On the night from July third to fourth 1941, in newly occupied Lviv, the Germans arrested a group of Polish scholars, dragged them at dawn to Wuleckie Hills, and shot them in fours over a freshly dug pit. Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński died in one of those rounds. Le Testament, Tristan and Isolda, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Montaigne’s Essays, Dangerous Liaisons, Jacques the Fatalist, The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma, Père Goriot, Lost Illusions . . . Polish-French literature enthusiasts could carry on for a long time, reciting a personal debt of gratitude.
“What Boy did is unmatched anywhere in the world. He created French literature for Poland. And magnificently so,” said Joanna Guze nearly seventy years later. At that point, she herself would be a legend, and her translator’s oeuvre would make her known as “Boy in a skirt.” I doubt this would have delighted her. She did, of course, wear a skirt. And she revered Boy. But she had no patience for stock phrases.
*
Meanwhile, the year is 1941 and the German eastward push is in full swing. Guze is twenty-four years old, and is still working on her degree in philosophy and art history at Jan Kazimierz University. As of yet, she knows next to nothing of the French language. Awaiting her is an intensive Russian language course and what Leopold Tyrmand once called “communist civilization.” Before the Germans roll in, she leaves her hometown. The mathematician Hugo Steinhaus notes: “A friend of my daughter’s, Joanna Guze, left home in a light overcoat, with no suitcase, and set off with the Soviet army.”
The young woman in the light overcoat vanishes alone into the abyss of Russia. She returns three years later apparently devoid of a past or a memory. For half a century, she is silent about her trials in the East; she only mentions her prewar life in vague allusions. In July of 1944 she appears in Lublin as an educational officer in the First Polish Army, pressing westward alongside the Red Army. She has a uniform, a weapon, and a rough demeanor. Or so Julia Hartwig remembered her. Soon they would become thick as thieves, even though Joanna Guze initially made a poor impression on the younger poet.
“She wore a military uniform longer than she should have, because she had no money to buy civilian clothes . . . She was brash, self-assured, impatient with others . . . Now that she’s gone and I recall that long period of our friendship, I can say those shortcomings were largely a show of the personality that was smothered during her harrowing period in Russia,” Hartwig wrote near the end of her life.
In Lublin, Joanna Guze also met Jacek Bocheński, an eighteen-year-old publishing his first poems in Odrodzenie. The tall soldier spotted him at a morning poetry reading and invited him back to her quarters, where a few older writers were chatting over tea and cigarettes. At one point, the avant-garde poet Julian Przyboś picked up his host’s unholstered gun and began fiddling with it.
“That’s not for boys,” snapped Guze, confiscating the weapon.
*
The next two years see Guze wandering, a fate shared by many of those who lost everything during the war; here the chronology blurs, it is full of blank spaces and murky cause-and-effect relationships. She is an army commander in Puławy. During the Warsaw Uprising, she appears on the east bank of the Vistula River. She is made head of museums and monument protection in the culture department of the Polish Committee of National Liberation. In Krakow she sets up a municipal culture bureau, after which she moves to Łódź, where she finds work at the Kuźnica culture weekly.
A year later, another move. Guze gets a Ministry of Education scholarship to go to Paris with Julia Hartwig. She spends eighteen months there, makes friends, views hundreds of pictures, reads a sea of books, picks up the language at an incredible speed, and begins translating. She reinvents herself, or perhaps: makes an old dream come true.
In the fall, she gets a letter from Irena Sztachelska, a friend from Emilia Plater Independent Women’s Battalion, at her flophouse on Tournon Street, located between the Jardin de Luxembourg and Saint-Germain Boulevard. “I was just recalling,” writes Sztachelska, “one of our conversations in the dugout outside Siedlce. You, Lutka, and I were fantasizing together about what each of us would wish for. You said you wanted to study in Paris. It sounded fairly odd at the time—we had no idea what would become of us, or of things in general.”
