Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

I am an omnivorous scavenger, I sniff every object, I trust my intuition more than my eyes, and my most highly developed instinct is to run away. And if I have to be somewhere quickly, I run. At a rate of one breath to four paces, I can run ad infinitum, for hours on end. I can eat and drink without stopping. Absolutely nothing will induce me to get into a lift if I’m not going higher than five floors. I never take the lift down. And I never get lost. My brain has its own in-built navigation system.

I even know how to talk to dogs, though I don’t wish to chat with every dog I meet, because like all the creatures in my house I have my racial prejudices. We can’t stand pit bulls, for instance – nasty muscle-bound dogs, four-footed yobbos with brains the size of a pea. And the scavenging – it’s just a reporter’s metaphor. When I go into the field (as the old reporters say), in other words on a work trip, within Poland or abroad, to gather material for a new article, I stop to inspect every speck of dust, every detail, every scrap of information and every little story – every bit of carrion, rubbish or shit. I might not use it later on, I might not devour it, but I’m sure to pick it up and take it away with me.

The limping dog, or ‘being on the road’ versus ‘travelling’

All this makes me naturally equipped for travelling. Anyway, I love to travel, though I hardly ever say that. What I say is that I love ‘being on the road’, which is hardly surprising, considering that in a former life I was a stray dog.

Please note, I didn’t say a dog ‘with no master’, but a stray dog. For what sort of pleasure is there in being a dog ‘with a master’? In having a master? So I wasn’t a dog with no master, I was just free, independent, a drifter… All right, I was eternally hungry, crawling with lice and fleas, and covered in eczema, on top of which I had cancer of the testicles – by the end of my short life they were virtually trailing along on the ground behind me, but for all that, I was a cheerful, actually a very happy dog. A disgusting mongrel with festering eyes and ears, exuding a stink like a latrine, but proud of all the vigorous, dynamic spermatozoa I’d sent out around the entire world then known to me.

I was lame in a back paw, so it’s probably from my dog’s life that I remember the coarse rhyme I’ve never heard in my present life. My mother says that in her childhood the lowlifes in Sochaczew (the town we’re from) used to bellow something like this at the homeless dogs to chase them away, after tying empty cans to their tails. The rhyme goes like this:

A limping dog ran on the grass
(Screw the fucker, screw the fucker, screw the fucker)
Some bastard kicked him up the arse
(Screw the fucker, screw the fucker, screw the fucker)
Oh you fucker, booted up the bum
(Screw the fucker, screw the fucker, screw the fucker)
I’m grassing on you to your mum
(Screw the fucker, screw the fucker, screw the fucker).

It must be because of my former identity that I get such unspeakable pleasure out of reporting on the homeless – people, not dogs, because a dog can indeed be homeless too, but once he has a home he ceases to be a dog. (That’s what I thought in my previous life, but I shouldn’t be saying it now, because when my own dogs read this, I’ll be the one in the doghouse.)

The three reports I wrote about the homeless were examples of immersion journalism. Two were researched in Warsaw, and one in Moscow. I got myself up in rags and went to live on the streets. It felt wonderful – I hadn’t the slightest doubt it was, or used to be my way of life. I was in no doubt at all that I hadn’t changed, I’d just gone back to my old identity, my old life, my old ways of getting food and drink and a bed for the night.

Like changing the railway points, with a change of dress you get rid of your identity as a journalist, husband, father, owner, or citizen – in short, you stop being a normal person, a Muggle, and you become a tramp, who’s not ashamed to beg, piss in the park, or sleep on the grass below the statue of Adam Mickiewicz. To my excellent fellow reporter Wojciech Jagielski, who doesn’t rate this genre of reportage (or rather this method of gathering material) and says it’s just done for a lark, I reply that he is quite mistaken. The world of the homeless can only be described from the position of a piece of trash lying in the street (or of a stray dog too). You’ll never find out how people (the normal ones) regard a piece of trash that’s knocking about in the street, unless you are one.

