Where Have You Been? (22 page)

A frank admission of what happened—if indeed, something has “happened”—the voicing of some proper gratitude to the Carpenters for their work, some regret for the past and modest trepidation for the future, a little of what used to be called glasnost, would have helped. Even some public relations claptrap along the lines of “personal and musical differences” would not have gone amiss. Instead, the Carpenters go by default. Adam Zagajewski in his short five-page introduction, doesn't mention them—well, perhaps it would have seemed strange if he had. Alissa Valles does—mention them:

I owe a considerable debt to previous translators of Herbert—to John and Bogdana Carpenter, who not only acted as Herbert's translators over many years but contributed much to his reception and recognition in the English-speaking world—but also to all those who produced versions of individual poems for anthologies: Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, Adam Czerniawski, and Robert Mezey, who included a translation of the poem “Sequoia” done in collaboration with Jacek Niecko in a recent Library of America
Poems of the American West
.

I quote the whole sentence because it is both an outrage and a disaster. The Oscar-style diminuendo or rallentando listing is an indignity; and as for “acted as”—are we to understand that the Carpenters were pretending, that they weren't really his translators, or that their engagement was temporary, a stopgap? Stuffing the translators of hundreds of poems over decades into one sentence with chancers who contributed a poem or two to an anthology here or there is hideous. God knows I can understand the translator's wish to appear invisible in such circumstances (I sometimes think there is no good news about translation, ever)—but it is precisely here, where there is another version, that invisibility is not an option. The publisher should have stepped forward at this point. And from Ms. Valles—who covers two of her four pages arguing the toss over the way to translate Marsyas' cry (should it be “A” or “Aaa”?)—I should have liked something on the actual pleasures and difficulties of translating Herbert.

Now. To brass tacks, to onions, to sheep, whatever. Herbert has always written poems with exiguous punctuation or (for the most part) none at all. He uses line breaks, spaces, indentation, dashes, and the occasional capitalization to mark sense and direct the reader. Given that he often wrote poems of some length—many of his greatest poems are two or three pages long—this made the experience of reading him unlike reading any other poet. There was a novelty, a surprise, an unpredictability, an ongoing untangling as one read. Every reading was a first reading. One could never remember what went with what. The poem remade itself—squeezed itself out as of a tube—before one's very eyes. It is like reading something still wet, not set, not combed, not furnished and furbished with signs, explanations, directives. Sense wasn't handed down in a predetermined, apodictic way but seemed to make itself as one blundered along. Authority is not assumed, but accrues. (There is something in Sartre, I seem to remember, about the quality of this uncharted, open-ended type of writing; one tends to associate it with the damaged and freshly dangerous condition of the world after World War II; certainly such a connection existed in the minds of Herbert and other Polish poets of his generation, veterans, many of them, of the Polish Underground.) Herbert's late poem “The Book”—though ostensibly on the work of a friend—describes the effect nicely: “This book is a gentle reminder it does not permit me / to run too rapidly in the rhythm of a coursing phrase / it bids me return to the beginning forever begin again.”

The corollary of this absence of punctuation—and hence, if you like, a second component of an absolutely original style—is an unusually powerful, certain, unambiguous vestigial syntax. This holds the reader in place, points him in the desired direction, reveals contrast, reveals continuity, reveals consequence, makes irony possible. (Herbert studied philosophy and law, he is a logician in a way most writers—alarmingly, one begins to think after a while—aren't: Kafka the most obvious exception.) Without this very firm syntax, this series of pushes and prods, the reader—much more in translation—would be quite at sea; it would be like reading soup. A very basic testimony to Herbert's greatness is the simple fact that one never has this sensation of floundering while reading him. His always struck me as being probably a very demanding style to write—so much for playing tennis without a net—but (and I'm sorry about the backhanded compliment) until I saw Alissa Valles's versions I had no true understanding of the absolute mastery in the Carpenters' handling of it in English, where it is always taut, always sprung, never gassy, foggy, or cloudy.

Two further dimensions. The first, let's call it voice, Herbert's hectic, surprising, fervent, dry, whispering, breathless speech, whether in propria persona or as an alter ego or body (or rather mental!) double called Mr. Cogito, or again (a particular avocation of this poet's) bodied forth in some hostile, monstrous, tyrannical figure, Claudius, Damastes, Fortinbras—the words sometimes spinning their gears in formidable lists, sometimes impelling grave contents with a musing, methodical disbelief. And the second is diction or register, which I know sounds starchy and unattractive but is really anything but: this is dignified, detached, possessed of a noble stiffness, at once quiet and dramatic, jetting from the highly particular to the hugely general, from the antique to the current. And it all sounds like this (from “Elegy of Fortinbras”):

Now that we're alone we can talk prince man to man

though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant

nothing but black sun with broken rays

I could never think of your hands without smiling

and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests

they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this

The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart

and the knight's feet in soft slippers

Or this (from “Isadora Duncan,” from
Report from a Besieged City
):

Lightheartedly she disclosed the secrets of her heart and alcove

in a censurable book with the title “My Life”

Since then we know exactly how the actor Beregy

revealed to her the world of the senses how madly in love

was Gordon Craig Konstantin Stanislavski

hordes of musicians nabobs writers

while Paris Singer threw everything

he had at her feet—an empire

of never-failing sewing machines et cetera

Or this (from “Mr. Cogito on a Set Topic: ‘Friends Depart'”):

with the inexorable

passing of years

his count of friends

shrank

they went off

in pairs

in groups

one by one

some paled like wafers

lost earthly dimensions

and suddenly

or gradually

emigrated

to the sky

The poems are in chronological sequence (from the '60s, the '80s, and the '90s), and the translations are, respectively, by Dale Scott and Mi
ł
osz, the Carpenters, and Alissa Valles. The passages are from poems I admire, and translations I regard as successful.

