Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the ......TranslatoLogica: A Journal of...
Transcript of Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the ......TranslatoLogica: A Journal of...
TranslatoLogica: A Journal of Translation, Language, and Literature, 2 (2018), p.49-73
Paweł Marcinkiewicz University of Opole
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
ABSTRACT
John Ashbery made his debut in Polish translation in 1976, in the Warsaw-based literary magazine Literatura na świecie [Literature in the World]. Since then, the New York writer has become one of the most popular and most important American poets in Poland. Yet, for some reason, his recent translations into Polish go unnoticed by both critics and readers. In fact, Ashbery’s existence in the Polish language could be divided into three phases: the phase of mimicry, the phase of conflict, and the phase of diffusion. During the phase of mimicry, which is quite typical for the early existence of translated literature in the receiving culture, historical importance and literary quality of the translated author are not recognized, and he or she reaches the reader in a package of literary stereotypes typically attached to his or her native culture. The phase of conflict is reserved for the canonical authors, who often enter the foreign language in series of translations, over a long period of time. Such an author starts a conflict between the ideology represented by his/her texts and the ideology of the literary culture, dominating in the receiving language. The translator’s main goal is initiating and sustaining the above conflict, which is a means of critique and – in a broader perspective – a change of his or her own literature and its ideological undertone. The phase of diffusion manifests itself with a more intense presence of the translated writer on the book market of the receiving culture, which changes the readerly perception of his or her works: no longer does the author sound foreign, but his or her style resembles local patterns of literary tradition. Ashbery’s translations into Polish went through all the above phases. However, his position within the polysystem of Polish literature is not final, but it is based on stereotypes formed during the phase of conflict. Thus, there is a chance that we will rediscover Ashbery’s poetry in the Polish language in the future and the cycle of his reception will get repeated.
KEY WORDS
translations of American literature into Polish, ideology, Polish translations of John Ashbery’s poetry, communist era in Poland, contemporary Polish poetry
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
50
1. Introduction
When we analyze the ideological motifs for the emergence of John Ashbery’s poetry in the
Polish language – including actions of translators, publishers, and academics aimed at
starting a conflict in the aesthetic and ethical spheres in order to establish new means of
artistic expression – we must come to a conclusion that the case of the New York school
poet repeats a paradigm typical of the earliest renderings of Anglo-American literature into
the language of the largest Slavic country in Central Europe. Following the publication of
Adam Mickiewicz’s version of The Giaour in 1835, the role of Anglo-American literature in
Congress Poland was to propagate the ideals of freedom that emanated from the
Declaration of Independence. The first American writer whose works hit a real nerve in
Poland was Washington Irving, translated by Ksawery Bronikowski (1796-1852), a journalist
and activist involved in a lifelong struggle for Poland’s liberty against the Russian Empire.1
The Polish collection of Irving’s short stories – Nadzwyczajne przygody człowieka
osłabionych nerwów. Z dzieł P. Washington Irving, Amerykanina, wyjęte. Z portretem autora
[Unusual Adventures of a Man with Weak Nerves. Selected from the works of Mr.
Washington Irving, an American. With a Portrait of the Author] – was based on the two-
volume edition of Tales of a Traveller. By Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, published in London, in
1825. What must have been most appealing in Irving for the Polish reader – except for his
face of a romantic sage presented in the eponymous portrait – was the American writer’s
apotheosis of travels, full of surprising adventures and mysterious events, in magical settings
of provincial Germany and Italy. In the 1820s and 30s travelling was getting more and more
difficult for the citizens of Congress Poland, especially for intellectuals, like Ksawery
Bronikowski, who were considered suspicious by the Tsarist regime. Bronikowski was a co-
founder of “Związek Wolnych Polaków” [“Association of Free Poles”], a secret organization,
aiming at regaining independence of partitioned Poland. Later, he was a vice president of
Towarzystwo Patriotyczne [Patriotic Association]. For his subversive activities, Bronikowski
was imprisoned in 1824, and he emigrated to France in 1831, where he collaborated with
the influential conservative political camp “Hotel Lambert.” When he died in Paris in 1852,
1 Irving’s first Polish translations were published anonymously, but the translator’s name was revealed thanks to the efforts of Karol Estreicher (1827-1908), nicknamed the “father of Polish bibliography.” His monumental 36-volume work is now available online at https://www.estreicher.uj.edu.pl/home/.
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
51
he was the Director of the Polish School and the Editor in Chief of the Polish publishing
house “Pamiętniki Polskie” [“Polish Memoirs”] (Więckowska, 1989, p. 468-470).
I give a detailed account of Bronikowski’s biography not only to stress the relationship
between American literature and the ideals of freedom cherished by its translators, but first
of all to prove that ideology – including the translator’s own system of values – has always
been the most important level of translation, determining his or her very interest in foreign
authors. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ashbery was published in translation behind the Iron
Curtain, in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania. In Poland, the government-controlled
media was subject to censorship, yet Ashbery’s poems were let through since they
apparently did not contain timely political references.
In literary magazines, Ashbery was published with other New York School poets, such as
Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, who helped the younger generation find a non-political
stance, suspicious of all power discourses.
2. The first appearance of Ashbery in Polish: the phase of mimicry
The first presentation of John Ashbery’s poetry in Polish translation was published in the
Warsaw-based literary magazine Literatura na świecie [Literature in the World] in June,
1976. In the two decades immediately preceding World War II, the translator of canonical
literature was often – as Jerzy Jarniewicz has it – the “ambassador” of great writers he or she
introduced to Poland (Jarniewicz, 2012, p. 24). However, the reality of the postwar era,
when People’s Republic of Poland was under the Soviet occupation, modified the role of the
translator and readjusted the place of translations from English in the polysystem of Polish
literature. First, because of the conflict between the Eastern and the Western blocs,
translating from English was often perceived as a dissident activity, endangering the
translator to all sorts of persecutions, from invigilation to censorship, since American
literature and Americanness in general became synonymous with democratic traditions.
Second, translations of American authors became inspiration for Polish writers, replacing
earlier aesthetic models – Russian, German, and French.
Ashbery’s first Polish appearance was a part of Piotr Sommer’s mini anthology
“Współcześni poeci amerykańscy” [“Contemporary American Poets”] and thus was rather
scanty: a single lyric, consisting merely of 10 lines, accompanied by a black-and-white, half-a-
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
52
page photograph of the poet. The date of publication seemed symbolic2, as in June, 1976,
the ideology of socialism revealed its true face of aggression and, at the same time,
helplessness. Censorship could no longer prevent voices of aesthetic distinctness and ethical
ambiguity from entering the polysystem of Polish literature. Ashbery’s poem – “A Vase of
Flowers” – opens the mini anthology, and – although it seems to be a tribute to Jane
Freilicher’s paintings3 – it relevantly shows the ideological tensions of those turbulent
times4:
Wazon jest biały i byłby jak walec Gdyby walec szerszy był u góry niż na dole. Kwiaty są czerwone, białe i niebieskie. Wszelki kontakt z kwiatami jest zabroniony. Białe kwiaty wyciągają się w górę Do bladego powietrza własnych zależności Popychane lekko przez czerwone i niebieskie. Gdybyś była o te kwiaty zazdrosna, Proszę cię daj spokój. Są dla mnie absolutnie niczym (Sommer, 1976a p. 178).
