Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [0]
Originally published in Poland in 1937
with the title Sanatorium pod Klepsydra.
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CIP data is available. ISBN 0-395-86023-7
Printed in the United States of America
QUM 10 987654 3 21
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
He was small, unattractive and sickly, with a thin angular body and brown, deep-set eyes in a pale triangular face. He taught art at a secondary school for boys at Drohobycz in South Eastern Poland, where he spent most of his life. He had few friends outside his native city. In his leisure hours — of which there were probably many — he made drawings and wrote endlessly, nobody quite knew what. At the age of forty, having received an introduction through friends to Zofia Nalkowska, a distinguished novelist in Warsaw, he sent her some of his stories. They were published in 1934 under the title of Cinnamon Shops — and the name of Bruno Schulz was made. Three years later, a further collection of stories, with drawings by the author, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, was published; then The Comet, a novella, appeared in a leading literary weekly. In between, Schulz made a translation of Kafka's The Trial. It is said that he was working on a novel, entitled The Messiah, but nothing has remained of it. This is the sum total of his literary output.
When Bruno Schulz's stories were re-issued in Poland in 1957, translated into French and German, and acclaimed everywhere by a new generation of readers to whom he was unknown, attempts were made to place his oeuvre in the mainstream of Polish literature, to find affinities, derivations, to explain him in terms of one literary theory or another. The task is well nigh impossible. He was a solitary man, living apart, filled with his dreams, with memories of his childhood, with an intense, formidable inner life, a painter's imagination, a sensuality and responsiveness to physical stimuli which most probably could find satisfaction only in artistic creation — a volcano, smouldering silently in the isolation of a sleepy provincial town.
The world of Schulz is basically a private world. At its centre is his father 'that incorrigible improviser. .. the lonely hero who alone had waged war against the fathomless, elemental boredom that strangled the city.' Father, bearded, sometimes resembling a biblical prophet, is one of the great eccentrics of literature. In reality he was a Drohobycz merchant, who had inherited a textile business and ran it until illness forced him to abandon it to the care of his wife. He then retired to ten years of enforced idleness and his own world of dreams. Father who surrounds himself with ledgers and pores over them for days on end — while in reality all he is doing is putting coloured transfers on the ruled pages; Father who has zoological interest, who imports eggs of rare species of birds and has them hatched in his attic, who is dominated by the blue-eyed servant girl, Adela; who believes that tailors' dummies should be treated with as much respect as human beings; Father who loathes cockroaches to the point of fascination; who in a last apotheosis rises above the vulgar mob of buyers and sellers and, drowning in rivers of cloth, blows the horn of Atonement. . . . Then there is Mother, who did not love her husband properly and who condemned him therefore to an existence on the periphery of life, because he was not rooted in any woman's heart. There are uncles and aunts and cousins, each described with deadly accuracy, with epithets as from a clinical diagnosis.
These were Schulz's people, the people of Drohobycz, at one time the Klondike of Galicia when oil was stuck near