*
She made her name with translations of the novels and essays of Albert Camus: The Plague, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel . . . She also won fame and readers’ affection with her Three Musketeers. Yet when I look at her bibliography, something else immediately sticks out: the piles of memoirs, diaries, and letters. Works that balance between stories of places, times, and people and journeys deep inward. She translated Benjamin Constant’s Intimate Journal, Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Théophile Gautier’s Wanderings in Spain, Eugène Delacroix’s Journal, the Diaries of Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Vincent van Gogh’s Letters to His Brother, Jules Renard’s Journal, Henri Frédéric Amiel’s Intimate Journal, André Gide’s Journals, the Notebooks of Camus, André Malraux’s Anti-Memoirs . . .
If reading and translation—the latter being an extreme version of the former—means relinquishing one’s own voice and opening oneself up to another’s, translating a journal would be the ultimate and most radical form of this surrender. Hours, weeks, years spent on the meticulous transfer of the lurchings of a stranger’s soul from one language to another. Monday—him. Tuesday—him. Wednesday—him. And so on, unto death. We might imagine an extreme variant of this situation. One person, probably fairly affluent, spends their life recording their daily exploits, thoughts, and emotions. Another person spends their life translating them. In her work, Joanna Guze drew near to this extreme. She did quietly what Witold Gombrowicz did with much ado: she introduced the “self” to Polish literature. Except in her case, it was other people’s “selves.” Of herself, she remained silent—though not entirely.
*
Joanna Guze first encountered Albert Camus—to be precise, his freshly published Plague—on her Paris scholarship in 1947. Though she had only been learning French for a few months, she translated a sample fragment and sent it to the editors of Nowiny Literackie. She missed it by a hair: the Krakow journal had just published an excerpt from the same novel in someone else’s translation.
*
Among the Polish scholarship holders diving into French culture in postwar Paris, Guze was not alone in spotting Camus. A year earlier, the new author Kazimierz Brandys read The Stranger in one night and woke his wife the next day, saying: “You must translate this.” Maria Brandys reacted as strongly as her husband to the story of the murderer blinded by the sun. Upon returning to Poland, she got down to translating it. Some time later, a fragment of her translation appeared in Kuźnica, with a commentary that serves as a good window to the spirit of the times and the slant of the journal. The poet Stanisław Brucz, who was heading the French translations section of Czytelnik publishers at the time, explained:
Camus’s philosophy of personality is both a product of the rot of capitalism and its instrument of revenge: condemned to death, it strives to drag a man down with it, destroying his inner mental integrity, the autonomy of his consciousness. For us, Meursault should be a warning, as an extreme symptom of capitalist antihumanism. We should juxtapose this concept of humanity with the only one that is binding and true today—the concept of the social human being.
It was this same publishing house that was soon to be releasing Camus’s novel.
The publication never saw the light of day. By the time the issue of Kuźnica with the fragment from The Stranger hit the press, a bureaucrat from the censor’s office on Mysia Street had finished a review for her superiors. “This book contains existentialism in a nutshell . . . A man lives solely in a world of his inner experiences, sensations, reflections, and impressions, creating a closed circuit,” stated the censor’s spreadsheet in point six (“brief summary of the contents, re: the book’s issues”), going on to suggest in point eight (“proposed intervention”): “Not only does the book itself demand intervention, so does its whole philosophical system, along with its author.” Point nine contained the verdict: “Do not publish.”
*
In the fall of 1951, Camus published The Rebel, a philosophical essay in which he traced the history of rebellion in modern Western thought, from de Sade and Rousseau to Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, and the Russian anarchists, up to Surrealism. To Camus’s way of thinking, rebellion was a noble stance, and one that forges bonds. It is dissent, first against an unworthy God or tyrants ruling by His authority, and later, from the nineteenth century onward, against the injustice of a world devoid of a transcendental ethical sanction. The core of the essay is part three, “Historical Rebellion.” Camus explores how rebellions are warped, and step by step—from the guillotine in Paris, to Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Feuerbach, and Lenin—lead to purgings, tortures, gulags, and the NKVD. This is what comes from idolizing History and blindly believing in its verdicts.
