Any translation of poetry—and the translation of these poems in particular—seems to corroborate the thesis Gregory Rabassa advanced with respect to prose: if literature is a metaphor for experience, literary translation is a metaphor for a metaphor, a word for a word. Therefore, rather than the “competing versions” juxtaposed by Dinitia Smith—a metaphor in itself which likens concurrent translations to a sports contest, to a vying for supremacy in which one must necessarily prevail—I’d favor the idea of complementing translations, neither of which, as Clare Cavanagh describes, is a facsimile for the original. Each accentuates a distinctive feature of the source.
In a similar spirit, it’s not exactly clear—or, at best, it’s arbitrary—by what criteria Grudzińska-Gross identifies bad translation. The test, seemingly, is olfactory. If she, as a reader of at least Polish, Russian, and English, detects a whiff of the original wafting through, the poem is a success. One sure way to stifle this aroma is, for example, to make the “tragic” mistake of translating into white verse when rhyme or meter are a hallmark of a Russian or Polish original. This facile argumentation mars the writer’s point by turning personal preference into the highest trump card, foreshortening the poetics of translation by applying the vapid, totalizing heading of good/bad precisely when Grudzińska-Gross wishes to amplify their dimensions.
But despite the glaring paucity of her rationale, Grudzińska-Gross confirms the importance of situating a text in literary, historical, and biographic contexts. In this case, if a translator does not identify the allusions to Polish literature, or position the poem against the backdrop of the Nazi invasion, or know that the author was pursued, imprisoned, and finally murdered by the German war machine, that translator would likely deliver a skewed or diluted representation of the original.
I, for my part, admire Grudzińska-Gross’ translation. The irony, reinforced by the rhythm and the meter, is sharp, even jagged, culminating in the enigmatic last line. The angels exist on two planes. They represent, on the one hand, the horror, the injustice, and the deprivation of the poet’s circumstances transmuted into the eternal, ethereal space of literature. She will perish, the historical circumstances will expire, but her symbolic rendition will continue, immutable, in the realm of verse. On the other, the supposedly good neighbors who betray her out of envy, greed, or cowardice wear their maleficence like a badge upon their arms. The traitors are as conspicuous as angels walking the surface of the earth, and in effect, the woman who informed against Ginczanka is, after the war, singled out and sentenced for her crime.
Eve Bigaj’s translation, although blunting the poem’s acerbic irony, culls out a meaning whose echo is very faint in Grudzińska-Gross. Here, we have a poet who not only proposes literary patrimony as a formula to outstrip her material circumstances but also to transcends the vindictive pettiness of bitterness. The clarion call for justice exists alongside the moral prerogative to forgive. The atmosphere, the tone, and the timbre of the poems, so distinct each from the other, only together approximate the texture and the thematic compression of the original.
Finally, Joanna Huss, completing this eclectic portrait of the divergent but equally successful emphases in translation, finds vivid images in abstractions and extracts the poetic marrow from the often eschewed Latinate contingent of the English lexicon. My hunch is that her choices, far from an imposition on the translator’s part, respond to the poems’ unique necessities. The variety of forms and the breath of voices present in the translations probably stem from the differentiated complexity of the poet herself.
-Josh
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