So, in a former life, I was a stray dog. I’m doubly fond of the Polish word wałęsać, meaning ‘to stray’ or ‘to wander’, out of respect for Lech Wałęsa. I realised this in the days of the so-called first Solidarity (from August 1980 to December 1981), when folks used to say as a joke that the government (meaning the communists) was wandering – wałęsa się – while Wałęsa was governing.

So why do I prefer ‘being on the road’ to ‘travelling’? Because for me the most important thing is the time before I reach my destination, the before, the going, the slow transfer. When I meet my readers, I often tell them, or write in book dedications, that the most important thing about travelling is being on the road, not reaching your destination.

The Sherpa with a grand piano, or ‘traveller’ versus ‘tourist’

They say travelling is very simple and easy now, accessible and affordable to everyone. I have friends who go to the most far-flung corners of the world, including New Zealand, Swaziland and Patagonia. But are they travelling, even if they ride across the pampas on horseback?

I doubt it. When I’m preparing for each trip, I read innumerable accounts of such exploits on the internet. The level of ignorance about the place the person has gone to is staggering. But does he need to know more? Of course not. People are free to do as they like. But they can’t say they’re travelling. What they’re indulging in is tourism!

A PE teacher from Świdnik rides his motorbike solo all the way across Siberia to Magadan in Kolyma – an extraordinary exploit, but the question is, what for? For nothing. For pleasure, because he likes riding his motorbike, and here on the Eurasian continent that’s the furthest you can go.

But he too is a tourist, as are the clients of all those adventure travel agencies called things like ‘Tingling Spine Trips’ or ‘Cupful of Adrenaline’. For these companies nothing is impossible. After all, tourists are taken up Mount Everest, or sent off to the North or South Pole. A good Sherpa can carry a grand piano up Everest. There is no limitation – not even disability disqualifies you. Sightless or legless tourists have conquered the world’s highest peak. You can sail down the Amazon on a raft, ski across Greenland, cycle over the Gobi Desert (I have this particular exploit to my credit), kitesurf across the Red Sea or swim the Bering Strait, and you’ll still just be a tourist. Because if you ask these people why they go to the Poles, they’ll reply: to conquer them.

What for? They’ve already been conquered. So what’s the difference between a traveller and a tourist? The objective. The traveller is a geographer, geologist, cartographer, missionary, reporter, film-maker, naturalist, or glaciologist who has been commissioned to research the rate at which the glaciers are melting in the Pamir range. The traveller goes abroad for a reason. The tourist goes because he likes going, out of curiosity. And thus for no reason.

All the travel festivals, of which we have at least a dozen in Poland, and I’ve even been to some, should be called tourist fairs, because all their participants’ incredible expeditions and exploits are frankly quite pointless.

The bike and the estate car, or give luck a chance

Your form of transport – that is one of the most important decisions an itinerant reporter has to make. The subject you’re working on determines the way you’re going to have to move about in the field. And vice versa – your form of transport will have an effect on the sort of material you gather.

The rules are quite simple. The more outlandish your idea, the more likely it is to happen. Sometimes my dear colleagues at Gazeta Wyborcza’s foreign correspondence section raise an uproar, crying: ‘It’s just not possible!’ And that makes my blood boil, because I wouldn’t be going to the other end of the world if my idea were impossible; so I come up with a bicycle, hitchhiking, a canoe, or else I buy an old jeep to make the possible happen – in an ordinary way, any old way, by making something out of nothing. I do all this purely to give luck a chance, to get it to start working.

Małgorzata Szejnert, who for many years was my boss and mentor at the newspaper’s reportage section, used to say a reporter who has no luck shouldn’t really be in this profession. So I do everything I can to improve my luck.

And I must admit you get the most luck (or at least some) on a bike. It’s the best form of transport for a reporter. It only has one drawback, which is that it’s slow. In a country as big as China, for instance, it didn’t work for me, because I had too little time to do my job, to gather material. I was always behind.

