Waiting for the Dog to Sleep : Short Fiction

Waiting for the Dog to Sleep is poet, translator, and scholar Jerzy Ficowski's only collection of prose. In these short fictions and sketches Ficowski reinterprets a question posed by the writer central to him, Bruno Schulz, about the mythologization of reality. For Schulz, fiction was a way of turning the quotidian into the fantastical and eternal. Ficowski's prose seems to reinterpret this approach to address the sense of loss and bleak landscape of postwar Poland. Effortlessly weaving memory, religious ritual, daily life, and the magical, he hints at a sinister presence lurking behind these dreamlike tales ― a trace of ruin or disintegration always present as the narrator repeatedly struggles to link some aspect of a past that has been annihilated with a present that is foreign and hostile.

Not having belonged to any definable literary school or circle, Ficowski occupies an unique place in Polish literature. His only identifiable precursors might be Boleslaw Lesmian (whose Russian verse he has translated to Polish) and of course Bruno Schulz.

Jerzy Ficowski was born in 1924 in Warsaw, and was a distinguished poet, prose writer, scholar and translator (from Yiddish, Russian and Roma). During the German occupation of Warsaw in World War II, Ficowski served in the Home Army (AK) and took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. He has published some twenty volumes of poetry since his debut in 1948, and one book of short stories: Waiting for the Dog to Sleep. His poetry has been illustrated by Marc Chagall, and his 1979 collection of poems, A Reading of Ashes, has been called the most moving account of the Holocaust written by a non-Jew. A major scholar of Roma history and culture (his book Gypsies in Poland: History and Customs is a seminal work in the field), he translated Roma folk tales into Polish (Sister of the Birds and Other Gypsy Tales), and was one of the most active translators of Yiddish literature in postwar Poland.

Starting in 1946, Ficowski dedicated a vast amount of time to reassembling the scattered fragments of the visual and literary legacy of Bruno Schulz, a writer of great importance whose work was under-appreciated following the Second World War. At the time of its publication in Polish, Ficowski's "biographical portrait," Regions of the Great Heresy (W. W. Norton, 2003), was groundbreaking and remains the definitive study of Schulz's life and art. Instrumental in establishing the collection of Schulziana at the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw and in planning the permanent Schulz Museum in Drohobycz, Ukraine, Ficowski also edited compilations of Schulz's letters and drawings as well as writing the Introduction to The Drawings of Bruno Schulz. He lived in Warsaw until his death in 2006.