My Life's Travels and Adventures

Władysław Roczniak has done Anglophone readers a great service by translating and editing Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa's My Life's Travels and Adventures: An Eighteenth-Century Oculist in the Ottoman Empire and the European Hinterland. Not only has he made this remarkable text available to a wider audience, he has equipped that audience with an enormously useful scholarly apparatus: a thought-provoking and engagingly written introduction that provides a helpful overview of the book and the history of its critical reception, and a wealth of footnotes that not only guide the reader through the text, but also deftly negotiate the complexities that arise in relation to it. The book also contains several appendices that are useful in tracking people, place names, and the chronology of the text in relation to historical events.Pilsztynowa's memoir is a fascinating work, one that repeatedly confounds readerly expectations and brilliantly illuminates the messy realities of the eighteenth-century world. Pilsztynowa is a remarkable figure: a woman with little to no formal education who worked as a doctor; who traveled the length of the Eastern regions of Europe and around the Russian and Ottoman Empires; was married twice but lived largely independent of her husbands (and had an unhappy love affair with a man she refers to as her cavalier); a member of the gentry who was regularly on the brink of poverty and yet somehow managed to personally meet both Fredrick the Great and two different Empresses of Russia; who expended much effort into securing the liberation of captive Turks from Russia but owned several enslaved men herself; and a devout Catholic who nonetheless took great interest in the particularities of various religions around her.Like so many eighteenth-century texts, the narrative is episodic and unpredictable, shifting abruptly from one area of interest to another, at one moment glossing seemingly major episodes or decisions in a mere line or two, and at another, expounding at great length on what seem like trivialities. The first chapter of her narrative is characteristically chaotic, beginning as if in medias res. We learn that Pilsztynowa's parents gave her in marriage at a young age (she was fourteen) to Jacob Helpir, who took her to Istanbul. Rather than describing her early life or her impressions of this new place, she plunges into a story about how her husband was imprisoned and sentenced to death after a patient of his died, and how she, despite being ill and in terrible pain, managed to negotiate his freedom. In the next paragraph, she recounts how she foils an enemy who was scheming to destroy her, and for the next several pages, we hear tales of secret poisonings and sudden deaths and curses and sorcery and miracle cures. Meanwhile, her husband abandons her (and her baby daughter), with no explanation provided. She travels around the Balkans, working as a doctor, and purchases several enslaved German men, hoping to make a profit from them (one of them, Joseph de Pilstein, later becomes her second husband). At the end of the chapter, she is back in Istanbul, having been provided with a house and pharmacy thanks to the Sultan's physician, Hakim Pasha. Such is the nature of this book: it is not an orderly, progressive narration, but a motley assemblage of episodes and opinions. The text comprises four chapters loosely chronicling some thirty years of Pilsztynowa's life, and then another three chapters that are a kind of ethnographic account of the customs and religious beliefs of various groups—Muslim Turks, Jews, Armenians, and various other Eastern sects of Christianity.As Roczniak explains in the introduction, Pilsztynowa's narrative has been considered (and critiqued) through various lenses—as the autobiography of an eighteenth-century woman, a Pole living in the Ottoman Empire, a doctor, a Catholic, a traveler. She manages to simultaneously impress and disappoint almost everyone, it seems (and Roczniak helpfully lays out these conflicting perspectives): her medical practice, for instance, is an uncomfortable combination of scientific knowledge, folk wisdom, and prayer. Her virulent anti-Semitism and trade in enslaved people problematize her status as feminist icon (though she has an honorary place among the floor tiles of Judy Chicago's Dinner Party!). These complexities and contradictions, of course, make this an important text for further study, and also a compelling text to teach, particularly in comparison with other books, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, or other works of Polish memoir (it would be an excellent companion piece to the writings of Jan Chryzostom Pasek, for example).Because, as Roczniak writes, one of the great ironies of Pilsztynowa's text “haunting her work, in the preservation of her uniquely feminine voice—[is that] her manuscript was discovered by a man, edited and shaped by a man for general literary consumption in her own country, and is now, as well, presented by a man to the Anglophone audience” (p. 26), it is appropriate to comment in more detail about the translation itself, even if only briefly—one could easily write an entire essay on the topic. As Roczniak explains in his introduction, the editor of the first scholarly edition of the complete text, Roman Pollak, modernized Pilsztynowa's Polish and edited her prose, improving her grammar and spelling. In his own introduction (itself a document worthy of translation!), Pollak lists Pilsztynowa's grammatical and orthographic foibles with what I would characterize as loving, though critical, detail. Though he uses terms such as primitive (prymitywna) or describes the reading experience as miserable,1 to the eyes of this reader, at least, there is a genuine sympathy in the attentive and careful examination of the peculiarities of her grammar. Pollak strikes a careful balance in correcting some of the errors while attempting to preserve the uniqueness of the style: as he explains, the various linguistic quirks “shine a strong light on the character and personality of the author”2 and therefore, “[e]xorcising them entirely, simplifying, correcting—does not seem right.”3 Yet to leave the text entirely uncorrected also seems unideal, knowing what we do about the (often unconscious) assumptions that readers make about a person's intelligence based on grammar and diction. This is perhaps all the more true when presenting a “foreign” work to English readers, who may already apprehend the author as Other in various ways that will only be exacerbated by an overly faithful translation. It is thus understandable that Roczniak further tidies the infelicities of Pilsztynowa's style, smoothing out the grammar and diction, and carving up some of her excessively long sentences, or editing out repetitive and formulaic turns of phrase. Though this does iron out some of the uniqueness of the author's remarkable (and often remarkably strange) voice, it also, arguably, serves to ameliorate some of the barriers of understanding between her and an Anglophone audience.In sum, then, this is a truly unique and captivating text, and one that is eminently worthy of increased attention from a wide readership in Slavic Studies and beyond. We are fortunate to have this excellent new critical edition, skillfully translated and thoughtfully annotated by Władysław Roczniak

Adventure · Ancient history · Art · Art history · Ottoman empire · Political science · Historical and Cultural Studies of Poland · History · Law