Such ways of thinking were dangerous in the Paris of the early 1950s, rife as it was with communism. The tone was set by sworn compagnons de voyage like Louis Aragon, Simone de Beauvoir, Paul Éluard, and Elsa Triolet, while Jean-Paul Sartre forged human souls; as Marci Shore has put it, for many European intellectuals, he stood in for God.
Back in the mid 1940s, Camus had joined Sartre in relishing Faulkner, and had confided his flings to de Beauvoir. He had planned to direct Sartre’s play No Exit and play the part of Garcin, the character who says “Hell is other people.” For Camus, those words were prophetic.
After The Rebel was published, the renegade was to be suitably punished. Sartre’s journal, Les Temps Modernes, launched the attack with a review by a young columnist, Francis Jeanson. Camus replied with an open letter to Sartre, who responded with a condescending essay. He mocked Camus’s philosophical indolence (“all that Hegel and I share is that you have read neither of us”), exposing him as a bourgeois and Hamletesque aesthete. The letter as much severed their friendship as it was anathema. Beauvoir then twisted Sartre’s blade, publishing The Mandarins, a roman à clef in which a theater director modeled on Camus, Perron, is the embodiment of hypocrisy. It won her the Prix Goncourt.
“All of Paris smirked maliciously when a certain famous actor stepped onto the stage—it was she, the lover of Perron—Camus of the Mandarins,” recalled Czesław Miłosz, who observed the hounding of Camus from up close. He knew this situation firsthand. He was only too familiar with what it meant to have friends spit in your face. A moment earlier, fleeing the Polish diplomatic post in Paris, he had broken with the Polish regime. Explaining his motivations in a piece titled “No,” published in the Kultura émigré journal, the press showered him with insults, both in Poland and abroad. In 1954—the same year The Mandarins was released in France—Kazimierz Brandys published a short story, “Before He’s Forgotten,” in Kuźnica. His protagonist is a calculating painter, Wejmont (modeled on a version of Miłosz’s biography, adapted for propaganda purposes), who takes advantage of a trip to Vienna to flee to the West. Miłosz responded in Kultura with “Thoughts on a Closed Community,” juxtaposing The Mandarins with Brandys’s lampoon, and the inbred conformism of the Parisian cafes with the Warsaw writers who supported the regime.
*
The political and cultural thaw in mid-1950s Poland paved the way for the publication of modern Western authors who had been absent or only marginally available in Polish translation: Beckett, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Camus.
This process was not without its problems. Irena Szymańska, a legendary publisher tied to Czytelnik and PIW, longed to publish The Plague. For PIW, where she was editor-in-chief, she was planning a series of thirty-five masterpieces of the twentieth century, and was hoping to place Camus in the collection. She received an icy response from Gallimard—the author did not wish to appear in the same series as the communist Louis Aragon. This should have come as no great surprise, given the harassment and insults that Camus had endured in France for several years. But obstacles of this sort were no great problem for Szymańska. With the aid of the bilingual Jerzy Lisowski (who translated Iwaszkiewicz and Schulz into French and Sartre and Malraux into Polish) she composed a letter in which she courteously pointed out that, in France, Camus’s books, like Aragon’s, were released in the Blanche collection. Did Camus want to treat his Polish readers differently from his French ones? Camus backed down.
The translation was assigned to Joanna Guze. When it was ready, Camus got ahold of the typescript and then asked Paris-based artist Józef Czapski to rate the translation and verify that no interference was made on the last page. He probably had the final paragraph in mind, the one stating that the plague microbe never dies, whose symbolic meaning may have irked the censors. Czapski offered to look it over with his sister, Maria, a translator of François Mauriac and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He did not spare the praise for Joanna Guze:
I would like to stress that your translator is a person I would certainly recommend, were you to ask for my opinion. She is a young and talented woman, educated and quite brave, who stood up for the oppressed in a dark time, a translator of Baudelaire. I am certain she has made every effort to render your work as best she could, and, as far as I know her, she would prefer to be cut into pieces than to permit the slightest dishonesty.
The next day he added a postscript to the same letter:
Before sending this letter, my sister and I read perhaps the first ten pages of the translation. The use of language is tremendous, and moreover, it holds onto your “aura.” Read once more in silence, the same text is quite free of excess.Always generous and ready to be of service, Czapski would not hear of remuneration. Camus signed him a set of the Pleiade edition of Proust and sent it to him in gratitude.