But apart from that, the bike has nothing but advantages. Best of all, you don’t miss anything, not a single apricot – in Uzbekistan they dry them on the asphalt. You can’t miss anything because you’re going so slowly. With full saddlebags, a tent, and some supplies of food and water your speed is at best 20 kilometres per hour. You only have to stop pedalling and put a foot on the ground, and people spring up around you. It’s always like that. Then they start asking questions, you patiently answer them, and when they ask what now, you say you have to find a place for the night. In Central Asia there has never been an occasion when somebody hasn’t shouted: “Come and stay at my place!” Can anything better happen to a reporter? Before bed, we have supper together, then we chat away half the night, if not the whole night, and by morning I’m a local. I know all about this town, village or district.

On the other hand a car is wonderful, because it gives you an incredible sense of freedom. You can move about the entire country at the speed of light and nobody can stop you, and you also have a roof over your head. I love to sleep in my old Volvo. Of course, a reporter should have a big estate car, big enough to unroll a mattress and stretch out comfortably even though you’ve got a bike next to you in summer and a pair of skis in winter. I once wrote a long article about the Suwałki region of north-eastern Poland, but there was such a big dump of snow that I could only get about the place on cross-country skis.

I love this dog’s life. When I’ve got a topic I can cover at home, meaning in Warsaw or somewhere in Poland, I always choose the smaller places – Łomża, Krasnystaw, Czarnków, Dzierżoniów… I love the dog’s life, hotels, roadside bars, and inns. I love being on the move, on the road.

• You can download an alternative and larger version of the piece here.
• Jacek Hugo-Bader will be talking to Susan Hitch at Oxford Literary Festival about Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia’s Haunted Hinterland on Friday 28 March, 4-5pm, Christ Church: Festival Room 2. Tickets are £11. Book online and b
  uy the book. 
• This event will be in Polish with translation into English provided by the translator of Kolyma Diaries, Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

The post Once I Was a Dog appeared first on English PEN.

Eric Lane – Dedalus

We have begun 2014 with Diego Marani’s first detective novel, God’s Dog, translated by Judith Landry, set in the near future with Italy a theocratic state ruled by the Vatican. Described as ‘energetic and trenchant’ in The Independent.February sees Before and During by Vladimir Sharov, translated by Oliver Ready. This is one of, if not the most, extraordinary novel we have ever published. My view of Stalin will never be the same again.In March there is the first English translation by Alan Yates of  Raimon Casellas’  fin-de-siècle masterpiece Dark Vales. A Catalan classic full of darkness and foreboding.

Jane Lawson, Editorial Director – Doubleday 

The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver by Chan Koonchung (May 2014, translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman).  Humorous and erotic Chinese road novel about the love life of a hapless drifter whose life is upturned when he falls in love with the statue of a young girl from Beijing- the second novel from the author of The Fat Years.

Susan Curtis-Kojakovic, Director – Istros Books

Hamam Balkania by Vladislav Bajac (Serbia) translated by Randall A Major – An ambitious look into the power structures of the Ottoman Empire, juxtaposed with musings on contemporary concepts of identity and faith. (January 2014)

Mission London by Alek Popov (Bulgaria) translated by Daniela and Charles Edward Gill de Mayol de Lupe  – Combining the themes of corruption, confusion and outright incompetence, Popov masterly brings together multiple plot lines in a sumptuous carnival of frenzy and futile vanity, allowing the illusions and delusions of post-communist society to be reflected in their glorious absurdity! (April 2014)

Death in the Museum of Modern Art by Alma Lazarevska (Bosnia) translated by Celia Hawkesworth – Avoiding the easy traps of politics and blame, Lazarevska reveals a world full of incidents and worries so similar to our own, and yet always under the shadow of the snipers and the grenades of the Bosnian war. (June 2014)

