It’s Clare Cavanagh’s attention to the poems and her humility which carry her article, “The Art of Losing: Polish Poetry and Translation” and lend her so much authority as a translator; I am reminded, once again, that translating is a test of one’s quality as a reader at least as much as one’s quality as a writer. This also reminds me, in an elliptical way, of the attention paid to texts by the early exemplars of New Criticism, where the available resources for the critic in their task of “improving opinion into knowledge” (Samuel Johnson, 1751; long before New Criticism) are so spare and so clearly defined: the text itself and the critic as reader. For translation, the task is different, but the materials are the same (unless the translator decides that they fully grasp the text, and then the materials are astonishingly diminished. What could it possibly mean to fully grasp anything: in mathematics you take the concept of 0, basic arithmetical operations, identity properties of addition and multiplication, and little else and the turn out to be unimaginably vast. What line of poetry is simpler than 2+2?).
On the other hand, the translation of poetry requires an almost anti-poetic orientation toward the poem, as Cavanagh describes it, by compelling the translator to imagine the inseparably univocal speech act of the poem as somehow anything other than singularity. This is where the loss comes in, as such a treatment is based on fundamentally flawed first principles; there is a poem, you can read it or not, you can know the language or not, but what you cannot do is read it any other way, although you can certainly read something else. For translation, there is no escaping this something else and it is the radical choice to move towards it, conscious of its Borgesian futility, that prefigures the whole enterprise; translation, the irrational rejection of the not otherwise.
-Elijah Frydman
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