246
PARTISAN REVIEW
It's also been recreated-marvelously-in Polish by my sometime co–
translator Stanislaw Baranczak, who is perhaps the most gifted and pro–
lific translator from English in the history of Polish literature. And
Bishop's poem served, in turn, to create a new form in Polish poetry.
It
inspired Baranczak's own villanelle
"Plakala
w
nocy,"
from his most
recent collection
Chirurgiczna precyzja (Surgical Precision,
1998),
which we have since translated into English as "She Cried That Night."
I'll turn to that poem in a moment. But first, Bishop's villanelle:
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last,
or next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
-Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard
to
master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Modern poetry, Jean-Paul Sartre remarks, "is the case of the loser
winning." And the tug-of-war between mastery and loss that structures
Bishop'S poem would seem to lend weight
to
Sartre's paradox. But let
me turn here to another poem, one whose title appears to contradict my
argument. I have in mind one of Wislawa Szymborska's best-known
lyrics, "The Joy of Writing"
("Radosc pisania").
The kind of creation
Szymborska celebrates might initially seem directly opposed to the "one
art" that shapes Bishop's poem. Szymborska's joy of writing, though,
