Sherry Chandler

Long time ago, back in July, a couple of poets considered The Collected Poems, 1956-1998 of Zbigniew Herbert, which had just come out. The issue was that Herbert’s longtime translators, John and Bogdana Carpenter, had not been invited to do this translation. Instead the job had been given to an unknown, Alissa Valles.

Michael Hofmann, writing in Poetry, did not like this decision at all. He articulates his unhappiness in detail. David Orr, witing in the NYTimes is more circumspect.

I have very little knowledge of Herbert and can’t form an opinion of my own but I was interested in the questions the reviews raised about translating. So I pulled the quote, which has been sitting here all this time, waiting for me to get my thoughts together about it.

I had a distracted fall.

But here’s what I had in mind to say.

Hofmann reads no Polish, and yet he had very strong ideas about what made Herbert great based on the Carpenter translations. He makes a very good case that the Carpenters write better poetry but do they give us the real Herbert?

How can we know?

Here is what Orr had to say:

Still, Herbert wrote many poems; mistakes are to be expected. And as always, the central difficulty for any translator lies in conveying words and concepts that lack true analogues in our language. In such cases, is the literal meaning best? Or what you think the poet might have said if he were an English speaker? To understand how complicated these questions can be, consider “On the Road to Delphi.” In this short prose poem, Apollo is shown idly toying with the severed head of Medusa while repeating a particular line. In Polish, that line is “Sztukmistrz musi zglebic okrucienstwo,” to which a Polish-English dictionary offers this translation: “A performer must get to the bottom of cruelty.” The Carpenters, however, render the line: “A craftsman must probe to the very bottom of cruelty.” “Craftsman” is surprising, but it makes a certain sense — the poem is exploring the old idea of art as an essentially coldhearted activity (as Yeats said, “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death”), and Herbert has deliberately avoided the Polish word for “artist” (“artysta”) in favor of “sztukmistrz,” which means “performer, juggler, conjuror.” In doing so, Herbert is emphasizing the side of art that has to do with performance for its own sake — by extension, he’s pointing out the chill at the core of technical excellence. So “craftsman” may help bring that aspect of the poem into English.

But it isn’t what Herbert said. Which is perhaps why Valles gives the same line as “a conjuror must plumb the depths of cruelty.” Aside from “plumb the depths,” which is overdone, this version is almost certainly a better word-for-word translation. But it doesn’t make much sense in English, probably because the figure of the traveling magician doesn’t figure prominently in American consciousness. Consequently Valles’s version, while accurate, has the unfortunate effect of making the casual reader think of David Blaine. Talk about plumbing the depths of cruelty.

So if translation is always a matter of approximating, does it matter that Herbert’s “Collected Poems” has its weaknesses? Well, yes: after death, a translated poet may, as Auden said, become his admirers, but only after he’s become a poet in English who’s interesting enough to attract admirers in the first place. Herbert is now a complete poet in English, and he’s not as strong as he should be.

It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.

These words by William Carlos Williams stand as a critique of the news media and a challenge to the reading public. Even if the mainstream media cannot change, the question remains of what one should be reading and how one should read. Williams suggests that we are either reading the wrong things or reading the right things obtusely. Certainly the wars go on and men die for not knowing what they should know.

That said, I have never trusted the distinction between poems and news, political deception and artistic truth. You can find both artistry and bad behavior on both sides, and no democratic society can live on poetry alone.

This quotation is pulled from a powerful blog post at No Caption Needed, a post considering a photograph from The New Yorker for October 2 (read it!), a very graphic photograph of a dead Buddhist monk, taken in Burma. It’s disturbing and I will leave it to you to decide whether to click through and see it.

But because the post considers the intersection of art, news, and politics — subjects I deal with here often — I hope the author, Robert Hariman, won’t mind if I re-produce it at some length.

The blog post continues:

One place where art and news intersect is photojournalism. Applied there, Williams question acquires more precise reference: Are we getting the news–the real news–from the photograph? To do that, it would seem, we have to learn to recognize its poetry. And the difficult task would still remain: to see what can be found there that is not available in the photo’s reportage.

…

The force of the photograph comes in part from comparison with standard images of Buddhist serenity. All the elements are there: the still pond, isolated reeds, monk in repose, all composed in simple aesthetic harmony reflecting alignment with the cosmic order. Surely this monk is undisturbed by desire, surely he is in harmony with his natural surroundings. Although his stillness is foreign to us, there is no doubt that he is close to God.

But, of course, the photo depicts not that image but rather its terrible perversion. The pond is still but filthy; the monk is serene because dead; his union with the cosmic order has begun via the body swelling with putrefaction. In place of the harmonious life, he has died miserably.

Cynics could say that he died because he did not understand the poems he had been reading. Would Buddha have taken to the streets? Well, Buddha did take to the streets, in Burma, and now the question is what we are to learn from that. I think the news of this photograph is that Burma has been turned into an ugly, brutalized semblance of what it was. …This process of violent, destructive, brutalization is going on across the globe. Not everywhere, but in too many places. As with totalitarianism in the 20th century, it happens when modern technologies are placed in the service of a primitive will to power, and when the rest of the world stands by and watches or forgets.

And so there really is no news here after all. And that may have been Williams’ point.

Atrocity piles on atrocity and we forget the last one in the horror of the next one. How can we comprehend them all, much less remember?