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113 pages

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Born in what is now Ukraine to Polish parents, naturalised as a British citizen, and schooled on the high seas of international commerce, Joseph Conrad was a true citizen of the world. His novels bore witness to the dehumanising repercussions of empire, explored a world in which state-sponsored terrorism ruined individuals' lives, and pioneered complex narrative structures and subjective points-of-view in what was to become the first wave of literary modernism. To mark his 160th birthday, 14 authors and critics from Britain, Poland and elsewhere have come together to celebrate his legacy with new pieces of fiction and non-fiction. Conrad felt that the writer's task was to offer 'that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.' In an age of increasing isolationism, these celebrations remind you of the value of such glimpses. Commissioned as part of the Joseph Conrad Year 2017, the book has been published with the support from the Polish Cultural Institute, the Polish Book Institute, and the British Council.

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Publié par	Comma Press
Date de parution	30 novembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910974506
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Comma Press.
www.commapress.co.uk

Copyright © remains with the authors 2017.
This collection copyright © Comma Press 2017.
All rights reserved.

This book has been co-commissioned by Comma Press and
the Polish Cultural Institute in London.

The moral rights of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this
work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The opinions of the authors and editors are not necessarily those of the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1910974331
ISBN-13 9781910974339

This publication has been supported by the ©POLAND Translation Program, the Polish Cultural Institute in London, and the British Council.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of Arts Council England.
Contents
Foreword
Professor Robert Hampson