False Apocalypse by Fatos Lubonja (Albania) translated by John Hodgson – 1997, a tragic year in the history of post-communist Albania.  This is one man’s story of how the world’s most isolated country emerged from Stalinist dictatorship and fell victim to a plague of corruption and flawed ‘pyramid’ financial schemes which brought the people to the edge of ruin. (October 2014)

The Great War by Aleksandar Gatalica (Serbia) translated by Will Firth – In the centenary year of the start of WWI, we finally have a Serbian author taking on the themes of a war that was started by a Serb assassin’s bullet. Following the destinies of over seventy characters, on all warring sides, Gatalica depicts the destinies of winners and losers, generals and opera singers, soldiers and spies, in the conflict that marked the beginning of the Twentieth Century. (October 2014)

Rowan Cope, Senior Editor – Little Brown, Abacus and Virago

Here are our four highlights for fiction in translation in 2014 from across our lists – we’ve got some fantastic titles coming up.I’m hugely excited about Patrick Deville’s novel Plague and Cholera (Little, Brown hardback, Feb 2014, translated by J.A. Underwood), which is a rich, fascinating and gripping fictional portrait both of the real historical figure of Dr Alexandre Yersin, a game-changing microbiologist and explorer, and of the turbulent early years of the twentieth century. It was a notable bestseller and shortlisted for every major literary award in France.Spanish debut novelist Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera’s The Awakening of Miss Prim (Abacus, June 2014, translated by Sonia Soto) is a charming, quirky tale of love, literature, philosophy and the pleasure to be found in the little things in life – I hope it will appeal to readers who loved novels such as The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Malice by Keigo Higashino (Little, Brown, October 2014, translated by Alexander O. Smith): Malice is the most acclaimed novel in Keigo Higashino’s bestselling series featuring police detective Kyochiro Kaga. Kaga is one of the most popular creations of Japan’s bestselling novelist and appears in a dozen novels, several TV series and a handful of major motion picture adaptations.

The Stone Boy by Sophie Loubière (February 2014, translated by Nora Mahoney): The Stone Boy is an award-winning and darkly atmospheric French psychological thriller with an unforgettable elderly heroine – Madame Préau.

Juliet Mabey, Publisher – Oneworld

We have a growing list of fiction in translation, which has been actively expanded over the last year with acquisitions from Korea, China, Israel, and Russia, and have a particularly strong list of translated novels for 2014.

The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is one of the highlights of this year’s list. Written by the multi-award winning author Sun-Mi Hwang and translated by Chi-Young Kim, it has been on the Korea bestseller list continuously for more than a decade, selling in excess of two million copies. A modern fable-esque classic with strong philosophical themes, it features a spirited hen’s quest for freedom and self-determination, and has been compared to E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Illustrated by London-based Japanese artist Nomoco, it will launch in April at the London Book Fair where Hwang is Author of the Day as part of this year’s Korean Focus.

The Space Between Us by Iranian bestselling author Zoya Pirzad and translated from the Persian by Amy Motlagh is publishing in February, a follow up to Things We Left Unsaid, which we published in 2012. Dubbed the Anne Tyler of Iran, [Pirzad has written] a poignant, wistful story about belonging and otherness, pride and prejudice, and brilliantly paints the Iranian landscape of complex social conventions and private emotional conflict.

Revolution Street by Amir Cheheltan is translated from the Persian by Paul Sprachman and publishes in March. In this critically acclaimed and searing novel – Cheheltan’s first to be translated into English – power and corruption in post-revolutionary Iran are exposed through the actions of two men who scheme to exploit the chaos and confusion for their own benefit. Both torturers in one of Tehran’s most notorious prisons and in love with the same woman, their machinations take them deep into Tehran’s underworld of criminals and provocateurs, in an unusual tragi-comic tale of rivalry and revenge.

