Just wondering if anyone’s checked out polish horror author Stefan Grabinski’s (1887-1936) translated short story collection Dark Domain. I know Jay’s made mention of him but has anyone read any of his stories yet? Sounds like really good stuff!!!
Here's a link to an albeit non-supernatural tale to give you a taste of this author's style:
http://www.members.aol.com/eurosin/grot.html
China Mieville whom I greatly admire lists this guy amongst his top Weird fiction authors. Here’s part of what he’s said about the author:
Early in the last century, this shockingly underrated Polish writer saw the horror that haunted modernity. His ghosts and demons don't inhabit graveyard or ruins, but steam trains, electricity cables, and the rapidly growing cities. The antithesis of nostalgic fantasy.
Sometimes Grabinski is known as "the Polish Poe", but this is misleading. Where Poe's horror is agonised, a kind of extended shriek, Grabinski's is cerebral, investigative. His protagonists are tortured and aghast, but not because they suffer at the caprice of Lovecraftian blind idiot gods: Grabinski's universe is strange and its principles are perhaps not those we expect, but they are principles - rules - and it is in their exploration that the mystery lies. This is horror as rigour. A student of philosophy, Grabinski took Bergson, James, Maeterlinck, and extrapolated them, sometimes cross-fertilising them with the science of Newton or Einstein, to create weird tales of a heretic intelligence. And of an intense style, which Miroslaw Lipinski, translator of The Dark Domain , renders without contortions or stiltedness. Grabinski has several stylistic tics, and the only one that sometimes grates is his prediliction for ending paragraphs with ellipses...
Grabinski shows us up for our condescension to the past. His themes astonish us - they're so contemporary, so trendy. Fluid gender identities, the discombobulated subject, schizophrenic time - all manner of Deleuzian and media-studies-type concerns, laid out overtly, with shattering precision, 80 years ago in a town near Lwow…..
For a writer often referred to as the classic practitioner of fantastic literature in Polish, Grabinski is shockingly undertranslated. When he died in 1937 he had published several short-story collections, three plays and three novels, and yet The Dark Domain is the only volume of his work in English, and it is not a long book - 11 stories.
Here's a link to an albeit non-supernatural tale to give you a taste of this author's style:
http://www.members.aol.com/eurosin/grot.html
China Mieville whom I greatly admire lists this guy amongst his top Weird fiction authors. Here’s part of what he’s said about the author:
Early in the last century, this shockingly underrated Polish writer saw the horror that haunted modernity. His ghosts and demons don't inhabit graveyard or ruins, but steam trains, electricity cables, and the rapidly growing cities. The antithesis of nostalgic fantasy.
Sometimes Grabinski is known as "the Polish Poe", but this is misleading. Where Poe's horror is agonised, a kind of extended shriek, Grabinski's is cerebral, investigative. His protagonists are tortured and aghast, but not because they suffer at the caprice of Lovecraftian blind idiot gods: Grabinski's universe is strange and its principles are perhaps not those we expect, but they are principles - rules - and it is in their exploration that the mystery lies. This is horror as rigour. A student of philosophy, Grabinski took Bergson, James, Maeterlinck, and extrapolated them, sometimes cross-fertilising them with the science of Newton or Einstein, to create weird tales of a heretic intelligence. And of an intense style, which Miroslaw Lipinski, translator of The Dark Domain , renders without contortions or stiltedness. Grabinski has several stylistic tics, and the only one that sometimes grates is his prediliction for ending paragraphs with ellipses...
Grabinski shows us up for our condescension to the past. His themes astonish us - they're so contemporary, so trendy. Fluid gender identities, the discombobulated subject, schizophrenic time - all manner of Deleuzian and media-studies-type concerns, laid out overtly, with shattering precision, 80 years ago in a town near Lwow…..
For a writer often referred to as the classic practitioner of fantastic literature in Polish, Grabinski is shockingly undertranslated. When he died in 1937 he had published several short-story collections, three plays and three novels, and yet The Dark Domain is the only volume of his work in English, and it is not a long book - 11 stories.
