I write and translate this the day I learn my aunt, Felicity Apolinarska neé Samorzewska, has died, making my father the last of his kind. 

Droga

Tam, gdzie zielona ściele się dolina
I droga, trawą zarosła na poły,
Przez gaj dębowy, co kwitnąć zaczyna,
Dzieci wracają do domu ze szkoły.
 
W piórniku, który na wskos się otwiera,
Chrobocą kredki wśród okruchów bułki
I grosz miedziany, który każde zbiera
Na powitanie wiosennej kukułki.
 
Berecik siostry i czapeczka brata
Migają między puszystą krzewiną.
Sójka skrzekocząc po gałęziach lata
I długie chmury nad drzewami płyną.
 
Już dach czerwony widać za zakrętem.
Przed domem ojciec, wsparty na motyce,
Schyla się, trąca listki rozwinięte
I z grządki całą widzi okolicę.

[Dzienkujé bardzo literatura.wywrota.pl]

I've rendered this into English as:

The road

There, where green stretches valley
and road half-grassed
through oakdales sketching out flowers,
children come home from school.

Opening crosswise, a pencil case
rattles with crayons amid breadcrumbs
embracing a copper, saved,
to welcome the cuckoo’s spring.

Beret sistered and brothered cap,
they both flash through thicket and bush,
so a jay screeches in clearing the twigs,
but longer clouds float over the trees.

Already a bend reveals the red roof,
father at home, leaning on hoe,
reaches down to the leaves returning
to the earth, here he watches all that surrounds.

Originally I found this poem in:

From the following page:

Introduction to the rendering project

In these renderings I will put the original first, then my rendering, and then, lastly, some discussion and bloggy meanderings.

This is to honour both the work and the site called only the recipe, which strips all the POV or introductory material, people often present on cooking blogs. I actually enjoy that material, but when needing to look at a recipe and not someone's journey, it can be a little frustrating. It is also in the spirit of TL;DR.

However, it is inverse in spirit to orgins of the radio show The Moth, where the stories people told introducing their 'poems' were more interesting than the poems per se. Something got lost in the poetry.

I’ll do these renderings like I did, rather undiplomatically, on the poetryetc email list run by John Kinsella in the 1990s & 2000s, which produced things like Interactive Geographies.

On that list I would quickly re-write a recently posted poem (not mine), not so much to make it better, nor to criticise it but to

<special project warning> investigate the poetic experience available to the reader (me)</end of special project warning indicating that is all I had access to and is not narcissism though co-morbity is a thing, it’s a fine line>.

I was jealous of musicians who jam. But not jealous of painters who refuse to let others smear over their own shit.

Introduction to rendering Droga [from Świat] by Czesław Miłosz

Tasmania, late 20th Century

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was stripped of citizenship and booted out of the Soviet Union, for continuing to write what he wrote since Khrushchev, Western ‘intelligencia’ and intelligence services thought they were getting another Czesław Miłosz, only Russian not Polish.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once repeated that the misdeeds and culpabilities of the 20th century were because "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." (see my post on the… —gap for this sort of use of a landfill to forget stuff.) Miłosz would never had said that.

Sozhenitsyn was a trained chemist and writer who portrayed Soviet gulags and the great patriotic war as an inmate and artillery Captain, and came to the west as a cold-war dissident. He favoured a pan-Slavic presidential-style republic rooted in an Orthodox Christinity unmarred by the schism of 1666, and blamed the tsars and the Soviet Union for ruining this potential. His mother's family was of Ukrainian background, but he was vehemently against Ukrainian independance because of this romantic but imperial worlding. Vladimir Putin and Solzenitsyn got along just fine.

For now, we will leave alone the Russian romanticism directing an official mystical approach (мир = world/peace/system) to its identity issues, to note that I heard more about Solzhenitsyn in Tasmania growing up than Miłosz, despite the Polish diaspora in Tasmania. No doubt because of the closer to home stories of ‘Syberyjski’ who walked out of Siberia to Iran… —and Miłosz’s professorship in Berkely was too far away. Perhaps unheard of.