Below, I give a word-for-word translation of Sommer’s rendering:
The vase is blue, and it would be like a cylinder If a cylinder were broader at the top than at the bottom. The flowers are red, white, and blue. Any contact with the flowers is forbidden. The white flowers stretch themselves upwards Towards the pale air of their own dependencies Pushed lightly by the red ones and the blue. If you – my mistress – were jealous of those flowers, Please, take them seriously, For me, they are absolutely nothing.
2 I refer here to the so called “June 1976” – a series of strikes and riots that took place in People’s Republic of Poland when Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz announced a radical rise in food prices. Hundreds of workers were brutally pacified and arrested in Radom, Ursus, and Płock. 3 Jane Freilicher (1924-2014), one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century, was the poet’s friend since the day he started living in New York in the summer of 1949 (Roffman, 2017, p. 4). 4 For the needs of the above analysis, I quote the original version of Ashbery’s poem: “A Vase of Flowers”//The vase is white and would be a cylinder/If a cylinder were wider at the top than at the bottom./The flowers are red, white and blue.//All contact with the flowers is forbidden.//The white flowers strain upward/Into a pallid air of their references,/Pushed slightly by the red and blue flowers.//If you were going to be jealous of the flowers,/Please forget it./They mean absolutely nothing to me.// 1962 (written in 1959) (Ashbery, 2008, p. 924).
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
53
The red, white, and blue flowers in a white cylinder of a vase create an austere, quasi-
futurist, mechanical environment, simplified and devoid of details, like Piet Mondrian’s
compositions. However, the “flowers,” with whom “any contact is forbidden” take on an
allegorical meaning, bringing to mind surreal “flowers-prisoners” or “flowers-convicts,”
closed in an oppressive reality. The meaning of the colors borrowed from the Mondrianian
palette also has an allegorical undertone: the “white flowers” (innocent and passive) are
pushed by the “red ones” (politically hot) and the “blue” (in military uniforms). However, the
allegoricalness of the flowers is paradoxical, aimed at creating a semantic dissonance rather
than metaphorically elucidating reality. On the one hand, the flowers “mean absolutely
nothing” to the speaker, yet, on the other, they are objects of his focused attention and
scrutiny, or even invigilation. What is important, the commitment of the poem I’m trying to
stress does not dominate over its character of a disinterested game or play. The only true
engagement of “The Vase of Flowers” is the speaker’s communication with the Ashberian
pronoun “you” which, for the poet, is paradoxical and problematic: as much as a sign bulging
with presence, it may be a placeholder of absence (Vincent, 2007, p. 149).
Obviously, the Ashberian play has a deeper meaning. The mystery of flowers depends on
their vague, allegorical sense, exemplifying what Marjorie Perloff calls the “Rimbaudian
tradition in Anglo-American literature” (Perloff, 1999, p. 157). The semantic indeterminacy
of Ashbery’s poem is typical of all writers trying to debunk realistic conventions. As a result,
the poem’s senses oscillate between referentiality and compositional game, and its
particulars do not cohere into a logical configuration, because they often resemble the
abstract arguments of music: it is not possible to decide which associations are relevant for
interpretation and which are not. According to Perloff, this fundamental undecidability is the
core of the poetic of indeterminacy started by Arthur Rimbaud and first transferred into
English by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.5 By the token of its programmatic undecidability,
Ashbery’s poetry was an important alternative to the dominating ideological conflict in the
Polish sociopolitical environment of the late 1980s: polarization between the propaganda of
the totalitarian regime and the anti-communist nationalistic impulses, which subordinated
5 Perloff’s notion of “indeterminacy” brings to mind John Cage’s lecture “Indeterminacy,” delivered at the Brussels Fair in 1958. The lecture was composed of stories to be read like “odd bits of information… at the end of columns in a small-town newspaper” when one “jumps here and there and responds at the same time to environmental events and sounds” (Lo Bue, 1982, p. 69). It seems that the New York School poets’ indeterminacy similarly includes the “operations of nature,” meaning all events that happen during the poem’s composition.
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
54
the individual freedom to the struggle for political independence. “A Vase of Flowers” gave
the reader a chance to achieve the kind of freedom that was postulated by Joseph Brodsky
in reference to the literatures of the countries conquered by the Soviet Empire: intellectual
and spiritual detachment from hot political topic by creating an independent world of
aesthetic values, which could protect literature from being blinded by timeliness (Toruńczyk,
2009, p. 130). The main goal of Brodsky’s strategy of “detachment” consisted in avoiding
gestures typical of fiercely anticommunist and allusive literary productions, since those
gestures diminished artistic values of literary works. This is why subtly lyrical and enigmatic
poems, such as Ashbery’s “A Vase,” were attractive to Polish readers in 1976.
Piotr Sommer’s translation sounds precise and succinct, and the only detail that seems
odd is the Ashberian “you” which – quite unfortunately – takes the feminine gender in
Polish: “Gdybyś była o te kwiaty zazdrosna” [“If you – my mistress – were jealous of those
flowers”]. Clearly, Sommer tries to adapt his translation to the patterns of love poetry
dominant at the end of the twentieth century, but since Ashbery criticism was still
underdeveloped in 1976, the translator’s procédé is fully justifiable. What seems more
puzzling is Sommer’s choice of the poem for his mini anthology. Ashbery wrote “A Vase of
Flowers” in 1959, and the poem was not included in any of his books. Only recently, in 2008,
“A Vase” was reprinted in the over thousand-page volume of Collected Poems 1956-1987.
This fact is quite important: in 1976, Ashbery’s seventh volume Self-Portrait in a Convex
Mirror won the triple crown of literary prizes – the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and
the National Book Critics Circle Award – and the poet’s career reached its climax. Many
critics expressed praise for the volume, and especially for its monumental title poem, which
John Roussell called “the most intelligent thing of its kind ever written” (Roussell, 1990, p. ii).
In his most important books published in the 1970s, e.g. A Map of Misreading (1975), Harold
Bloom championed Ashbery as an heir to the great romantic tradition of verse that
commenced with Emerson and extended through Whitman and Stevens. Therefore, “A Vase
of Flowers” must have seemed woefully unrepresentative of Ashbery’s mature oeuvre when
the poet started to be perceived as one of the pillars of contemporary American poetry in
the mid-1970s.
An important element of Ashbery’s first presentation in Literatura na świecie was –
besides Sommer’s translation – a photograph taken by Jill Krementz, a New York artist
specializing in portraits of writers. In a black-and-white grainy photo of poor quality, we can
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
55
see a close-up of Ashbery’s face in a stylization that the poet himself called a “Mexican
bandit look” (Tranter, 1998, Jacket). Four or five inches long graying hair, combed with a
parting, surround his handsome face of a mature man, with a thick mustache falling down, in
a way fashionable in the 1970s. However, Ashbery’s face is far from being typical: his dark
eyes pierce through the reader, smiling gently, which is stressed by his slightly parting lips. It
is a face of a sage who knows all the secrets of the human soul and understands his readers
better than they can understand themselves. Quite mysteriously, Ashbery’s face from the
1976 Literatura na świecie is similar to Washington Irving’s face from his first Polish
publication, in 1826.
