Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Jan Twardowski Serious Angel: A Selection of Poems
translated from the Polish by Sarah Lawson and Malgorzata
Koraszewska (Waxwing Series No 3).
Dedalus (32pp ISBN 1904556175)

A Fine Line New Poetry from Eastern and Central Europe
edited by Jean Boase-Beier, Alexandra Büchler and Fiona
Sampson
Arc (270pp ISBN 1900072971)

THESE two collections stipple out the ‘fine line’ of cultural territory in Central and Eastern Europe whose nation-states have just joined the EU. This is the stated aim of the Arc volume, with selections from Estonia in the North, via Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary and Romania, to Bulgaria in the South. I write ‘stipple out’ rather than ‘draw’: Arc presents two poets from each country, usually one man and one woman, neither over the age of forty. Dedalus’ volume adds another point to the Polish section of the line: a selection of translations by Jan Twardowski, a retired priest.

   Twardowski’s is a poetry of real-world spirituality: quizzical, humane, accessible whilst staying the right side of trite (though sometimes only just):

He wrote ‘my God’ but crossed out because he thought after all
it’s only my if I am selfish
he wrote ‘God of humanity’ but bit his tongue because he 
                                                                                    remembered
the angels and stones looking like rabbits in the snow
finally he wrote ‘God’. Nothing more.
Still he wrote too much

   The translations read beautifully. To some theoreticians (such as
Lawrence Venuti), this is a bad sign: a translation that reads fluently, that is not spiky with the presence of the foreign, is an act of violation by the target culture. As a poetry translator, I could not disagree more. My ideal (unattainable though it may be) is to get a translation to a level where it sounds like an English poem, whereas stylistic spikiness can all too often read like translationese. In any case, the lack of spikiness in Lawson and Koraszewska’s translations, the effortless flow of their English lines, allows the poetry’s foreignness to get through. All good poetry, even that originally written in the reader’s own language and culture, has foreignness - a newness of content, of voice, of viewpoint. Here, the foreignness is the voice of the old Christian sage who, like Hopkins in aim but unlike him in style, distils the spirituality out of the everyday. The Dedalus edition is monolingual, implying that the translations should be judged simply in their own right. But a check against the originals shows them also to be accurate in content and tone. Not that this came as a surprise: often, I find, the poems that read best in English are also the most faithful to their source.

   As for Arc’s arc, the editors and publishers should be congratulated on the scope and ambition of their grand idea - on the book's geographic range and the number of different poets and translators who have contributed. Though this might have resulted in a bag of bits, there is a surprising unity of theme, probably because of the selection criteria that were applied. The picture is one of a post-Communist, post-modern, post-everything world imbued, not by Twardowski's presence of God, but by the absence of grand idea, be it spiritual or political, leaving only the world which we see and inhabit. There are some striking exceptions, of course. Slovakia's Katarina Kucbelová, for example, is not post-modern
but uncompromisingly modernist. The best of her poems have a
crystalline beauty where language is more important than what it represents:

(ideals:)

;perfect - more perfect;
;almost perfect - perfect;

two: (from; to) (movement)

deceptively double: deceptively one

:unendingly approximating:

a perfect ideal needs a perfect ideal

   By giving source and translated texts on facing pages, the editors invite comparisons. Thus James Sutherland-Smith and Katerina Sutherland-Smithová's versions capture lightness of Kucbelová's sound-structure well (zdanlivo dvojité: zdanlivo jedno    deceptively double: deceptively one).

   Not all of Arc’s poets and translators impressed me quite as much, I must admit. Though all seemed competent, only now and again did I sense a major poetic voice, and not every translator gave their poet the zing they deserved. This is perhaps the inevitable downside of the editors' ambitious and praiseworthy vision: they were, I suspect, often dependent on which poets their informants recommended, and on which translators could actually work from the lesser-read languages in this volume.

   One major poetic voice, to my hearing, is Hungary’s Krisztina Toth. Interestingly, she was also the only poet to use clear metric and rhyme forms, though this does not always come across in translation:

A hold neonja hullik          The moon's neon light falls
kilobbant ég a hóra           a flare of sky in the snow.
Átfordul, visszaperceg.      Turning, ticking, switching back.
Ébrenlét, homlokóra.        Wakefulness, brow of the hour.

   Peter Sherwood’s English misses the driving seven-syllable rhythm of the original, with its ironic reference to the certainties of Hungarian poetic tradition. One might argue, of course, that syllabic rhythms are ‘un-English’, but Sherwood does not use an accentual equivalent (trimeter, say) either. He does, however, compensate with a much stronger assonance-structure than in the original - though some might accuse him of over-domestication here, replacing Toth’s deadpan rhythm-driven verse with a more mainstream Anglo-modernist lushness (‘falls / a flare of sky in the snow’ for the original Hungarian’s ‘falls / flickers out burns on the snow’). But I am quibbling here: overall, Sherwood’s verse convinces.

   Interestingly, whether the translators in this volume were source- or target-language natives seemed to have little to do with quality of poetic output. The best, like Ana Jelnikar (working from what I presume is her native Slovenian), did their poets justice, subtly adjusting what needs adjusting whilst leaving intact what is best translated straight - as in this poem by Primo Cucnik:

Prva pesem govori o starem nacinu 
                                    First song speaks of the old way
ivljenja. Kako so bile stvari postavljene of life. 
                                    How things were set
v zacetku in kako se je vedelo, kje naj bi 
                                    in the beginning and how it was clear where
se koncale, ali v obrisih ponovo zacele 
                                    they should end or outlined begin again
z znamimi custvi.          
                                    with familiar feelings.

And doing justice is what translating is all about.

   Buy these books. Serious Angel, for a deservedly popular poet, exquisitely translated. And A Fine Line for the inclusive verve of its cultural vision.