Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

The Nobel award committee’s citation called her the “Mozart of poetry,” a woman who mixed the elegance of language with “the fury of Beethoven.”

Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012) was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature.  The Nobel prize has frequently brought a lot of attention to writers who were little-known outside the group of readers who understand the language in which they write. There are over 38.5 million people in Poland who speak Polish as their first language, and it’s a second language for speakers in western parts of Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine, and northern parts of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

That sounds like a lot of people, until you consider that there are 339 million native English speakers, and an estimated 603 million people who speak it as a second language.

So how do you get a poem written in Polish into English so more people can read it? First, of course, you have to find someone who knows both languages really well. But just as important, you need someone who understands poetry. A literal translation of Polish into English won’t give you the feel of the original, and sometimes doesn’t even make much sense. Take a look at the opening stanza of Szymborska’s poem Some People:

Jacyś ludzie w ucieczce przed jakimiś ludźmi.
W jakimś kraju pod słońcem
i niektórymi chmurami.

which becomes

Some people to escape some people .
In a country under the sun
and some clouds .

when you go to Google and ask for a Polish-to-English translation, which sounds more like an especially cryptic Japanese haiku.

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