William Faulkner’s Polish Afterlife

Michał Choiński ponders the sudden popularity of new translations of William Faulkner’s novels in Poland.

By Michał ChoińskiMarch 13, 2025

• Fiction

• Literary Criticism

IN FEBRUARY 2024, the influential Polish literary magazine Książki [“Books”] selected William Faulkner’s 1932 novel Light in August as the previous year’s Book of the Year. The novel was also nominated for a prestigious literary prize sponsored by the city of Gdynia, and, with sales exceeding a few thousand copies, it entered the Polish bestseller lists. Yet, even before those recognitions, the headlines of literary magazines and cultural media outlets were already hailing the “Polish Revival of the Giant” and the “New Generational Reading of Faulkner.”

All this attention followed the publication of three new translations of Faulkner that came out in the country within a span of eight months. Piotr Tarczyński’s translation of Light in August [Światłość w sierpniu] and Maciej Płaza’s of 1929’s Flags in the Dust [Flagi pokrył kurz] were published in 2023, while Jacek Dehnel’s version of 1930’s As I Lay Dying [Gdy leżę, konając] appeared in early 2024. Sixty-two years after his death, Faulkner, retranslated, has entered the Polish literary spotlight. So, why is it that so many people in Poland are now so interested in his fiction?

The earliest translations of Faulkner’s prose appeared throughout Europe relatively quickly. Light in August is a representative example. Within two years of its publication in the United States, it was available in German and in French. Curiously, Nazi censorship under Joseph Goebbels deemed its agrarian setting to be conservative enough to accord with the party’s cultural policy. Faulkner’s subversiveness was spotted only later. On the eve of World War II, Czech and Italian renditions were published, and then, four years later, the first Spanish version—although, in that case, the raging war forced the publisher to print and release the book in Argentina. In 1946, Lys i August—a Danish version—was released, becoming the third Faulkner novel to appear in Denmark. And following the death of Stalin, during the so-called “thaw” that loosened the Soviets’ oppressive grip over Eastern Europe, the first Polish translation of Light in August arrived in 1959.

At that time, behind the Iron Curtain, the news about Faulkner’s prose was already circulating among Polish readers. Before he defected in 1951, first to France and then to the US, Czesław Miłosz, a future Nobel Prize–winning poet, worked as a cultural attaché representing communist Poland in Washington, DC. While there, he wrote an essay on Faulkner, emphasizing that, to him, the Southern author wrote “as if he were Polish.” Faulkner’s depiction of the antebellum South reminded Miłosz of the bygone gentry culture of Polish country manors—with banquets, hunting parties, and oppressive prudery. In particular, the sense of historical loss and cultural nostalgia seemed eerily familiar. To Miłosz, Faulkner’s short story “The Bear” felt as if it were excerpted directly from Adam Mickiewicz’s 19th-century Polish epic Pan Tadeusz (1834), which bemoans the collapse of the traditional gentry and reminisces about the loss of Polish independence under the partition that resulted in the eradication of the country from the map of Europe for more than a century. “These stories might have been about one of our wars,” Miłosz wrote about Faulkner’s fiction.

Curiously, that sense of historical affinity went both ways. In his introduction to The Faulkner Reader, published in 1954, Faulkner himself builds on his Nobel Prize speech, where he famously lauded human “endurance,” recalling how, as a child in his grandfather’s library, he picked up a copy of a historical novel by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, a fellow Nobel laureate. That novel, which Sienkiewicz famously wrote to “uplift human hearts,” depicts chivalric members of the Polish gentry and their heroic exploits. Highly popular at the time, Sienkiewicz’s fiction glorified the pre-partition past and downplayed how the Polish gentry had mistreated the peasants and inhabitants of the eastern borderlands—the territory of contemporary Western Ukraine. Sienkiewicz’s nationalistic animus addressed the sense of helplessness arising from the systemic eradication of Polish culture by the partitioning invaders, as well as the despondency over a series of failed national uprisings. His novels carried the message of a Polish “lost cause” as a rallying cry for embattled national identity. Little wonder that Faulkner was so enthralled by his work.

The surprising synergy between Faulkner’s fictional world and the Polish literary milieu grew over time. By the 1960s and ’70s, Faulkner was an esteemed and widely read writer in Poland. As was the case with John Steinbeck, Faulkner was seen as an author whose tales of the US working class undercut the American myth of equality and prosperity.

Faulkner’s reverberation with the Polish literary idiom extended far beyond political debates about class struggle. As Włodzimierz Odojewski, a contemporary novelist, asserted:

In Faulkner’s fiction I have seen the same ending of an epoch, the same ethos falling apart, when the new ethos is not yet formed, the same set of problems connected with the waning of traditional social bonds, family ties and kinship […] and the same cruelty stemming from atavistic hatred. In one word, I have seen a similar dying of time.

