Boleslaw Lesmian, poems

[Senna Jawa]

Bolesław Leśmian, poems

Poetry means large spaces, and minute details, where you look under a microscope at the impact of a single letter.

I don't do all those things anymore which I know one should do to write poetry, things like rolling and rolling phrases in your mind, associating everything with poems all the time... For years I want to get away from poetry, and I was hardly writing any poems, just some, just by inertia, without consciously reaching for new territories. And each time when I am about to succeed and get rid of the contact, somehow something keeps me from a total getting away.

And now Angeline brought translations of Leśmian, of which I was not aware. These are valuable translations. Suddenly there is a chance for the English language audience to have a glimpse at the poetry of this unique poet.

I am starting just a thread, not a "class". Angeline was kind to me in the tanka thread, but no, hardly anybody on this board wants to have to do anything with me, and certainly not any class. Let's simply give a chance to anybody who is able to enjoy Lesmian's poetry to enjoy it.

Angeline had an impression of Leśmian being "modern". Some r.a.p.pers had a similar feeling when they read old Chinese poems. All that partition of poems into old fashion and modern is ironic. First one would have to isolate the good stuff, and only then it would be possible to look at the progress. Indeed, poorly written poems get old very fast, withing a couple of years, while those from a long time ago seem sooooo modern. The simplicity and strength impress us as modern.

Ironically, Leśmian, during his life, was considered backward , an anachronism, he was viewed as an epigon (? last remnant?) of "Young Poland". It was all nonsense.

Let's start with the poems brought to our board by Angeline.

*******************

In the Dark
Bolesław Leśmian
Translated by Jerzy Peterkiewicz and Burns Singer

The lip is the lip's friend, the hand the hand's
Lying next each other each one understands
To whom he belongs - each one of the buried dead.
Unwillingly the night goes overhead;
The earth asserts itself, but hesitantly;
And leaflessly the leaves move on a tree.
God stirs the wind and space: but He is high
Above the forest's distant forest sigh.
The wind says this to space:
"I'll not be back
Across this forest while the night shines black."
Still darkness thickens, pierced by small starlight.
The seagulls flying over the sea are white.
One says : "I've heard the fate of stars foretold."
The next: "I've watched the heavens themselves unfold."
The third is silent, but because it knew
Two bodies, glowing in the darkness, who
Wove darkness into their embrace: it found
Them made of the caress in which they wound.
​

********

And the other one was just a fragment of a longer poem. I am not sure who the translator was/were:

*****

Tango

A nowhere sailing golden boat,
A lilac shore – and my dismay.
Let’s glide in tandem, like two ships,
Not looking at the gleaming floor.

​

I have translations of these poems by Sandra Celt. I'll present them in the next post. Sandra Celt was a pioneer in these translations but I think I like the new ones better, we will see later for sure.

Regards,

__________________

 

[Senna Jawa]

Translations by Sandra Celt

In the Dark
Bolesław Leśmian
tr. by Sandra Celt

Bodies know to whom they pertain
While they lie there in twofold shade!
Lips and hands become satisfied,
Night's reluctant to pass on by.
Earth abides with a shaky feeling,
Treetops rustle, but meta-treely!
And above the woods, far away,
God makes Cosmos and North-wind stray.
North-wind says to the Cosmos: "I'm
Not returning to the Woods this time!"
Stars are shining at murky trees,
Seagulls white overfly the sea.
One gull sees heave from afar,
And the other--the fate of stars.
While they jabber, the third gull harks:
Two forms blazing within dark.
And the murk which inspinuates
Finds in flesh nothing but embrace.
​

*******

The Tango
Bolesław Leśmian
tr. by Sandra Celt

Nasturtium fire in feline eyes,
Alert and body-careful haze,
A nowhere-sailing golden boat,

A lilac shore--and my dismay.​

Let's glide in tandem, like two ships,
Not looking at the gleaming floor--
We know the flower truth and are

Uneasy of our own accord.​

A sullen dusk in windowpanes,
A multi-storied light cascade--
A foot immersed in notes to come,

A musical and ceaseless wade.​

Conspiracy of dance and sound:
They mistify to mistify!
Unconscious tango purple starts

Reluctantly to bluify...​

The final sound has second-guessed
The foot in search of cozy fog...
Unused and free, it wants to die--

And dies in music dialog.​

​

*******

(Above, I was trying my best to approximate the graphics format from a Polish edition of the original).