The context in which Ashbery’s poetry entered the Polish language is a separate
important factor, influencing the early perception of the New Yorker. Piotr Sommer
presented “A Vase of Flowers” in an alphabetically ordered anthology that he entitled
“Współcześni poeci amerykańscy” [“Contemporary American Poets”], containing seventeen
names.6 The anthology was preceded by a brief introduction, in which the translator
confessed that majority of the writers that he had chosen were poorly known in Poland or
even totally unknown (Sommer, 1976b, p. 177). The only well-known poet was Allen
Ginsberg, who was previously translated into Polish by Leszek Elektorowicz, Tadeusz
Rybowski, Teresa Truszkowska, and others. The Polish reader was also acquainted with
Robert Bly (translated by Tadeusz Rybowski) and Amiri Baraka, who used the name of
Imamu Amear Baraka back then (translated by Jarosław Anders).
Sommer sounds rather unconvincing when he tries to explain the rationale of his
anthology: he underlines the obvious fact that most of his authors were born in the 1920s,
except for Dudley Randall, William Stafford, and Reed Whittemore, who were born a decade
earlier, and Imamu Amear Baraka, who was born a decade later (Sommer, 1976b, p. 177).
Yet, it is quite clear that the poets he chooses do not belong to any particular generation or
literary group. Moreover, the Polish translator admits that his goal is not to sketch a
comprehensive panorama of contemporary American poetry, but to get his readers familiar
with a few important names. This is also hardly credible, since many poets from the
6 Sommer based most of his selection on the 1962 Contemporary American Poetry edited by Donald Hall. The Polish translator does not mention this fact, which might result from the fear that censorship would not let through a publication from the period of the Cold War.
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
56
anthology were ephemeral literati, soon to be forgotten.7 The last poet Sommer mentions by
name in his introduction is Frank O’Hara, and the only fact that the Polish reader learns
about the author of “Biotherm” ten years after his death is that he died in a car accident
(Sommer, 1976b, p. 177). John Ashbery is not mentioned in Sommer’s introduction at all.
This is exactly the situation I call the “phase of mimicry,” which is typical for the early
existence of translated literature in the receiving culture. Initially, historical importance and
literary greatness of the translated author are not recognized, and he or she reaches the
reader in a package of literary stereotypes and ideological conceptions attached to his or her
native culture. It seems that the main goal of Sommer’s anthology was not to get the Polish
reader acquainted with popular or important American poets, but to get any of
contemporary American poets published, taking advantage of an opportunity to compose an
“American” issue of Literatura na świecie, which the communist authorities tolerated from
time to time, since it gave foreign observers and intellectuals an illusion that Poland was a
free country. Such an issue devoted to Western literatures was usually published at a price:
in exchange for a gasp of artistic freedom, several following issues of the magazine had to
deal with literatures of the Eastern Bloc. Otherwise, it would be difficult to imagine any
coherent basis of ideological or aesthetic values, enabling the editor to present the fierce
experimenter John Ashbery, together with the black nationalist Amiri Baraka and the
fundamental Christian Denise Levertov.
Independently of Sommer’s anthology, the issue of Literatura na świecie contains works
of such American writers as Thomas Pynchon, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, William Styron,
and Mark Twain. Additionally, the magazine brings out essays by Anglo-American critics on
various aspects of contemporary American literature, for example Robert Daly’s review of
contemporary American poetry, Mathew Winston’s discussion of Thomas Pynchon’s
conspiracy theories, or Tonny Tanner’s study of the post-war American novel. Also, several
academic papers by Polish scholars appear there, including Maria Teresa Aniśkowicz’s
account of Richard Brautigan’s literary development or Zbigniew Lewicki’s analysis of Joseph
Heller’s fiction. In this disorderly context, with his penetrating eyes of a visionary looking at
the reader from Jill Krementz’s photograph, Ashbery must have been perceived as another
7 At least this is what happened to Dudley Randall, William Stafford, and Reed Whittemore, whom Sommer championed as important American poets born in the 1910s.
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
57
American eccentric, who wrote lyrical grotesques in the spirit of Gertrude Stein and Williams
Carlos Williams.
As for the main ideological message emanating from the pages of the American issue of
Literatura na świecie, it was concurrent with the fundamental stereotype about
Americanness present in Polish culture from Emerson, who warned his readers against being
“subdued” by their “instruments” and advised “[reading] God directly” (Emerson, 1969, p.
44). Accordingly, the object of literary understanding was not the text but the world, and the
American authors presented by various translators gave an example of aesthetic variety and
ethical freedom, which opposed rigid schematism typical of the Polish literary scene,
controlled by the Communist apparatchiks from PZPR – the Polish United Workers’ Party.
When democratic opposition started to emerge in the 1970s, American poets were
perceived as allies of the so-called “Nowa Fala” [New Wave movement], engaged in social
criticism in the spirit of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes.8 This is exactly the gist of
the phase of mimicry: the dominant ideology of a foreign literature, perceived as a set of
stereotypes, manipulates our reading of a particular foreign author, who assimilates with
other authors from the same language and time.
Ashbery’s next appearance in Literatura na świecie was only nine months later – in the
issue 3(71) 1977, in a brief presentation “Sami siebie” [They Themselves] – but it
foreshadowed a significant change in his reception in Poland. What is important, Ashbery
was not shown as a poet or writer, but as an amateur cartoonist, the author of a miniature
self-portrait drawn as a dedication for Burt Britton, who worked in the Strand Bookstore,
one of the most famous bookstores in New York. Britton had a peculiar hobby: he asked
novelists and poets invited to the bookstore for weekly readings to draw self-portraits for his
album, which he published as an art book entitled Self Portraits, in 1976. The half-page
anecdote about Britton’s project – published as an intro to a set of 9 pictures – was meant to
warm up the image of the Unites States of America which was still labeled by the communist
authorities as the greatest enemy of the Eastern Bloc. On top of that, the editors of the 1977
issue of Literatura na świecie broke stereotypes about a literary magazine published behind
the Iron Curtain. The whole presentation – with 9 drawings of writers, including John
8 This problem was highlighted by Polish critic Jerzy Kwiatkowski in his essay entitled “Stanisław Barańczak,” published in Pochwała poezji. O poetach polskich XX wieku [In praise of poetry. About Polish poets of the twentieth century]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, p. 327-345.
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
58
Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, John Barth, William Gaddis, Lois Gold, Stanley Kunitz, Maurice
Sendak, John Updike, and Kurt Vonnegut – created an illusion that censorship did not exist in
Poland.
