Living Tradition

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, Clare Cavanagh had no exposure to the Polish language. In graduate school, she says, she decided to take a class in Polish only because “it was a department requirement.” There, her career as one of the premier Polish-to-English translators began. Earlier this year, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Nobel Prize–winner Wisława Szymborska, who passed away in 2012. Cavanagh, who translated Szymborska’s poetry for more than three decades, edited the volume. She spoke with the Poetry Foundation recently about the benefits of lengthy collaborations and how manners were instrumental to Szymborska’s work. The following interview was condensed and edited.

How did you get started as a translator? I’m assuming you didn’t wake one day and decide you wanted to translate Polish and Russian poetry.        

[laughs] Russian was my first Slavic language, and I dabbled in translation when I was an undergraduate. I started Polish in graduate school only because I had a departmental requirement; my teacher happened to be the person who became my co-translator and my really dear friend, Stanislaw Baranczak. I had only one year of Polish at the time, and we just discovered that we liked translating together. If I hadn’t had Stanislaw holding my hand and saying “Go for it,” I don’t think I would have started.

What was it exactly that interested you?

I went to graduate school knowing I wanted to work on poetry. I knew poetry was going to be my thing, and I wanted to work on Mandelstam. The professor at the time, who taught Russian poetry and will remain nameless, almost convinced me to switch to novels; he was so dreadful. We used to pinch each other to stay awake in his seminars. [laughs] Stanislaw was just the opposite. He was fabulous, and he was so excited that I wanted to do poetry. I was his first American student after he came to the States. He spent extra time talking about Polish poetry with me in his office outside class. He himself was a poet and lived in this poetic world and knew the people. It changed my whole perception of literature. Suddenly, I was seeing things from the inside. It was addictive.

Is it necessary to understand not just the language but also the period and what’s going on around the work to translate effectively?

Knowing the language definitely helps, though lots of translators work from cribs or collaborate with someone else. Stanislaw and I, in our case, both knew English, and we both knew Polish, just to different degrees. I think the only way you get ready is by doing it and then doing it again and then doing it again. And getting a lot of feedback along the way, which I got because I was working in a partnership with someone who was an extremely experienced translator going into Polish. You learn it only by doing it. If you really had to know everything about the milieu, how would you ever even dare? And what would you do with people who have been dead for a couple thousand years?

It turned out that I loved working on this living tradition and watching things unfold. From watching struggles and listening to people, I know the period in a way I never would have otherwise. Who hates whom, who loves whom, who’s influenced by whom, who’s pretending not to be influenced by whom. Mandelstam had a high school teacher who was a minor symbolist poet, and he said that from going to this high school teacher’s house, he learned that the tradition was one, long, extended family argument. Once you dip into that, you start seeing it everywhere. You start seeing literary tradition in a different light. It was really exciting. Now Szymborska’s gone and Stanislaw’s gone and Milosz is gone, so it’s not the same world, but at least I was in it for a while.

When did you first encounter Wisława Szymborska’s work?

It was in a class with Stanislaw. I first read her in a bilingual edition back in 1981 or 1982, and then I kept reading her. Stanislaw and I first started working on the poet Ryszard Krynicki, a dear friend of the Baranczaks whom I’ve gotten to know. He’s a poet of the same generation. Somebody asked Stanislaw to translate some of Ryszard’s poems, and Stanislaw asked me to help. I was his research assistant then. Then we did an anthology. This would have been 1985 or 1986, and [Szymborska] had a collection called The People on the Bridge; we started translating and just couldn’t stop.

What about her work really interested you?

I think she probably has the best sense of humor of any poet I’ve read. [laughs] This isn’t an official critical category, but she has enormous charm as a poet. It’s easy to get drawn in. I always get frustrated when people say she’s plainspoken or straightforward. She’s not. There’s all this stuff just beneath the surface—or sometimes right there on the surface. It looks immediately accessible, but the further you go in, the more you see.

Did you get to meet her and spend time with her over the years?

I met her for the first time at the Nobel Prizes in Stockholm, actually, which was a terrifying way to meet someone for the first time who doesn’t speak English. I kept thinking, My God, it’s like meeting Emily Dickinson, but she speaks only Polish. I was terrified of making mistakes in Polish. But she, bless her heart, turned out to be embarrassed that she didn’t know English. And then we got to be friends. She was a very kind person, but she also liked me. I made the cut. Part of it was because I was friends with the Baranczaks, but part of it was because we just hit it off. She had to be extremely protective of her time. She had a very close-knit group of friends. I know friends who went to some events after her death, and they were shocked at this wide range of friends from all regions who were not even remotely literary. She was immensely protective, not just of her time but of herself. I went to Poland once or twice a year, and she always made time for me—except once. Her assistant told me, “She’d love to see you but she’s in the country writing poems, and she can’t stop right now.” Given that she wrote so few poems for a long life, I thought it best to leave her alone. The last time I saw her was the May before she died.

