World Books Review: Lodgings — A Generous Selection of Verse from an Intriguing Polish Poet

By ⋅ April 15, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

A problematic selection of poems from an impressive contemporary Polish poet whose writing combines antic playfulness and insistent earnestness.

Lodgings: Selected Poems, Andrzej Sosnowski, translated by Benjamin Paloff, Open Letter, 163 pp, $13.95

by J. Kates

For a long time, modern Polish poets were seen by American readers only through the dark lenses of Cold War rhetoric and a mythology of “captive nations.” We were introduced to a number of interesting poets, a surprising number of whom were not driven by politics, but the context of their presentation was, tinged with the ferrous oxide of the Iron Curtain. But now a new generation has arisen that knew not Joseph, refreshingly influenced by Western poets as diverse as Algernon Swinburne and Frank O’Hara, and making easy connections with Paris and New York. Among these is Andrzej Sosbnowski.

Sosnowski, born in 1959, has such stature now in Poland that it is unfortunate that the edition of his poems translated by Benjamin Paloff in Lodgings is slightly unreliable. For the first five poems for which I have easy access to comparative texts, one (“What Is Poetry”) has dropped its terminal climactic line entirely, and another (“A Song for Europe”) mistranslates “forty” as “fourteen,” where the number matters.These may be anomalies, but a random sampling that yields a 40% error rate does not inspire confidence. There are other curiosities — a title left untranslated without explanation, and so on. The translations may very well be for the most part sound, and are vouched for by some who know Polish far better than I do; but when I read a loaded phrase like “nocturnal emissions of factories” (given in another translation as “factories spew by night”) I don’t know where the pun originates, or what to make of it.

You won’t find out much about the poet from Lodgings. There is a brief biographical note at the end, yet you’ll have to go somewhere else for information and context about Sosnowski’s place in contemporary letters. The Paloff and the publisher provide no notes, and only the briefest of introductions, mostly bibliographical.

For poems that the translator claims are pervasively allusive, readers are given no critical information — that the Korea of Sosnowski’s first book Life in Korea is the name not of a country in East Asia, for instance, but of a district of Warsaw; or that Hel is less a Germanic mythical allusion than a geographical location on the Baltic. Paloff alerts us to “the initial difficulties of reading Sosnowski’s work,” but neither elucidates these nor explains how he deals with them in English.

Poet Andrzej Sosnowski -- a major Polish poet whose verse reflects American influences.

Without the original Polish texts, Lodgings exists in a kind of suspended animation, unattached to anything around it. Paloff does refer briefly to Sosnowski’s literary relationship to American poets he has translated, but the only direct connection he makes is between John Ashbery’s “What Is Poetry” and Sosnowski’s response. In a little interview tucked in just before the last poems, Paloff talks with the poet almost exclusively about American correspondences, yet Sosnowski himself seems relatively uninterested in chasing these down: “This is something that only you, and eventually your readers, can sense and know for yourselves. I have read quite a bit of American poetry, and I’ve translated some. Has some of that rubbed off on my own poems? I don’t know.”

The poems exude an exuberant air of playful language, and sometimes I don’t care if the voice is Sosnowski’s or Paloff’s:

to hell with your distant voice in the receiver
to hell with drops of dew on lilac
tears of alder above the mill what did you do
with that light the deutzia flowers charlock the view of delft
what was your last magic my make-up artist
the last vaginalia turned out so pale
followed by horrendalia that’s now so-so
over the rainbow . . .

(“Spring Rounds”)

Sometimes, though, it makes a difference: one image in the original “Czym jest poezja” turns on a rhyme of two words, glos and los, “voice” and “fate.” Paloff has gone for the rhyme, “voice” and “choice,” at the laborious expense of meaning.

Does meaning matter here — is “fate” the same as “choice?” Underneath the playfulness of Sosnowski lies an insistent earnestness, a sober engagement that comes across at his best in the longer poems, as in “dr. caligari resets the world” and in the “The Oceans,” a Swinburnian double sestina:

How difficult it is, essentially, to understand this shadow,
which meanders behind me through all the oceans,
through the foam, like the Flying Dutchman, outpacing the day
on crescent-moon sails as it assaults the night with our belongings!

We do want to know what Sosnowski has to tell us.

Lodgings offers a generous selection of poems from Sosnowski’s books from 1992 through 2010. A few of Sosnowski’s poems have been available before, but not in such profusion. For this, we must be grateful, and hope that this tantalizing look at an intriguing Polish poet will spark more, and more reliable, English versions.

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J. Kates is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. He helps run Jephyr Press.

Discussion

4 comments for “World Books Review: Lodgings — A Generous Selection of Verse from an Intriguing Polish Poet”

  • http://www.facebook.com/paloff Benjamin Paloff

    Dear Editors:

    I would like to thank you for your recent attention to Andrzej Sosnowski’s Lodgings: Selected Poems 1987-2010 (“A Generous Selection of Verse from an Intriguing Polish Poet,” 4/15/2011). As the editor and translator of that volume, I would like to offer some minor corrections to the reviewer’s errors of fact.