I promise that over the coming days we will read it out loud, parallel with the French original, and then send it on to you.
*
In the first half of 1957, Joanna Guze reaches out to Camus. She informs him of plans to publish The Fall in June. She writes she is translating The State of Siege—a parabolic play about the origins of absolutism—after which she will embark upon the short-story collection Exile and the Kingdom. Polish television wants to air a performance of The State of Siege in a trimmed version. She considered this impermissible and has refused to hand over the translation. Is this correct? Camus replies that it is and, perhaps taken by her loyalty and Czapski’s praise, informs the Polish ZAiKS society of authors that in future he will entrust all his books to Joanna Guze. They were officially a couple.
In early fall, Guze writes Camus with news about The State of Siege. The play is being staged by Krystyna Skuszanka at the Ludowy Theater in the Nowa Huta district of Krakow. Guze writes with enthusiasm of the young director and her ensemble, of her bravado in going to the industrial town to perform a classical repertoire for the working-class audiences.
The letter also contains news of her translation plans. She has finished Exile and the Kingdom and is intending to move on to The Rebel, but PIW is opposed to the idea. Meanwhile, Guze seeks to publish a fragment in the Europa monthly, slotted to begin coming out in the fall.
Many journals got their start in the Thaw era, and some have survived to this day. Europa assembled a group of Warsaw intellectuals in their forties, feeling hungover from Stalinism, when they all “flirted or got in bed with the Party,” as one of them put it. The journal was meant to repair the ties between Polish and Western European culture that had been broken in the Stalinist era. The excerpt from The Rebel was the perfect fit.
Camus wrote back to Joanna Guze:
I am grateful that you are so good as to want to take on The Rebel. That book is important to me for many reasons, and if it were to be released in Poland I would have, so to speak, a sense of having made good on a promise. I would be grateful, and shall not soon forget it.
The late reply did not find its addressee in Warsaw. Taking advantage of the borders finally being open, Joanna Guze had set off for Paris, nine years after her scholarship journey. She was there when on Thursday, October 16, the news broke: Camus had received the Nobel Prize.
The author was deluged: telegrams, phone calls, congratulations, interviews; friends, suppliants, bootlickers, and those who were jealous. Joanna Guze, always prone to hang back in the shadows, hesitated to bother him. Yet in the end, she called. Camus invited her to Gallimard Publishers, where he had his office.
*
“I was smoking a lot at the time. He got up every time, walked around the table, and gave me a light. I liked him a lot. He spoke not about literature, but about me. Where had I been in Russia? What had I seen there? He was a ladies’ man, you could sense that in his books,” she recalled years later.
In Joanna Guze’s private library I found Réflexions sur la peine capitale, written jointly by Camus and Arthur Koestler, published in 1957. The title page has an undated dedication: à Madame Joanna Guze en très reconnaissant hommage—Albert Camus. This was doubtless a souvenir from their only encounter.
She had not yet managed to return to Warsaw, nor he to travel to Stockholm, before ill tidings came from Poland. On November 2, a messenger came to send Europa’s entire editorial staff packing. The decision to dissolve the journal had come from Władysław Gomułka himself.
It became clear that there would be no publishing a translation of The Rebel. Guze wrote to Camus with a new plan: publishing the book with Jerzy Giedroyc in Paris. Of course, she wrote, it would be better in Warsaw, but books put out by Kultura reached Poland and were read. Camus agreed, Guze got to work. At the end of the year she sent him one more letter, unrelated to literature:
Dear Sir,If she herself was happy in the following year—this we cannot say. We do know that she broke her back over The Rebel, as she wrote as much to Giedroyc (“a very difficult piece of writing, I’ve not worked on anything more stubborn in my life”), mentioning that all his letters to her were monitored. She sent the manuscript to the publishers—perhaps through a trusted individual, perhaps in person during her summer visit to Paris—and in the fall of 1958, The Rebel was released by the Kultura Library series. The translator was not credited.
