Best Seller
Salt of the Earth
By Jozef WittlinTranslated by Patrick Corness
Ebook
Published on Feb 05, 2019 | 384 Pages
The classic pacifist novel by a major Polish writer, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize
‘Only the villages are asleep, the eternal reservoir of all kinds of soldiery, the inexhaustible source of physical strength’
The villagers of the Carpathian mountains lead a simple life at the beginning of the twentieth century – much as they have always done. They are isolated and remote, and the advances of the outside world have not touched them. Among them – Piotr, a bandy-legged peasant, whose ‘entire life involved carrying things’. A notional subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, all he wants in life is an official railway cap, a cottage with a mouse-trap and cheese, and a bride with a dowry.
But then the First World War comes to the mountains, and Piotr is drafted into the army. Unwilling, uncomprehending, the bewildered Piotr is forced to fight a war he does not understand – against his national as well as his personal interest.
In a new translation, authorised by the author’s daughter, Salt of the Earth is a strongly pacifist novel inspired by the Odyssey, about the consequences of war on ordinary men.
‘Only the villages are asleep, the eternal reservoir of all kinds of soldiery, the inexhaustible source of physical strength’
The villagers of the Carpathian mountains lead a simple life at the beginning of the twentieth century – much as they have always done. They are isolated and remote, and the advances of the outside world have not touched them. Among them – Piotr, a bandy-legged peasant, whose ‘entire life involved carrying things’. A notional subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, all he wants in life is an official railway cap, a cottage with a mouse-trap and cheese, and a bride with a dowry.
But then the First World War comes to the mountains, and Piotr is drafted into the army. Unwilling, uncomprehending, the bewildered Piotr is forced to fight a war he does not understand – against his national as well as his personal interest.
In a new translation, authorised by the author’s daughter, Salt of the Earth is a strongly pacifist novel inspired by the Odyssey, about the consequences of war on ordinary men.
Author
Jozef Wittlin
Józef Wittlin, born in 1896, was a major Polish poet, novelist, essayist and translator. He studied in Vienna, where he met Joseph Roth and Rainer Maria Rilke, before serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War. His experiences during that war inspired him to write The Salt of the Earth, which was first published in 1935. It was awarded the Polish National Academy Prize, won Wittlin a nomination for the Nobel Prize, and has since been translated into 14 languages. Józef Wittlin also translated Homer’s Odyssey into Polish, published several collections of poetry, many of which were strongly pacifist, and penned numerous essays including ‘My Lwów’, which is included in City of Lions, also published by Pushkin Press. With the outbreak of the Second World War he fled to France and then to New York, where he died in 1976.
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