Moving Parts
ABOUT
THE BOOK
A feckless, comical narrator struggles against all odds to tell a story for which he is responsible, but which he neither controls nor understands. His characters multiply, repeat, and go astray; his employer is paying no attention, asleep in a drunken stupor. The increasingly desperate narrator clambers over rooftops and through underground passages, watching helplessly as his characters reappear in different times and settings and start rival stories against his will. This brilliant, wryly humorous work tells of the sadness of the world and of the inadequate means that language and storytelling offer for describing and understanding it. Yet it does so in Tulli’s characteristically clear, concrete, gorgeous prose.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Bill
Johnston
Bill Johnston has published more than 30 translations from the Polish. His translation of Wiesław Myśliwski’s novel Stone Upon Stone won the PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award for 2012. In November 2019, he received the National Translation Award in Poetry for his translation of Adam Mickiewicz’s 1834 epic poem Pan Tadeusz. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. For his work in promoting Polish literature abroad, he has been awarded the Transatlantyk Prize (2014) and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit (2012). He teaches literary translation at Indiana University.
Bill Johnston has published more than 30 translations from the Polish. His translation of Wiesław Myśliwski’s novel Stone Upon Stone won the PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award for 2012. In November 2019, he received the National Translation Award in Poetry for his translation of Adam Mickiewicz’s 1834 epic poem Pan Tadeusz. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. For his work in promoting Polish literature abroad, he has been awarded the Transatlantyk Prize (2014) and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit (2012). He teaches literary translation at Indiana University.