Bill Johnston
Bill Johnston is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. His translations include Witold Gombrowicz’s Bacacay; Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, Moving Parts, Flaw, and In Red; Jerzy Pilch’s His Current Woman and The Mighty Angel; Stefan Żeromski’s The Faithful River; and Fado and Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk. In 1999 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship for Translation. In 2008 he won the inaugural Found in Translation Award for Tadeusz Rozewicz’s new poems, and in 2012 he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize and Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award for Myśliwski's Stone Upon Stone.
Wiesław Myśliwski’s seventh novel, Needle’s Eye, presents a memory of an ancient gate in the writer's hometown of Sandomierz, Poland. You can see the halation, that salty glow of daylight memories, right from the outset. An elderly man muses on love and says he will give the narrator his life, only to collapse down flights of stairs, lifeless. The ensuing investigation will remind readers of Kafka, but there is an escalating doubt and pervasive confusion that put me in the mind of Ferenc Karinthy’s excellent novel Metropole. As the narrative tumbles forward, the diffusion of time and memory swells. Characters speak like people speak in dreams, paying out chains of semi-logic that assume profound weight in the moment. The undeniable brilliance of this work, and the other Myśliwski books I've read, makes me suspect he’s not far from being the sort of obscure Central European writer who shocks everyone and wins a Nobel.