Regards,

 

[Angeline]

I'm sticking it for a week anyway so it doesn't get lost.

Oh and the quality I found modern in his poetry is the use of dialogue, but maybe it's just that the translators used quotation marks so it jumps out at me. I also felt a quality that I very much admire in other poets, too: that is a sensual quality that has to do with images and adjectives like in phrases like "trembling leaves" and an "armchair sipping its own velvet peace." I have seen that more extensively in poets like Neruda and Paz and Pessoa, a lot of writers from countries with a Spanish influence in the culture.

 

[Senna Jawa]

About translations

We hardly ever talked technically about translations. It is a common knowledge even among pedestrians that it is often impossible to translate a poem in a way which would preserve its sense, style, all the artistic values. That's after all why we have different languages.

Thus what is ok and what is a no-no for translations?

It is ok to change the story somewhat. It is ok to lose something in one place and to add in another for the sake of not so much justice as of balance, e.g. one may repeat a different noun than in the original. Myself, I was also looking at other poems of the given author and was trying to create a poem which is like from that same author, by taking devices, phrases and style characteristic for the totality of that author's work. Sandra Celt was doing it too but, in my opinion, in the most unfortunate way.

A common problem with translators comes from their pride in their understanding of the original poem, or so they think. When they do it, they show that they do not understand poetry. Indeed, instead of passing to the, say, English language reader the fresh, untouched text of the original, they insert in the translation their understanding. And that's a crime. The talented author, following their artistic insight and instinct, was allowing her/his reader to arrive at certain conclusions on their own. But no, the translator just has to give it to the reader explicitly, thus turning the great original into junk. On the top of it, the translator's interpretation does not have to be the only one, or its scope is to well defined, etc. Horrible.

Otherwise, the translator has to preserve the genre and the artistic principles. For instance Marek Lugowski is very good at this. In the next posts I will concentrate on these issues.

 

[Senna Jawa]

About the form of "In the Dark"

The form of the original while strict is simple. Each line has 10 syllables. Rhymes are just aa bb cc dd ... I am not a specialist on versification (formal aspects of rhythm, melody, accents, feet, etc). Let me just say that the poem reads pleasantly. As a curiosity, and for the record, let me mention that the first rhymed pair involves two full syllables--something which is routinely frown upon (while sometimes it is done intensively and on purpose; I did it too on some occasions). In the second line the rhymed 2 syllables form an entire verb "to lie" in the present tense. In the first line these two last syllables form a suffix of verb "to belong", again in the present tense. There is a slight surprise in this. That 3-syllable verb has additionally only a standard prefix "na" (which by itself means "on" or "above"). Thus one would expect that these two rhymed words should have a similar meaning, but, as you see, they don't. The remaining rhymes are nice, and some are of a high quality. Altogether, the strict form, the melody, and the strict rhymes add to the value of the poem, but its main attractions are still elsewhere.

(Digression: even if the form in this particular Lesmian poem is modest, it's still noble, and it makes poems by, say Frost, feel primitive).

 

[Senna Jawa]

"Mythematics and Extropy", Selcted ... translated by Sandra Celt

For the record: in this thread above, the two translations by S.Celt are from her publication:

************************************************

Mythematics
and Extropy​

Selected Poems of Boleslaw Lesmian

Translated and Annotated by Sandra Celt
(Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, Ph.D.)

A. R. PORAY BOOK PUBLISHING
STEVENS POINT, WISCONSIN

That's roughly how the front cover page looks like.

