nicomachus.net

Originally published in the News of the National Humanities Center

Poetry, says Piotr Sommer (2004-05 Hurford Family Fellow at the National Humanities Center), is the “basic cognitive instrument” by which he measures life, “almost a way to deal with the misunderstandings and miscommunications of the world.”

Editor of the Warsaw-based journal Literatura na Swiecie, Sommer divides his time between writing poetry, writing about poetry, and translating Anglo-American poetry into his native Polish. Literatura na Swiecie gathers together foreign literature into Polish translations, most often but not always contemporary literature. Sommer translates the journal’s title as “somewhere between ‘Literature in the World’ and ‘World Literature.’” To Sommer, the “somewhere between” symbolizes that even simple cultural concepts do not translate comfortably.

Through Literatura na Swiecie, Sommer is responsible for introducing or reacquainting Polish readers with such luminaries as Jacques Derrida and John Cage. A 1986 issue of Literatura na Swiecie on the New York Poets has been cited as perhaps the single most influential collection of American poetry on the Polish literary community.

Sommer has published two books during his residence at the Center and is spending his fellowship working on two others. Continued (Wesleyan University Press, 2005), his first book-length collection of poetry translated into English, gathers poems from his previous Polish publications. Po Stykach (Slowo/Obraz Terytoria, 2005) is a collection of his essays on Polish and Anglo-American poetry and on the art of translation.

In Polish, Sommer explains, ‘po stykach’ is a “concise slangy phrase, so rich that I really cannot translate it into English in one phrase. It suggests doing something along delicate lines, which can be lines of contact or lines of argument. It contains the concept of borderlines as well. And also a sense of touch—in Polish, ‘styk’ means touch.”

His current projects include a book-length examination of the influence of twentieth-century American poets such as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, and Charles Reznikoff on contemporary poets in Poland. He’s also finishing a Polish-translation anthology of American poets he’s “been excited by in the last twenty years.”

A poet who writes and a poet who translates, he claims, are different people. “Writing poetry in your own language, you both control it and let it behave the way it wants to behave,” he explains. “You can allow it quite a bit of pleasure and freedom. You can even let it outpace you.” A translating poet, on the other hand, doesn’t want to give the foreign text a lesson, or correct the author’s voice. “You study the original, see what you can do with it, and find a way to bring things into your own language,” Sommer says.

When translating, he continues, “you must be prepared to take into account every single ingredient that works for the desired result in your language, to find the multiple levels of meaning, beginning with, let’s say, such a basic unit as the sentence.” Being careful, however, he cautions, “doesn’t exclude freedom in the new language, naturally, because the result still must be beautiful. And because the new language doesn’t have to—or sometimes cannot—behave like the original.”

It takes tremendous effort but also serendipity for a poem to translate well into another language, Sommer notes. Between double meanings and colloquial expressions, translating is a process that constantly asks the question, “How much can we stretch our syntax and still keep it beautiful in our language?” Finally, Sommer adds wistfully, a thoughtful translator also must be willing to accept that something beautiful in one language may not be possible in another.

UPDATE: Recordings of Piotr Sommer reading his own poetry in Polish and in English translation are now up at PennSound.