In comparison with the previous presentation in Sommer’s anthology, the most important
change was Ashbery’s literary status. Although peculiarities of his style were yet
undiscovered by critics, the New York poet was recognized as one of the greatest American
writers of his time, on a par with the authors well-known by the Polish audience, such as
Updike or Vonnegut. Interestingly, Ashbery’s self-portrait contained a surplus meaning,
which was difficult to decipher both for the editors of the magazine and the Polish reader.
The poet’s face, slightly caricatural, is rendered skillfully, proving that, as a teenager,
Ashbery wanted to be a painter, and he went to an art class for children at the Rochester art
museum (Ashbery & Ford, 2003, p. 25). The most striking detail is that the head is seen from
a peculiar perspective: it is slightly turned left and shown from a point below the center of
the composition. Obviously, the perspective mocks the famous painting of the sixteenth-
century Italian painter Francesco Mazzola, also known as Parmigianino – “Self-Portrait in the
Convex Mirror” – which was a direct inspiration for Ashbery’s most famous collection and its
eponymous poem. As Ashbery recollects in a conversation with Mark Ford, he worked on his
“Self-Portrait” from February 1973, when he saw the copy of Mazzola’s painting in a display
window in a bookstore in Provincetown, for the whole year (Ashbery & Ford, 2003 p. 57).
The ironically mocking drawing, in which the poet sees himself as Parmigianino, is signed
with a date: December 11, 1973. This was the moment when Ashbery must have finished the
work on his long poem and was reading its fragments to his audience at Strand Bookstore.
The double meaning of Ashbery’s “self-portrait” must have been clear for American readers
of Britton’s album in 1976.
3. The phase of conflict
The next phase of the translation’s existence in the target language could be defined as the
“phase of conflict.” Of course, not all translated authors get to this phase, because their vast
majority stays at the more neutral level of reception, which is the phase of mimicry. The
phase of conflict is reserved for the canonical authors, who often enter the foreign language
in series of translations, over a long period of time. Perhaps the very “seriality” of their
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
59
existence in renderings by various translators – axiological/ideological and aesthetic
difference from the dominating discourses and ability to yield multiple interpretations – is
the most crucial feature of authors entering this phase.9 In the case of John Ashbery, this
phase was initiated by his next appearance in Literatura na świecie, eight years later, in the
issue 9 (158)/1984. The very cover of the magazine seems to be symbolic: not only is it
intensely red, but also contains surrealist details, such as the image of a winged nib, which –
like a bird of prey – tries to destroy the word “literature” in the magazine’s title. This is
exactly how the phase of conflict functions: the author chosen for translation – very often
controversial, but at the same time enjoying critical acclaim and readers’ approval – enters
into a struggle between the ideology represented by his texts and the ideology of the literary
culture, dominating in the receiving language. The translator’s main goal is initiating and
sustaining the above conflict, which is a means of critique – and in a broader perspective a
change – of his or her own literature and its ideological undertone. Here, translation is a tool
whose aim is a transformation of the domestic system of values, determining the
relationship between literature and social life.
On the back cover of the 1984 “red” issue of Literatura na świecie, the reader finds names
of the most important contributors to the magazine, all of them in fancy fonts, resembling
autographs: Harry Mathews, John Ashbery, Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick, and
Gilbert Sorrentino. The most significant contrast between the phase of mimicry and the
phase of conflict consists in the fact that, in the latter, the format of the translated author
has already been recognized and he or she has been placed in the proper literary and critical
contexts. In the case of John Ashbery, it was the context of postmodern avant-garde in
American visual arts and literature, initiated in the 1950s by abstract expressionists and the
New York School poets. Ashbery met Harry Mathews in 1956, in Paris, and together they
edited an experimental literary magazine Locus Solus (Ashbery & Ford, 2003, p. 57). Later,
Mathews became a member of an experimental literary group OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature
potentielle usually translated into English as Workshop of Potential Literature), which was a
loose association of mainly French writers founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and
9 I understand the concept of “series of translations” after Agnieszka Adamowicz-Pośpiech as a form of “retranslation” (Adamowicz-Pośpiech, 2013, p. 38). The difference between the two notions is that “series” implies simultaneous analysis of all of its constitutive elements while “retranslation” focuses the reader’s attention on the last element of the series, treating it as the aesthetic peak. Thus works existing in “translation series” invite the reader to a special kind of interpretation, focusing on stylistic variety.
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
60
François Le Lionnais. Its most famous members included Marcel Duchamp, Georges Perec,
and Italo Calvino. As for Raymond Federman and Ronald Sukenick, both of them were
unconventional writers, often very radical in their formal endeavors. Gilbert Sorrentino was
most versatile of them, writing novels, poems, and criticism.
Thus, the ideological attack performed by the 1984 issue of Literatura na świecie seems to
have been extremely violent: it entailed poetry, fiction, and critical writing, and it aimed at
re-evaluating cultural and literary hierarchies of contemporary Polish literature, using the
anti-bourgeois shock tactics of the historical avant-garde. In Poland, in the mid-1980s,
literary values were very conservative on both sides of the political barricade. Literary
productions propagated by Jaruzelski’s regime – as it used to be from the 1949 convention
of ZLP (Polish Writers’ Union) in Szczecin when the Soviet social realism was announced the
only legitimate aesthetics – were controlled by the Party’s Central Committee. The most
important writers belonged to the informal group called “Kolumbowie rocznik 20”
(Columbuses born in the 1920s): they were shaped by World War II, during which they
fought for their country’s freedom and socialist future. The group included Jerzy Putrament,
who published his 13 volumes of collected works from 1979 to 1988; Roman Bratny, who
published 18 novels during the decade, most of them bestsellers, in editions of hundred
thousand copies; and Bohdan Czeszko, whose Collected Works, Vol. 1-3, came out in 1983.
However, the object of the attack of the Warsaw-based monthly was not the ideology of
the socialist state based on the idolatry of the Soviet Union – the state, which was already
shaking in its foundations. The true enemy of the American avant-garde was the model of
literature propagated by the Polish samizdat, sponsored by the western governments and
various human rights foundations – the so-called “drugi obieg” (second circulation). The
Polish samizdat published authors living in Poland, such as Andrzej Kijowski, Andrzej
Szczypiorski, Jan Józef Szczepański, Kazimierz Orłoś, or Julian Stryjkowski, but also émigré
writers, including Czesław Miłosz, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, Adam Zagajewski, Stanisław
Barańczak, or Zbigniew Herbert. It would be difficult to find a common denominator for all
the above authors, but it seems that they belonged to the post-romantic tradition of
symbolic realism, rooted in the values of Roman Catholicism and based on the scenic style,
which was – as Charles Altieri has it – “a reaction against the Enlightenment strategies for
idealizing reason” (Altieri, 1984 p. 11-12). The post-romantic provenience of the samizdat
authors was due to the fact that an effective critique of communism required a full
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
61
understanding between the writer and the reader on the socio-cultural level, rooted in the
experience of oppressive reality. In the sphere of ideology, the samizdat authors were not
superficially anti-communist, but they were Roman-Catholic transcendentalists. The writer
as a sage and servant of his nation was connected with the mystical reality of the Creator,
and he got involved in the public sphere, fighting for his nation’s freedom. This tradition was
the real target of the 1984 issue of Literatura na świecie. The presentation of radically
innovative writers, representative of American postmodernism, was an act of dissidence,
aimed at initiating an artistic revolution at home. Polish poetry of the 1980s lacked anti-
illusionistic lyricism, showing how the rhetoric controls the reader. American avant-garde
authors could help Polish writers redefine the primary social role of literature, which should
– according to Altieri – “offer concrete experience and plausible worlds that foster individual
powers of self-reflection without tying the individual to one of the explanatory schemes
competing to dominate the political marketplace” (Altieri, 1984, p. 21).
