Landscape of Loss: The Personal is Universal?

Landscape of Loss: The Personal is Universal?

by Meghan Miraglia

 

In workshop last semester, one of our poetry professors made a comment about poetry and translation. They said something along the lines of, “The end goal is to have your poetry translated into other languages. That’s how you know it is great.”

I’m not sure how I feel about this sentiment, but I was reminded of these words when I came across this quote from Piotr Wojciechowski from this week’s reading: “[Wislawa Szymborska’s] poetry…was as if made to be translated, […] it [was] a deep penetration into human situations, full of wit and at the same time philosophical reflection.”

In my attempt to cerebrally knit these thoughts together, I wonder if “the point” is to write poetry that, like Szymborska’s, deals with “universal” themes – things that all humans are haunted/consumed by. Passion, grief, anger, joy, despair. I suppose most poetry is, in its own way, universal. The personal is political; the personal is universal. In specificity, there is universality.

I’ve been thinking a lot about form, too. I spoke with a new poet friend over break, and we discussed my skepticism of form, which I often link to conservativism, “tradition”, patriarchy, and control. Also a feminist, my poet friend suggested that learning the rules is necessary in order to break them. I take this to mean, I must understand the tradition I’m “talking back to.” I agree.

To that end, I very much liked Cavanagh’s thesis that, in modern Polish poetry, the lyric is a trauma response of sorts, “creating lyric forms to take the place of the domestic shapes and human habitations shattered by one atrocity or another” (6). Another poet friend of mine once titled a project “Forms of Shelter” because she found she was using forms to make sense of nonsense. Last semester, I wrote a poem in syllabics (alternating between lines of 7 and 9 syllables before the “volta”, after which, all lines were something like 8 syllables each); I used the form because the content was too emotionally troubling for me to explore in free-verse. I needed the scaffold. I needed the habitation, the shelter, the domestic shape.

As I’ve progressed in my final project, I’ve found this statement by Cavanagh too true: “translating poetry is impossible: all the best things are” (12). Whatever I lose in the process of translating (and, I also believe, in the process of writing) is a gain. Loss generates "creative possibility" (8); I find myself meandering through Cameron's "landscape of lost things" (8), wandering, always, toward a poem. Running, always, into myself (or the very thing I was too afraid to face. And often, these are the same things).