Sherry Chandler

Zbigniew Herbert

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.

Possibly related posts:

Vendler on Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery

Internet Poetry Archive

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)

from dbqp:

Baudelaire, Second Preface

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