Introduction and translations copyrighted (c) 1983, 1984
by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt
ISBN 0-938-335-13-8
Library of Congress 87-061444

The quoted (copied) above translation of the two poems by Lesmian were:

• Po ciemku, p.64 (In the Dark, p.65)
• Tango, p.118 (The tango, p.119)

On one hand this is a valuable position in the literature, since it features translations of a unique poet, which was virtually unknown outside Poland (he was also known in Russia but for his Russian poems! He wrote a few of them in his youth). On the other hand I am strongly critical about the quality of these translations. The title already illustrates its problems. It's made up completely by Sandra Celt. Lesmian has nothing to do with this. Of course "Mythematics" stands "Mathematics" and "Myth", while "Extropy" realtes to "Entropy" and and and what? Even Sandra Celt didn't explain this one. To me, "Ex" may relate to the past, to things which do not exist anymore. Lesmian's poetry is full of neologisms, they significantly contribute to the impact. Thus S.Celt tries to mimic Lesmian but her attempt is totally misguided. Lemian never ever uses technical terms, scientifical, industrial or even city words. To do it in translations, or even in the title of the collection, goes against the very fundamental Lesmian's poetic assumption about the language. Marek Lugowski pays attention to such basic issues in his translations, but Sandra Celt didn't.

It's relatively easy to translate poems which are based on the robust, invariant aspects of poetry. That's why Zbigniew Herbert is relatively easy to translate. But it's very difficult to translate a poet who relies on the fragile, transient artistic means, in particular, when they are so intimately embedded in the very ancient roots of the language, as it is the case of poems by Lesmian. The fabric of his Polish is crucial. There is no room there for international words like mathematics and entropy. One can see how this problem haunts S.Celt's translations. This alone amounts to an almost full defeat, despite so much work and even talent put into the translation.

 

[Senna Jawa]

Less is more. About translations of "In the Dark"

Translation by Jerzy Peterkiewicz and Burns Singer has "buried dead" in the 3rd line. There is no such description in the original, no "buried" and no "dead". The readers on their own may, almost must feel that the poem is about the dead bodies. But it is very wrong to spell it out. The whole delicate balance of the poem and of Lesmian's philosophy got ruined. You need those two bodies to be full members of the environment, which is alive but not quite, just like those two bodies are dead but not quite. The words life and death in this translation should not be spelled out. Lesmian is investigating the thin line between the two, he widens that thin line and creates a universe out of that thin space. By not mentioning such morbid and harsh words like dead and buried, the whole poem mood is lighter, relaxing.

Also, the ending has this fantastic, poetic notion that the two bodies don't exist materially, that they are nothing but tight embrace and caress, without any material to it.

Now compare the later large portion of the two translations. The one by Peterkiewicz & Singer is here more close to the original and much better. It preserves the Lesmian's construction. First we have God and wind. Wind pronounces its phrase. Then seagulls their phrases. We have the gradual and harmonious sequence: God, wind, seagulls. S.Celt didn't honor it. She didn't let seagulls talk directly to us, like wind did. Instead she adds her own, unfortunate goodies. She tells us her opinion about the gulls' behavior, which Lesmian didn't do, he let us have our own impressions. Thus Celt says that gulls are jabbering. Perhaps they did, but she had no business to state it. We need to imagine the sound which gulls make by ourselves, on our own. When she tells us about jabbering then she kills that part of the Lesmian poetry. Instead of giving us the fresh dish, offered by Lesmian, she stuffs it into her mouth, chews on it, and then she takes it out of her mouth and offers it to the reader. Don't do it in translations, don't do it IN YOUR POEMS.

 

[Senna Jawa]

[Celt] tells us her opinion about the gulls' behavior, which Lesmian didn't do, he let us have our own impressions. Thus Celt says that gulls are jabbering. Perhaps they did, but she had no business to state it. We need to imagine the sound which gulls make by ourselves, on our own. When she tells us about jabbering then she kills that part of the Lesmian poetry. Instead of giving us the fresh dish, offered by Lesmian, she stuffs it into her mouth, chews on it, and then she takes it out of her mouth and offers it to the reader. Don't do it in translations, don't do it IN YOUR POEMS.

