Waiting for the Dog to Sleep [Paperback]

Jerzy Ficowski (Author), Soren Gauger (Translator), Marcin Piekoszewski (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2006

Not part of any literary school or circle, Ficowski occupies a peculiar and unique place in Polish literature, and this is his only collection of prose. In these short stories and sketches Ficowski mythologizes reality, using fiction to turn the quotidian into the stuff of dreams and eternity, and reinterprets it by asking the question: To what extent was/is this possible following the Holocaust’ The Holocaust, however, is only implied, a lurking, vaguely sinister presence behind the dreamlike tales Ficowski spins as he effortlessly weaves memory, religious ritual, daily life, and the magical. And yet there is always an aspect of ruin or disintegration while the narrator repeatedly struggles to link some aspect of a past that has been annihilated with a present that is foreign and hostile.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this collection of 28 short, lyrical prose pieces, Ficowski, a Polish poet and scholar who participated in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, blends hallucination, reminiscence and reverie in a way that suggests but never spells out the horrors and deprivations of life in Poland during and after WWII. An ambiguous first person narrator describes the remains of ghost-filled shtetls seen from passing trains, an aborted escape from a prison camp and a forest that may or may not only exist in the narrator's imagination. Many pieces read like dream journals, or "recollections confused with fantasy," unraveling from reality in a style recalling the work of Borges and Calvino, and the dark, surrealist fables of Bruno Schulz, the subject of Ficowski's best known nonfiction work, Regions of the Great Heresy. But the collection contains pieces, such as the profound "Intermission," about a brief, terrifying lull during the Warsaw Uprising, that clearly touch on his own experience of war and loss. First published in Poland in 1970, this expressive collection illustrates how a suffering nation can find refuge in dreams, even if those dreams are haunted by a reality the dreamer is trying to escape.
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About the Author

Jerzy Ficowski was born in 1924 in Warsaw and is a distinguished poet, prose writer, scholar and translator of Yiddish, Russian and Roma. He has published twenty volumes of poetry and is primarily known for his work on Bruno Schulz, Regions of the Great Heresy (Norton, 2003), and his poetry, A Reading of Ashes.

Product Details

• Paperback: 188 pages
• Publisher: Twisted Spoon Press; Tra edition (January 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 8086264246
• ISBN-13: 978-8086264240
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,399,243 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)