To people of Odojewski’s generation, specifically the novelists whose world was annihilated by the Second World War and who witnessed the emergence of new totalitarian governments, Faulkner’s novels, enmeshed in the paradoxes of history, seemed to capture a moment of aching loss and angst about the future. At that time, they spoke directly to the Polish national ghosts.

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At the turn of the new millennium, the original translations of Faulkner throughout Europe were being replaced by new, updated editions. Light in August reappeared in Italian in 2007, and in German in 2008. In 2018, a new Catalonian translation supplanted the earlier one from 1965. A new translation of Sanctuary was also published in Turkish in 2007. In fact, there seems to be a wider European trend to reexamine Faulkner and to offer readers an approach to his prose with a more contemporary, reflexive spin.

The recent renewed interest in Faulkner throughout Poland has taken place in a distinct political-cultural context. Between 2016 and 2024, the Polish government formed by the Law and Justice party propagated conservative and illiberal policies. The party appointed loyalists to head public media, attempted to subvert the court system and judicial power, and curtailed abortion rights. Its cultural and educational policies were steeped in insular, nationalistic nostalgia, and political discourse in Poland grew increasingly patriarchal and homophobic. Then-candidate for president Andrzej Duda infamously declared at an election rally in 2020 that “LGBT are not people but ideology.”

Against this political backdrop, the task of translating Faulkner’s novels anew was taken up by a Polish gay couple: the award-winning novelist and poet Jacek Dehnel translated As I Lay Dying, and Piotr Tarczyński, a political scientist and host of a popular podcast on American culture and history, translated Light in August. Together, under the female pen name Maryla Szymiczkowa, they have authored a best-selling cycle of Agatha Christie-esque detective stories set in 19th-century Kraków. Dehnel and Tarczyński comprise one of the few queer couples in Poland with a major public profile. Since same-sex marriages are not recognized in the heavily Roman Catholic country, they traveled to London six years ago to get married. In 2020, given the hostile political situation in Poland, the couple decided to move to Berlin. It is there that they began work on their new translations. “It took me a few years to convince literary agents that we need ‘new’ Faulkner,” Tarczyński told me. Ultimately, Znak, one of the leading presses in Poland, accepted the pitch.

From the beginning, the couple sought not to distance themselves from previous versions of Faulkner’s novels but to build on what had already been accomplished. Having finished a longer passage, Tarczyński would consult both the older Polish translation and the Spanish version. Some elements were retained, others updated. Dehnel stresses that the use of dialects in the earlier version of As I Lay Dying was particularly effective and natural. Seventy years later, however, it would not sit well with readers, given the natural changes in the fabric of the Polish language. Most importantly, Tarczyński and Dehnel had access to online repositories of information about Faulkner’s world, such as Digital Yoknapatawpha. With the help of such resources, they were able to construct a more detailed, historically comprehensive vision of the South than their predecessors.

Tarczyński and Dehnel were surprised by the success of their translations and their popularity among younger readers. The first printing of their translation of Light in August sold out quickly. Visually, the book is very appealing. The cover illustration, a modernist design by Arthur Hawkins Jr., depicts a house on a hill with rays of sunlight beaming down (the same cover image used for the novel’s first US edition). The translators’ public profiles definitely helped the promotion campaign. However, the translation’s success is hardly a matter of successful marketing and quality design. Tarczyński and Dehnel both describe “new readers” for whom Faulkner seems surprisingly transgressive. Many of his characters—such as Joe Christmas from Light in August, a white man who suspects he is of mixed racial origins—are always caught in paradoxes of history and identity. Joe’s liminal racial status injects an unsettling political ambiguity into the rigorous world of white supremacy—which is why he is ultimately lynched by a racist mob at the end of the novel. The fact that Faulkner’s ambivalent narratives have now been rendered into Polish by queer translators only highlights the transgressiveness of his stories.

Most importantly, however, the success of the new translations cannot be divorced from the country’s cultural and political landscape, which has in recent years been saturated with nationalistic nostalgia. “Those people who buy Faulkner now, who are in their twenties, spent their whole adult life in Poland governed by the Law and Justice party,” Dehnel told me. “They were surrounded by nationalistic myths of failed uprisings, of heroes of old, and of the threat of migration. They were brought up in a Poland that resembles the American South.”

It’s not only Tarczyński and Dehnel who have noticed the important political context for the Polish revival of Faulkner. Maciej Płaza, a fiction writer who began working on the new translation of Flags in the Dust in 2015, holds a similar perspective. He has been enchanted with Faulkner’s novels for years, admiring the conflicted cultural mythologies they contain. “Faulkner felt compelled to unmask the racist system of violence in the South, but at the same time he embraced his identity as a Southerner,” explained Płaza. And it is this paradox that gives Faulkner’s work a universal appeal. The cover of Płaza’s translation of Flags in the Dust features a collage of horses’ heads, suggesting the symbolic importance of cavalry to the “lost cause” narratives of both the US South and post-partition Poland. “Sadly, we feel at home with the conflicts of history,” he told me. “We understand them, and we are marked by them. Maybe, on some deep level, Polish readers craved literature that would subvert the nationalistic mythologies that began their ascent in the 2010s.”