Navigational Hazard
Paul Theroux

A Game of Chess
Kamila Shamsie

Conrad Street
Wojciech Orliński
Translated by Eliza Marciniak

Expectant Management
Sarah Schofield

The Helper of Cattle
Farah Ahamed

The Inn of the Two Witches – A Find
Zoe Gilbert

Mamas
Grażyna Plebanek
Translated by Scotia Gilroy

Fractional Distillation
SJ Bradley

Legoland
Agniezska Dale

The Double Man: An Hotelier’s Tale
Giles Foden

Guided by Conrad
Jan Krasnowolski

Conrad, Capital and Globalisation
Dr Richard Niland

Live Me
Jacek Dukaj
Translated by Sean Gasper Bye

About the Authors

About the Translators
Foreword
Robert Hampson
The man who was to become known to the world as the novelist Joseph Conrad was born 160 years ago, on 3 December 1857, in Berdichev in Ukraine. Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was the son of Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski, who, in May 1862, were sentenced to exile as a result of their political activities in support of Polish independence. At this time, Poland did not exist as a country: it had been divided up between Austria, Prussia and Russia. Berdichev was under Tsarist rule, but was one of Poland’s border regions with a complex population of Polish land-owners, German settlers, Ruthenian peasants, Cossacks and a substantial Jewish community. Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski were dedicated to the liberation of their country, and both gave their life to this cause. Ewa died in April 1865 and Apollo died in May 1869. After a childhood spent among political exiles in Vologda and Chernikiv, Conrad had a few years schooling in Kraków before, in 1874, at the age of sixteen, he left Poland for Marseilles and the beginning of his sea-career.
From 1874 until 1893, Conrad was to work as a sailor, first in French ships and later in the British Merchant Marine. During these years, he gradually worked his way up the rungs of the profession, although he only once had command of a sea-going ship: the Otago , which he captained from January 1888 to March 1889, taking over in Bangkok and resigning from the ship in Port Adelaide, Australia. During his years as a sailor, he voyaged to the West Indies, spent much time in the Indian Ocean and the China Seas, and, most famously, signed up to captain a steamer on the Congo. These experiences provided him with material for important parts of his life as a writer. His experience of command on board the Otago prompted two stories, The Shadow-Line and ‘The Secret Sharer’; his experiences in Africa produced two important stories, ‘An Outpost of Progress’ and Heart of Darknes s; while his glimpse of South America provided one of the stimuli for his masterpiece, Nostromo , the great twentieth-century novel of neo-colonialism. It was his experiences as first mate of the Vidar , however, which led directly to his first novel. This Arab-owned steamer made regular voyages between Singapore and small ports on the east coast of Borneo and the west coast of Celebes. At one of these, Conrad met the man who was to be the model for Kaspar Almayer, the protagonist of his first novel, Almayer’s Folly .
Over the next thirty years, Conrad was to produce the novels and short stories which made his name: ‘Typhoon’, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes . From the start, his work met with critical acclaim. However, it was only with the publication of Chance in 1914 that he gained popular success. Doubleday, who published Chance in America – and had a collected edition of Conrad’s work in hand – undertook a massive advertising campaign: the success of that campaign in promoting Conrad’s works established Conrad’s reputation in America. Thereafter, all his novels – Victory, The Rover, The Arrow of Gold, Suspense – were best-sellers in the United States, and a generation of American writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, were influenced by his work.
Conrad was very quickly established as a world writer. During his lifetime, his work was taken up by André Gide and his circle. Gide was immersed in Conrad’s works: he dedicated his Travels in the Congo to Conrad’s memory, while his novel The Counterfeiters was influenced by Under Western Eyes . In Germany, Conrad’s work was championed by Thomas Mann, and, more recently, has influenced works as diverse as Lothar-Günther Büchheim’s The Boat, where U-boat experiences are read through the generational dynamics of Victory , and Christa Wolf’s Accident , where Chernobyl and brain surgery are approached in a narrative shaped by Heart of Darkness . Conrad’s work has also had a complex role in post-colonial writing. The Guyanese writer Wilson Harris argued that Conrad’s fiction opened a door for post-colonial writers. The South African writer Lewis Nkosi and the Kenyan writer Matthew Buyu both undertook doctoral research on Conrad. Ngugi wa Thiongo’s novels, A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood , are readings of Under Western Eyes and Victory respectively. The Trinidadian writer V. S. Naipaul was similarly immersed in Conrad’s works: he felt that Conrad had been everywhere before him, and this is evident in a novel like A Bend in The River . Gabriel Garcia Màrquez, in One Hundred Years of Solitude , responds to Conrad’s portrayal of South America in Nostromo , as does Juan Gabriel Vàsquez in his more recent novel The Secret History of Costaguan a. Similarly, the Australian Randolph Stow’s The Visitants is Heart of Darkness transferred to the Trobriand Islands and his later novel Tourmaline shows various debts to Lord Jim , not least in its narrative method.
Conrad continues to have an impact on contemporary writers. David Dabydeen’s The Intended flags up its connection to Heart of Darknes s with its title. W. G. Sebald devoted a section of The Rings of Saturn to an account of Conrad’s early life. Iain Sinclair has had a long and complicated engagement with Conrad from his first novel, Downriver , with its Conradian endpapers, through to Dining on Stones . Nor has Conrad’s legacy been restricted to literature. The author and artist Tom McCarthy has had a long fascination with Conrad – at one point co-creating an installation based on the Greenwich bombing that features in The Secret Agent . And there have been numerous dramatisations of Conrad’s fiction since the 1916 stage adaptation of Victory . Equally, there has been a long history of film adaptations from the silent film versions of Victory and Lord Jim through to the recent French adaptation of ‘The Return’, the Malay adaptation of Almayer’s Folly and Peter Fudakowski’s version of ‘The Secret Sharer’. The most famous film adaptations, of course, are Hitchcock’s Sabotage (based on The Secret Agent ) and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now . Indeed, Apocalypse Now has been responsible for renewed popular interest in Conrad. This has been most evident in the world of graphic novels, with a number of publications (in Britain, France and Italy) exploring Heart of Darkness and Conrad’s own Congo experiences.

Conrad’s sophisticated handling of narrative technique, from his first novel onwards, continues to engage writers and readers. His interest in psychology has also appealed to both critics and readers: early criticism focussed on his explorations within the self (from Almayer’s Folly through to ‘The Secret Sharer’); more recent criticism has picked up on his attention to trauma (from Lord Jim through to the succession of traumatised young women in his later fiction). The thematic concerns of his fiction are also strikingly relevant to the political climate of today. Heart of Darkness , probably his best-known work, was a pioneering exposé of colonialism and empire, which became a key text in late twentieth-century post-colonial studies. Nostromo has proved to be a prescient work on neo-colonialism and globalisation; his London novel The Secret Agent is similarly timely with its address to refugees, terrorism and the policing of both; Chance begins with share promotion and financial fraud; while his Russian novel Under Western Eyes returns to the topic of political violence and political refugees. Conrad’s fiction is the product of an historically-informed and politically-engaged imagination. The thorough-going scepticism that informs his work proves an effective instrument of political analysis, which he uses on the rhetoric of empire as a ‘civilising mission’, and on political rhetoric more generally. At the same time, his critique of the competing nationalisms that produced World War I led him to explicit support for a transnational united Europe as the best hope for the future.

This book brings together new responses to Conrad’s legacy from Polish and British authors, as well as from writers further afield, to mark what in his home country has been declared the Year of Joseph Conrad. The fictions and non-fictions produced in response to his commission pick up on many of Conrad’s abiding concerns. Paul Theroux’s ‘Navigational Hazard’, for example, not only reflects Conrad’s reputation as a writer