Post by kaima on Jul 29, 2007 7:59:21 GMT -7
From the NY Times
tinyurl.com/3224tu
July 29, 2007
On Poetry
Translating Zbigniew Herbert
By DAVID ORR
It’s easy to say which nation has the fastest trains (France) or the largest number of prime ministers who’ve probably been eaten by sharks (Australia), but it’s impossible to know which country has the best writers, let alone the best poets. Even so, if cash money were on the line, you’d find few critics willing to bet against Poland. Since 1980, the Poles have two Nobel Prize-winning poets, 34 pages in the “Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry” (11 better than France, a country with 25 million more people) and enough top-flight artists to populate dozens of American creative writing departments, probably improving many of them in the process. The 19th-century Polish poet Cyprian Norwid said he wanted to see “Polish symbols loom / in warm expanding series which reveal / Once and for all the Poland that is real” — for decades now, those symbols and that reality have been hard to ignore.
Of course, for most of us, discovering “the Poland that is real” means reading works translated from Polish. The most significant such translation this year — possibly in many years — is Zbigniew Herbert’s “Collected Poems, 1956-1998” (Ecco/HarperCollins, $34.95), translated by Alissa Valles, which was published in February to (almost) universal acclaim. The book is significant for two reasons. First, Herbert himself is significant — like Frost and Auden, he’s a poet whose failure to win the Nobel Prize says more about the prize committee than about the writer. Second, his poetry is relatively difficult to find. Although most of Herbert’s collections have been translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, many of those books are now out of print. For the casual reader, then, this “Collected Poems” is the likeliest path to this poet’s achievement.
That achievement is well worth the journey. Along with Tadeusz Rozewicz, Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, Herbert is one of the principal figures in postwar Polish poetry — and by extension, in European letters generally. Born in 1924, he was active in the Polish resistance during the German occupation, then became an admirably uncooperative citizen of the subsequent Soviet puppet state. (According to a recent article in Süddeutsche Zeitung, whenever Herbert was asked by the secret police to write up reports on foreign trips, he would fill them “with interpretations of the poems of the Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz ... as well as long-winded cultural-philosophical observations.”)
The quiet but determined insubordination that marked his public life is echoed in his poetry, which is lucid, low-pitched and saturated with irony. A typical Herbert poem uses spare diction and a meticulously orchestrated syntax to investigate ethics as much as aesthetics — indeed, a Herbert poem often points out the blurred border between these two categories. As he puts it in “The Power of Taste”:
It did not take any great character
our refusal dissent and persistence
we had a scrap of necessary courage
but essentially it was a matter of taste
Herbert is sometimes described as a poet of precision and reserve — as if he were interchangeable with the subject of his much-quoted poem “Pebble”: “The pebble / is a perfect creature / equal to itself / mindful of its limits ... its ardor and coldness / are just and full of dignity.” There’s some truth to this, but the compression in this poet’s writing can also produce considerable heat. Unlike many poets who focus on morality, Herbert has a powerful sense of right and wrong without a corresponding belief in a system that would make right action more likely. The difficulty of this position gives his work a peculiar, knotted intensity, and leads to the stoicism evident in poems like “Mr. Cogito’s Monster,” in which Herbert’s alter ego, Mr. Cogito, challenges a monster each day that “lacks all dimensions” and exists only as “the flickering of nothingness” (recalling the Nazi and Soviet occupations). Cogito’s quest is hopeless, yet necessary — a vivid symbol of Herbert’s ethical irony.
Our ability to appreciate such effects, however, depends on the skill with which they’re translated — and this is where the story of Herbert’s “Collected Poems” becomes more complicated. In a recent essay in Poetry magazine, the poet and translator Michael Hofmann argued not only that the poems in this new book are inferior to works translated decades ago by the Carpenters (whose efforts weren’t included here, for obscure reasons), but also that this is “a hopelessly, irredeemably bad book.” Hofmann can’t read Polish (neither can I), but he makes a vigorous, smart and hugely entertaining case by comparing the older and newer translations. Admittedly, not all of Hofmann’s examples are convincing. He claims, for instance, that Valles “makes a fool of herself” by using the phrase “indifferent plenitude” whereas the Carpenters — “knowing or wisely sensing that Herbert demands a mixing of English and Latin — have ‘indifferent fullness.’ ” Putting aside the nitpickiness of the complaint — “plenitude” originates in Latin, “fullness” doesn’t — “plenitude” also has philosophical associations running from Aristotle to St. Thomas Aquinas to David Lewis.
That said, Hofmann’s basic point is sound — this book would’ve been better if some of the Carpenters’ work had been retained. Sometimes, it’s a matter of the earlier translations being subtly richer. In “Mr. Cogito — the Return,” for example, Herbert’s protagonist returns to his occupied homeland to confront its miseries. The Carpenters render one of the threats Cogito faces as “the blow given from behind.” In Valles’s version, it is “a blow out of the blue,” which is tinnier and needlessly clichéd, and emphasizes the unexpectedness of the “blow” at the expense of its treacherousness. Other times, the newer translation appears to be inaccurate. We are told that Mr. Cogito can “no longer / stand the colloquial turns” (in context, Herbert clearly means “commonplace,” not “colloquial”), that a prosecutor has a “yellow indicator finger” (“index finger”?), and that you can hear “the tolling of scattered walls” (“collapsing walls”?).
