Out of a Shredder

...Since his decision to stay in the West in the wake of martial law, Brandys has been busy continuing to write The Months, three volumes of which have so far been issued by both émigré and Polish underground presses...

...Born in 1916, Brandys has been a presence in postwar Polish literature since the moment of its inception and has participated in all of its historic ups and downs...

...The last sentence puts this reviewer in a state of mental torment: As someone who happens to have read both the Polish and English versions, I am torn between gratitude to Random House for having made Brandys' illuminating work available to the American reader, and resentment that it has been mutilated so terribly and inexplicably...

...Close to the Socialist Left during his prewar student years, he was one of the staunchest supporters of Poland's new political order in the decade following the War...

...Especially characteristic is his method of creating a work of fiction by employing seemingly nonfictional genres and forms of discourse...

...In addition, certain reflections by Brandys, notably those dealing with the intricacies of Polish history and literature, might be considered too specific and too hard for an American audience to follow...

...Not that he was completely unknown in the West...

...In his numerous subsequent books Brandys has never ceased to explore the highly complex and difficult moralistic issues resulting from the Polish intelligentsia's involvement in modern history...

...While his debut, the novel A Wooden Horse written in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and published in 1946, was still a rather avant-garde, ironic and grotesque analysis of the breakdown of the liberal mindset in the face of civilization's catastrophe, his tetralogy Between the Wars (1948-51) and particularly his novel The Citizens (1954) were marked by all the typical oversimplifications and shortcomings ofpropagandistic Socialist Realism...

...Yet exactly what rule guided the editor in killing many of the best passages of the original remains a total mystery to me...

...His classic collection of essays in epistolary form Letters to Mrs...

...In fact, most of his recent American publications, except for the excellently translated A Warsaw Diary, leave much to be desired as far as editorial care is concerned...

...it tends to include profound thoughts and relevant observations along with passages of lesser importance...

...Numerous arresting thoughts and incisive observations have disappeared in the American edition...

...As matters stand, however, it appears the editor's instrument here was not a scissors but a paper shredder...

...It presents the history of one Polish family over several centuries through a series of letters by its consecutive members, and each letter exudes the magnificently captured flavor of the language of its respective epoch...

...Z, for instance, was issued last year by Decernber Press in a stupendously bad, at times almost unintelligible translation...

...Their artistic merits aside, works of this kind brought upon Brandys the wrath of the Polish authorities, whose hired critics began to accuse him in the '70s, not without distinct anti-Semitic overtones, of falsifying Polish history...

...One such book was The Months, his memoir, or rather personal chronicle, of the fateful late '70s in Warsaw, published in English as A Warsaw Diary...

...Any attempt to go back would have been foolish: After all, over the previous two decades Brandys had been one of the best known representatives of dissent in Polish literature, and indeed his name immediately sprang up as one of the favorite targets on the hit lists of martial law propaganda...

...The memoir's focus is actually the author's allpervading sense of alienation: the alienation of an Eastern European in the West, the alienation of an old man amid the young, the alienation of someone who still dares to hope in a world that seems to have given up on hope...

...This, give or take a few details, is what happened to the prominent Polish novelist and essayist Kazimierz Brandys when he arrived in New York at the end of 1981...

...At the same time, during the '60s and '70s he was tirelessly broadening his esthetic range by experimenting...

...In 1976 he co-founded the first uncensored Polish literary journal, Zapis(The Record), and his books, more and more indigestible for the censor, soon afterward began to be produced by underground publishing houses...

...At that point, Brandys was already deeply involved in the rapid fermentation of intellectual dissent that directly preceded the emergence of Solidarity...

...On the contrary, Brandys has ranked for many years among the most widely translated contemporary Polish writers, though his output is not as readily available in English as it is in French, German or Italian...

...In Poland, he was himself, Kazimierz Brandys, a writer with his own clearly defined personality, his individual history of complicated political and artistic evolution, his sharply delineated circles of admirers and detractors, his particular place in his native literature...

...But if Brandys shared—and profusely contributed to—the pro-Communist illusions and misplaced dreams of the intellectuals of his generation, he was also one of the first to raise his voice in protest when the system's abuses became more apparent...

...author, "A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert" Imagine yourself as a writer in your mid-60s who has just arrived for a brief visit to a Western metropolis, half a world apart from your small and exotic homeland...

...No wonder the focus of Brandys' memoir is not really New York or Paris (where he eventually settled and feels more comfortable...

...It is relatively easy to live out of your suitcase and wait for the dust to settle in your faraway country if you are young and strong enough to carry that suitcase...

...Paris, New York: 1982-1984 is the English version of the third volume...

...True, a memoir can easily become rambling and disorganized...

...You can t return...

...It would be deplorable yet still understandable if Brandys' book had been made shallow, if the editor's scissors had cut out anything that was difficult...

...As you set foot on the foreign pavement, you learn that a military coup was staged in your country and all your friends were arrested...

...it is a heavily edited abbreviation, and this fact is not mentioned on the cover or anywhere else...

...His short stories and novels published in the mid-'50s (including a brief novel on the fate of a worker's family under Communism, known in English as Sons and Comrades) formed an essential part of the sweeping Polish cultural "thaw...

...Some of his later novels, for example, take on the shape of an interview or a sequence of letters...

...Like many of his fellow Poles who had the misfortune—or good fortune, depending on your point of view —to be visiting the West exactly when martial law was imposed on their country, he had no other choice than to stay put and wait for new developments...

...That is not the kind of baggage that you can pack for a trip on an intercontinental airline...

...But you write in a language that almost nobody around understands...

...His crowning achievement in this regard is the stylistically brilliant (and, alas, hardly translatable) novel Postal Variations (1972...

...In principle, then, some cuts may have been necessary...

...continuity and cohesion suffer at every step of the way, not only in the sense of destruction of logic but also in terms of sheer consecution of facts and events described...

...Reviewed by Stanislaw Baranczak Alfred Jurzykowski Professor of Polish Language and Literature, Harvard...

...You are stranded with your elderly wife, your two suitcases and your frail health on the shore of an alien continent...

...For Brandys, who could see that the situation in Poland might not improve within his lifetime, the very sense of being stranded indefinitely outside his country, language and culture was tantamount to a personal disaster...

...a logical argument is more than once left dangling in mid-paragraph and never picked up...

...Neither is it Poland, even though his comments on the events in his country, and reflections on their historical roots and cultural contexts, form a large part of the book...

...Based on the reading of this edition alone, one would have a hard time trying to reconstruct even what happened to Brandys between 1982 and 1984 in New York and Paris, let alone the entire system of his opinions and arguments...

...The only thing you can count on is your writing skills...

...For Paris, New York: 1982-1984 is not simply a translation of the original book...

...You have no command of the language, no source of income in sight, no literary recognition to speak of, and no Social Security benefits to soothe your old age...

...In the West, however, he is merely one of those numerous, more or less intriguing writers from Central Europe...

...Only about a half of the full text has been preserved in this edition, and regardless of whether the cuts were made with or without the author's consent, they did the book a disastrous disservice...