Olga Tokarczuk: The Right Time and Place (original) (raw)

Abstract

This essay examines Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk’s works, especially "Flights" and "Księgi Jakubowe" (the English- language version, "The Books of Jacob is scheduled for publication in March 2021), with special attention to Tokarczuk’s recurrent themes and the challenges of rendering her often allusive and myth-laden prose into English. As expressed in The Books of Jacob’s subtitle, Imagination . . . Is Humani- ty’s Greatest Natural Gift. In The Books of Jacob Tokarczuk’s imagination, exhaustive research, and writing skills have brought to life Poland in the eigh- teenth century, with all its ethnic groups, tragedies, atrocities, cultural achievements, aspirations, and conflicts, as well as its interconnection with Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant developments in Eastern and Cen- tral Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Flights dissects the crucial fragmenta- tion of modern life, developing the importance of wandering, journeys, and time. Tokarczuk’s writing seamlessly shifts from mythological motifs to real- ist accounts of locations and objects, to subtle depictions of human activities and motives, and to the grand scope of the history of Eastern Europe and the role of religions.

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References (2)

1. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 204-42, with quotation at 230, citing Zohar I, 15b.
2. Maciejko, Mixed Multitude, 93-100.