Still, Herbert wrote many poems; mistakes are to be expected. And as always, the central difficulty for any translator lies in conveying words and concepts that lack true analogues in our language. In such cases, is the literal meaning best? Or what you think the poet might have said if he were an English speaker? To understand how complicated these questions can be, consider “On the Road to Delphi.” In this short prose poem, Apollo is shown idly toying with the severed head of Medusa while repeating a particular line. In Polish, that line is “Sztukmistrz musi zglebic okrucienstwo,” to which a Polish-English dictionary offers this translation: “A performer must get to the bottom of cruelty.” The Carpenters, however, render the line: “A craftsman must probe to the very bottom of cruelty.” “Craftsman” is surprising, but it makes a certain sense — the poem is exploring the old idea of art as an essentially coldhearted activity (as Yeats said, “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death”), and Herbert has deliberately avoided the Polish word for “artist” (“artysta”) in favor of “sztukmistrz,” which means “performer, juggler, conjuror.” In doing so, Herbert is emphasizing the side of art that has to do with performance for its own sake — by extension, he’s pointing out the chill at the core of technical excellence. So “craftsman” may help bring that aspect of the poem into English.
But it isn’t what Herbert said. Which is perhaps why Valles gives the same line as “a conjuror must plumb the depths of cruelty.” Aside from “plumb the depths,” which is overdone, this version is almost certainly a better word-for-word translation. But it doesn’t make much sense in English, probably because the figure of the traveling magician doesn’t figure prominently in American consciousness. Consequently Valles’s version, while accurate, has the unfortunate effect of making the casual reader think of David Blaine. Talk about plumbing the depths of cruelty.
So if translation is always a matter of approximating, does it matter that Herbert’s “Collected Poems” has its weaknesses? Well, yes: after death, a translated poet may, as Auden said, become his admirers, but only after he’s become a poet in English who’s interesting enough to attract admirers in the first place. Herbert is now a complete poet in English, and he’s not as strong as he should be. In “Elegy of Fortinbras,” in which the practical Fortinbras eulogizes the romantic Hamlet, Herbert writes that “we live on archipelagos / and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince.” Whatever this poet’s new words can do, we’ll have to hope it’s enough to carry him across the estranging sea between his language and our own.
tinyurl.com/3224tu
July 29, 2007
On Poetry
Translating Zbigniew Herbert
By DAVID ORR
It’s easy to say which nation has the fastest trains (France) or the largest number of prime ministers who’ve probably been eaten by sharks (Australia), but it’s impossible to know which country has the best writers, let alone the best poets. Even so, if cash money were on the line, you’d find few critics willing to bet against Poland. Since 1980, the Poles have two Nobel Prize-winning poets, 34 pages in the “Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry” (11 better than France, a country with 25 million more people) and enough top-flight artists to populate dozens of American creative writing departments, probably improving many of them in the process. The 19th-century Polish poet Cyprian Norwid said he wanted to see “Polish symbols loom / in warm expanding series which reveal / Once and for all the Poland that is real” — for decades now, those symbols and that reality have been hard to ignore.
Of course, for most of us, discovering “the Poland that is real” means reading works translated from Polish. The most significant such translation this year — possibly in many years — is Zbigniew Herbert’s “Collected Poems, 1956-1998” (Ecco/HarperCollins, $34.95), translated by Alissa Valles, which was published in February to (almost) universal acclaim. The book is significant for two reasons. First, Herbert himself is significant — like Frost and Auden, he’s a poet whose failure to win the Nobel Prize says more about the prize committee than about the writer. Second, his poetry is relatively difficult to find. Although most of Herbert’s collections have been translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, many of those books are now out of print. For the casual reader, then, this “Collected Poems” is the likeliest path to this poet’s achievement.
That achievement is well worth the journey. Along with Tadeusz Rozewicz, Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, Herbert is one of the principal figures in postwar Polish poetry — and by extension, in European letters generally. Born in 1924, he was active in the Polish resistance during the German occupation, then became an admirably uncooperative citizen of the subsequent Soviet puppet state. (According to a recent article in Süddeutsche Zeitung, whenever Herbert was asked by the secret police to write up reports on foreign trips, he would fill them “with interpretations of the poems of the Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz ... as well as long-winded cultural-philosophical observations.”)
