Not Everything Dies

In the poem “Non Omnis moriar,” written at the height of the Holocaust, the stateless Polish-language poet Zuzanna Ginczanka declares, “I leave no heirs, so may your hand dig out / my Jewish things, Chominowa of Lvov, mother / of a Volksdeutscher, snitch’s wife, swift snout.” Rage, spite, and defiance sizzle from each line. Although non Omnis moriar translates to “not everything dies,” the poem is less a rejection of death than a furious confrontation with it. Ginczanka wrote the poem while in hiding, not long after learning that her landlady, “Chominowa of Lvov,” had betrayed Ginczanka’s religion to the city’s German occupiers. According to some sources, this denunciation led directly to the poet’s death in 1944. Others say she was denounced anew after fleeing Lvov for Krakow, where the Nazis captured and executed her. She was 27 or 28 at the time.

“Non omnis moriar” surfaced after the war, appearing first in a Polish newspaper in 1946 and then in an anthology in 1955. It even served as evidence in Mrs. Chominowa’s trial for collaboration. It worked: the swift-snouted landlady was sentenced to three years in prison. Alison Willis, a composer who wrote a choral adaptation of the poem in 2018, claimed in the notes accompanying her piece that this may well be the only time in history that a poem served as evidence in a criminal trial.

Ginczanka was both a fiery poet and a persuasive one. Her biography—what’s known, anyway—suggests that she was also quite determined. Born Sara Gincburg in Kiev, which was then part of Russia, she grew up speaking primarily Russian and opted to live in Poland with her grandmother after her parents, refugees from the Russian Revolution, separated and emigrated. Ginczanka wrote her earliest poems at age four and started publishing at 14. By her early 20s, she had released a book, On Centaurs, and was to some degree part of Poland’s boundary-stretching Skamander literary group, whose central ideals were experimentalism and an optimistic emphasis on the present. Her work, suppressed under Soviet rule, was regarded as highly promising in her lifetime and has gradually reemerged in recent decades. In 2023, On Centaurs appeared in English for the first and second times. In February, World Poetry Books released On Centaurs & Other Poems, a sprawling bilingual edition translated by Alex Braslavsky, and in August, New York Review Books will release Firebird, a slim volume that includes On Centaurs and a handful of later poems, all translated by Alissa Valles.

In the introduction to Firebird, Valles points out the oddity of Ginczanka’s decision to write in Polish, given that Yiddish literature was thriving. With the exception of Sholom Aleichem, the Yiddish writers of the pre–World War II period are poorly remembered today, but at the time, choosing Yiddish would have put Ginczanka “squarely in the center of an international modernist movement which boasted many powerful female voices and that could have won her readers in New York, Buenos Aires, and Tel Aviv.” At the time, men dominated Polish literature. All four of the Skamander group’s founders were male, which, according to the Polish poet Julia Fiedorczuk, comes as no surprise. For generations, she argues in an essay published by World Literature Today, Polish literary culture venerated men’s testimonies of war and violence above all else, which means that “female creativity [has been] viewed, a priori, as trivial.” Finally, by writing in Polish, Ginczanka all but guaranteed that her audience would include readers who disliked Jews. Anti-Semitism, never absent from Poland, rose sharply in the years Ginczanka came of age—which makes it intriguing that Valles and Braslavsky seem not to agree on the poet’s relationship to her religion. Per Valles, Ginczanka’s pseudonym “is as Jewish as her birth name,” but in the introduction to On Centaurs & Other Poems, Braslavsky describes the poet’s decision to adopt a pen name with a Polish suffix as “political, at a time when anti-Semitism was on the rise.” It’s hard—and not necessarily relevant—to determine Ginczanka’s intentions on this front, but the slight clash highlights the scarcity of insight readers have about her life while perhaps also foreshadowing the differences between the two translators’ approaches.