The presentation of Ashbery’s poetry was quite large for a content of a literary magazine,
and it included seventeen poems. Two of them came from the poet’s most famous volume
The Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and were translated by Piotr Sommer: “As One Put
Drunk into the Packet Boat” and “Worsening Situation.” The remaining fifteen poems were
rendered by Bohdan Zadura: six from Houseboat Days (1977), eight from Shadow Train
(1981), and one from As We Know (1979). All those texts represent Ashbery’s middle period
when he sounded almost like a classic, and he perceived reality as a collective experience,
rooted in history, whose mechanism was essentially explainable. Yet, even those mildly
experimental poems must have been shocking for Polish readers in 1984.
First of all, the earliest Polish collection of Ashbery’s poems lays bare an artificial
character of dignified, moralizing diction, being synonymous with valuable poetry in Poland,
in the 1980s. For the New York poet, the most important aspect of the poem was “play,”
which also meant a more relaxed attitude towards writing. Ashbery describes the working of
the play in one of his most often anthologized poems “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,”
translated in the magazine by Bohdan Zadura:
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. … What’s a plain level? It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play. Play? Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
62
A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, As in the division of grace these long August days Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know it It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters. It has been played once more. … The poem is you (Ashbery, 2008, p. 698).
The “deeper outside thing” is an aesthetic strategy of being lighthearted about writing, as if
the composition of a poem were a game, with the reader not as a rival but an ally, whose
attentive presence is crucial for the poem to succeed. Succeeding here means giving sense
to “the division of grace these long August days/Without proof,” which is a metaphor that
cannot be simply rationalized but has to be accepted and lived through by reading. The
Ashberian play has also a more frolicsome dimension because he – as much as other New
York School poets – invests his poetry with masquerades, parodies, eccentric juxtapositions,
and pseudo-scientific profundities. He and other New York School poets favor verse forms
that are, as David Lehman has it, “at base arbitrary... You could cull lines at random from
books. Or you could scramble the lines in an already written poem to produce a disjunctive
jolt. … Poems didn’t have to make sense in a conventional way; they could discover their
sense as they went along” (Lehman, 1999, p. 4). The variety of the play’s registers also
includes play of sounds, signifiers, and references, whose goal is, to use Roger Gilbert’s
phrase, “to frustrate hermeneutic expectations” (Gilbert, 2007, p. 200). Ultimately, the play
becomes a sense-generating device, working very much like a procedural form, such as
sestina, canzone, or pantoum, which broadens the scope of the poem to include elements
that evade commonsensical logic.
Quite unexpectedly, this type of poetry read extremely well in Polish translations. First,
the poetics of indeterminacy was totally new in the Polish language and that is why
Ashbery’s poems had a mysterious aura around them, sounding like texts of a supereloquent
madman or a supermodern Rimbaud. Second, there were no critical works on Ashbery
available at that time, and readers were quite helpless trying to interpret the author of Self-
Portrait. Third, the earliest Polish translations of Ashbery’s poems were simply great
renderings, containing a decorative tapestry of semi-confessional riffs, self-referential
lucidity, which helped the poem achieve a distinctive form of ethical autonomy and – above
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
63
all – rebellious irony. Bohdan Zadura’s translation of the above quoted “Paradoxes and
Oxymorons” could serve as a good example of Ashbery’s poetic excellence in Polish:
Ten wiersz zajmuje się językiem na bardzo prostym poziomie. … Co to jest prosty poziom? To jest to i coś innego, Co cały system wprowadza do gry. Gry? No więc w zasadzie tak, ale mam grę za coś Głębszego a zewnętrznego, wyśniony wzorzec roli, Jak w tym podziale łaski w długie sierpniowe dni Bez uzasadnień. Z otwartym końcem. Nic o tym nie wiesz, A już przepadła w parze i szczebiocie maszyn do pisania. Rozegrało się jeszcze raz. … Ten wiersz to ty (Zadura, 1984, p. 179).
Below, I give a word-for-word translation of Bohdan Zadura’s rendering :
This poem deals with language on a very simple level. … What is a simple level? It is this and something different, Which the whole system brings into play. Play? Well, strictly speaking yes, but I consider play to be something Deeper, yet external, a dream pattern of role-playing, Like in a division of grace during those long August days Without justification. With an open end. You know nothing about it, And it is gone in the steam and chirp of typewriters. Someone played it once again. … The poem is you.
Zadura’s translation is faithful, and it preserves all major senses of the original. The most
important meaning in the text is produced by the personification of the “poem,” which talks
to its addressee, and finally metamorphoses into him, making the conditions of speaking its
central thematic concern. What does it mean to “speak” in a text? How does speaking in a
particular text affect other texts? What is the most basic relationship between the text and
the reader? Trying to answer these questions, Ashbery’s poem is “concerned” with language
on a very “plain” level indeed – a level that was rarely an object of poetic exploration or
critical scrutiny in the Polish literary tradition. On top of that, the poem’s aesthetic
dimension is strikingly alluring in Zadura’s translation, not only because it has a very peculiar
title, which is somehow in opposition to its content, but because it does not sound very
much like poetry, using prosaic sentences. Moreover, the text addresses the reader very
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
64
intimately, like a love poem written for him or her, due to the supremely elastic pronoun
“you,” which functions as a point of entry into the poet’s stunning lyrical patterns. Yet,
“Paradoxes and Oxymorons” is totally anti-romantic: the poem mentions neither communist
dictators, nor oppression of those who fought for freedom, nor the end of humanism, and
yet it says something profoundly important. There was nothing like that in the allegorical
Herbert, the metaphysical Miłosz, the paradoxical Szymborska, the Buddhist Krynicki, or
Zagajewski, who was looking for Lwów. Ashbery’s poems were interstellar aesthetic objects
coming from beyond the Polish literary galaxy.