The quiet but determined insubordination that marked his public life is echoed in his poetry, which is lucid, low-pitched and saturated with irony. A typical Herbert poem uses spare diction and a meticulously orchestrated syntax to investigate ethics as much as aesthetics — indeed, a Herbert poem often points out the blurred border between these two categories. As he puts it in “The Power of Taste”:
It did not take any great character
our refusal dissent and persistence
we had a scrap of necessary courage
but essentially it was a matter of taste
Herbert is sometimes described as a poet of precision and reserve — as if he were interchangeable with the subject of his much-quoted poem “Pebble”: “The pebble / is a perfect creature / equal to itself / mindful of its limits ... its ardor and coldness / are just and full of dignity.” There’s some truth to this, but the compression in this poet’s writing can also produce considerable heat. Unlike many poets who focus on morality, Herbert has a powerful sense of right and wrong without a corresponding belief in a system that would make right action more likely. The difficulty of this position gives his work a peculiar, knotted intensity, and leads to the stoicism evident in poems like “Mr. Cogito’s Monster,” in which Herbert’s alter ego, Mr. Cogito, challenges a monster each day that “lacks all dimensions” and exists only as “the flickering of nothingness” (recalling the Nazi and Soviet occupations). Cogito’s quest is hopeless, yet necessary — a vivid symbol of Herbert’s ethical irony.
Our ability to appreciate such effects, however, depends on the skill with which they’re translated — and this is where the story of Herbert’s “Collected Poems” becomes more complicated. In a recent essay in Poetry magazine, the poet and translator Michael Hofmann argued not only that the poems in this new book are inferior to works translated decades ago by the Carpenters (whose efforts weren’t included here, for obscure reasons), but also that this is “a hopelessly, irredeemably bad book.” Hofmann can’t read Polish (neither can I), but he makes a vigorous, smart and hugely entertaining case by comparing the older and newer translations. Admittedly, not all of Hofmann’s examples are convincing. He claims, for instance, that Valles “makes a fool of herself” by using the phrase “indifferent plenitude” whereas the Carpenters — “knowing or wisely sensing that Herbert demands a mixing of English and Latin — have ‘indifferent fullness.’ ” Putting aside the nitpickiness of the complaint — “plenitude” originates in Latin, “fullness” doesn’t — “plenitude” also has philosophical associations running from Aristotle to St. Thomas Aquinas to David Lewis.
That said, Hofmann’s basic point is sound — this book would’ve been better if some of the Carpenters’ work had been retained. Sometimes, it’s a matter of the earlier translations being subtly richer. In “Mr. Cogito — the Return,” for example, Herbert’s protagonist returns to his occupied homeland to confront its miseries. The Carpenters render one of the threats Cogito faces as “the blow given from behind.” In Valles’s version, it is “a blow out of the blue,” which is tinnier and needlessly clichéd, and emphasizes the unexpectedness of the “blow” at the expense of its treacherousness. Other times, the newer translation appears to be inaccurate. We are told that Mr. Cogito can “no longer / stand the colloquial turns” (in context, Herbert clearly means “commonplace,” not “colloquial”), that a prosecutor has a “yellow indicator finger” (“index finger”?), and that you can hear “the tolling of scattered walls” (“collapsing walls”?).
Still, Herbert wrote many poems; mistakes are to be expected. And as always, the central difficulty for any translator lies in conveying words and concepts that lack true analogues in our language. In such cases, is the literal meaning best? Or what you think the poet might have said if he were an English speaker? To understand how complicated these questions can be, consider “On the Road to Delphi.” In this short prose poem, Apollo is shown idly toying with the severed head of Medusa while repeating a particular line. In Polish, that line is “Sztukmistrz musi zglebic okrucienstwo,” to which a Polish-English dictionary offers this translation: “A performer must get to the bottom of cruelty.” The Carpenters, however, render the line: “A craftsman must probe to the very bottom of cruelty.” “Craftsman” is surprising, but it makes a certain sense — the poem is exploring the old idea of art as an essentially coldhearted activity (as Yeats said, “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death”), and Herbert has deliberately avoided the Polish word for “artist” (“artysta”) in favor of “sztukmistrz,” which means “performer, juggler, conjuror.” In doing so, Herbert is emphasizing the side of art that has to do with performance for its own sake — by extension, he’s pointing out the chill at the core of technical excellence. So “craftsman” may help bring that aspect of the poem into English.
But it isn’t what Herbert said. Which is perhaps why Valles gives the same line as “a conjuror must plumb the depths of cruelty.” Aside from “plumb the depths,” which is overdone, this version is almost certainly a better word-for-word translation. But it doesn’t make much sense in English, probably because the figure of the traveling magician doesn’t figure prominently in American consciousness. Consequently Valles’s version, while accurate, has the unfortunate effect of making the casual reader think of David Blaine. Talk about plumbing the depths of cruelty.
So if translation is always a matter of approximating, does it matter that Herbert’s “Collected Poems” has its weaknesses? Well, yes: after death, a translated poet may, as Auden said, become his admirers, but only after he’s become a poet in English who’s interesting enough to attract admirers in the first place. Herbert is now a complete poet in English, and he’s not as strong as he should be. In “Elegy of Fortinbras,” in which the practical Fortinbras eulogizes the romantic Hamlet, Herbert writes that “we live on archipelagos / and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince.” Whatever this poet’s new words can do, we’ll have to hope it’s enough to carry him across the estranging sea between his language and our own.
