{"id":9042,"date":"2020-10-13T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2020-10-13T12:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/?p=9042"},"modified":"2020-09-26T23:50:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T23:50:00","slug":"polish-sft-olga-tokarczuk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/?p=9042","title":{"rendered":"Polish SFT: Olga Tokarczuk"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-9043\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/tokarczuk-photo.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"134\" height=\"179\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline; color: #333333;\"><strong>OLGA TOKARCZUK (b. 1962)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\">&#8220;Tokarczuk is one of the most critically acclaimed and most translated Polish writers, with <em>House of Day, House of Night<\/em> and <em>Primeval and Other Tales<\/em> being her greatest commercial and critical successes. She studied psychology at the University of Warsaw and lives in Wa\u0142brzych. An outstanding writer, essayist and a devotee of Jung, she is an authority on philosophy and arcane knowledge. Undeniably a great discovery in Polish literature in the nineties, she is admired by both critics and readers. She is a phenomenon of popularity respected for her good taste, knowledge, literary talent, philosophical depth and the knack for storytelling. Tokarczuk, about herself, &#8216;To me writing novels is telling fairy tales to oneself, moved to maturity&#8217;.&#8221;- <em>Culture.pl<\/em><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><a style=\"color: #333333;\" href=\"https:\/\/culture.pl\/en\/artist\/olga-tokarczuk\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Biography at Culture.pl<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_8980\" style=\"width: 139px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-8980\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-8980\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/tokarczuk2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"129\" height=\"200\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-8980\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><span style=\"color: #333333;\">(1998; tr 2003)<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #333333;\" href=\"https:\/\/nupress.northwestern.edu\/content\/house-day-house-night\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><i>House of Day, House of Night<\/i>,<\/span><\/a> translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Northwestern University Press, 2003).<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\">&#8220;Nowa Ruda is a small town in Silesia, an area that has been a part of Poland, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia in the past. When the narrator moves into the area, she discovers everyone&#8211;and everything&#8211;has a story. With the help of Marta, her enigmatic neighbor, the narrator accumulates these stories, tracing the history of Nowa Ruda from the its founding to the lives of its saints, from the caller who wins the radio quiz every day to the man who causes international tension when he dies straddling the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\">Each of the stories represents a brick and they interlock to reveal the immense monument that is the town. What emerges is the message that the history of any place&#8211;no matter how humble&#8211;is limitless, that by describing or digging at the roots of a life, a house, or a neighborhood, one can see all the connections, not only with one&#8217;s self and one&#8217;s dreams but also with all of the universe.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-8971 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/tokarczuk.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"140\" height=\"200\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #333333;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.twistedspoon.com\/primeval.html\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><i>Primeval and Other Times<\/i><\/span><\/a>, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Twisted Spoon Press, 2010).<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\">&#8220;Set in the mythical Polish village of Primeval, a microcosm of the world guarded by four archangels and populated by eccentric, archetypal characters, the novel chronicles the lives of the inhabitants over the course of the feral 20th century in prose that is forceful, direct, and the stylistic cousin of the magic realism in Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s <em>One Hundred Years of Solitude.<\/em> Told in short bursts of \u201cTime,\u201d the narrative takes the form of a stylized fable, an epic allegory about the inexorable grind of time and the clash between modernity and nature in which Poland\u2019s tortured political history from 1914 to the 1980s is played out amid the episodic brutality visited on ordinary village life. Yet <em>Primeval and Other Times<\/em> is a novel of universal dimension that does not dwell on the parochial and it established eventual Nobel Laureate Tokarczuk as one of the leading Polish and European writers.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #333333;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-6279\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/allsaints_banner_final.jpg.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"183\" height=\"122\" \/><strong><a style=\"color: #333333;\" href=\"https:\/\/hazlitt.net\/longreads\/all-saints-mountain\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">\u201cAll Saints\u2019 Mountain,\u201d<\/span><\/a> translated by Jennifer Croft (<i>Hazlitt<\/i>, 2019).<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OLGA TOKARCZUK (b. 1962) &#8220;Tokarczuk is one of the most critically acclaimed and most translated Polish writers, with House of Day, House of Night and Primeval and Other Tales being her greatest commercial and critical successes. She studied psychology at the University of Warsaw and lives in Wa\u0142brzych. An outstanding writer, essayist and a devotee<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/?p=9042\" class=\"more-link themebutton\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9043,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1119,46],"tags":[752,16,234],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9042"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9042"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9092,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9042\/revisions\/9092"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sfintranslation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}