The peak of the phase of conflict was the very next issue of Literatura na świecie
containing Ashbery’s poems, from July 1986, the so-called “blue” number, entirely devoted
to the New York School of poetry. In comparison with the previous Ashbery issue of the
magazine, now other members of the New York School were introduced. Frank O’Hara was
represented by twenty six poems rendered by different translators – mostly by Piotr
Sommer – and the reader could have a feeling that O’Hara was the blue number’s main
protagonist. Apart from his poems, the number contained two essays by O’Hara:
“Personism: A Manifesto” and “American Art and Non-American Art,” and a long interview
he gave to Edward Lucie-Smith a year before he died, in 1965. Moreover, five critical texts
were devoted to O’Hara, including an essay by Piotr Sommer “O krok od nich” (“A Step away
from Them”), which was published as an afterword to Sommer’s collection of O’Hara’s
poems in Polish under the same title the following year.10 The blue number also contained
poems of less known members of the New York School, such as Kenneth Koch (six
translations), James Schuyler (nine translations), and Kenward Elmslie (five translations).11
The next difference was that he red number presented both poetry and prose, and its
scope was the late twentieth-century American avant-garde, while the blue number
presented mostly poetry and criticism. Thus, the main purpose of the blue number was not
just to criticize the Polish post-romantic literary tradition, but also to correct the balance
between the two modes or “poles” of Polish poetry – bieguny poezji – as famous critic Jan
Błoński called them (Błoński, 1978, p. 200). By the “poles” of poetry, Błoński understood two
10 The title was borrowed from the 1956 poem by O’Hara, one of his greatest literary achievements, published in the collection Lunch Poems (1964). 11 It seems rather strange that there were no poems by Barbara Guest, who was artistically most accomplished of the whole group in the 1950s. Guest was also a visual artist, creating collages, and she was an editor of a prestigious magazine devoted to art called ARTnews.
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
65
stylistic patterns typical of the two most influential Polish poets of the twentieth century –
Julian Przyboś and Czesław Miłosz. The first represented radical experimentation in the spirit
of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes; the second represented more traditional
“voice” poetics, rooted in post-romantic historiosophical symbolism. Towards the end of the
twentieth century, the balance between the two poetic modes was disturbed due to the
growing importance of Czesław Miłosz, culminating in his Nobel Prize in 1980. Also, political
situation in Central Europe privileged socially committed literature, which seemed an
effective means of fighting against pro-Soviet oppressors of political opposition and
apparatchiks who imposed Martial Law in Poland on December 13, 1981. In those
circumstances, the post-romantic and nationalistic poetry inspired by Miłosz dominated the
underground literary scene, and the blue number of Literatura na świecie was a precise
dissident operation, aimed at preserving a necessary balance between arrière-garde and
avant-garde in Polish literature.
The opening gesture of the blue number of Literatura na świecie was undoubtedly
meaningful: it was John Ashbery’s poem “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” translated by
Piotr Sommer. By his reference to Horace’s Ars Poetica, Ashbery reminds us that
postmodernism’s goals and ideals, to a large extent, were inspired by visual arts, where
artistic revolutions occurred a decade or two earlier. Saying that poetry was like painting,
Horace stressed that both disciplines of art must be evaluated by the same criteria, and
painting should not be privileged as more suitable for serious topics. Ashbery’s
argumentation seems to be similar: poetry has to abandon safe paths of post-romantic
realism and express broader, metaphorical meanings, similarly to contemporary painting.
The blue number contains a glossy inset “Trzej malarze” (Three painters), with color prints of
the most important visual artists loosely connected with the New York School poets,
including Willem de Kooning, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers. There are also several black-
and-white prints of the above painters in the magazine, illustrating critical texts or poems.
In one of his interviews Ashbery said that back in the 1950s and 60s “one got one’s
inspiration and ideas from watching the experiments of others” (Kostelanetz, 1976, p. 19-
20). Watching the experiments of others became even more important for the poet when, in
1960, Ashbery accepted Barbara Guest’s offer to replace her as an art critic for the Paris
edition of Herald Tribune. This started a career, in which for the next twenty-five years he
wrote art reviews for such distinguished magazines as Artnews and Newsweek. According to
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
66
David Bergman, while the career may have been accidental, “it has not been insignificant to
[Ashbery’s] development as a poet” (Bergman, 1989, p. xi). As for the presentation of
Ashbery’s writing in the blue number, it was his largest appearance in Polish so far: besides
thirty four poems, two of his essays were translated (“Introduction” to the Collected Poems
of Frank O’Hara and “Things As They Are” about Fairfield Porter’s painting), and an interview
he gave to Piotr Sommer during his visit to Poland in 1980. Additionally, Ashbery’s texts
were accompanied by critical analyses of scholars specializing in his poetry, including
Marjorie Perloff, the author of The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, and David
Shapiro, the author of the first monograph devoted to the New York poet, John Ashbery: An
Introduction to the Poetry, published in 1979. Ashbery’s poems were rendered into Polish by
a larger number of translators: beside Sommer and Zadura, there were a few new names,
including Agata Preis-Smith, Andrzej Szuba, and Jan Zieliński, while Ahbery’s prose was
translated by Andrzej Szuba and Magdalena Konikowska.
Piotr Sommer must have been aware of the destructive potential of the magazine for
readers on both sides of the political barricade, and he tried to soothe it by printing a brief
note “Układanie numeru” (“Arranging the Issue of the Magazine”) inside the back cover. It
seems that the note was added in the last moment before printing the issue. Probably,
Sommer wanted to assure censorship that the texts he was going to publish do not try to
propagate American capitalism. This was even more plausible because the magazine’s
editor-in-chief, Wacław Sadkowski, was a secret police agent.12 From Sommer’s note, we
learn that the current American issue of the magazine is, in fact, very similar to previous
issues devoted to poetry, especially the one with Chlebnikov’s poems, which were deeply
rooted in Polish literature and culture thanks to a great volume of translations by Anna
Kamieńska and Jan Śpiewak (Sommer, 1986, p. ii). If we cracked this code, it would tell a
simple message to cultural apparatchiks: the blue number simply presented literature, just
like all previous numbers of the magazine. Everything was under control: we still considered
the USA to be our greatest enemy, and Russian experimenters were far more revolutionary
than their American counterparts.
This line of thinking was completely wrong. In 1986, nothing could be controlled, neither
in the sphere of culture in the collapsing People’s Republic of Poland, nor in the Eastern Bloc,
12 Here I’m referring to Marek Nowakowski’s firsthand account published in the Polish edition of Newsweek on July 22, 2007: http://www. newsweek. pl/kultura/wiadomosci-kulturalne/fakty-i-akta,10275,1,1.html
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
67
which was falling apart. On top of that, the blue number managed to achieve something
totally unpredictable: it won hearts of the youngest generations of readers, who were
twenty or thirty years old and just started their careers as poets, critics, and novelists. Many
of them contributed to the literary magazine bruLion, which rejected the model of the
socially committed literature. The new young writers included Marcin Świetlicki, Manuela
Gretkowska, Andrzej Stasiuk, and Olga Tokarczuk – the most important voices in the Polish
literature of the next decade.
