Bruno Jasieński: I Burn Paris (1928–) [PL, EN, ES]

11 January 2014, dusan

I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland’s most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization by Henri Barbusse in 1928 in L’Humanité (for which Jasieński was deported for disseminating subversive literature). It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris’s water supply. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, embittered Russian émigrés, French communards and royalists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the one thread that binds all these groups together. As Paris is brought to ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world, mixing strains of “The Internationale” with a broadcast of popular music.

With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human and economic relationships have turned just about everyone into a prostitute. Yet rather than cliché and simplistic propaganda, there is an immediacy to the writing, and the modern metropolis is starkly depicted as only superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic at its core.

This English translation of I Burn Paris fills a major gap in the availability of works from the interwar Polish avant-garde, an artistic phenomenon receiving growing attention with recent publications such as Caviar and Ashes.

First serialized in French as “Je brûle Paris” in L’Humanité in 1928.

Polish edition
Publisher Towarzystwo Wydawnicze “Rój”, Warsaw, 1929

English edition
Translated by Soren A. Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski
With an Afterword by Soren Gauger
Publisher Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, 2012
ISBN 9788086264370
309 pages

Review (Benjamin Noys, Mute)
Review (M.A.Orthofer, The Complete Review)
Review (Isla Badenoch, Article Magazine)
Commentary (Nina Kolesnikoff, 1982)
Wikipedia (in Polish)

Publisher (EN)
Google books (EN)

Palę Paryż (Polish, 1929, HTML), Alt link
I Burn Paris (English, 2012, EPUB, removed on 2015-1-15 upon request of the publisher)
Anatol Stern’s 1957 preface (Polish), English translation (Issuu.com)
Voy a meterle fuego a París (Spanish, trans. Jorge Segovia and Violetta Beck, 2013, added on 2014-2-2)


One Response to “Bruno Jasieński: I Burn Paris (1928–) [PL, EN, ES]”

  1. Twisted Spoon Press on January 14, 2015 3:25 pm

    Your posting of the English epub of I Burn Paris is a violation of copyright. Would you please take it down. Thank you.

    Kind regards,
    Twisted Spoon Press

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