New Orleans Review LOYOLA UNIVERSITY VOLUM E 16 NUMBER 21$9.00 ) ) New Orleans Review Summer 1989 Editors John Biguenet John Mosier Managing Editor Sarah Elizabeth Spain Design Vilma Pesciallo Contributing Editors Bert Cardullo David Estes Jacek Fuksiewicz Alexis Gonzales, F.S.C. Andrew Horton Peggy McCormack Rainer Schulte Fourzding Editor Miller Williams Advisory Editors Richard Berg Doris Betts Joseph Fichter, S.J. John Irwin Murray Krieger Wesley Morris Walker Percy Herman Rapaport Robert Scholes Miller Williams The New Orleans Review is published by Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118, United States. Copyright !fJ 1989 by Loyola University. Critical essays relating to film or literature of up to ten thousand words should be prepared to conform with the new MLA guidelines. All essays, fiction, poetry, photography, or related artwork should be sent to the New Orleans Review, together with a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The address is New Orleans Review, Box 195, Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118. Reasonable care is taken in the handling of material, but no responsibility is assumed for the loss of unsolicited material. Accepted manuscripts are the property of the NOR. Rejected manuscripts without stamped, self-addressed envelopes will not be returned. The New Orleans Review is published in February, May, August, and November. Annual Subscription Rate: Institutions $30.00, Individuals $25.00, Foreign Subscribers $35.00. Contents listed in the PMLA Bibliography and the Index of American Periodical Verse. US lSSN 0028-6400 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW CONTENTS SUMMER 1989 VOLUME 16 NUMBER 2 Interrogation Ryszard Bugajski/fr. Michael Szporer 5 Ode to a Pantheress Pablo Nerudaltr. Margaret Sayers Peden 62 Between Arlt and Borges: An Interview with Ricardo Piglia Marina Kaplan 64 Artificial Respiration Ricardo Piglia!tr. Daniel Balderston 75 Ode to a Ship in a Bottle Pablo Neruda!tr. Margaret Sayers Peden 86 The House of Sugar Silvina Ocampo!tr. Daniel Balderston 88 Only the Blank Page Anghel Dumbraveanu!tr. Adam f. Sorkin and Irina Grigorescu 92 The Conscience Ana Marfa Matute!tr. Michael Scott Doyle 93 Runes Anghel Dumbraveanu!tr. Adam f. Sorkin and Irina Grigorescu 96 The Guests Silvina Ocampoltr. Daniel Balderston 97 Ryszard Bugajski INTERROGATION Translated by Michael Szporer No work of art can be created if its author concludes for one reason or another that the life in which his characters are immersed is a masquerade, since he will then be unable to understand either their passions, or why they may be prepared to sell their souls to the devil, or heights to which they can rise. The most he will produce is a puppet show, a deft shuffling of cliches, a vapid exercise in plot-making. -Andrzej Wajda, "The Artist's Responsibility," Gdansk, 1980 o film produced in the socialist bloc is a more human appraisal of contemporary realities than Ryszard N Bugajski's Interrogation, now also a novel. It probably would not have seen the light of day were it not for Solidarity and the brief spell of unprecedented artistic freedom which the mass movement brought about in Poland in 1980-81. Initially the screenplay by the promising young director of several telefilms and a collaboration (with Janusz Dymek), A Woman is a Woman (1980), was rejected out of hand by the Ministry of Culture and Art. The film was eventually produced by Andrzej Wajda's Film Unit X when the film cooperative was allowed to make its own decisions without the usual necessary approval from the Ministry. The screenplay originally appeared in Dialog, a magazine of the performing arts. Bugajski completed Interrogation after martial law was declared on December 13, 1981, and civil liberties were suspended. The film was submitted to the deputy minister for review by the so­ called "colaudation" commission and subsequently shelved. (For a transcript of the censorship hearings see The New Criterion Oct. 1982). In 1982, Interrogation was named "Film of the Year" by the Solidarity underground, and the novel was published simultaneously by NOWA free press underground and by Kultura/Institut Litteraire, an emigre publisher in Paris. interrogation is the only feature film from the Solidarity era still banned in Poland. It has not been released in spite of its having been seen by over two million viewers underground on video NOWA 1 which is available in thousands of copies; the figure exceeds box office receipts for most officially released films. (According to an estimate published in Trybuna Ludu in January 1987, there are 500,000 to 700,000 video recorders in Poland and some two million cassettes.) Even though Interrogation could not be shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982, because of the Ministry's refusal to release it, in 1987 it was voted "Best Film" at the Rotterdam Film Festival. While the power of the censor has been circumvented, the fact that the film has not been publicly released for so long and the wide popular appeal it has amassed at underground showings speaks to the currency of its message. It was not the only film outrightly banned or withdrawn from circulation after December 13, 1981. The long list included much of the new wave of Polish films, the so-called "cinema of moral anxiety," which anticipated the 1980-81 crisis: several Wajda films, including the very popular Man of Iron; films by Agnieszka Holland, Lonely Woman and Fever; and Wojciech Marczewski's reflection on the Stalin years, Shivers, among others; even the merits of classics like Ashes and Diamonds were questioned. Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Incident, also invited to Cannes in 1982, and Janusz Zaorski's adaptation of the Kazimierz Brandys novel, Mother of Kings, were not released until 1987. Still, it is worth noting that less than a month after the lifting of martial law, Andrzej Baranski's Let Go of Your Illusions, a film that among other things deals with Stalinism and makes indirect references to the contemporary crisis, opened in an out-of-the-way theater in Warsaw, and within a year or two, several controversial films produced at the time of Solidarity were released. Evidently the authorities were hard-pressed for new films because of the boycott which crippled the entertainment industry and reduced film and TV production to a fifth of its normal yearly output-and they had to keep up the image that everything was getting back to normal. Film censorship BUGAJSKI 5 is as expensive as the production of films which the public rejects-and censorship in Poland has come to mean almost the assurance of success. A number of internationally acclaimed films have been censored at one time or another. As the director of Witnesses, a documentary about a pogrom instigated by the party in Kielce in 1946, Marcel Lozinski summed it up: "We make realistic films using public funds which reject propaganda, expecting them to be shelved and then allowed to surface at a politically appropriate moment." Interrogation is a "bastard history of the Stalin era," a growing genre which includes several quality Polish and Hungarian films, notably Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble, Wojciech Marczewski's Shivers, Janusz Zaorski's Mother of Kings, Pal Gabor's Angi Vera, the Yugoslav Cannes Festival winner, My Father Is Away on Business by Emir Kusturnica, and the Soviet perestroika film Repentance, by the Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze. Reexamination of past errors brings up the problem of current injustices. Such films are politically risque because they question the legitimacy of the system by taking account of its history and lay open those who hold power without public consent to public scrutiny. However, Interrogation goes far beyond breaking silence on a sensitive issue. It is a direct assault on a political system that terrorizes its citizens. For what characterized the Stalin years was the relative freedom of action of the security police apparatus which became the instrument of fear more powerful than the party or the politbureau, answerable only to the party secretary-and in Poland, on more than one occassion, with a direct line to Laverentin Beria and Joseph Stalin himself. Basing himself on what happened to Tonia Lechman, a friend of the secretary to Wladysl'aw Gomulka, and other actual accounts by political prisoners, Bugajski's portrayal is highly documentary. In no sense does it glamourize Stalinism by straying into symbolism or sentimental reflections about "the painful period." It shows Stalinist terror for what it was-a raping of the human spirit. What must have been hair-raising to the censor was the implication of continuity-the contemporaneity of history suggested by Interrogation-that was only exacerbated by the declaration of martial law. For how legitimate is a government that has to rely on troops to quell the aspirations of its people, to intimidate them with mass arrests, loyalty oaths, identity checks, police searches, and wiretapping in order to keep them in line? Even the initial objections to the screenplay were not primarily to its daring and graphic depiction of security police abuses. Not many people in Poland, not even those in power, admire "the UBeks" (security police) except perhaps the UBeks themselves. The Ministry of National Security was officially dissolved on December 7, 1954, and security police was purged and reorganized already before the period of liberalization following the "Polish October" of 1956. The party leadership since then has tried to distance itself from Stalinism, portraying itself as reformist or legally­ constituted. What the censors disliked in Bugajski's scenario was the parallel contemporary theme, which was filmed but was cut from the final version for artistic reasons. The film, in contrast to the novel, is a historical broadside against the regime, more direct, perhaps even more blatantly "documentary," in its black and white colors on underground video.