To Płaza, Faulkner’s appeal to contemporary readers also derives from how his retranslated novels fit into the so-called “folk turn” in Polish literature. This growing wave of rusticism, in both fiction and nonfiction, is skeptical about urban progressivism and hostile toward the traditional condescension afforded to folk themes. For years, Poland has told itself myths about the abrupt capitalistic transformation that followed the end of communism in the early 1990s—such as a belief in the possibility of accelerated social advancement in the privatized economy. The “folk turn” has forced a reconsideration of these myths. Not nostalgic but revisionist, this renewed agrarianism allows Polish readers to discover in Faulkner yet another layer of subversiveness—this time directed at neoliberal capitalism.

Krzysztof Majer, one of four translators at work on a new Polish rendition of Faulkner’s Collected Stories (forthcoming from Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy), attributes at least some of the publishing success to how fashionable retranslations of the classics have become. “In the last five years alone, we’ve had a second Ulysses, a second Mrs. Dalloway, a slew of retranslations of Hemingway, Proust, Camus, and Kafka,” he told me. “Quite apart from the political dimension, the time was ripe for the new Faulkners.” Currently on the Polish literary market, there are 14 versions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), seven translations of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), six of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and two of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Jerzy Jarniewicz, a literary translator and a professor of translation studies at the University of Łódź, commented on the reason behind this literary cornucopia: “Older translations often presented censored or bowdlerized versions of the translated works, but more significant is the growing awareness that literary translation is a creative activity, with translators becoming visible, often being distinguished writers in their own right.” On top of that, there is also the sociopolitical context: frequently, these new translations reflect shifts and perturbations in Poland’s cultural landscape.

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In October 2023, the political tide in Poland turned. With an unprecedented turnout of 74.3 percent of the electorate—a record that exceeded even the historic showing of 1989, a vote that prompted the collapse of the Soviet-backed communist system—the Law and Justice party’s eight-year reign was overturned. The key political force in that shift was young voters. Encouraged by the promise of same-sex civil partnerships and the decriminalization of abortion, almost 70 percent of people under the age of 30 cast ballots, expressing their dissatisfaction with the government’s conservative policies. These dedicated voters seem to be members of the same generation responsible for the success of Faulkner’s new translations.

According to Jay Watson, Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies at the University of Mississippi, it makes perfect sense that Faulkner would resonate so strongly in the current sociohistorical context in Poland. Watson notes that the translators showed an “intuitive genius” in picking specific novels, especially Light in August, given the polarized cultural-political situation on both sides of the Atlantic. For years, Watson has been organizing a conference dedicated to Faulkner in the writer’s hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. This conference attracts not only researchers from all over the world but also nonacademic admirers of Faulkner’s fiction. One of the event’s revered traditions is to congregate at Faulkner’s grave in the middle of the night, passing a bottle of bourbon around as people recite quotations from his works. The passages they’re reading may be decades old, but their focus on the paradoxes of history and the scourge of racist violence seems uncannily prescient today.

“Of course, Faulkner writes about Southern racism and provincialism,” Watson explained to me, “but in doing so, he’s pointing to a racial nationalism founded in white supremacy.” This makes Light in August “a novel for our current moment in the US, when white nationalism is once again showing its true colors in our country.” Faulkner’s deconstruction of the regional lost cause and the pitfalls of nationalistic nostalgia seems like a lesson that still has not been learned. Thus, as Watson noted, this is “a great time for people to read Faulkner in the US as well.” Indeed, “it could be that Light in August proves to be the Faulkner novel for the 2020s.”

Writers and critics who work at the cultural crossroads between Poland and the United States feel the dual relevance of Faulkner’s prose even more keenly. Steve Yarbrough, a novelist from the Mississippi Delta who lives near Boston as well as in Kraków, understands the need to revisit Faulkner in Poland. He has been closely observing the unfolding political situation in both countries—the triumph of the liberal parties in the recent Polish October election and Donald Trump’s steady march towards reelection despite widespread warnings about the authoritarian threat he poses. “The myth of some glorious past that has been undone by the forces of modernity, by progressive social changes, is both here and there,” Yarbrough told me. “It’s that thinking that, if we could go back to an imagined past, we would recover who we really are.” To Yarbrough, such a cultural agenda is both treacherous and contagious, especially since “so very few people reflect that this bygone prosperity was built on the backs of subjugated classes and oppressed minorities.” The strength of Faulkner’s prose resides in his continued ability to unmask and dismantle such narratives.

The success of the new Polish translations of Faulkner is thus both surprising and unsurprising. On one hand—with the help of Tarczyński, Dehnel, and Płaza—Faulkner’s work has found a new home with young readers in Poland, serving to deconstruct the insularity of nationalistic mythmaking. On the other hand, the dire warning underlying Faulkner’s tales of racist violence, white supremacy, and treacherous nostalgia remains increasingly relevant—in the United States as well as in Poland.