But now—invidious though it be—I must quote comparatively, to make it clear how much the old translations are to be preferred to the new. In a generally and increasingly monolingual culture, the importance of translation is little discussed and less understood. “What does it matter—we still have the author,” runs one argument. Actually, “we” don't—that's the whole problem. Another would have it: “Well, another one can't hurt—the more the merrier—we can triangulate them, or something,” though, given that what we have here is not addition but substitution, that doesn't apply either. Alissa Valles herself writes, a little disingenuously therefore: “Great poets deserve many translators.” I don't agree—except over very long periods of time. They deserve—or rather should count themselves blessed to have—one good one, or preferably yet, a great one. Numbers, variants, alternatives, while seeming to appease Choice—the great false god of our consumer age—actually only produce clutter, distraction, waste. Are two Rilkes better than one? Are seven better than two? I don't think so, not least when “choice” in this context is bound to be such an uninformed, haphazard operation. The argument for abundance is in fact an argument for oversupply. It is too anxious, too sentimental, and too pleased with itself to understand that even the perfect operating of choice is predicated on an endless round of rejection, elimination, incineration. There's no getting around elitism, but this is the version for inflationary times, for self-publishers, and for those who can't bear to be told the bad news.

Still, it remains the case that some poets are more spacious, more accommodating than others. Herbert, I would have thought, is one of the least. A Herbert poem, with its unpunctuated layout, its rigid syntax, its careful collisions of diction, is like a tiptoeing through snow. There actually isn't room for competing versions. I have now read hundreds of pages of Alissa Valles's translations against the German, and against the Carpenters, and (if I am being generous) perhaps one time in twenty hers are better, six or eight about the same, and half the time they are worse. (For reasons to do with the infinitely ramifying nature of language, these kinds of comparisons rarely produce shut-outs; this result strikes me as being unusually conclusive.) From the very beginning, I don't think anyone has “got” Herbert in English the way John and Bogdana Carpenter have. In their introduction to their first engagement with Herbert, that second
Selected Poems
of 1977, they wrote: “One of the major principles of translation of these poems has been to
interpret
Herbert's meanings as thoroughly as possible. This is different from literalness; the translators have tried to recast Herbert's poems in English, using all the resources at their disposal.” For years, I didn't believe them, I thought it was the usual translators' blarney. Now I do. They go on: “At the same time they have tried to resist any tendency to be reductive, to round off the texture or structure of a poem, or to adapt it to a particular idiom, or expectation. This has meant the creation of a new speaking voice, a voice that can be heard, in English.” They have done brilliantly just that, using mostly tiny means of vast reach, pronouns, particles, tenses, word order, forms of the genitive (whether apostrophe or “of”) even in their deployment of definite and indefinite articles (Polish has none). It goes a long way to explaining why Herbert in English is so bracing, so agile, so fresh, so delightful.

I have so many examples—literally hundreds—that it's a problem to know where to begin. (I sense, and perhaps you do too, that I've tried to put off the moment.) What about “Mr. Cogito Reflects on Suffering”? Valles ends—the object is suffering—“joke around with it / very solicitously / as with a sick child / cajoling in the end / with silly tricks / a wan / smile.” The first two lines are mutually incompatible, and indeed both her verbs are excessive to the point of crude; using three “with” constructions is poor; and a characteristically glamorous or poeticizing diction gets in the way of what is being said. The Carpenters have: “entertain it / very cautiously / like a sick child / forcing at last / with silly tricks / a faint / smile.” What about this description in the lovely early poem “Biology Teacher”: “He towered over me / his long legs spread / and I saw / a gold chain / an ash-colored vest / and a scrawny neck / with a dead bow-tie / pinned on.” Again, the word choice is flashy—towered, ash-colored, scrawny—but still more destructive is the unthinking word order. The Carpenters: “he stood high above me / on long spread legs / I saw / the little gold chain / the ash-grey frock coat / and the thin neck / on which was pinned / a dead necktie.” The punch line is properly left to the end, not dispatched prematurely. (Even their dispensing with an “and” in the middle—just “I saw”—seems inspired, and typical of their thoughtful economy.) What about a difficult, bare passage in “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination”? Valles has: “a bird is a bird / slavery slavery / a knife a knife / death is death // he loved / a flat horizon / a straight line / earth's gravity.” Here the Carpenters expand things gently, but decisively: “that a bird is a bird / slavery means slavery / a knife is a knife / death remains death // he loved / the flat horizon / a straight line / the gravity of the earth.” Their version is so much more resolute, less perfunctory (Valles's sounds—“earth's gravity”—simply bored). Here is the poem “Mother,” one of very few intimate or familial poems Herbert permitted himself. Valles:

He fell from her lap like a ball of yarn. He unwound himself in a hurry and beat it into the distance. She held onto the beginning of life. She wound it on a finger hospitable as a ring; she wished to shelter it. He rolled down steep slopes, sometimes labored up mountains. He came back all tangled up and didn't say a word. He will never return to the sweet throne of her lap.

Her outspread arms glow in the dark like an old town.

“Beat it” is a disaster, a sudden touch of Bukowski. The fourth sentence is blighted by the sloppy agreement—is a finger like a ring? Is a ring hospitable? And then do you shelter something by making it a ring? I would have thought a ring is rather exposed. The glow at the end—is it sodium?—is also distinctly unhappy. The poem looks routine, messy, abrupt, unaffecting, rather sentimental. The Carpenters render it (I don't know if it's prose or verse, and frankly I couldn't care a hang):

He fell from her knees like a ball of yarn.

He unwound in a hurry and ran blindly away.

She held the beginning of life. She would wind it

on her finger like a ring, she wanted to preserve him.