January 17 — Tadeusz Różewicz’s translator discusses the difficulty of translating Różewicz
The great Polish poet and playwright Tadeusz Różewicz has been called “a poet of silence.” That makes the job of translating Różewicz into English sound either very difficult or very easy, sort of like playing John Cage’s piano piece, 4′33″ (four minutes and 33 seconds of non-playing). Różewicz’s translator explains which it is.
When: Thursday, January 17 7:30 PM
Where: IUPUI University Library, Lilly Auditorium
The IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, University Library, and University College present: The 2007-08 Rufus and Louise Reiberg Reading Series, featuring translator Bill Johnston
Director of the Polish Studies Center at IU Bloomington, Bill Johnston has translated both contemporary and classic Polish writers, including Witold Gombrowicz and, most recently, Tadeusz Różewicz, one of Poland’s greatest living poets. Using Różewicz as an example, Johnston will illuminate the difficult but essential art of translating poetry.
Poles are pretty good at celebrating their poets, which may be why they have so many great ones. Here is the standard take on Różewicz:
A poet, playwright and novelist, he is the most versatile, and perhaps the pre-eminent living writer in the world today… He is renowned in many countries, and above all in the Balkans, as an example of an excellent poet of the highest moral authority. Różewicz is a precursor of the avant-garde in poetry and drama, an innovator firmly rooted in the unceasing re-creation of the Romantic tradition, and an independent artist who, despite the pressure of public opinion, has steered clear of politics. He is a grand solitary, convinced of an artistic mission that he regards as a state of internal concentration, interior alertness, and ethical sensitivity… Many ask: Is poetry possible after Auschwitz? Różewicz has provided his own answer by creating a new type of restrained verse that is known as the fourth versification system in literary Polish …Różewicz ferrets out contemporary instances of human cruelty. He is the founder of a shocking tendency in Polish literature, which concentrates on existence conceived as the effort to exist, as the struggle against nothingness … He is a seeker of new forms in poetic expression that abandon the avant-garde for aesthetic straightforwardness and the stunning short-cuts that are a metaphor for a human existence bounded by the act of birth and the act of death. “Yes, that is all there is,” reads one of his verses on the fragility of existence. Equal to Beckett or Ionesco in the renovation of theatrical forms, he is fascinated by “open theatre” and the means of expressing on stage the internal anxieties of contemporary man … He is an artist gifted with an extraordinary “ear,” who has anticipated such contemporary artistic phenomena as feminism and post-modernism … Różewicz has published little in recent years and would seem to be less active, but he is in fact at work on a poetic autobiography, a form that will permit continuity of discourse and the transcendence of the boundary between art and life in a commentary on all of existence even in the conviction that such a commentary is impossible, that poetry is the domain of the Inexpressible. A disturbing writer who resists definition, a poet of silence who rejects poetic trappings, Różewicz could almost be called a mystical writer. He is also a classic of the avant-garde, a precursor of post-modernism, and an explorer of inner experience. He is a poet whose long life has opened the gates of Mystery.
For more information contact: Karen Kovacik, 317-274-9831
Know before you go … You should read some of Bill Johnston’s translations of Różewicz’s poems, either in the collection New Poems, or read some of Bill’s translations and an essay about the challenges here.
Another great book about the challenges of translation is Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
If you think this event sounds interesting, check out … the March 27 appearance by Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, who has been influenced by Różewicz.
December 26th, 2007 at 11:40 am
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