Firebird is a miniature book, hardly larger than a reader’s hand. It contains all of On Centaurs and the poems that Ginczanka wrote between that book’s publication in 1936 and her death. None of her pre-On Centaurs work appears, maybe because, as Valles writes, any “assessment of [Ginczanka’s] work as a whole is shaped by the knowledge of her premature death, and it is a delicate business to distinguish real accomplishment from what were obviously awkward early experiments.” On Centaurs & Other Poems, Braslavsky’s translation, sidesteps this issue to some degree by including many, if not all, of Ginczanka’s early poems in both Polish and English. Opting for a bilingual edition is a boon to both scholars and translators-in-training, but it also lets readers fluent in Polish decide for themselves whether Braslavsky or her editors have been tempted to smooth an awkward experiment into an accomplishment.

Of course, the very existence of Firebird and On Centaurs & Other Poems allows non-Polish-speaking readers to do the same. It is both rare and exciting to compare two translations done in the same moment, emerging from the same literary milieu, and negotiating the same standards of what makes a good translation or a good poem. Firebird and On Centaurs & Other Poems are both thoughtful, elegant works done by translator-poets with deep knowledge of Polish literary culture: Braslavsky is a doctoral candidate in the Harvard Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Valles has translated several major Polish poets and teaches European literature at Boston University. Putting the two books side by side is not a competition but a window into the idiosyncrasies of the translation process—and into Ginczanka’s poetry.

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It is only natural to start with “Non omnis moriar,” Ginczanka’s most famous poem and her best. Braslavsky writes that she “tried to retain in many places [Ginczanka’s] playful and ornate syntax”—an effort that’s apparent in her translation. The poem opens, “Non omnis moriar—my proud domain, / Meadows of tablecloths, strongholds of closets staunch, / Sheets endless, precious linen fabrics / And dresses, bright dresses will remain after me.” Valles, less worried about the original syntax, opts for a more natural, modern English in which the poet’s “tablecloth meadows, steadfast fortress shelves, / my precious comforters and billowing sheets, / my dresses, my colorful dresses will survive.” Her version is both more familiar and concise than Braslavsky’s. As a result, it hits harder—a distinction most relevant in the poem’s descriptions of the landlady who betrayed Ginczanka. In Valles’s translation, quoted above, Chominowa of Lvov is a “snitch’s wife, swift snout.” In Braslavsky’s, she is the “gutsy wife of a snitch, / Quick informer.” Snitch’s wife is curt and leads with the negative; gutsy wife sounds laudatory until readers get to the snitch. Quick informer, similarly, is less viscerally nasty than swift snout. Braslavsky gives readers a woman; Valles, a snuffling pig.

In the latter half of “Non omnis moriar,” Ginczanka imagines her friends searching her home for “gems and gold.” It isn’t quite clear whether these are real friends or more looters, and, in Braslavsky’s translation, the ambiguity remains. After the friends appear, she refers to them only as them and they. Her translation lands on the friends covered in feathers from torn pillows: “the fresh down, binding with my blood, / Swiftly turns them to winged angels.” Valles interprets “Non omnis moriar” differently. In her translation, the poem ends with “my blood will seal the fresh feathers with oakum, / transforming birds of prey into sudden angels.” Here, the speaker’s blood has agency after her death, and her “friends” are, plainly, no friends at all. By opting for birds of prey, Valles embraces the poem’s anger, giving full weight to the cruelty of Ginczanka’s death.

In general, Braslavsky is open to a softer, less-certain Ginczanka, as shown by her decision to translate the poet’s early work. On Centaurs & Other Poems includes 41 poems written before On Centaurs. Some are strikingly sophisticated, some are movingly adolescent, and some are embarrassingly so. In “August Mint on a December Morning” (1932), Ginczanka beautifully describes the experience of reading in search of wisdom, alternating between optimism and pessimism: “the sentences fog up with grayish doubt, / the sentences shine up with blue hope.” Imagery and emotion meld perfectly here. It’s jarring to turn the page and discover a fairy tale-ish poem about a stuffed Mickey Mouse or to contrast the sensuality of “Woman” (1933) with the same year’s “Poem of Joyful Waiting,” whose speaker is glad to kill time “because after all—I think to myself—for once something will / finally happen.” What 16-year-old hasn’t entertained that thought? And, had Ginczanka not died in a genocide, would anyone consider her iteration of it worthy of print? I doubt this is true, or consciously true, but the Jewish cynic in me—or the reader of Dara Horn’s polemic People Love Dead Jews (2021)—wonders whether Braslavsky and World Poetry Books are giving Ginczanka the Anne Frank treatment, tugging contemporary heartstrings by putting a dead teenager’s woes on display.

