I’ve been happy since the morning. Delighted, even. Everything seems so splendidly transient to me. That dust, from which thou art and unto which thou shalt return — it tempts me. And that’s why I wander about these roads, these woods, among the nearby houses, from which waft the aromas of fried pork chops, chicken soup, fish, diapers, steamed potatoes for the pigs; I lose my eye-sight, and regain it again. I don’t know what life is, Ola, but I’m holding on to it.
Thus speaks the narrator of Rafał Wojasiński’s novel Olanda. Awarded the prestigious Marek Nowakowski Prize for 2019, Olanda introduces us to a world we glimpse only through the window of our train, as we hurry from one important city to another: a provincial world of dilapidated farmhouses and sagging apartment blocks, overgrown cemeteries and village drunks; a world seemingly abandoned by God — and yet full of the basic human joy of life itself.
Our English translation of Olanda, which includes the radio play Old Man Kalina, brings one of Poland’s great contemporary writers of fiction to the wider world for the first time. These narratives may not contain the entire world, just like a village at the end of a dirt road running through ponds, that floods after a heavy rain, does not contain all that may be found in Warsaw. But the world they contain is an intriguing one, in which everyone, from aging beauties through gravedigger philosophers, defrocked seminarians and even the occasional politician, is welcome.
Translator
Charles S. Kraszewski (born 1962) is a poet, novelist and translator working in English and Polish. He is the author of three volumes of original verse in English and two in Polish, and of the satirical novels Accomplices, You Ask? and At the Tone. He translates from Polish, Czech and Slovak; his translations for Glagoslav include Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve, Tytus Czyżewski’s A Burglar of the Better Sort, and Rafał Wojasiński’s Olanda and Tefil. He is a member of the Union of Polish Writers Abroad (London) and the Association of Polish Writers (SPP, Kraków). In 2022 he received the Gloria Artis medal from the Polish Ministry of Culture, and in 2023 the ZAiKS award for translation into a foreign language.
Endorsements and Review Quotes
“I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I picked this book up, but I was gripped by the narrative voice from the start and read through it almost in one go. There’s a slightly dream-like quality to the writing; the characters and their stories will stay with you.” Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
“A casual reading of this book might suggest that it is about nothing much but as we have known at least since the days of Flaubert, there are some very good books about nothing much. This is one of them. […] Wojasiński has written a work which must surely become a classic of Polish literature.” The Modern Novel
“Charles S. Kraszewski’s translation of Wojasiński’s Olanda presents the Anglophone world a work that is both complex and yet approachable at the same time: a joy to read and a challenge to analyze. Though a work of prose, its language is highly poetic, but a poetry that never falls into esotericism.”
Jack J. B. Hutchens, The Polish Review