4. The phase of diffusion
When the ideological conflict between the tradition/culture of the original and the
tradition/culture of the translation gradually subsides, a next phase of the translation’s
functioning starts – the phase of diffusion. The conflict ends because of a growing similarity
between the value systems represented by the original texts and their translations. In most
cases, the culture of the source language propagated by the translation gradually transforms
the culture of the target language. An important element of diffusion is appearance of
imitators and continuators of the translated author in the target language. Traces of
Ashbery’s influence were seen in the earliest poetry of his translators, very often
accomplished poets. Piotr Sommer’s volumes from the mid-1980s – Kolejny świat [The Next
World] (1983) and Czynnik liryczny [The Lyrical Factor] (1986) – bear clear resemblance to
the Ashberian dream poetics, where constituent sections of the text are often series of non-
sequiturs. Bohdan Zadura, on the other hand, in his collections Starzy znajomi [Old
Acquaintances] (1986) and Prześwietlone zdjęcia [Overexposed Photographs] (1990), makes
use of syntactical possibilities offered by the Ashberian poem, experimenting with
punctuation and employing lexical elements of the text so that its overall meaning could be
as broad and unprocessed as possible.
Usually, the phase of diffusion manifests itself with a more intense presence of the
translated writer on the book market of the receiving culture, which changes the readerly
perception of his or her works: no longer does the author sound foreign, but his or her style
resembles local developments and patterns of literary tradition. The Polish literary elites
absorbed the ideology and aesthetics of the New York School poets at the end of the 1980s,
and indeterminacy – an oscillation between reference and compositional game – was used
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
68
by a number of Polish poets as the most important meaning-generating strategy. However,
as Charles Altieri has it, for contemporary artists, “it is not enough to ‘make it new’; artists
must also make it culturally resonant” (Altieri, 1999, p. 638). Finding a broader cultural
resonance for his poems, which more and more often speak for contemporaneity, the Polish
Ashbery lost the allure of novelty for Polish readers and critics. Thus, the New York poet’s
later presentations – in Literatura na świecie and other literary magazines and anthologies –
went almost unnoticed.
The most important of Ashbery appearances in the Polish language after the collapse of
the Communist Bloc was the bibliophilic collection of his poems No i wiesz [And You Know]
(1993). The book contained forty-six poems chosen by Bohdan Zadura, and translated by
Bohdan Zadura, Piotr Sommer, and Andrzej Sosnowski. Additionally, Sosnowski wrote an
afterword to the collection, one of several texts he devoted to Ashbery’s poetry. In the
1990s and 2000s, Andrzej Sosnowski was one of the most important Polish poets, who
helped transform the idiom of contemporary Polish poetry from post-romantic realism
based on clarity and transparency towards non-representational, parodic, and
deconstructive poetics. Sosnowski’s poetry quickly gained a high literary status, and he
became a cult personality. This was reflected by numerous literary awards he received and
many editions of his poems churned out by wide-circulation publishers, including Dożynki
[Harvest Home], which came out in Biuro Literackie, in 2006. What is even more important,
Sosnowski’s style became a model for a younger generation of poets, whose presence in
literary magazines and critical texts finally altered the literary scene in Poland. On top of
that, Sosnowski published his own collection of Ashbery’s poems, Cztery poematy [Four Epic
Poems] (2012), which contained the previously published fragments of Ashbery’s longer
poems from his middle period, such as Three Poems (1972) and A Wave (1984).
Apart from the above collections, Piotr Sommer published two influential anthologies of
American poetry, presenting Ahbery’s poetry in a broader context, not only of the New York
School poets, but the whole twentieth century. The first of them was Artykuły pochodzenia
zagranicznego [Articles of foreign origin] (1996), presenting – besides Ashbery – Frank
O’Hara, E. E. Cummings, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles
Reznikoff. The second anthology was O krok od nich. Przekłady z poetów amerykańskich [A
Step away from Them. Translations from American Poets] (2006), and it contained all poems
from the previous anthology, plus seven texts from Ashbery’s more recent volumes,
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
69
including Can You Hear, Bird (1995) and Your Name Here (2000). The second of Sommer’s
anthologies seems to present a more appropriate context for Ashbery’s oeuvre, with texts
by Kenneth Koch, John Cage, and August Kleinzahler.
I would like to complete the list of Ashberian translations into Polish with my own humble
book Oni przybyli, żeby wysadzić Amerykę. John Ashbery i dwudziestowieczne awangardy
amerykańskie [They Came to Blow up America. John Ashbery and the Twentieth-Century
American Avant-Gardes] (2015). My study reads the poet through his complex relationships
with the twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes, casting him as a typical American
continuator of Rimbaudian indeterminacy. My monograph contributes to the corpus of
Ashbery criticism, but it also smuggles sixty-two poems by John Ashbery in a form of
appendix. Interestingly, the poetic appendix went totally unnoticed, and none of several
reviewers mentioned the fact that I published the largest selection of Ashbery’s poems in
Polish so far.
Many Polish poets making their debut at the beginning of the 1990s consciously used the
Ashberian model of the poem, which offered an alternative to the Polish literary tradition. In
the English language, the New York School poets subversively undermined the post-romantic
“scenic mode,” which in the contemporary context was not really poetry but a marketing
strategy colonizing the academy. In the 1990s, the poems of the most daring Polish young
poets, such as Andrzej Sosnowski, Marcin Sendecki, Darek Foks, or Tadeusz Pióro, played a
similar role to the poems of the New York School poets back in the 1950s. They questioned
illusionistic models of lyricism: they did not deal directly with experience, but rather with the
“experience of experience.”13 Transcendental closure was not the poem’s goal, but rather a
point of departure for redefining the self, which, in contrast to the fixed, specular self, was a
diffused nebula of rhetorical gestures. Moreover, linear, cumulative progress of meaning
was replaced with independent, sense-generating whirls—structural units like images or
metaphors—and instead of depth there was a mingling surface. Rather than developing
along a meticulously structured scheme, the poem followed a disorderly, conversation-like
itinerary. In a word, the Polish poem of the mid-1990s could finally do the same things as the
Ashberian poem from the issues of Literatura na świecie published a decade or two earlier.
The Polish poems inspired by John Ashbery, written by the above poets, multiplied the
aesthetics of the original texts, disseminating the ideology of the New York School avant- 13 The apt phrase comes from the title of A. Poulin Jr.’s interview with the poet (Poulin, 1981 p. 245).
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
70
garde. The phase of diffusion usually means the end of the existence of translation in the
target language – the existence understood as an inspiration and critique of the domestic
culture. Diffusing in the target language, the translation merges with its literature and
fertilizes its literary tradition. Nowadays, Polish translations of Ashbery’s poems belong to
the “pole” of Przyboś as much as original Polish poems by Karpowicz, Białoszewski, or
Sosnowski. However, Ashbery’s position within the polysystem of Polish literature is not
final, but based on stereotypes formed during the phase of conflict. First, the Polish Ashbery
significantly differs from his American original simply because we know only a fragment of
his oeuvre, which belongs mostly to his middle period. Second, we lack the sociopolitical
context of his poetry and we do not understand the specificity of his perception in the USA.
Accordingly, there is a chance that we rediscover Ashbery’s poetry in the Polish language in
the future and the cycle of his reception will get repeated.
