Note from the Translator

When my dad first started talking about writing a book, I didn’t imagine eventually I’d be tasked with translating it. When he finished writing it, he asked me to translate the dedication into English, because it was an American story. I remember first getting the manuscript my father printed in 2006. It must’ve taken a year to get through the first five pages. It just didn’t seem possible that I could do this. Although I learned to speak Polish in the home from my parents at the same time that I was learning English from the television, I had never had any formal training. I can speak it easily, if not quite fluently, but reading was difficult and writing skills are just non-existent. At the very least then, the task of translating Skyliner could be an exercise in learning to read in Polish. After all, picking up the manuscript sporadically to try to plow through a few sentences wouldn’t work and I didn’t think I had the dedication to learn Polish just to read my dad’s book and not translate it. So when my father’s book was picked up by a publisher in Poland, probably sometime in 2008, I began a serious attempt at translating the text. I knew the process of simply reading it in Polish would take an incredibly long time, so I decided I would translate it as I read, along with my father, to get the most meaning out of each word, really, of the book, as I came along it. This was largely done with my father, on my laptop, with a Polish-English dictionary, an English dictionary, a Thesaurus and Google (for historical figures, of which there are plenty, and obscure terminology, of which there is a bit). I actually bought a very heavy Polish-English dictionary at some sort of specialty Polish store to which my father sent me, but it did not take him to look up two words to realize it would not be so helpful. In fact the various online Polish-English dictionaries sufficed for what we needed, something to help me and my father understand each other on the finer points of some meaning. My reading skills, I’d like to think, improved pretty quickly while we read and translated. I picked up on the grammar about a fourth of the text in. Polish grammar is a bit different from English grammar, in that there is more discretion in subject-verb order. Because of this, the subject of a sentence would sometimes appear at the end of it, followed by text that worked off the subject, not whatever action might have taken place in the sentence. One of the major mistakes I made at first was attempting to retain and preserve as much of this structure as possible. This made the very first draft of the text very difficult to read. The process of getting that first draft took probably a little more than a year and a half. While it was a very time-consuming process, through which I had the entire time a full time job, additional difficulties contributed to the time it took to produce that first, very literal draft. I worked on a laptop that was on its last legs and our internet connection was not always there. This was the biggest obstacle. An undertaking like this requires the use of the Internet. To find out what a feldsher is, exactly, or a baker boy cap, or what to call a carabine. Largely where foreign words are kept in place, I’ve tried to italicize them. Some words are Anglicized or otherwise appropriated into use for an English text. The literal draft was completed in early 2010, after which I set it aside for a few months, and then re-read the text for the first time, editing out a lot of the really difficult literal stuff in there and correcting typographical and other errors. After this I took another break, and then set about editing the text for popular consumption. At the end of the day, it is no secret that the setting for this story is Poland, circa 1954, although the author does make the particular city somewhat of a secret. There are clues throughout, such as the blue streetcars, the appearance of Pablo Picasso in the city’s history and most importantly for the narrative itself, the status of the town as formerly German, and one that could be returned to them by the Soviets at any time. Though the main story told in the narrative is of youthful adventure, it is inextricably tied to the sociopolitical situation surrounding the characters. World War II is a sharp memory, still very much real in the landscape of the country, Joseph Stalin still looms in the atmosphere despite being dead for more than a year, and the task of building communism is a very real thing. But perhaps the most important political actor in the text never really appears—America. From the title, a work by Charlie Barnett, to the mention of dozens of jazz musicians and jazz pieces that very much affected the narrator and his social world, America is a central character. The narrator compares himself to Humphrey Bogart on multiple occasions and Sokal’s harrowing story of escape from Austria at the outset of World War II is most interesting for how he came to Benny Goodman and his mastery of clarinet. I think translating this work into English was most important because although this story is largely set in post-war Poland, it is very much an American story. There is no love lost between the narrator and his native Poland, throughout the work, America is the aspiration and, indeed, the cultural animator. American clothes, American music and American lifestyle are what matters. And getting at large sums of money, the narrator knows, will actually get him there and out of a communist world he despises in every appearance of it in this very American story. I hope you enjoy it.
EdSeptember 18, 2011Newark.