With the "Competing Poems by Nobelist" piece, it’s really hard not to want to reconcile the two translations, and I wish I could see how they might have been reconciled in the original piece. For instance, the difference between “redemptive handrail” and “saving banister” feels massive to me, but they provide so much clarity to each other: I love the extra meaning Trzeciak creates (or maybe preserves?) with “saving banister” where it evokes the sense of there being a staircase, as though the poet, or even the reader of poetry, has to try and clamber up some grueling staircase with a failing support in order to get at the “sort of thing” that poetry is, but I’m not sure I would’ve understood this kind of fail-safe quality of the insufficient answers to the question “what is poetry” without Baranczak and Cavanagh’s “redemptive handrail,” nor do I feel I would’ve gotten the same meaning solely out of Trzeciak “clutch” as I do looking at it in conjunction with Baranczak and Cavanagh’s “cling.” I also love the way Baranczak and Cavanagh’s description of “tumbling” fits precisely with Trzeciak’s staircase and the idea of climbing/falling, even though that idea does not seem elsewhere present in their translation. I would almost be persuaded that the best-poem might have been a secondary franken-poem of the two translations, where “saving banister” was simply the better choice for a closing line, where what you lose from the word "redemptive" is regained in the substitution of “saving banister” by the pervasive idea of climbing, falling, and reclimbing, but there are other points where the measure of difference between the choices seemed itself to display best the essence of the poem. Basically, I think a very good argument is made for competing translations, whether that takes the form of a franken-poem, or reading between the lines of multiple translations.
I think I'm too bad a reader of poetry to appreciate Ginczanka's on my own -- I need someone else to talk about it before I can figure out how I feel about it (eg. I was neutral on Julia Nemirovskaya's poems until I Dralyuk talked about them, and perhaps this is simply a merit of Dralyuk, but now I think he and Nemirovskaya are absolutely the greatest). However, this sequence in Physiology:
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
was striking even to me. The last line in particular conjures such a poignant idea, and I wondered if the phrasing was more, or less, idiomatic (less creative? and I don't mean that to be derogatory) in the original Polish -- from what I could tell from google translate, "the stake of" was an addition from Trzeciak (the literal translation perhaps being "yet I am impaled, on my own backbone"), so I was curious whether that was because there was an idea of/word for impalement in polish that in itself capture this idea of there being a stake (instead of any other impaling object, i guess) that Trzeciak was trying to redeem.
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