I took the face out, carefully, trying not to damage the reflection, a little fragile and warm still. The plaster mask cooled slowly in my hands, as I looked at its interior. I could see the imprint of the eye brows and nose, forehead and lips. I could see myself from within.
I was overwhelmed by a strange feeling. Probably not because I had made the first ever plaster cast of my own face and could see something I had never looked upon before (no mirror could offer such a perspective), but also because I had read Paz’s poems about the process of permeation. His words speak of touch, and the aftermath of touch, the kind I was experiencing having removed the mask in the cool, empty room which served as my workspace that night.
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Polish Writing’s stimulating interview with Soren Gauger, Krakow-based Canadian translator.
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Bio below… for Polish readers, more of same po polsku na indepenedent.pl
Soren A. Gauger grew up and was educated in Vancouver Canada. He moved to Krakow, Poland in 1998 to study Polish language and literature. Having taught literature at Jagiellonian University, he is now a freelance writer and translator, regularly contributing articles on culture to The Krakow Post and Month in Krakow. His fiction has appeared in journals internationally, including Capilano Review, Chicago Review, Jacob’s Ladder, and Prague Literary Review, as well as a chapbook of short stories, Quatre Regards sur L’Enfant Jesus (Ravenna Press, 2004). His translations include Waiting for the Dog to Sleep by Jerzy Ficowski and Wojciech Jagielski’s Towers of Stone (Seven Stories Press), and he is currently translating Bruno Jasienski’s novel I Burn Paris, to be published by Twisted Spoon Press.
Our bestest friends, Minimalbooks, an on-line journal going the other way – publishing lots of English language writing in Polish translation, as well as some fabulous Polish language writing in the original, has just revamped.
Cleaner and sharper than before, pay them constant visits…
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OFF_EDS
Evening time. Workers streaming out of factories and workshops, vanishing somewhere in empty space. The chill of rotting leaves slowly envelopes all. Before us once more the vast and rather inconsequential mystery of life playing itself out – slowly seeping through everything.
Icy silence, black abandoned trees, grey empty parks, hollow streets, the smell of chimney smoke, alleys abandoned and extinguished, littered with leaves. The light cool already, slowly departing, so unlike that which fully warms in July. Now is time to put on a thick sweater, a woollen scarf and hole up somewhere far from people. Reading books, firing up the stove, taking long walks in deserted parks, studying this slow and silent provincial life; shrunken women wandering through the dusk after work, shopkeepers noticing and with some ever so subtle gestures letting us know they too sense the same melancholy and the cool, ancient sadness, in spite of their inherent coarseness. Read the rest of this entry »
