The Story of the Paper Crown - Jozef Czechowicz

The Story of the Paper Crown by Józef Czechowicz, translated by Frank Garrett / small 80-page paperback, 5 x 7 inches / ISBN 9781955190619 / published by Sublunary Editions

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Although primarily known as one of the premier Polish avant-garde poets, Józef Czechowicz made his literary debut at the age of twenty with his novella The Story of the Paper Crown. Published in the first (unnumbered) edition of Reflektor in June 1923, this story gives an account of Henryk, a sensitive young man who, through philosophical debates, sex, religious visions, and febrile fantasies, undertakes a journey whose ultimate purpose is to come to terms with his homosexuality as well as to build a foundation for an authentic life.

Much of the brief life of Józef Czechowicz orbits around the town of Lublin in southeastern Poland, where he was born 15 March 1903. His childhood was marked by poverty, illness, the threat of war, and the death of his father. In 1920 he volunteered to serve in the Polish Army during the Polish-Soviet War. After his military service and the completion of his studies, he worked as a teacher in rural Poland.Czechowicz made his literary debut in 1923 with his novella The Story of the Paper Crown. In 1927 his first volume of poetry Kamień [Stone] was published. In the following years, he published seven more volumes of poetry. In the early 1930s after a brief stay in France, Czechowicz relocated to Warsaw, where he lived until the outbreak of World War II. In 1939, he was evacuated to Lublin, where he was killed by a bomb dropped by the German Luftwaffe in an air raid on 9 September. He was thirty-six years old.

Józef Czechowicz, who lived openly as a homosexual, is still considered one of the greatest Polish poets of the twentieth century and one of the main proponents of the literary avant-garde. His writing weaves together nostalgic provincialism, an openness regarding sexuality, prophetically catastrophic visions, folklore and mythology, and technological alienation.

Frank Garrett trained as a translator at the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas and at Philipps-Universität Marburg after earning advanced certification in Polish philology from the Catholic University of Lublin. In 2000 he was a FLAS fellow at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, and in 2001 he was a Fulbright scholar in Warsaw. Since 2021 he has served as essays and features editor at minor literature[s]. Sublunary Editions published his translation of Bruno Schulz's Undula in 2020. Frank lives in Dallas with his husband.