On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe BY Andrzej Stasiuk TRANSLATED FROM THE POLISH BY Michael Kandel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) From the Publisher: “Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. His journeys take him from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine. By car, train, bus, ferry. To small towns and villages with unfamiliar-sounding yet strangely evocative names. ‘The heart of my Europe,’ Stasiuk tells us, ‘beats in Sokolow, Podlaski, and in Husi, not in Vienna.’ Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin, he wonders as he is being driven at breakneck speed in an ancient Audi — loose wires hanging from the dashboard — by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. In Comrat, a funeral procession moves slowly down the main street, the open coffin on a pickup truck, an old woman dressed in black brushing away the flies above the face of the deceased. On to Soroca, a baroque-Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampment, to meet Gypsies. And all the way to Babadag, between the Baltic Coast and the Black Sea, where Stasiuk sees his first minaret, ‘simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky.'”

They lived in the old Jewish quarter, at the edge of a Slovak town, at the foot of a Hungarian castle, so in order to exist and not disappear, they had to create their own rules, their own special theory of relativity, and a gravity that would keep them on the surface of the earth and not let them fall into the interstellar void, into the vacuum of oblivion. — On the Road to Babadag, p. 17 Named after a woman abducted by Zeus in Greek mythology, Europe has retained something of its mythic identity in spite of the best efforts to provide it with a real-world definition. Brussels is the current locus of this probably hopeless defining process, yet it is the only slightly less recent and far less benevolent attempts to solidify the amorphous space of the continent directed from Moscow and Berlin that are most relevant to the “other Europe” Andrzej Stasiuk’s book purports to explore. Though filled with the author’s incessant movement through Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Slovenia, Ukraine, Albania and Moldova, this is definitely not a travel book. Travel books, even the most literary, are supposed to make each place distinctive while Stasiuk does his best to blend and blur the towns and borders he passes through. Crucially, this is not simply a stylistic decision but what he sees as an inherent characteristic of this part of Europe: No trip from the land of King Ubu to the land of Count Dracula will hold memories you can rely on later, as for example you can rely on Paris, Stonehenge or Saint Mark’s Square. — pp. 10-11 Unmoored, the reader is led through towns that have had four or five different names as they have switched countries and empires. Many of the chapters are titled with these unrecognizable names, words made of masses of consonants and unfamiliar accent marks. The reader’s experience is paralleled when Stasiuk describes trying to decipher the names of Hungarian towns on highway signs, the strangeness of which “freed our trip from geography, letting it follow instead the path of fairy tale, legend, toward a childhood in which the sound and music of words mattered more than their meaning.” What is more, the trips recounted in the book have no chronological sequence and are clearly taken as a collage of his travels in the region. One moment Stasiuk writes about being stranded or waiting for a train, while in the next moment he inexplicably appears behind the wheel of a car in an entirely different country. It is not only geography that gets blurred but time as well. Stasiuk has an ever present awareness of the ghosts that inhabit these landscapes, evoking Austro-Hungarian cavalry as vividly, or with as much unreality, as he paints the present-day inhabitants. At times that unreality reaches hallucinatory heights, such as when he describes the breakaway territory of Transnistria as a “phantom country” that “in places looks like a film set” or when he describes “some kind of nothingness that for a moment attempted to be a bus station.” Even his own objectivity is called into question as it is during a train ride to Bukovina when he writes “I remember nothing in particular of that trip, so I must invent it from scratch.”

He also can create haunting, evocative images only to undercut them at a moment’s notice. In Hungary he mentions following his guidebook in looking for a psychiatric hospital located at the end of what it describes as “a long and creepily empty square,” which leads Stasiuk to envision a horrific asylum as a metaphor for Eastern Europe as a whole.

Following this exuberant, dark description, Stasiuk curtly mentions that upon arrival the place looked nothing like he’d imagined it but was a normal sanatorium in a shaded square.

The fact that On the Road to Babadag is not a travel book leaves the question open as to what kind of book it is. A comparison with one of Stasiuk’s predecessors is illuminating. Joseph Roth was also born in what was for a time Polish territory in Galicia, and like Stasiuk wrote novels and nonfiction that explored this phantom territory between Germany and Russia, relishing in describing Europe’s most exotic and inaccessible outposts. There are lines in this book that could have been pulled straight out of Roth’s nearly century-old novels or journalism:

The borders at the edge of old Europe must have looked like this: emptiness, wind, and garrisons, where you wait for something, for the enemy perhaps, and when the years pass and the enemy doesn’t show, you put a bullet through your head out of boredom.

— p. 51

This is the dusty borderland where Roth’s disillusioned officers and Jewish peddlers, gypsies and smugglers and refugees all rubbed shoulders as the world around them crumbled. Stasiuk’s conception of the places he visits draws heavily on the writers who created its mythology yet is never bookish, as if what Roth and Romanian writer E. M. Cioran wrote has blended into a kind of intellectual folklore, a poetry of the indeterminate east, and is no longer dependent on specific texts.

Stasiuk’s conception of the places he visits draws heavily on the writers who created its mythology yet is never bookish, as if what Roth and Romanian writer E. M. Cioran wrote has blended into a kind of intellectual folklore, a poetry of the indeterminate east, and is no longer dependent on specific texts.

Joseph Brodsky said of Roth that there is a poem on every page of his; the same is true of Stasiuk’s book. You can open it anywhere and find phrases that instantly demand to be reread for the weight of ideas and images they contain. The sentences come long and vivid as well as fragmentary, without verbs, as if he sliced his memories up into small pieces and put them back together in a different order. Considering how well the rich and evocative language of the book comes across is a testament to the excellent job done by translator Michael Kandel.

This strength though, the poems in prose that reveal this part of Europe in a wholly unique manner, can also be a weakness at times. Just as you can pick up the book at any point without losing the thread you can also put it down just as easily, its density, like over rich food, causing you to try to digest all you have taken in until you regain the strength to wade back in. As you go through the book you increasingly suspect that the “other Europe” is less a place than a sensibility, one which has paradoxically survived in the east precisely because of its neglect and poverty, that this lost world Stasiuk imagines can still be found in a Romanian village or Albanian port because it has not been given a fresh coat of paint or paved over as it would have been in the west.

At one point Stasiuk picks up a small map of Europe from a roadside inn that identifies by omission what the writer considers as his Europe. The map shows the capitals of Spain, France, Austria and other western countries but east of Prague and Budapest is a “terra incognita” without capitals and even without some countries altogether. Rather than trying to counter those omissions, Stasiuk relishes the blank and unfixed nature of what he finds in the east. Through writing, this book has — in a way — fit these countries and territories into a vast, united whole, as if imaginatively reviving former empires as Joseph Roth attempted to in his last despairing novels written during his Paris exile. Like Roth, Stasiuk’s imaginative effort is aimed at reconstituting a continent he considers home. He explicitly states that understanding Europe is impossible without taking into account the role of this “terra incognita” — that what is true for Albania is true for the east as a whole: