A warm clasp of the hand to Marcin Piekoszewski, Howard Sidenberg, Stan Bill, and Scotia Gilroy for their patient and intelligent help.
About the Author
Poet, novelist, and playwright, Bruno Jasienski (1901–1939) was born in Klimontów, Poland. Having authored in 1921 “To the Polish Nation: A Manifesto on the Immediate Futurization of Life” and “Manifesto on Futurist Poetry” he became the unquestionable leader of Polish Futurism, writing poetry that was marked by dynamism and absurdity. In 1925, he emigrated to France but was deported after his novel I Burn Paris was published in 1928. He spent the last decade of his life in the USSR working for the Union of Soviet Writers and producing work in Russian, chief among which were the play The Mannequins’ Ball (1931) and the novel Man Sheds His Skin (1934). Arrested in 1937, Jasienski was expelled from the Party, put on trial, and sentenced to fifteen years in the gulag. Thought for many years to have died in transit some time in 1939, it is now known that he was executed on September 17, 1938, in Moscow’s Butyrka prison. The Brunonalia Festival is held annually in his honor in Klimontów.
About the Translators
Soren A. Gauger is from Vancouver, Canada, and has resided in Kraków for over a decade. His translations include Waiting for the Dog to Sleep by Jerzy Ficowski, Towers of Stone by Wojciech Jagielski, and Bruno Jasienski’s Futurist texts in The Legs of Izolda Morgan. His own writing has appeared in numerous journals and includes a collection of stories, Hymns to Millionaires, and a novella soon to be published.
Marcin Piekoszewski studied at the English Departments of Opole University and Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, graduating from the latter in American Literature. Having worked as a teacher, translator, journalist, and bookseller, he currently lives in Berlin where he runs Buchbund, a Polish-German bookstore.
Copyright
Translation copyright © 2012 by Soren A. Gauger, Marcin Piekoszewski
This edition copyright © 2012 by Twisted Spoon Press
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be used or reproduced in any form, except in the context of reviews, without written permission from the Publisher.
Originally published in Polish as Palę Paryż by Towarzystwo Wydawnicze “Rój” (Warsaw) in 1929.
First serialized in 1928 in French in L’Humanité.
Earlier versions of parts of the translation have appeared in Antithesis, Asymptote, and Calque to whose editors we are grateful.
Cover by Dan Mayer
Published in 2012 by
Twisted Spoon Press
P.O. Box 21 – Preslova 12
150 21 Prague 5, Czech Republic
ISBN 978-80-86264-37-0 (illustrated hardcover)
ISBN 978-80-86264-75-2 (e-book)
This publication has been funded by the Book Institute – the ©POLAND Translation Program.