    In his review of Lodgings, Mr. Kates suggests that the translations don’t jive somehow with the original Polish, despite their having been “vouched for,” as he himself notes, “by some who know Polish far better than I do.” But the evidence Mr. Kates supplies in support of his doubts is spotty. His assertion that “What Is Poetry,” a personal favorite of mine, “has dropped its terminal climactic line entirely” is simply false: it’s all there. On the other hand, the reviewer is entirely correct that the number “forty” in “A Song for Europe” has been changed to “fourteen” in the translation. For the life of me I cannot recall at what point in the long process of writing this book that this change was introduced, or who suggested it, or whether it was merely accidental. It does change the line’s meaning, though no more so than my version’s having been written in English rather than in Polish.

    Mr. Kates’s mistrust of this work, however, appears to stem in part from my decision, after long deliberation, to omit annotations and other auxiliary material. I simply found my own abortive attempts to provide the kinds of explanatory prose he suggests distracting, so I cut them out. But what makes these translations “slightly unreliable,” in the reviewer’s formulation, probably has more to do with Sosnowski’s poems than with my rendering of them, and in this respect I find the characterization oddly heartening. For Sosnowski’s language is indeed so idiosyncratic (or, as he calls it in the interview appended at the back of the book, “fallen”) that every line is at once informative and questionable, direct and confusing, ironic and dead serious. The reviewer cites an excellent case-in-point: “but when I read a loaded phrase like ‘nocturnal emissions of factories’ (given in another translation as ‘factories spew by night’) I don’t know where the pun originates, or what to make of it.” For the record, the word that Sosnowski uses to describe what these factories are producing is “polucja,” and while the word shares an obvious etymological ancestor with our English “pollution,” in Polish it means precisely what my translation says. A loaded phrase indeed. Make of it what you will.

    It may be that confidence does not count among the many things that Andrzej Sosnowski’s poems inspire. For my part, I have always found them deeply troubling. In this way they are rather like that line about factories: undeniably true to their own nature, but no more likely to spare us discomfort and doubt.

    Sincerely,

    Benjamin Paloff

  • Anonymous

    Having written a review, I don’t ordinarily get drawn into further commentary — I’ve had my say — except over drinks. I think what I’ve written should stand on its own, and readers can judge for themselves. But Mr. Paloff has raised some factual questions, and my editor Mr. Marx has drawn those to my attention.

    In the original Polish text of “What is Poetry?” available to me, the last line, following what Mr. Paloff has translated, is a statement: “A dla nie znających rzeczy obraz jest pociechą.” I do not see that line in any form in Mr. Paloff’s English, but perhaps he is working from a different original text from mine. If there are divergent texts, this is the kind of information that an introduction usefully provides a reader. And it’s that kind of contextual note in general that would be helpful — if not in the poem itself (where I agree with him such notes would be exceeding awkward) — at least somewhere around the edges or as front or backmatter. And in this case, it seems to me that the missing line, which Wiesław Powaga and Charles Boyle have translated “For those who know nothing / image is consolation” has some importance to the poem as a whole. In fact, I don’t think “climactic” is too weak an assessment.

    And I’m delighted to be informed about the connotations of ” polucja “. The pun then does make sense. Once again, the explanation (outside the edges of the poem) is valuable for helping me understand Sosnowski’s poetry. In fact, the same use of “pollution” used to be current in English, and it is an interesting conversation to have about how current that usage is in Polish, or whether it carries the same Victorian tinge as in this language.

    I think a poem about Europe that looks forty years back from its writing is very different from one that looks only fourteen years back — but this may just be a matter of personal interpretation of what’s important in history and literature. Still, a mistake is a mistake, and I’m glad Mr. Paloff admits it. And, in fact, I did not know the Polish and thereby find the mistake — I read Mr. Paloff’s English first and thought there must be something wrong, because “fourteen” didn’t sound right for the context, and guessed “forty.” I then consulted one of my Polish contacts, and he confirmed the original text.

    Most important, I suspect whatever quarrel Mr. Paloff and I have is not with each other, but with the editorial eye that oversaw (or failed to oversee) his work. His own close relationship with the poems might have been filtered through the kind of reader’s sensibility that would have caught errors and also made his book more valuable to those of us not so close to the original, enabling us to draw closer to Sosnowski’s poetry, which I assume to be the translator’s goal.

    Stay well,
    J. Kates

  • Anonymous

    Just a note that the above discussion suggests how publishers are doing a disservice to books-in-translation by not offering prefaces, forewords, and notes that will help readers appreciate writing from around the world. “Lodgings” is a representative case in point.

    Perhaps e-books, because they offer curated links that provide biographical and cultural information, may help the situation.

    Bill Marx
    Editor, World Books

  • http://profiles.google.com/mzimu2007 Elzbieta Haftek

    I have stumbled on that article and then found above comments. It is quite fascinating to find both unknown (to me) poet and the following comments. Thanks to this article, I intend to read Sosnowski’s poems (not to compare) but to feel in both languages. The art of translation remains art. For a person like myself emerged in statistics and language of scientific reports, idiosyncratic, confusing, ironic language of poetry is a missing link. The poet and myself were growing up in the same time and the same place. These facts alone make me very curious about his vision and curious about ability to convey that to a larger audience.
    Viva poetry ! Niech żyje poezja !