Here we encounter a fine point. In regular poems, when you describe seagulls, you may write that they "jabber", it'd be fine. But here Lesmian takes advantage of the less common artistic situation. Since his gulls are talking-like, there is no need to say that they are jabbering. He avoids the potentially crowding feeling created by unnecessary words and over-specifications or redundant descriptions. And so should you

INdeed, in the context of the poem, Lesmian's "says" (about seagulls) is like "communicates".

Poetry is difficult. On one hand there is that outcry: be specific, be concrete. And here Sandra Celt is so, and I am critical. What's going on?

Actually, it's simple. Be specific, but say things which your reader otherwise wouldn't know. When your readers know something than possibly there is no point of boring them (to death ).

 

[Senna Jawa]

English versus Polish

Let me start with a digression. I knew Russian topological terminology for years before I had visited Moscow. I knew that they use two equivalent terms "majorizes" (from French; "majoriruet" in Russian) and "dominates" (from English). But during my talk I wanted to be nice to my hosts and I said "preobladaet" which would be the correct Russian word. But no, I was corrected immediately. In my opinion, the symbolic terminology (including abbreviations like g.c.d. or g.l.b. or l.u.b.) should be international, so that abbreviations these days should come from English. But the word names should be taken from the given language, it's nice this way, and this is, or used to be, the approach to terminology taken by the Polish mathematicians and in general by Poles, at least in the past. Russians however have a different tradition. They prefer to adopt the Western names.

Back to Lesmian and translations. There are subjective difficulties, when translating Lesmian. It's next to impossible to match Lesmian's deep mastery of Polish. I don't know if there is a single person in the world who knows English so well. To translate Lesmian well or even decently is an overwhelming task. You need to know English like it was your childhood small home village. On the top of it you need to be a superb poet, so that you can create on a similar high level. Good translation process is really creation of poems.

There are however also objective difficulties. English is relatively young language, which has a relatively small core of truly English words. In English, most of the time you do not distinguish between the old English words and words from French, German, Latin, Greek. Majority of these adopted words have attained a full citizenship in English, and there is nearly a full democracy between the words, or at least there is a nearly full tolerance for all these guys even in poetry. Without those foreign words there would be no English anyway.

Not so in Polish. Polish is way more than a thousand years old, and it is rooted in an old Slavic language. In everyday practice, sure, there is nearly a full equality between old and the new words. But in poetry, when you are sensitive to the language, the words which have old Slavic roots are preferable (unless you are writing about computers and software, but even then I wonder). This is especially true about Lesmian's poems. He has a lot of his own neologisms but they are always deeply rooted in the Polish language (etymologically and grammatically). And no techno talk.

 

[Senna Jawa]

sploty (Polish) versus english neologism "inspinuates"

(I am in a hurry now; possibly I will do a bit of editing-adding-modifying later).

Near the end of her translation of "In the Dark", Sandra Celt creates a neologism:

And the murk which inspinuates
Finds in flesh nothing but embrace.
​

for which she deserves at least some partial credit since in several ways it's quite impressive. The word combines "insinuates" (used in its physical sense, not as in rhetorics and political conflicts) and "spin"--very nice! At least by itself. It does have a drawback of a wrong kind of mood. It's too disquieting, too nervous, too busy, in a sharp contradiction to the original--it's not topical, not integrated, not organic. And still and nevertheless, "spin" is close in its sound to Lesmian's "splot". Also: "spin" is an old, good English word (say, in the context of ballet), just like "splot" in Polish. On the top of it, and this is even a little bit ironic, both these old words were later used in science (mathematics and physics),
where "splot" in the scientific language means "convolution".

S.Celt has achieved quite a bit. I'll leave it to you if that's enough to call it a success. Poetry is hard. There is so much of ingenuity in her "inspinuates", and the sound is good, and it is still not a full success, that's for sure.

I'll present a story of word "sploty" later, and of the 2-line ending.

BTW, "splot" is singular, "sploty" is plural. More about it later, it is an important point.