Before I started translating the book Mer de Glace by Polish poet Małgorzata Lebda, I made a list:
Bright
Brilliant
Clear
Light
Lucid
Transparent
Pale
Fair
Plain
Shiny
Evident
Obvious
Radiant
Vivid
Luminous
Of course!
Sure thing!
I hoped it might come in handy whenever I came across the word “jasne,” for which all the above could be possible translations, depending on context, and which I knew was conceptually important for the collection, where it appears nearly a dozen times. But I also knew the word was bound to be grammatically tricky.
You see, the way Lebda uses it, the neuter adjective takes on the feel of an abstract noun that imbues the poems with a kind of life force related to brightness, radiance, clarity, and luminosity, carrying with it a sense of attentiveness and care. She could have but doesn’t use the abstract noun “jasność.” Instead, a noun created from a nominalized adjective (the luminous) gives the abstract a more tangible feel, a thingness, and evokes a tender search for clarity in relation to embodied experience.
Her search for the revelation of the material realm has everything to do with the experience that led to the writing of her award-winning collection. In 2021, out of a desire to live alongside and attend to the “arteries of the earth,” as she says in one of the poems, Lebda ran the entire length of the longest river in Poland, the Vistula, from its source at Barania Góra in the Beskid Mountains to its mouth at the Baltic Sea near Gdańsk. (You can read more about it in her essay “The Circles on the Water are Expanding, Expanding” at the New England Review and in my “Translator’s Note” at Poetry Northwest). She set out to run as a poet, not as an athlete, to use the rhythms of her own body as a means of understanding and connecting to the rhythms of the river’s body of water, under threat of environmental ruin from the planned E40 waterway. Such a feat is the ultimate embrace of embodied awareness: direct, rhythmic, flowing. As simple as setting one foot in front of another. Committed to being there.
So, too, are her poems, imbued with a love of tactile existence in quotidian moments. The tongue savors the flavor of a particular variety of local apple. A boy apes his mother’s reaction as he watches a runner cool off in a stream. A stranger gesticulates on a train, revealing white spots on her fingernails, signs of a zinc deficiency. These snapshots of daily life enact an ecopoetics, by which I mean a desire to be rooted in a strong sense of home, be it house or town or region or river route. Likewise, language is also a home to be rooted in, where we can investigate etymology like switching on a lamp to illuminate the term “ecopoetics,” which combines two ancient Greek roots: “oikos” (οἶκος) meaning home or dwelling place and “poiesis” (ποίησις) meaning creation. Lebda’s emphasis on tactile experience—the thingness of this, right here, as it is coming into the speaker’s awareness—enacts a desire to dwell, in both senses of that word.
Underneath these snapshots, sure enough, life is in process—just as rivulets of water course underneath a glacier like that of the book’s title, the Mer de Glace (Sea of Ice), the largest though rapidly receding glacier in France. Confluence. Movement. Detail. Concentration. All of these viewed through a dense and luminous prism of ice. Similarly, these poems are filled with localized, layered impressions sifted through the work of the senses.
Such work includes the movement not only of the body but also of language. Translating these poems felt like participating in an effort of articulation akin to sucking the sweet flesh off a cherry till the sharp pit was the only thing left in my mouth. I had to resist my own tendencies toward poetic diction in favor of directness and make choices to privilege the simple word made strange through context, grammar, emphasis, and attention. I can’t help but think here also of a honed muscle, in this case not of a competitive athlete but of a poet running in the name of sharpened awareness, dark silhouette on a road outlined in sunlight.
And jasne—of course!—it is valuable to remember that “if brightness appears, it is to illuminate what is dark, to outline its contours,” as Lebda once said in an interview.
As is always the case in the act of translation, the process heightened my appreciation for the way words work—the way words do their work—in English. I’m thinking specifically of articles, which Polish doesn’t use. Since the definite article “the” is the most common word in English, followed closely by the indefinite “a,” I find myself in a constant state of inserting words not there in the original. This might seem a minor negotiation. But in poetry focused on the tangible, the tactile, and the body’s interaction with the material world, the definite article, it turns out, is everything.
As an example, I’ll end by pointing to another important way Lebda wakes us to tactile awareness, which is by using a plethora of verbal nouns, that is, a gerund used as a subject (running) or in place of an infinitive (to run), as in “running is a fun activity.” This grammatical tick proved a bit difficult to recreate in English, especially in the series of prose poems “Seasonal Plots” that are built of long lists of verbal nouns, which can so easily be read as the present continuous form of a verb instead. Initially, I simply used gerunds, as in this excerpt from “Seasonal Plots (III)”:
falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon—like a child; waking like an adult; work; the duty of work; the effects of work; the fulfilled obligation of work; the stifling obligation of work; stewed vegetables; greengage plums; closing the eyelids; filling the mouth—with a body, with a verse; reading, reading, reading some poems, out loud; a swarm leaving the hive…
While there was nothing inherently bad about my first version and its energetic feel, I was aware that it flattened out this distinctive and odd aspect of Lebda’s style. The English seemed to emphasize the continuous present underneath the glacier instead of the prismatic snapshots illuminated through the ice. I went back to the drawing board (thanks to Justyn Hunia for the counsel) and transformed the gerunds to verbal nouns by using the definite article:
the falling into sleep in the middle of the day—like a child; the waking like an adult; work; work’s duty; work’s results; work’s fulfilled obligation; work’s smothering debt; smothered vegetables; greengage plums; the closing of the eyelids; the occupying of the mouth—with the body, with a verse; the reading, reading, reading of some poems, out loud; the leaving of a swarm from the hive…
Rather than simply relating one-time action, as in the initial translation, this second version takes a step back and studies action in its habitual form, repetition being integral to what creates a sense of dwelling in place (so, too, work; so, too, reading poems out loud). Though the final version here is certainly less “fluent” in English, I would argue that it is far more “fluent” to the embodied awareness that Lebda’s poetry relates.
That’s my goal as a translator of poetry, to arrive at a way of using language that marks it as different from “fluent” or natural speech. This might sound counterintuitive. Aren’t translators supposed to make something sound natural? But the unnatural is precisely how poems, even in their first iteration in the original language, refresh our sense of awareness and meaning making, how they deepen and complicate our relationship to the world around us. It’s what first attracted me to Lebda’s poetry and what I find so compelling in the way she enacts ecology. She reminds me not to take our home, or our language, for granted.