I’m curious about some choices you made in assembling the book. For example, you chose not to translate Szymborska’s earliest work. In the afterword, you sound very protective of her.

It’s the difference of working on someone you know. In that case, I knew how she would react. Most poets when they’re doing their collected poems, they do a lot of screening. W.H. Auden is a famous example. They cut things they wish they’d never written. She didn’t get a chance. Marina Tsvetaeva said there are poets with history and poets without history. She meant poets who from the first poem sound like themselves versus the poets who have to grow into themselves. Szymborska was someone who you could see where she started finding herself. She laid out all the road markers by looking over these various selected poems so carefully and deciding what not to publish. I wanted to respect that, trying to imagine what she would have wanted it to be. That’s what happens when you know the person.

She reprinted two or three of her socialist realist poems afterward, and really most of them have only historical interest. It’s good to give people an example of what socialist realist poetry looks like, but I wasn’t going to put 40 or 50 of those in the volume. She also wrote a lot of comic poetry, but she never put that in the various selected poems. I’m sure lots of other poets write limericks on the sidelines too.

She wrote so few poems, relatively speaking. Was she writing constantly but happy with only a few of the poems?

A good friend of mine who was also a good friend of hers and who knew her for a very long time said that she threw out 90 percent of what she wrote. I think part of it is privacy again. She didn’t want the poem out there unless it was absolutely as good as she could get it. Otherwise, it was like going out in public with your buttons done wrong. It’s bad manners. She loved Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Manners,” which she knew in Polish translation. The thing is that you observe good form; you don’t impose your messes on other people. She just didn’t want them out there. There were some poems that I think were very close to being done that she had in draft form, and I’m still of two minds about them, but I can’t do anything about it now.

You made a comment in the book’s afterward that one of her poems was untranslatable. What does that mean, exactly?

It’s the form, the language, and the puns in this case. I remember working on that poem because it was rhyme and meter, plus untranslatable puns about a walk in the woods. They were all forestry-related puns; you couldn’t invent a non-forestry pun. She had a fabulous rhyme; it was gotyk-niebotyk, which means “Gothic” and “skyscraper.” She was using it to describe a pine tree. It works great, and I worked and worked, and it sounded worse and worse, and I told her that. She said, “Oh forget it; you can’t translate that one.” Then she said the Dutch translator had wasted six months before he gave up.

I was trained by Stanislaw that you have to maintain the form. Acting as though that’s the first thing to go means that you’re no longer treating it like a poem. He was phenomenally gifted at it, but he hated the idea that a poem was its literal meaning and the form was just something thrown in for decoration. If she rhymed, we had to rhyme. He got me stuck in that mode. I can recognize that there are other forms of translation, but I can’t do that. I have to work my damnedest to keep the form. It’s also thinking about what Stanislaw would let me get away with. I’ve internalized his voice from working with him for so long.

After working with her for so long, I would imagine that it’s hard to think about what’s next.

I figured out after she died—which I refused to believe for a long time—that I’ve been working on Szymborska pretty much half my life. [laughs] It felt really strange. The book is out, which makes me happy, but it’s strange to develop such an odd skill set in which you say, I can see what she’s doing here, or I know what’s she’s thinking, this is her kind of simile. Now I have no place to put that. I’ve been working on a biography of Czeslaw Milosz for a long time. I’m still translating Adam Zagajewski. I went back to Ryszard Krynicki, the poet Stanislaw and I started with. I’m doing a volume of his poetry for New Directions. So I’ll translate other people. I’ve been working on Zagajewski for a really long time too. I’m so glad he’s still sending me things. I have that same sense of working with someone for decades and saying, “Wow, look what he did with this.” I love working on poets where you live with them, get to be friends with them over years and years.

From my admittedly limited reading, there seems to be a lot of Western European and American notions of poetry and language and politics that don’t match up with Polish or Russian models.

It’s true. There’s a lot of exchange back and forth too, which is also fun and surprising and, again, something I see when I’m in my scholarly mode. I shocked the Poles by pointing out that something they had assumed Milosz had gotten from a Polish thinker he’d actually gotten from reading Faulkner. There’s all this strange back and forth that’s really fun to trace, but the whole idea of what the poet is and what a poem has historically been is radically different. Although the normalization in Poland certainly has changed some, and I can’t really speak so much to what’s happening in Russia right now with poetry. Certainly you don’t have—not just in American literary culture but in the culture generally—a canon of poets who if you don’t know, you’re not a good American. It would be an embarrassment to admit that you’ve never read Pushkin or Akhmatova or Mandelstam. They’re your tradition. They’re part of what constitutes your identity. There are negative sides to that too, but we don’t have that even remotely.

The thing which partly has given Russian and Polish and Eastern European poetry such prestige over the past few decades is the idea that you could actually be oppressed for your poetry or suppressed for your poetry. Mandelstam has a hyperbole about it—only in Russia do they care enough about poets to kill them. A mixed blessing, to say the least.