CLARE CAVANAGH
The Art of Losing: Polish Poetry and
Translation
I
'VE
CALLED MY ESSAY "THE ART OF LOSING" for obvious reasons:
according to many critics, losing things is what translators do best. And
it seems to me-although this may just be my personal bias-that trans–
lators of poetry generally get the worst of it. "Why isn't your translation
faithful? Why isn't it literal?" we're asked-as if faithful and literal were
synonyms, and as if one of poetry's tasks weren't to shake us loose from the
fetters of literal-mindedness. "Why did you keep the form and mangle the
meaning, or vice versa?" we're queried-as if poetry weren't forever invit–
ing us to consider the forms of meaning and the meaning of forms. Trans–
lating poetry, we're often reminded, is impossible. Well, apparently so is
bees' flying-but the bees who translate poetry have been busy for a long
while now, so perhaps it's time to reconsider this particular brand of impos–
sibility. What people really mean when they say this, I suspect, is that it's
impossible to translate poetry perfectly. Fair enough. But what are the other
activities that we human beings perform so flawlessly against which the
translation of poetry is being measured and found wanting?
My title is meant to suggest a more humane vision of translation. It
implies, I hope, that the losses and gains that make up the art of trans–
lation are intertwined, and further, that in the case of poetry, the trans–
lator's "art of loss," in John Felstiner's phrase, may perhaps be akin to
what Elizabeth Bishop calls the "art of losing," in her glorious villanelle
"One Art." I want to examine not how translation violates lyric art so
much as the kinship I see between the force that impels some people to
write lyric poetry-the force that Osip Mandelstam calls "the craving
for form creation"-and the drive that pushes others to translate it. And
I'd also like to take a look at what is lost and found when you try to fol–
low the poet's form-creating impulse by recreating, however imperfectly,
the original poem's rhyme and meter.
Bishop's villanelle is a perfect starting point for what I have in mind
not only because it's one of the loveliest poems in the English language.
Clare Cavanagh teaches Slavic Literatures at Northwestern University.
