Magdalena Tulli

(b. 1955) – writer, translator from English, Italian and French.

Magdalena Tulli is the daughter of Ludovic, an Italian translator (Polish to Italian), and Renata, a sociologist. She spent part of her childhood in Milan. Between 1970 and 1974, she attended the Narcyza Żmichowska General Secondary School in Warsaw. In 1974, after passing her secondary school leaving exams, she began studying biology at the University of Warsaw, obtaining a master’s degree in 1979. She worked for half a year at the Henryk Arctowski Polish Antarctic Station, managed by the Department of Antarctic Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). In 1983, she obtained her doctorate at the PAN Institute of Biology and Zoology. In 1982, she was a courier for the editorial office of “Tygodnik Mazowsze”. Between 1982 and 1986, she initially worked as an orderly in an operating theatre, and later as a perfusionist during cardiac surgery at the 2nd Cardiac Surgery Clinic on Spartańska Street in Warsaw. In the years 1986–1991, she studied psychology at the University of Warsaw.

To earn money, she translated books from various fields, mainly from English (using various pseudonyms, including “Marek Nocny”). She also translates from Italian and French – her bibliography includes works by Marcel Proust (“Utracona”, The Fugitive, 2001 – the sixth volume of In Search of Lost Time), Italo Calvino (“Długi dzień Ameriga”, The Watcher, 2000) and Fleur Jaeggy – a collection of short stories titled “Gniew niebios” (Last Vanities, 1999), as well as the novels “Szczęśliwe lata udręki” (Sweet Days of Discipline, 2002) and “Proleterka” (S.S. Proleterka, 2003).

Tulli made her debut as a writer in 1995 with the novel “Sny i kamienie” (Dreams and Stones), for which she received the Kościelski Award (1995). She published further prose works in the years that followed. In 1997, she joined the Polish Writers Association.

“Sny i kamienie” can be seen as evidence of a new phenomenon – anti-prose, which differs from non-fiction prose in that it breaks the traditional rules of fiction in various ways. In this novel, Tulli sets the action in a city that combines the features of all cities, with a layout that is both real and imagined, an agglomeration that somewhat resembles Warsaw. On the surface, the city seems to obey the simplifications of the narrator’s mind, but as the action develops, it becomes increasingly subject to the processes of decentralist disorganisation. The real theme here is the transience and disintegration of all established orders, the suffering born of the very nature of the world.

On the other hand, Tulli’s second novel “W czerwieni” (In Red) is set in a “possible world” created especially for the author’s needs – that is, one that essentially corresponds to the structure of “our” world, but is devoid of the feature of permanent realities; backgrounds and foregrounds, like theatre decorations, repeatedly disappear and are replaced by others, yet the characters, acting out their dramas, experiencing suffering, living and dying, pay no attention to this volatility. Suffering is ubiquitous in this story, though told by an unsympathetic, ruthless narrator – a literary device intended to serve as an appeal for compassion of a much broader and more universal character.

“Tryby” (Moving Parts) – Tulli’s third novel – misread by many readers as a literary rebus or a commentary on literary theory, is in fact a poignant book about the lack of transparency, and therefore meaning, in the world; a lack of love, justice, and truth about our lives. The narrator attempts to tell a rather banal story of a marital triangle, but is hindered by other, much more tragic stories that disrupt his plot structure, somehow pushing themselves into the foreground against his will and, as a result, telling themselves without his participation (although in fact, his own story is “told” in the same way). In “Tryby”, Tulli demonstratively refuses to create even a semblance of reality in the presented world, but in the background of this refusal, the story constantly refers to real histories that lurk behind every fabrication. This is an extremely mature novel about the randomness and insignificance of our existence, and ultimately, perhaps, even about the fact that we are stuck in a metaphysical void.

In “Włoskie szpilki” (Italian Heels, 2011), Tulli uses the format of biographical short stories to describe the fate of a girl living in two worlds – the People’s Republic of Poland and Italy. The girl experiences a lack of warmth from her parents and becomes an object of ridicule among her friends. The language is both poetic and extremely precise. The heroine of the stories is revealed to be a victim of the war that caused her mother to lose so much, rendering her unable to show love to her daughter.

In 2014, “Szum” (Noise) was published, largely continuing the autobiographical threads from “Włoskie szpilki”. Dariusz Nowacki wrote an enthusiastic review: “Conversations with a fox, offering chocolate to an SS man (a motif from the proceedings of the ‘lowest court’), phone calls to the dead – there are many metaphors of this kind here. Each of them seems successful, capacious and suggestive. What are they for? It seems they serve to somehow control the painful past, to remove from it that which torments and cripples. It is about the past itself, a past that concerns both historical matters (here: the wartime ‘era of contempt’) and personal matters or intimate dramas (humiliation, disappointment, death in the family). In this respect, ‘Szum’ is a novel that cannot be overestimated, one that shows all too emphatically what top-shelf literature can give us.”

Tulli herself has presented the creed of her writing – and perhaps also her life – as follows: “A person does well when they don’t know who they are. Because then everything is open, and who they are is yet to become clear. Once everything is sealed and everything has been said, they then have to adapt to what they have created. That’s it. They are a bit like a puppet. Personally, I prefer dealing with people who don’t know what they have to do, what they have to think about it. Because then there’s hope… because then there’s hope.”

Tulli has also authored children’s books – “Awantura w lesie” (Fracas in the Forest) was published in 2013, and “Ten i tamten las” (This and That Forest) in 2017. The latter is a story about ordinariness and the value of learning from each other, featuring poetic, moving illustrations by Alicja Rosé. It touches on topics including the future, unknown and full of surprises; great catastrophe; and how happiness is discovered by chance.

Tulli has won many literary awards and distinctions: her second book, “W czerwieni”, was longlisted for the Nike Literary Award in 1999, as was “Skaza” (Flaw) in 2007; in 2004, “Tryby”, was shortlisted for the same award, as were “Włoskie szpilki” in 2012 and “Szum” in 2015. She won the Gdynia Literary Prize and the Gryfia Literary Award for “Włoskie szpilki”. Her translation of Fleur Jaeggy’s short story collection “Gniew niebios” won the “Literature in the World” Prize. In 2018, she received the Literary Award of the Capital City of Warsaw in the category of children’s and young adult literature (for “Ten i tamten las”), and in 2013, she was awarded the Julian Tuwim Literary Award for lifetime achievement.