But On Centaurs & Other Poems is, unlike Firebird, a portrait of poetic maturation. In its comprehensiveness, it allows readers to understand the roots of Ginczanka’s style and the nature of her experiments. In “Poem of Joyful Waiting,” her dashes seem derivative of Emily Dickinson. By On Centaurs, she had learned to wield them in her own style, often using them to inject a flight of fancy with a sobering thought or to cut thoughts short in a way that renders her poems breathless and headlong. In “The Foreign,” Ginczanka does both in her description of attending a street fair:

Look:
the purple troubadour has announced the holiday with surma-horns—
the merchants are handing out scarlet pigment and ointment-scented measures—
on the soprano’s wobbling glass stilts the singers are fainting—
the dancers jingle their torsos, and thighs shine with ornament—
—and you have become ordinary.

Valles translates this poem as “Otherness” and, as is often her habit, condenses words more than Braslavsky does. Her merchants “distribute scarlet and sulfurous balm,” and her dancers’ “torsos and ankles jingle with trinkets.” She also skips the double dash between the poem’s fifth and sixth lines. Doing so does not matter in Firebird, but in On Centaurs & Other Poems, with its early, clumsy dashes, it might.

Reading Firebird and On Centaurs & Other Poems highlights the fact that differences in translation are frequently neither good nor bad. Often, a decision matters only in the context of its particular book. In Valles’s “On Centaurs,” the first three lines rhyme; in Braslavsky’s, they don’t. In On Centaurs & Other Poems, with its leisurely, ornate verses, the absence of rhyme has no real impact. In Firebird, whose opening poem is “On Centaurs,” the rhyming verses’ insistent beat—“Whetting rhyme on rhyme, sharpening verse lines grind / —don’t trust calculations, lest they ensnare your mind / —don’t trust your fingers like the blind”—evokes a centaur’s hoofbeats and sets readers up for the quick, demanding pace of the poems to come.

The poems in Firebird sound startlingly contemporary. In “Declaration,” Ginczanka’s speaker calls herself “nothing but a sharp-sensed sort of human,” and, often, the poems here are both sharp-sensed and sharp-tongued. Consider “Virginity,” which juxtaposes a lushly sensual opening stanza with one mocking the idea that women should, while living amid nature’s sexy riches, remain “hermetically sealed.” Valles plays up both forms of sharpness. She also plays up the poet’s Judaism when she can. In Braslavsky’s translation of “Explanation in the Margins,” the speaker declares, “I have not come down / from the sky / and I will not go back to heaven.” In Valles’s “Explanation,” the speaker “did not descend / from heaven / and I won’t return / to heaven.” Valles’s lines are more curt, almost pissy. In their brevity and repetition of heaven, they sound like a rejection of the very idea of heaven, in which Jews generally do not believe.

As a translator and reader of poetry, I admire Braslavsky’s and Valles’s translations equally, but as a Jew, I prefer Valles’s. It’s pointless to pretend otherwise. (What is criticism if not subjective?) I like that Firebird, which contains no juvenilia, cannot be seen as presenting Ginczanka as an object of study, and I like that it leans into her anger. Reading “Non omnis moriar” leaves no doubt that she was angry; how could a European Jew living and writing in the 1930s and 1940s be anything but? Of course, Valles may be projecting anger into some of Firebird’s poems. I may be too. I want Ginczanka to sound mad. I don’t want to read her as a victim. Firebird gives me that choice.