Thursday, November 20 at 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Center for Brooklyn History
128 Pierrepont St, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Please, RSVP

Join us at the Center for Brooklyn History for an evening with translator Bill Johnston and Will Chancellor, novelist and critic, as they discuss Johnston’s translation of Needle’s Eye, the latest novel by renowned Polish author Wiesław Myśliwski. A lyrical, nonlinear meditation on memory, time, and history, Needle’s Eye blends autobiography and fiction to reflect on a half-century of Polish life.

The book is the third one published by Archipelago Books, New York first and second being Stone Upon Stone (Kamień na kamieniu), trans. Bill Johnston (2011) and A Treatise on Shelling Beans (Traktat o łuskaniu fasoli), trans. Bill Johnston (2013).

In Season 3, Episode 10 of Encounters with Polish Literature, we explore the work of Wiesław Myśliwski with translator Bill Johnston, focusing on Stone Upon Stone and his latest novel, Needle’s Eye—his most experimental narrative to date, set for English release next year by Archipelago Books. The episode delves into Myśliwski’s signature blend of philosophical reflection and everyday life under communism, as well as the translation process and collaboration with both the author and publisher Jill Schoolman.

About the book: In a Polish village, a young man watches an old man trip and fall down a flight of stairs. From this singular event arises a cascade of memories, regrets, and longings: the buried sensations of a whole lifetime, condensed and released. We hear of life during occupation, the scarcities of a childhood lived under the sign of war—and fragments of a home’s sounds and scents (the private speech of mothers and fathers, the treasures of coffee, raisins, almonds, and plums). There are loves unrequited and fulfilled, landscapes of winter and spring, old jobs and old friends, all flowing together.  

Wiesław Myśliwski’s latest novel is a personal epic written on the smallest scale. Its narrator, a medieval historian in his latter years, lives surrounded by images of the past. From within this wandering mind, Myśliwski has composed his own ode to lost time, a nonlinear, chameleonic meditation on a half-century of Polish life as it does not appear in the historical record. Part autobiography, part dreambook, Needle’s Eye is both a writer’s farewell to the Poland of his youth and an extended address, like the final lecture prepared by its narrator, on the persistence and necessity of memory.

About the author: Wiesław Myśliwski is the only writer to have twice received the Nike Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award: in 1997 for his novel Horizon and again in 2007 for A Treatise on Shelling Beans. He worked as an editor at the People’s Publishing Cooperative and at the magazines Regiony and Sycyna. In addition to the Nike Prize, Myśliwski has received the Stanisław Pietak Prize, the Arts Ministry Prize, the State Prize, the Reymont Prize, the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation Award, and the Golden Sceptre Award. In Polish literature, Wiesław Myśliwski is considered a representative of the peasant current, although his works significantly transcend this category. Moral and existential themes, along with his characters’ distinct sense of responsibility for themselves and others, place his prose and drama among universal parables about the complex nature of the world and the unpredictability of human fate. The writer’s pen has given the contemporary Polish countryside expression, and its inhabitants—dignity, character, and a touch of magic. To learn more, read The Novels of Wiesław Myśliwski by Sam Munson.

Bill Johnston received the 2019 National Translation Award in Poetry for his rendering of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic narrative poem in rhyming couplets Pan Tadeusz (Archipelago Books, 2018). He translates from Polish and French; his recent translations have included work by Julia Fiedorczuk, Wiesław Myśliwski, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, and Jeanne Benameur. His other honors include the PEN Translation Prize, the Best Translated Book Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches literary translation at Indiana University. 

Author of the novel A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (Harper Perennial, 2014), Will Chancellor is currently writing an alternate history of the Soviet space program titled The Meaning of Certain Dreams. He edits fiction at the Brooklyn Rail. His writing has appeared in Bookforum, Lit Hub, The New York Times Magazine, Interview, Electric Literature, The White Review, and The New York Times. He recently wrote on the Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda for David Zwirner books (Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo). 

This event is co-sponsored by Archipelago Books, Brooklyn Public Library, the Polish Cultural Institute, and The Brooklyn Rail.