If on a winter’s night a translator...
Ivonna Nowicka
...were to say which poem by the poet she likes best, what would she say?
Aren’t there too many unknows in this sentence? Let’s try and specify
them. Which winter’s night, you’re asking? Well, not Calvino’s
winter’s night, obviously, but our own dear winter’s night exported
from Siberia that has set upon us these days. Now you’d like to know,
which translator? No point denying, the very same one who is trying to keep
your attention on this very screen and with these very words. Time to disclose,
which poem? That is clear, too – a poem by the poet who passed away exactly
on the birthday of the translator who renders her poems from Polish into Persian.
The poet who used to call the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to her, and
all the ensuing fuss that confused the peace and intimacy of her private life,
“the Stokholm tragedy”.
The poet who would never pretend, who would neither surrender to circumstances
nor allow any situation to derail her from her natural way of being. Please
keep in mind, though, that our calm-loving poet was also sharp-witted and ironical
and when rejecting one invitation after another to various events, she instructed
her private secretary to write in reply: „I shall come, as soon as I grow
younger”.
The poet who violated the etiquette of the Nobel Prize ceremony and instead
of bowing towards King Carl Gustaf and the members of the Swedish Academy, first,
she bowed towards the audience; and when someone called her “a personality”,
she replied that she was not a personality but a person.
The poet who, in her own words, preferred “the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems” (“Possibilites”; trans.
by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh).
The poet who was sparing with words and polished her verses until each one became
like unto a unique star and transformed into a world of vision and meaning of
its own.
The poet who, unlike her fellow country-man and fellow Nobel-laureate, Czeslaw
Milosz, suceeded in having many readers.
And, of course, the poet who was a heavy smoker and in answer to the prompting
that she should quit this habit once replied that all those non-smoking friends
had been telling her not to smoke and now they were under the earth, and she
kept on living… Until medicine prevailed and the poet took her last sleep
at the age of 88 from lung cancer. Fortunately in peace, in her own flat, dozing,
cigarette to her lip. On February, 1st.
Finally, the poet with whose passing away, in the words of Polish writer Stefan
Chwin, “a great light of Polish poetry got extinguished”.
Wislawa Szymborska.
Szymborska considered reading her poems a better way to get to know her than
talking to her. Therefore, please allow me to keep calling her “the poet”,
or better still “the Poet”, here. Therefore, also, if on a winter’s
night the translator were to choose her favourite bright star from the constellation
of the Poet’s verses, she would immediately point to “The Miracle
Fair”.
Miracle Fair
The commonplace miracle:
that so many common miracles take place.
The usual miracle:
invisible dogs barking
in the dead of night.
One of many miracles:
a small and airy cloud
is able to upstage the massive moon.
Several miracles in one:
an alder is reflected in the water
and is reversed from left to right
and grows from crown to root
and never hits bottom
though the water isn’t deep.
A run-of-the-mill miracle:
winds mild to moderate
turning gusty in storms.
A miracle in the first place:
cows will be cows.
Next but not least:
just this cherry orchard
from just this cherry pit.
A miracle minus top hat and tails:
fluttering white doves.
A miracle (what else can you call it):
the sun rose today at three fourteen a.m.
and will set tonight at one past eight.
A miracle that’s lost on us:
the hand actually has fewer than six fingers
but still it’s got more than four.
A miracle, just take a look around:
the inescapable earth.
An extra miracle, extra and ordinary:
the unthinkable
can be thought.
(translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)
Readers who are demanding because of their profession, that is literary critics,
and readers who are demanding because of their taste, that is ordinary people,
are surprisingly unanimous in that the Poet had a talent to draw our attention
to seemingly ordinary details of reality. As her Italian publisher, Roberto
Calasso said: “Many people … would find in Szymborska’s poems
thoughts they did not know about or did not dare name. Thoughts, nevertheless,
hidden in the depth of their experience and in their being. … Szymborska
unveiled small and large secrets for them, secrets that otherwise would have
remained mute and concealed.”
