Why Ice? Ursula Phillips on translating ICE by Jacek Dukaj

The below is what Ursula Phillips, the translator of Jacek Dukaj’s Ice, wrote for the publisher of the book, Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury. In her piece, Ursula explains the process of translating this monumental (1200 pages long) and very complex novel. We are reposting it here with her kind permission.

Anna Blasiak

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My first encounter with Ice came shortly after it was published (December 2007). I bought it on a visit to Poland in the spring of 2008 after reading an intriguing review in a leading newspaper. Even though I did not finish it then, given its length (other more pressing commitments intervened), I already sensed some preordained connection. The substantial volume (the spine is three inches thick in the original edition) sat on a bookshelf directly above my TV for many years, so that whenever I switched on, it was there beckoning: finish me! This did not happen until the summer of 2017 following the signing with Head of Zeus at the London Book Fair in March, without a translator.

Why did I decide to put myself forward? This is not the usual way in which Polish literary works find publishers in Britain. As with other lesser-known literatures, the process largely depends on translators making pitches to publishers; the initial selection, in other words, is done by translators. In this case, the selection had already been made; rather than my finding the book, the book found me. After reading the whole, I realized that the translation process would be complex yet within the realms of possibility – and it has certainly taken me to the limits of possibility. For me, a deciding factor was the difficulty itself: I wanted to be challenged by problems that seemed insoluble. 

But I would not have consented to any difficult book, especially one involving a commitment that has lasted in total seven years; five years on the translation itself and another two before publication. I did not initially estimate it would take so long. But I decided to follow my usual practice of liaising with the author, which necessarily involved lengthy email exchanges, numerous meetings in person in Kraków and London, addressing the author’s answers to my questions as well as reacting to his additional comments, all of which resulted in several iterations of my files. The massive size was also a factor: I broke the text down into manageable segments, usually of subchapters, and worked on a near-finished version of each before moving on; I did not do a ‘first version’ of the whole.

I was attracted, as a life-long practitioner of total immersion in long books, to the big nineteenth-century-novel feel of Ice. It feels very Dostoevskian; for readers sufficiently initiated to recognize them, the many references to Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy as well as Thomas Mann, are an added bonus – but not essential to understanding, whilst the way in which an early twentieth-century English translation might have read was indeed a guiding principle when conveying archaism in Dukaj’s language. I was also inspired, whether meant to be or not, by other dramatic literary ice journeys, such as the opening scenes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the trek across the ice fields in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Ice is usually classified as science fiction, but it is also a consummate work of literary fiction.

I had not experienced extreme cold in Russian Siberia, but I had in China. Hard crystal structures, natural or manmade, can be formidable and thrilling. And I tend to do cold: give me a glacier in Norway or Iceland; you’ll not find me roasting on a tropical beach. The sad thing is, however, that even as I was reconstructing in English descriptions of ‘gleissen’ and ‘icecradles’, portraying the excesses of Dukaj’s Martsynians (an Old Believer-style sect that worships the Ice), actual Siberia was rapidly melting due to climate change. Dukaj also uncannily anticipates this, but the cause is different, not to be revealed here.

But what did I believe I could bring to this translation? Knowledge of the two literary languages, yes, my experience as a literary translator, yes, but I believe above all, my many years of following the history of Poland, the Russian Empire and the relations between them. In Dukaj’s novel, ‘science fiction’ expresses itself partly as alternative history. But in order to appreciate what is ‘alternative’ it is important for the translator to know where the ‘real’ history (objective facts established as far as possible by researchers and historians) ends and where the imagined begins. Often real historical characters play different roles in the novel than they did in life.

There is no space here to do justice to the complexity I had to confront in recreating this text in English: tensions between the Russian and Polish languages, reflecting the conflicted historical relationship between the two countries and cultures; Dukaj’s use of archaism, as well his invention of numerous neologisms (I noted almost 400 on my first complete reading) to portray the scientific and technological consequences (including effects on the human mind) of the Tunguska meteor explosion near Irkutsk in 1908 and the introduction to Siberia of an extraordinary new element from outer space; his invention of an unusual narrative form based on a grammatical peculiarity of Polish, which successfully supports the book’s philosophical subtext but which does not exist in English. Readers can read in more depth about these challenges in my postscript to the book.

A Trans-Siberian odyssey through political, criminal, scientific, philosophical and amorous intrigues, and into an endless winter to confront something utterly alien.

By Ursula Phillips

You can read a longer interview with Ursula about the translation here.