Apr

15

Lost In Translation.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

April 15, 2008 |

David Orr’s review of The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, which collects English translations of Zbigniew Herbert, begins,

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.

Maybe so, but isn’t that a matter of critical taste? Orr points to two Polish Nobel Prize winners–Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska–and 34 pages in the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry to make his case, noting that that’s “11 better than France, a country with 25 million more people”. Yes, but French poetry is well-represented in other books and other anthologies; it’s been widely translated. Couldn’t that have been editor J.D. McClatchy’s reason for including more pages of Polish poetry? I’m not knocking the poetry of Poland; Herbert, Milosz, Szymborska and, for that matter, Tadeusz Rózewicz and Adam Zagajewski, who are all included in the anthology, are excellent poets. And Orr is right that Herbert, whose work in English translation was, prior to the publication of the new volume, either out of print or difficult to find (in fact some of the poems in the new volume have never appeared in English translation), has been unfairly under-appreciated not only by readers in English but by the world community. He says, “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.” Wait. Didn’t he previously point to Poland as a producer of great poetry by citing its two Nobel Prize winners?

My criticism of Orr may seem like nitpicking, but poetry is made by people, not nations, and critics, like poets, have a responsibility to choose their words carefully. Orr is treating poetry like economics, suggesting Poland has more great poets per capita than France, and using a small sample–a single anthology–for his basis. This is drawing attention away from the focus of his review, the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, poetry which, for most English readers, is available only in translation. The cover of Herbert’s Collected Poems is rather poignant and speaks volumes–no pun intended. Words are absent; it’s merely a picture of the poet under a deep darkness–is that ignorance? obscurity?–holding up a match to light a cigarette. He’s taking his simple pleasure and setting a light against the darkness.

I will say this for Orr’s review: by briefly making poetry a numbers game he reminded me of one of Herbert’s most haunting poems, a quiet meditation on how misleading numbers can be:

Mr. Cogito Reads The Newspaper

On the first page
a report of the killing of 120 soldiers

the war lasted a long time
you could get used to it

close alongside
the news of a sensational crime
with a portrait of the murderer

the eye of Mr Cogito
slips indifferently
over the soldiers’ hecatomb
to plunge with delight
into the description of everyday horror

a thirty-year-old farm labourer
under the stress of nervous depression
killed his wife
and two small children

it is described with precision
the course of the murder
the position of the bodies
and other details

for 120 dead
you search on a map in vain

too great a distance
covers them like a jungle

they don’t speak to the imagination
there are too many of them
the numeral zero at the end
changes them into an abstraction

a subject for meditation:
the arithmetic of compassion

(from Mr. Cogito, translated by Jonathan Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter)


Comments

3 Comments so far

  1. James on April 15, 2008 4:05 pm

    I don’t see how you can treat poetry like economics. It is not measurable in the same way.

  2. Lost In Translation. | eugenetrueman on April 15, 2008 11:15 pm

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  3. Lost In Translation. | dietrichfidole on April 16, 2008 11:58 am

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