I do not know the traditions in France; on Christmas Eve here, when the first star comes out, we wish one another happiness in the coming year and break Christmas wafers together. This is called breaking opłatek. And we save a bit of the wafer for friends who are not with us. Then we light the candles on the tree, some in their memory. My daughter lit yours, and here is the wafer we put aside for you. I send it along with the best of wishes.
“I would prefer that matters concerning the translation of The Rebel were known only to yourself and the editor at Kultura, whom I told, upon submitting the manuscript, that I would be unable to sign it . . .” she wrote to Camus in a letter she sent from Paris, just to be safe. “I need not tell you how I was counting on publishing The Rebel, nor assure you that I made every effort to make my translation honest, even where this may not have been good. I only ask you try to appreciate my circumstances: when you live in a country where the last word always belongs to foreign assassins, you must take this into consideration.”
*
How much was she truly risking? Just two years earlier the journal had published, under her name, a reprint of her article about the financial straits of Polish painters, with no repercussions. Around October, Giedroyc had openly conferred with the editors at Europa by phone. But in early 1958—before the publication of The Rebel in Paris—Hanna Szarzyńska-Rewska was arrested for working with Kultura. She was sentenced to three years, and came out after eleven months. In February 1962, Anna Rudzińska stood before a court in Warsaw, accused of translating a book by an American sociologist for Giedroyc. Before that, the Secret Service had trailed her, intercepted her letters, and bugged her phone.
A chance to print the banned book came with the next thaw. In the early Gierek1 period, in 1971, PIW published Camus’s Essays; alongside “The Myth of Sisyphus,” “The Right Side and the Wrong Side,” “Letters to a German Friend,” and “The Notebooks,” there was a selection from The Rebel. As readers in communist Poland knew, “selection” was often a euphemism for “censorship.” The same was true here: the “Historical Rebellion” section vanished entirely, with its polemical reading of Marx and Feuerbach. A few years later, Camus’s books began coming out in the underground press: at least six uncensored editions were released. The first fully legal domestic edition was only published after the fall of communism.
*
The political shift at the close of the 1950s sunk The Rebel, but for several years before that, Camus was everywhere in Poland. The newspapers printed fragments of translations, sketches, reviews, and profiles of the author. The theaters played Caligula and State of Siege. The Plague, Exile and the Kingdom, and The Stranger were (finally) published. The Fall also came out.
This short novel takes the form of a spoken monologue. At night, in an Amsterdam dive called “Mexico-City,” a man introduces himself as Jean-Baptiste Clamence and sits down to tell an anonymous fellow about his life. He was a sought-after Parisian lawyer, specializing in noble causes, helping unfortunates. He excelled at sports, dabbled in philanthropy, held widespread respect, appealed to women, was wealthy, healthy, and handsome, and, above all, self-satisfied. One night, walking across the Seine, he passed a girl leaning over the bridge. A moment later he heard a cry and a splash. He froze, but did not go to help. That began his fall. Clamence loses self-respect and stops sensing it from others. He discovers his nobility was a pose to earn applause and self-satisfaction. The trajectory of his fall takes him to the Mexico-City. There he becomes a penitent judge: he confesses his guilt to chance passersby, then takes their confessions.
This does not sound realistic, but realism was not the point. What, then, is The Fall? A collection of snappy quotes cobbled into a story? A parable of how, as someone says in The Brothers Karamazov, “each of us is guilty for everything to everyone”? The story of a search for values in a godless world? A veiled confession by the author, who was no longer able to bear being a moral authority?
*
The discerning eye will see the Sartre–Camus conflict reflected in The Fall. Who is the intended target of the occasional spiteful comments about “our professional humanists” who adore writing manifestos, slumming in cafes, and extolling the virtues of a classless society? Apparently the rough draft had more of these jabs, but Camus crossed them out, not wanting to turn his novel into a pamphlet. Sartre actually liked The Fall. The literary rebuttals came from elsewhere. A few months after The Fall was released in Polish, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz wrote a short story called “The High,” dedicating it “To Albert Camus.”
