On “School of Unhabituation” and “Green: Therefore It Is”

“If Emily Dickinson and Ogden Nash had a love child in interwar Poland, it would be Miron Białoszewski.” This is one way I’ve tried to explain Miron Białoszewski (1922-1983) to poetically minded friends over the years. He is one of the great eccentrics of modern writing, and all comparisons invariably fall short. I first discovered him decades ago through my beloved teacher, collaborator, and friend, Stanisław Barańczak (1946-2014). I came up with another comparison years ago while sitting in the Barańczaks’ living room listening to jazz. “Białoszewski is the Thelonius Monk of Polish poetry,” I exclaimed. That came close, they said.

Stanisław and I began translating him together back in the 1980s. But we ran into problems with permissions, and turned to another shared love, Wisława Szymborska, who also, incidentally, adored Białoszewski’s writing, so my current co-translator Michał Rusinek tells me. Translating Białoszewski is, to keep the piano comparison alive, work for four hands. Puns, neologisms, fractured syntax, eccentric punctuation, metaphysical inclinations: mix these with the complexities of Polish grammar and morphology and suddenly two hands aren’t enough. I’ve known Michał for decades: he directs the Szymborska Foundation and was Szymborska’s secretary for many years. He’s written and translated more books than I can count. But I can summarize why I wanted to work with him in one line: “conditions conditioned by the conditional.” This was his contribution to my translation of Szymborska’s late poem “Reciprocity.” The original Polish plays with the meanings of a grammatical form that English, mercifully, does not possess.  And I was at a loss. But Michał was not.

That’s what it takes to translate Białoszewski. Like Szymborska, Białoszewski loves the ordinary, in which he sees nothing ordinary. He reorganizes ordinariness accordingly, beginning with the linguistic structures that strive to set things straight. “School of Unhabituation” is an inside poem, one of many in which he re-envisions his own room, this time at night. The second poem, “Green: Therefore It Is,” takes the night outside, and reconstructs both cosmos and language itself while parsing a wintry landscape. What difficulties did we encounter in translating them? Too many to count.