Reflections 4/20 (Ginczanka, Joanna Huss)

    I found the article “Competing Versions of Poem by Nobelist” a little funny this week. Last week in Professor Vincent’s class, we read the first 100 pages of Kate Brigg’s (incredible) book This Little Art, and in the text, she suggests that actually, we probably aren’t getting any better at translation—we’re just making new ones, different ones. I love this idea because it allows for any number of different translations of a given to text to exist. One translation does not have to be written off as “bad” or “wrong” in order for someone to make another. One translator can translate the same text as another translator in a different way, a new way—one doesn’t necessarily have to be better or worse. The versions need not “compete.” And the two publications, The New Yorker and the New Republic, can certainly publish two different translations of the same poem. They should do so, in fact. The space for translations should not be finite.

     I liked Joanna Huss’ translations of Ginczanka’s poetry. I was particularly struck by the poem “Physiology” and the lines:

I am happy: this is life! (exclamation point) I follow the orders of my breath,

that allege: I am seventeen,

that allege: I am happy,

yet I am impaled on the stake of my own spine

(inevitable death is in me, like a needle circulating in the veins)

this is not subject to negotiation,

this is not subject to supplication:

The use of punctuation is striking, especially the exclamation point followed by the words “exclamation point.” The end rhyme with “negotiation” and “supplication” reads beautifully too. 

    I first encountered Ginczanka’s poetry last semester in Professor Valles’ class when she very kindly shared with us a few beautiful translations she was working on. We read a few different renditions of “I Shall Not Wholly Die.” I like the version shared in the article “Something or Other” translated by Irena Grudzinska-Gross and her students, as well as the one in the article “An Angel Against Her Will,” but there are other translations I preferred. Although usually I prefer keeping non-English words from the source text in their original language, I like when translators of this poem in particular render the very first line, the Latin “Non omnis moriar,” as “I shall not wholly die” in English. They are so immensely powerful in English. The translation of the material objects is particularly important here too. For example, while the translation that appears in “An Angel Against Her Will” writes of “jugs” and “candles,” Grudzinska-Gross’ translation uses the words “goblets” and “candlesticks,” establishing a haunting opulence that feels essential to this poem.

-sharon