In the translator’s opinion this poem is a perfect example of this skill
of the Poet. Korean composer of contemporary music, Manbang Yi, once told the
translator that the skill of living is to keep the wide-open eyes of a child
alive in us. “The Miracle Fair” is an expression of exactly such
an attitude. It proves to what extent the Poet had this intellectual power to
behold the world with a fresh eye. “A miracle that’s lost on us:
/ the hand actually has fewer than six fingers / but still it’s got more
than four.” Indeed!
Or contemplate this scene: “Several miracles in one: / an alder is reflected
in the water and is reversed from left to right / and grows from crown to root
/ and never hits bottom / though the water isn’t deep.” What a freshness
of vision! As if an extraterrestial being had come to Earth and were getting
acquainted with the reality on this unknown planet. Or exactly as the wide-open,
amazed eyes of a child. This scene reminds the translator of the reaction of
her youngest nephew, a sweet child of four or five at that time, when he was
told that from a tiny seed a huge tree can grow. Tymek thought we were taking
him in. But for a grown-up person to create – or to maintain – such
an existential detachment requires special sophistication of mind.
Finally, apart from its philosophical load in the last stanza, “The Miracle
Fair” is one of the most beautiful descriptions of our Earth and after
a spiritual feast with this poem, planet Earth always becomes more precious
in the translator’s eyes.
The translator realises that the Poet’s rational and slightly dry style
may sound a bit alien, for instance to Persian speakers brought up on the canon
of sweet and soft verses by Hafez or Sa’di. This may be the reason why
the Poet’s poems apparently have not found such a wide and loving readership
in Iran, as they have in Italy, Sweden or in the Poet’s homeland, for
that matter.
Each collection of the Poet’s poems except for the first one (entitled
“That’s What we’re Living for” and loaded with heavy
communist propaganda) can be regarded as a small philosophical treaty, a pearl
of thought, and this attitude may be helpful in appreciating them. Just as Polish
poet and a friend of Szymborska’s, Adam Zagajewski, explained, Szymborska
“cherished wisdom and reason, i.e. the values of the Renaissance.”
(from: “Adam Zagajewski recalls Szymborska”; in: “Gazeta Wyborcza“,
Warsaw, February 3rd, 2012, p. 15).
The Poet’s original and well-finished poems, once you have read them,
have this haunting quality of remaining with you forever, and many lines have
become every-day quotations in the Polish language. Since starting the translation
of Szymborska’s poems into Persian with Persian poet and researcher Alireza
Doulatshahi in 1996 and publishing a Persian collection of her verse in 2003,
this translator had many of these works as friendly companions in her journey
through life. Among them “The Psalm” is no less important to her
than “The Miracle Fair”.
The Psalm
Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand shifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!
Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?
A humble robin – still, its tail resides abroad
while its beak stays home. If that weren’t enough, it won’t stop
bobbing!
Among innumerable insects, I’ll single out only the ant
between the border guard’s left and right boots
blithely ignoring the questions “Where from?” and “Where to?”
Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos
prevailing on every continent!
Isn’t that a privet on the far bank
smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,
would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?
And how can we talk of order overall?
when the very placement of the stars
leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?
Not to speak of the fog’s reprehensible drifting!
And dust blowing all over the steppes
as if they hadn’t been partitioned!
And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,
that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!
Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.
(Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)
Indeed, without this bitter description of the sorry state of reality mankind
has brought upon itself on Earth, without this unmasking of the amazing relativity
of man-made conditions, the translator’s answer would have been incomplete.
And again, if on a winter’s night the translator were to tell which one
of Szymborska’s poems she likes best, she would say she needed to name
three poems and had to mention “Instant Living”, too.
Page:
Ivonna Nowicka - Ivonna Nowicka, Polish specialist in Iranian studies, translator.In accordance with the etymology and mission of translation to carry cultures across, she is attempting to introduce Polish belles-lettres into Persian and Persian literature into Polish. Publications in Persian in book form include three collections of verse by Polish poets Wislawa Szymborska (Teheran 2003 and 2004), Halina Poswiatowska (Teheran 2010) and Adam Mickiewicz (Teheran 2010) translated together with Alireza Doulatshahi.