Like The Fall, “The High” is a monologue in a cafe, though told by a young construction worker who recounts his life story to a chance companion in a bar outside Warsaw over shots of vodka and greasy sausages. He was born a few years before the war, he saw its nightmares through a child’s eyes. The Soviets deported his mother to Kazakhstan, his brother died in Auschwitz, his father in the woods. Little Romek (the narrator) stole coal, smuggled food, swilled vodka. He saw two Jewish women executed at a suburban train station (“And they crumpled the way people always fall when they’re shot. In the twentieth century, I really don’t need to tell you how people fall when they’re shot”) and watched Poles and Germans die. He robbed corpses, plundered houses, killed, served time. In his story, everything that could have been beautiful suddenly reveals a grim face. Friendship ends in betrayal, love in abortion. The titular high is what the vodka brings: first comes elation, then the phantoms.
Those who associate Iwaszkiewicz with the melancholy of “The Maids of Wilko” and “The Birch Grove” might be taken aback at “The High.” Iwaszkiewicz abandons the mood of his prose, the atmosphere and language here recall early Hłasko. A cheap dive, lots of bar talk. And suddenly, in this realism, amid the blue-collar expletives, the author drops an allusion to Camus. “Have you read that book where a girl tosses herself from a bridge?” Romek asks his listener.
This reference comes out of nowhere. Iwaszkiewicz knew the world of his protagonist too well not to know this. He was an experienced writer, he did not need to prop himself up with a reference to Camus. To signal a polemic, the title, dedication, and ironic use of the word “fall” at the beginning were enough. What was this for? Why did he weaken a great story with this cheap stunt? Maybe it was rage. Maybe Clamence’s display stoked such blind fury in him that he was ready to wreck his novella, so that through the narrator he might spit on the preening know-it-all in The Fall. “The stinking cream-puff,” as Romek calls him.
*
In the fall of 1959, Albert Camus was alone in the Provençal town of Lourmarin, where he had bought a home with his Nobel Prize money. He was writing a novel, ignoring invitations to contribute his work and travel abroad. He was planning to return to Paris right after the new year. He bought a train ticket but ultimately chose to return by car with a friend, Michel Gallimard. Early in the afternoon on January 4, on a straight stretch of road just past the town of Sens, the speeding Facel Vega spun out and crashed into a roadside plane tree. Camus was killed on the spot; Gallimard died in the hospital.
*
In the decades that followed, Guze returned several times to Camus, translating his essays, diaries, and theater adaptations. In 1994, The First Man was released in France, Camus’s unfinished book, edited by his daughter, Catherine, based on a manuscript found at the scene of his demise. For the translator, this came as an unexpected gift. She was given one last chance to translate her favorite author. She was quite fond of The First Man; Camus’s autobiographical inspiration spoke to her.
“Just think,” she commented to Jan Kott, “if he had finished The First Man, he would have stripped away that intimate tone (which scared him like the plague) and all the confessions that give this book its meaning.”
Soon after translating The First Man, Guze also published a book of her own on Camus. This brief sketch, weighing in at sixty-nine pages, is called Albert Camus: Fate and Lessons. Of The First Man she wrote:
“This is myself and the ones dear to me; my land and those I have loved; this is what I have come from, what I owe myself to, without which I would be nothing . . . The truth of my life, stripped of all metaphors, suddenly becomes crucial. This is the stuff of Camus’s most personal book.”
The First Man, she added, is a book “in which [Camus] revealed himself as nowhere else; not entirely, but perhaps this is just as well, because it is hard to say what parts of a person’s life ought to be exposed, and what should remain concealed.”
“The truth of one’s own life . . . is suddenly of the utmost necessity.” Guze published Fate and Lessons in 2004, five years before her death. This was her last book. In that same period she wrote her only autobiographical piece, Lviv, and East of Lviv, wartime recollections of her time in the Soviet Union. She had finally reached the point in her life when she could speak in the first person. She could reveal herself—though only in part.
__________________
1Edward Gierek (1913–2001) – First Secretary of the United Polish Workers’ Party in the 1970s and the acting leader of Poland during that time.