“I also walked out from Siberia,” they would say.

It is thus late in life I have begun reading Miłosz in translation. It is good to read love in translation.

Firstly, with a series or cycle called Świat [The World] which contains 20 poems written during World War 2 in 1943, and A Song On The End Of The World in 1944.

Of course I will look at The world.

So, starting with the expectations of the first cuckoo of spring, I’ll find the Polish original, present the standard translation from Czesław Miłosz Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004. Ecco, 2011 [Introduction by Seamus Heaney].

Both versions of Droga or The Road are placed above.

Subsequently, I will then render my own, by this I mean a translation but more my reading of it than trying to channel the poet himself. Who probably spoke better English than me anyway.

I’ll do this like I did, rather undiplomatically, in the poetryetc email list run by John Kinsella in the 90s & 00s, which produced things like Interactive Geographies. On that list I would quickly re-write a recently posted poem, not so much to make it better, nor to criticise ti but to (special project warning) investigate the poetic experience available to the reader (me)(end of special project wanring indicating that is all I had access to and is not narcissism though co-morbity is a thing, it’s a fine line)

Unlike my readings in review or reaction to poetryetc, these will be a bit more considered.

Notes on rendering

Reading the English I was first caught by the folkloric reference to cuckoos who bring the spring, and making sure you have pennies in your pocket to jingle in order to have more financial good fortune. It's not just Polish. But I had never heard it before.

Second was the naivety, of which this is indeed classed. But later, how sophisticatedly it was structured, by…

—thirdly, the figure of the father.

Reading the Polish is near impossible for me with any "fluency". The best I can do is work on dimly percieved proto-indo-european roots as a way into the emotional loading. And then I just fake it. Particularly hard was gałęziach lata and okolica. Ouch.

That said I am much more engaged by the problem of understanding Polish than in reading any poem in my mother tongue. This is why I re-write them undiplomatically, and why I do not like being in an audience.

The scan

In addition, I found the English version didn’t scan well with my breathing, it sat uncomfortably between limerick and carefully enunciated free verse (without the sing-song spoken word effect). Thinking this slow American voice does not gel with my voice, and might be a artifact of my accent, or speech rhythms, as a part Irish/Polish/Scots-Jewish mixed into Brummie English here in Australia.

Given that LLMs began life as textual analysis tools, I fed both the official translation and mine into claude.ai (no real reason for this choice) and asked it to do some scansion (scan the rhythmic structure of poems).

I'll report two things (the original Polish was not mentioned, but that it was a translation of something):

1. Claude reported mine with : Monosyllabic end-stresses closing most lines (school, spring, cap, roof, surrounds) — this creates a percussive, settled cadence at each line's end, echoing a folk-song/ballad ancestry (common in translated Central/Eastern European pastoral verse). (OMG)
2. and the other: loose accentual verse with prose tendencies  (I think that’s what I said).

When I added the original, it of course told me it used strict Polish syllabic verse. This is partly why gałęziach lata and trąca listki rozwinięte were hell,  Polish hendecasyllable is dense! But it also said:

The first translation, with its shorter, more clipped lines, actually lands closer to the tone of the original's rocking regularity, even without reproducing its mechanics.

Completely smart-arsed it.

Notes on rendering as sitting with'

What is available to me now is how Christian it is. As in

"Narnia is good isn't!"
"Well, yeah, but its a bit, you know, Christian, isn't it?"

Written in 1943. WW2. There’s a war on, you know. Many children of god die for no reason at all.

The father welcomes us home, from a cross, becomes his son of the good earth, to see all our troubles, even if it should be spring coming sooner, not more winter clouds. But still…

Resources used in this rendering

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/czeslaw-milosz

https://www.poemhunter.com/czeslaw-milosz/poems/

https://allpoetry.com/Czeslaw_Milosz

https://poezja.org/wz/Czeslaw_Milosz/

https://literatura.wywrota.pl/wiersz-klasyka/39928-czeslaw-milosz-droga.html

claude.ai