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PARTISAN REVIEW
loss that the poem enacts, which is why we worked to retain it, at a cost,
in our English version.
She Cried That Night, But Not for Him to Hear
. To
Ania, the only one
She cried that night, but not for him to hear.
In
fact her crying wasn't why he woke.
It
was some other sound; that much was clear.
And this half-waking shame. No trace of tears
all day, and still at night she works to choke
the sobs; she cries, but not for him to hear.
And all those other nights: she lay so near
but he had only caught the breeze's joke,
the branch that tapped the roof. That much was clear.
The outside dark revolved in its own sphere:
no wind, no window pane, no creaking oak
had said: "She's crying, not for you to hear."
Untouchable are those tangibly dear,
so close, they're closed, too far to reach and stroke
a quaking shoulder-blade. This much is clear.
And he did not reach out-for shame, for fear
of spoiling the tears' tenderness that spoke:
"Go back to sleep. What woke you isn't here.
It
was the wind outside, indifferent, clear."
-tr. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
There is no equivalent to the villanelle in the Polish tradition; in fact,
Baranczak's use of the form was seen by Polish critics as his personal
contribution to Polish versification . The poetics of loss thus produce a
clear gain for Polish poetry as well as giving a suggestive example of
ways in which the translator's art, or at least this particular translator's
art, both resembles and nourishes the lyric impulse.
In
Wordsworth's
Prelude,
Stephen Gill remarks, "all loss is converted
into gain." My hunch is that this holds true not just for
The Prelude,
but for much of modern poetry generally (and perhaps even at times for
translation) . Certainly the Polish tradition confirms Gill's comment with
a vengeance. Since the time of the great Romantics-Adam Mickiewicz,
