Marek Bieńczyk

Born in Warsaw in 1956. He is a novelist, essayist, translator of Kundera and Cioran, a literary historian at Literary Research Institute of Polish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and a contributor to the French quarterly "L'atelier du roman". He studied Romance Languages and Literatures at Warsaw University.

His reputation was established by his novel Terminal (1994), a "post-modernist" love story of two scholarship winners who arrive in France from the opposite ends of the world. "Time's scholarship winner," as the male lover and narrator auto-ironically describes himself, is a contemporary troubadour - and the game that he must play is the contemplation of the vacuity and emptiness into which he is driven by self-knowledge and his role as a character in a tale of impossible love. After all, everything that happens is make-believe, in quotation marks, an intermezzo - for such is the nature of a scholarship. As a lover and as an author, he is fated to remain unsatisfied, to re- enact the gestures and rituals imposed by culture, language and memory. Bieńczyk's novel is full of delicate humor and elegant literary games, hidden quotations, allusions and digressions. It is complemented byMelancholy. Those Who Never Recover What They've Lost (1998), an essay on the melancholy sensibility and its presentation in contemporary literature.

In 1999 Bieńczyk has published his second novel Tworki, set in a psychiatric hospital during Second World War. It has received a prize from the Culture Foundation. It is a story about the proper name (the main protagonist Sonia doesn't survive the Holocaust, but she leaves a letter signed with the first letter of her name), which is both the closest and the most foreign thing in the world, since it is shared with so many other people. That is the definition of literature according to Bieńczyk: a signature asking for salvation, a trail of writing in need to be cared for.

A characteristic feature of Marek Bieńczyk's works is the obliteration of borders between genres - he fills his novels with essayist cogitation and in his collection of essays he puts fictional excerpts - or rather, excerpts in which the narrator reveals himself and his privacy - real or imagined. It's hard to define the genre of his prose - what's certain is that the author's individuality and the tenderness with which he looks around, are very strong. Possibly it's because in his essays he mostly writes about things important to him, it's almost impossible to distinguish the 'objective self' from the 'subjective self'. The way in which he reads reality before writing, a lecture that consists in collecting data (or: treasures) is very personal and also placed in-between genres. Bieńczyk reads both great novels and essays, and architecture, flavours, scents, movement.

Przezroczystość / Transparency (2007) is a collection of essays on the subject and at the same time a beautiful fable, a story of a dream (the word rêve - dream in French - is an anagram of the word verre, glass). In the book the author teaches us a beautiful Greek word diaphanes, which 'in French is used to describe a permeability of light, not total, but noticeable. Porcelain can be diaphane, as well as an autumn leaf, parchemenet, aristocratic skin on someone's hands'. Marek Bieńczyk also quotes Sartre: 'the sun was clear and diaphane: as white wine'. The quote indicates another characteristic property of his texts: synesthesia, the crucial role of reading the world through senses.