250
PARTISAN REVIEW
They took it away.
What remains is
a grey
naked
hole.
And this is enough for me;
grey naked hole
grey naked hole.
greynakedhole.
Finally, I want to quote at least one stanza from Milosz's exquisite
"Song on Porcelain," in the splendid translation that Milosz himself
produced in collaboration with Robert Pinsky:
Rose-colored cup and saucer,
Flowery demitasses:
You lie beside the river
Where an armored column passes.
Winds from across the meadow
Sprinkle the banks with down;
A torn apple tree's shadow
Falls on the muddy path;
The ground everywhere is strewn
With bits of brittle froth-
Of all things broken and lost
Porcelain troubles me most.
The "small sad cry/Of cups and saucers cracking," Milosz tells us in
the English variant, bespeaks the end of their "masters' precious dream
/ Of roses, of mowers raking, / And shepherds on the lawn." I want
to
mention in passing that Milosz violates his own translatorly preference
for preserving sense at the expense of form here. This poem about the
fragility both of human-made forms and the human form itself retains
its pathos in English precisely because Milosz and Pinsky have managed
to reproduce so movingly the stanzas and rhymes of the original. (I first
heard the Polish original, I should note, sung in a student cabaret in
Krakow in
I98I,
and the melody I heard fits the English version as
neatly as it did the Polish original, a tribute to the translators' gifts.)
Broken teacups and shattered pastorals: this would seem to be the land–
scape occupied by the lyric generally according to many recent theorists.
