254
PARTISAN REVIEW
and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings
sprinkled with pollen,
and the little nightingale practicing
its speech beside the highway,
and any journey, any kind of trip,
are only mysticism for beginners,
the elementary course, prelude
to a test that's been
postponed.
- tr. Clare Cavanagh
It is another demonstration of the capacity to create lyric joy through
apparent failure as Zagajewski, in a characteristic syntactic tour de force,
breathlessly stretches one sentence out for the space of twenty-odd lines,
only to conclude with the anticlimactic postponed examination that takes
the place of the revelation-"suddenly I understood"-we've been waiting
for.
In
my own conclusion, though, I want to turn to a distinctly nonpoetic
analogy for what I see as perhaps the chief affinity between the poet's joy–
ful frustration and that of the translator. A few years back, when my son
was first learning to walk, he started playing a game that scared the hell
out of us. He would take a blanket, put it over his head, run down the hall–
way, bang into the walls at full speed and fall down on the floor laughing
his head off. "Oh my God," we thought, "he's going to be a quarterback."
But then I happened to be talking to a friend who's a child psychologist,
and I told her about Marty's game. "It's a philosophical experiment," she
said. "He wants to find out if the world still exists even when he can't see
it, and he laughs when he hits the wall because it's still there."
Form, substance, and joyful failure: these are defining elements not
just in my son's game, but also, it strikes me, both in lyric poetry and in
poetic translation. Of course translating poetry is impossible: all the best
things are. But the impulse that drives one to try is not so far removed,
I think, from the force that sends the lyric poet out time after time to
master the world in a few lines of verse. You see a wonderful thing in
front of you, and you want it. You try reading it over and over, you see
if you can memorize it, or copy it out line by line. And nothing works;
it's still there. So if it doesn't already exist in English, you turn to trans–
lation; you try remaking it in your own language, in your own words,
in the vain hope of getting it once and for all, of finally making it your
own. And sometimes you even feel, for a while at least, for a day or two
or even a couple of weeks, that you've got it, it's worked, the poem's
yours. But then you turn back to the poem itself at some point, and you
have to hit your head against the wall and laugh: it's still there.