6. Conclusions
In Poland, John Ashbery never became a cult figure like his friend Frank O’Hara, whose
volume Twoja pojedynczość [Your Singularity – the final line of O’Hara’s 1957 poem,
“Sleeping on a Wing”] in Piotr Sommer’s translation inspired crowds of imitators, whom
critics called “O’Harists” and who were soon very popular at the turn of the 1980s. Yet,
Ashbery’s poetry was important: it neutralized the ideological conflict between the “pole” of
Polkowski and the “pole” of Świetlicki, when anti-communist nationalistic impulses tried to
subordinate individual freedom to the struggle for political independence.14 Also, it seems
that Ashbery’s influence on Polish poets was deeper than O’Hara’s and it lasted longer, and
it can be seen in anti-mainstream conceptual poetics gaining prominence today.
The history of Polish translations of John Ashbery’s works is, on the one hand, a history of
the fight for individual freedom in a totalitarian state; on the other, it is a history of the fight
for freedom from “freedom,” which means the superiority of individual’s rights over his or
her obligations in relation to a community. In Jean-Luc Godard’s movie Alphaville – one of
Ashbery’s favorite motion pictures – the main protagonist, agent Lemmy Caution, visits the
capital of the galaxy Alpha, ruled by the computer Alpha 60, which prohibited emotions. In
14 Here I refer to Marcin Świetlicki’s poem “Dla Jana Polkowskiego” [“For Jan Polkowski”] and the discussion it started. The conflict between ideologies of Polkowski and Świetlicki was meticulously analyzed by Dariusz Pawelec in his essay “Oko smoka” [“The Eye of the Dragon”].
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
71
each hotel room, there is the Bible, like today, but when Lemmy Caution accidentally opens
the book, it turns out that it is a dictionary. Surprised Lemmy asks Natasha von Braun, a
rebellious daughter of one of the engineers of totalitarianism, why he found a dictionary
instead of the Bible. Natasha answers: “I thought they were the same.” Ashbery’s poems
teach us that a dictionary is not the Bible: the history of Polish translation of Ashbery is also
a history of non-religious understanding of literature and reality, and it seems that the New
York poet’s critical potential in this sphere will be needed in Poland for a long time.
References
Adamowicz-Pośpiech, A. (2013). Seria w przekładzie. Polskie warianty prozy Josepha Conrada
[Series in Translation. Polish variants of Joseph Conrad’s Works]. Katowice: Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.
Altieru, Ch. (1999). Avant-Garde or Arrière-Garde in Recent American Poetry. Poetics Today.
20(4, Winter 1999), 629-653.
Altieri, Ch. (1984). Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. New York:
Cambridge UP.
Ashbery, J. (2008). Collected Poems 1956-1987. Ed. Mark Ford. New York: The Library of
America.
Ashbery, J., Ford M. (2003). John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford. London: BLT.
Bergman, D. (1989). Introduction.. In David Bergman (Ed.), Reported Sightings: Art
Chronicles, 1957-1987, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, xi-xxiii.
Błoński, J. (1978). Bieguny poezji.Odmarsz [Poles of Poetry. Marching Away].
Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków.
Emerson, R. W. (1969). American Scholar. In Reginald L. Cook (Ed.), Selected Prose and
Poetry. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, 39-55.
Estreicher, K. Elektroniczna baza bibliografii Estreichera [Electronic database of Estreicher’s
bibliography]. Retrieved from https://www.estreicher.uj.edu.pl/skany/
Gilbert, R. (2007). Ludic Eloquence: On John Ashbery’s Recent Poetry. Contemporary
Literature, 48(2, Summer 2007),, 195-226.
Kostelanetz, R. (1976). How to be a Difficult Poet. The New York Times, 23 May 1976, 20-
21.
Jarniewicz, J. (2012). Gościnność słowa. Szkice o przekładzie literackim [Hospitality of the
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
72
word. Essays on literary translation]. Kraków: Znak.
Kwiatkowski, J. (1997). Stanisław Barańczak. Pochwała poezji. O poetach polskich XX wieku
[In praise of poetry. About Polish poets of the twentieth century]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo
literackie, 327-345.
Lehman, D. (1999). The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poetry. New York: Anchor.
Lo Bue E. F. (1982). John Cage’s Writing. Poetics Today, 3(3), 65-77.
Pawelec D. (1999). Oko smoka. Kanonada: interpretacje wierszy polskich. [The Eye of the
Dragon. Cannonade: Interpretations of Polish Poems. Katowice: Wydawnictwo UŚ, 169–
183.
Poulin, A. Jr. (1981). The Experience of Experience: A Conversation with John Ashbery,
Michigan Quarterly Review 20(3), 242-255.
Perloff, M. (1999). The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Evanston: Northwestern
UP.
Roffman, K. (2017). The Songs We Know Best. John Ashbery’s Early Life. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Roussell, J. (1990). Praise for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Self Portrait in a Convex
Mirror by John Ashbery. New York: Penguin Random House, ii.
Sommer P. Translator (1976a). Wazon z kwiatami [A Vase with Flowers] by John Ashbery.
Literatura na świecie 6 (62)/1976. Warszawa: RSW “Prasa-Książka-Ruch,” 178.
Sommer P. (1976b). Współcześni poeci amerykańscy [Contemporary American Poets].
Literatura na świecie, 6 (62)/1976. Warszawa: RSW “Prasa-Książka-Ruch”, 177.
Sommer P. (1986). Układanie numeru [Arranging the Issue of the Magazine]. Literatura
na świecie,7(180)/1986. Warszawa: RSW “ Prasa-Książka-Ruch”, ii-iii.
Tranter J. (1998). Three John Ashberys. Jacket, 02/1998. Retrieved from http://jacketmagazi
ne.com/02/3jas.html
Toruńczyk B. (2009). Varia. XXVIII, Zeszyty literackie,4 (108)/2009. Warszawa: Fundacja
Zesztytów Literackich, 130-135.
Vincent, J. E. (2007). John Ashbery and You. His Later Books. Athens, GA and London: The
University of Georgia Press.
Więckowska, H. (1989). Polski słownik biograficzny, T. 2 [The Polish biographical dictionary,
Vol. 2] Kraków: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich.
Literary Translations and Stages of Their Existence in the Receiving Culture: The Case of John Ashbery’s Poetry
73
Zadura B. Translator (1984). Paradoksy i oksymorony [Paradoxes and Oxymorons] by John
Ashbery. Literatura na świecie,9(158)/1984. Warszawa: RSW “ Prasa-Książka-Ruch.” p.
179.
Contributor’s Bio: Paweł Marcinkiewicz works as Associate Professor at the University of
Opole and the Higher Vocational School in Racibórz. His interests focus on American poetry
and translation theory, and he is also a poet and translator. Recently he has published a
monograph on John Ashbery’s poetry “Colored Alphabets’ Flutter.” John Ashbery and the
Twentieth Century American Avant-Gardes (Opole University Press, 2012). In 2014, the New
York publishing house Spuyten Duyvil printed his selected poems The Day He’s Gone,
translated into English by Piotr Florczyk. His honors include the Polish Cultural Foundation
Award and the Czesław Miłosz Award. In 2016, his volume of poems Panties Up, Panties
Down (2015) was shortlisted for the Wrocław Poetry Prize “Silesius.”
E-mail address: [email protected]