Reviews
Rhymes and Reasons
Selected Poems by Cyprian Kamil Norwid, translated by Adam
Czerniawski.
Anvil Press Poetry. 95pp.; £7.95.
They Came to See a Poet: Selected Poems by Tadeusz Róýewicz, translated by Adam Czerniawski.
Anvil Press Poetry. 268pp.; £11.95.
These are two fascinating volumes of translations by two Polish poets of European importance. The translations have been done with great skill and resource by an outstanding contemporary translator and man of letters. The volumes have been handsomely and carefully produced by Anvil Press Poetry. All in all, these are two books worthy of notice.
Adam Czerniawski has translated widely – the poetry and plays of Róýewicz, the poetry of Leopold Staff and Jan Kochanowski, dramatic work by Zbigniew Herbert, philosophy by Roman Ingarden and Leszek Kozakowski, and much, much else besides. He is also a Polish poet of note and a redoubtable polemicist on matters of translation and Polish literature in general. In these two volumes he takes on the work of two great Polish poets, one from the nineteenth century and one from the twentieth and, indeed, twenty-first century (for Róýewicz is still writing poetry in his eighties).
Norwid (1821-1883) is certainly less well known outside Poland than Róýewicz and his work presents the translator with problems that the later poet’s does not. Despite his relative obscurity abroad, Norwid is a major canonical writer in Polish nineteenth-century literature. He is described in the 1985 edition of the encyclopedic Literatura Polska as “one of the most original and most versatile of Polish writers and thinkers” (translation mine – DM). Not only a poet, he was also a sculptor, visual artist and translator, with a wide knowledge and appreciation of music, history, and culture; he wrote verse, drama and prose. He is almost an emblematic figure of nineteenth-century Polish culture, that century of Polish erasure and un-freedom, for he was for most of his life an exiled and marginalized voice; he died in poverty in a Paris charitable institution, even ignored by the Polish émigré community. His verse is difficult. Condensed and elliptical, it is shot through with the specificities of Polish Romanticism, a nationalism, an experience of exile, a despair and a religious dimension that can seem alien to the English-language reader. All this is embodied in a language that seems strikingly modern by nineteenth-century standards. Comparisons to Browning and Emily Dickinson are often made by commentators. Czeniawski’s translations capture these features excellently. For example, the poem ‘Obscurity’ (‘Ciemnooeæ’) from the collection Vade-Mecum (1865): “He complains my speech is dark - / Has he ever lit the taper? / That remained his servant’s task / (The many reasons hid from us).” Or ‘Marionettes’ (‘Marionetki’), which is dated 1861: “Or better still – I know a braver way / Against this damned ennui: / Forget people, call on persons, wear / A neatly fastened tie! . . .” The enigmatic qualities, the urgency, the colloquial voice of the originals are all excellently done into English here.
It seems churlish to have reservations vis-à-vis such good translating work, but I do. Norwid rhymes; Czerniawski’s Norwid does not or does not do so consistently. Rhyme is not a matter of no importance. Czerniawski has himself written on the problems of translating rhyming verse. However, some of his solutions mislead the reader. Take, for example, the following first stanza from the poem ‘Undressed (A Ballad)’ (‘Rozebrana: Ballada’):
You will not see her morning or night,
She’s undressed . . .
. . .
She must be sleeping! – let her acolytes
Honestly stress,
Or she’s up, but undressed,
And in her bath.
Here Czerniawski hints at a rhyme in lines 2 and 4, but apart from that does not rhyme. Norwid, in fact, rhymes lines 1 and 2, lines 3 and 5, and lines 4 and 6. (Elsewhere in the translation, Czerniawski does not follow Norwid’s regular abab rhymes (except in stanza 8, which is abba), but at times, for example in stanza 8, allows himself a rhyme that is not part of Norwid’s scheme.) Rhyme is the translator’s bugbear, and I cannot presume to advise a translator of Czerniawski’s eminence (and I certainly am not going to try to do more Norwid than this), but one could English the above stanza from ‘Rozebrana’ differently, and in a way that keeps Norwid’s rhymes and more of his sound effects.
For example:
You won’t see her at dawn or when light fades in the west
For she’s undressed . . .
. . .
So she sleeps, for sure! – let them for once attest,
Her servant girls,
Or that when she gets up and before she’s dressed,
She washes well.
One can have many reservations about my translation, and I did it very quickly (“girls/well” is a bit dodgy as a rhyme), but it does show what might be attempted in terms of maintaining Norwid’s rhyme schemes.
The translator can be grateful that the question of rhyme does not occur on such an important scale with regard to Róýewicz’s verse (although in one famous poem, ‘A tree’ (‘Drzewo’), the poet rhymes “poeci” (poets) and “dzieci” (children). It beats me how you keep that in any translation (although Czerniawski has a good try). Róýewicz is clearly one of the major poets of post-war Europe. As Zbigniew Majchrowski, the outstanding Polish Róýewicz scholar, writes of him: “Indeed, Róýewicz, like a real master, has no imitators . . . for no one has the courage to go, in poetry, so close to reality, to get rid of illusions so absolutely, to bring together in such a risky fashion the trivial with the lofty” (translation mine). Czerniawski’s introduction to They Came to See a Poet is an excellent introduction to the work of this poet of searingly austere engagements with the awfulness of twentieth-century Europe. Czerniawski’s translations have much of the power of the originals – an accessible language, motifs of horror, an unflinching honesty and pessimism, and an almost baroque sense of the power of parallelism. ‘Posthumous rehabilitation’ (‘Rehabilitacja pooemiertna’) from a 1956 collection is a good example of this.
The dead recall
our indifference
The dead recall
our silence
The dead recall
our words
Czerniawski produces translations that work as poems in English
and that remain true to their fine originals. That is, surely, an enormous compliment to pay a translator. And yet, one does have some reservations, or perhaps only questions, about the translations. Some may seem trivial, but they do touch upon the ethics of translation as a craft. For example, let us take the poem ‘Warkoczyk,’ which Czerniawski translates as ‘Pigtail.’ That is correct, certainly, but in the last stanza, Róýewicz uses “mysi ogonek” (also “pigtail”) and “warkoczyk.” Czerniawski changes “warkoczyk”/“pigtail” to “plait,” and uses “pigtail” for “mysi ogonek.” Why? Róýewicz uses the same word in the title as line 4 of stanza 4, and a different word in line 5, not the other way around. He must have known what he was doing. In ‘The survivor’ (‘Ocalony’), Czerniawski inverts the order of lines 2 and 3 in stanzas 1 and 7. Why? And why “survivor” rather than “saved,” which seems to me closer to “Ocalony”? In ‘A tree’ (‘Drzewo’) – and, incidentally, (for Polish has no articles as such) why a tree, not tree, or the tree? – Czerniawski begins the poem with “Happy were / the poets of old,” which in its word order makes archaic in English something that is not in Polish. He also omits the personal pronoun “ci” (for “you”) in the first line of stanza 2, and elsewhere. Again why? Czerniawski renders the last line of ‘I have seen him’ (‘Widzialem Go’) as “at home / I washed my hands with great care,” whereas the Polish is “w domu umy³em rêce” (at home I washed my hands) – one line only, and nothing about care.
Let me be clear. All translation is approximation, is messy, is incomplete and imperfect. All translation is interpretation. Czerniawski’s translations are excellent in every respect (especially the Róýewicz ones), but caveat lector. He is manipulating the originals in certain ways, the reasons for which are not immediately apparent. I have great respect for his work. I suppose I would just like to have a conversation with him about some of his choices. Failing that, reading these fine translations of two great poets is the next best thing.
Page(s) 239-243
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