The Hilltop by Assaf Gavron and translated from the Hebrew by Steven Cohen won the prestigious Bernstein Award in Israel, where it hit the bestseller lists on publication. Publishing here in November, and described by one reviewer as “probably the best political novel to be written in Israel”, it documents a warped and psychotic society in Israel’s Wild West – the establishment of a new settlement in the West Bank. A specialist at showing both sides of the equation, Gavron explores his subject with subtle complexity, humor and great insight into the human condition, portraying a multi-layered reality that encourages readers to make their own judgments.

Meike Ziervogel, Publisher – Peirene Press

In 2014 Peirene will publish its Coming-of-Age series, three stories about our individual struggles to reach maturity in an ever-changing world.

The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfiled: A haunting tale about the environmental legacy of the Cold War. ‘Hamid Ismailov has the capacity of Salman Rushdie at his best to show the grotesque realization of history on the ground.’ Literary Review (February 2014)

The Blue Room by Hanne Ortavik, translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin: A mother-daughter relationship that will send a chill down your spine. ‘A book for all daughters… A book that will get under your skin.’ Elle (June 2014)

Under the Tripoli Sky by Kamal Ben Hameda, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.  A fascinating portrait of a pre-Gaddafi Libyan society on the verge of change. ‘Neo-realistic characters that could have stepped straight out of a Vittorio de Sica film.’ Cultures Sud (September 2014)

Laura Barber, Editorial Director – Granta Books & Portobello Books

This year kicks off in sinister style with reissue of six books by the great Sicilian author, Leonardo Sciascia, whose powerful exploration of Sicily’s gritty criminal underworld shows him to be a master storyteller across a variety of literary genres, from novels and short stories to detective fiction and true crime.On a lighter note, the satirist Dimitri Verhulst imagines the consequences of the second coming in Christ’s Entry into Brussels (translated by David Colmer).In April, we have a new dispatch from the inimitable Jacek Hugo-Bader, whose Kolyma Diaries (translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) record his vodka-fuelled experience of travelling 2000 kilometres through the former Soviet Gulag to meet the inhabitants of this grim land as they eke out an existence or transform themselves into oligarchs.And in May, we have Nightwork, a darkly comic coming-of-age story set during the Russian occupation from the celebrated Czech writer, Jáchym Topol, translated by Marek Tomin.Later in the year, we have A Short Stop on the Road From Auschwitz, a shattering literary memoir by Göran Rosenburg, the son of Holocaust survivors (translated from Swedish by Sarah Death), and Walter Kempowski’s Swansong ’45 (translated from German by Shaun Whiteside), a monumental collection of first-hand accounts that brings to life the last days of World War II.Finally, in December, Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days (translated from German by Susan Bernofsky) which is a story of the 20th century traced through the various possible lives of one woman and was last year’s winner of the Hans Fallada Prize.

Adam Freudenheim, Publisher and Managing Director – Pushkin Press

As a publisher specializing in fiction from around the world it’s always difficult to choose highlights for the year, so focussing on just two writers whose work appears with us in English for the first time this spring and with apologies to other Pushkin writers I’ve not been able to include, here goes.

Song for an Approaching Storm by Peter Fröberg Idling is an atmospheric thriller set in one tense month in 1950s Cambodia.  The story is told in three sections, each giving the perspective of one character in a love triangle.  The rub comes in that one of the three is Saloth Sar, who twenty years later would become known to the world as Pol Pot. First published in Swedish in 2012, Song for an Approaching Storm is an original and moving debut novel beautifully translated by Peter Graves. (March 2014)

Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda was a sensation on publication in Holland in 2010.  It went to number one on the bestseller list, was nominated for every Dutch literary prize going – and won five of them – and is being translated into eight languages.  Buwalda’s book is a family saga in which things go rather terribly wrong for one Dutch family in the 1990s and 2000s.  Set in Holland, Beligium and California, Bonita Avenue is a terrific, page-turning book that – as one critic put it – feels like a cross between the work of Jonathan Franzen and Stieg Larsson!  Jonathan Reeder has translated this larger-than-life debut novel. (April 2014) 

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