into a well-received movie by Andrzej Wajda. Curious too, especially for someone striving for a touch of irreverence, that Nasiłowska remains silent about the pornographic poems of Aleksander Fredro, texts that every Polish schoolboy knows by heart. Inscrutable, though, is her snub of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Ashes and Diamonds. To be sure, the 1948/50 novel (and then screenplay for Wajda’s seminal 1958 film), which was once required reading in the People’s Republic, has lost much of its luster, but to just record its existence without any discussion constitutes ideological overkill.

Conversely, what Nasiłowska does choose to feature is refreshing. She finds room, for instance, for such non-belletristic genres as diaries and journals (including those of Zofia Nałkowska and Maria Dąbrowska), correspondence (King Jan Sobieski’s with Marysieńka, Zygmunt Krasiński’s with Delfina Potocka), and travelogues (for example, Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski’s chronicle of his adventures in Mongolia during the Russian Civil War). Refreshing, too, is the amount of space (a full ten pages) she allots to Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, known primarily for his mind-boggling productivity, but whom she rightly recovers as a crucial bridge between the romantics and their successors. Indeed, Nasiłowska manages to find space for less canonical figures, if only with a word or two of recognition: for Dyzma Bończ-Tomaszewski, for Stefan Witwicki, for the post-WWII group of émigré poets connected with the journal Kontynenty, and a host of others.

Nasiłowska, however, has another way of dealing with the issue of what to include and what to omit. Sprinkled throughout the volume, set off in gray, are dozens of self-contained digressions of various length—“glosses” (in the original Polish, but mistranslated [about which more in a minute] as “voices”) she calls them, “annotations, observations” that “gesture towards more general questions, or suggest further avenues that the reader could explore independently” (xv–xvi). Reminiscent at once of medieval scribal marginalia and of hyperlinks, they address a plethora of topics: a given literary term (the Passion play, for instance, or mock epic); a context (the growth of medieval towns, say, or the emergence of the Second Republic), a concept (such as transsexualism or post-war depression); additional information about individual writers (Antoni Malczewski’s ascent of Mt. Blanc, for example, or Aleksander Wat’s late turn to mysticism); especially controversial topics (Polish antisemitism or the Warsaw Uprising); or simply interesting trivia (Artur Hanuszkiewicz’s use of motorcycles in his production of Słowacki’s Balladyna or Susan Sontag’s fascination with Helena Modrzejewska-Modjeska).

If many of these glosses concern phenomena that may have heretofore been marginalized in histories of Polish literature (while also revealing a genuinely lively and erudite mind), they by this very same token are meant to problematize Nasiłowska’s own undertaking, indeed, the very notion of a “Polish” literature. Time and again she raises the question of what a “national” literary tradition might mean in a polity that over the course of nine centuries was in various proportions inhabited by Western and Eastern Christians, Jews and Muslims, ethnic Poles, Germans, Galitzianers and Litvaks, Ruthenians (Ukrainians and Belarusians), and Lithuanians, all of whom at one point or another produced their own literatures in their respective vernaculars, but also in Polish and Latin, German and French, and even English. Nasiłowska makes no effort to theorize this issue: “There is … no single criterion permitting an unambiguous division between the various traditions and identities at their different stages of crystallization: either by language, confession, or delineation of cultural boundaries. One is therefore obliged to accept the premise of fluidity” (62). Her history of Polish literature thus makes room for Nikolaus Hussovius (Mikołaj Hussowski), a native of Belarus writing in Latin; and Stanisław Orzechowski, “the first to use the expression natione Polonus, gente Ruthenus” (58) but also writing in Latin; and Isaac Leib Peretz, “regarded as the ‘father of Yiddish literature’” (311). Of course, the contributions of outstanding Polish-Jewish writers—Julian Tuwim, Bruno Schulz, Zuzanna Ginczanka (Sara Ginsburg), Julian Stryjkowski (Pesach Stark), among many others—are all duly noted. It is disappointing, then, that she ignores the figure of Julian Klaczko (Jehuda Lejb), the brilliant late romantic critic and translator, who may be considered the inaugural member of this remarkable pantheon.

But this is quibbling, just as it would be quibbling to point out that Sts. Cyril and Methodius did not invent the Cyrillic alphabet nor were they active in Bulgaria; that Równo/Rivne is in Volhynia not Podole/Podolia; that Kazimierz Wierzyński settled on Long Island, not Rhode Island; or that Adam Mickiewicz was never in Warsaw, hence could not have “certainly met Pushkin” there (196). Indeed, for a fact-logged narrative of this sweep, Nasiłowska’s is remarkably free of factual errors (there are more, to be sure, but why continue quibbling). Actually, of the five just cited, she herself is to blame for just four of them, and they’re all relatively minor; the most egregious (and puzzling), concerning Mickiewicz and Pushkin in Warsaw, is in fact the fault of the translator, Anna Zaranko, and perhaps even more so of her editors—as are a myriad other errors, often just as embarrassing.

To put it bluntly, Zaranko, an otherwise well-respected, indeed, award-winning, translator of Polish fiction, is simply not up to the task of translating a scholarly text. And unlike literary translation, misrenderings here have consequences of an epistemological nature. A mistranslated plural has Mickiewicz being “enthusiastically greeted as a freedom fighter” (189) as he returns from an uprising in which he never participated; a mountain becomes not a molehill (Jeśli ta góra wielka śmieszną myszką zlegnie) but “obsolete” (myszką trąci? RK) (129); Lake Gopło is somehow transported from central Poland to the Rhine (116); Wiosna Ludów Footnote ³ becomes “League of Nations” (328)—and glosses (glosy)Footnote ⁴ end up as “voices.” I could go on, but you get the point—or, rather, points: mistranslation (of the most elementary Polish, moreover!) results in misinformation, which can lead to some strange misconceptions about Polish culture (more deplorable than no knowledge at all), which then willy-nilly ends up discrediting the author, the editorial board of the Polish Studies Series of which the volume is part, and the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education that funded it, just as much as it does the translator.

This is, of course, bad enough. But there’s worse—and I’m not just speaking about the stilted, odd-sounding English that betrays little or no evidence of editorial intervention by a native speaker. Rather, what is most troublesome is not so much even the execution, as the very aim of the entire enterprise. It would appear from the facts Nasiłowska chronicles in her history (many of which even a poorly educated Pole is familiar with) and the manner in which she treats them that she harbored greater ambitions, that her history was from the very beginning intended not so much for a Polish reader “który nie wiele o niej wie,” but for those outwith the culture.Footnote ⁵ If that is indeed the case (and if I’m wrong, what’s the point of this translation in the first place?), then why the Polonisms (“Orygines” rather than Origen [12]; “puenta” [73] rather than pointe)? Why a “recommended bibliography” that includes only works in Polish? Is something really better than nothing?

I will let Zaranko incriminate herself, and, by extension, all those who gave her a pass. Commenting on two examples of palindromic poetry, one by Jan Kochanowski, the other by Jan Andrzej Morsztyn (which, like all citations in the text, are—thankfully—given first in the original), the translator writes in a footnote: “Polish, being an inflected language in which the form of the word (rather than its location in a phrase) determines meaning, is very well suited for such linguistic games. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of English and no attempt has therefore been made to translate the two poems… .” (78). A fitting synecdoche for an unfortunate miscarriage and missed opportunity.

For all its shortcomings and peculiarities, but written in an elegant, eminently readable poet’s English that mirrors an outspoken poet’s take on things, with a poet’s masterful translations of representative texts, Miłosz’s still remains The History of Polish Literature.