Translator’s Note: “August 5, 1942” by Jerzy Ficowski

In the United States, Jerzy Ficowski is best known as the author of Regions of the Great Heresy, the foundational work of literary biography and criticism of the writer and artist Bruno Schulz, shot by the Gestapo in 1942. (Ficowski himself was briefly taken prisoner by the Gestapo in 1943, shortly before he and many other Polish citizens took part in the Warsaw Uprising.) Much of Ficowski’s poetry reveals the ubiquitous influence of this extraordinary writer. I have found, in fact, that understanding Schulz is central to understanding Ficowski.

Compared to many Ficowski poems, however, “August 5, 1942” is beautifully straightforward. Ficowski uses the line here both to parse the syntax but also to slow down the utterance of the speaker recounting, haltingly, the story of Janusz Korczak, a pediatrician who served for many years as the director of an orphanage in Warsaw, and who, although offered sanctuary outside the Ghetto, chose to accompany the almost two hundred children sent by the Nazis to Treblinka. This poem is among several Ficowski wrote that took place in 1942 Warsaw or within the confines of its Jewish Ghetto, contained in his best known collection, A Reading of Ashes.

I translated this poem with Piotr Sommer, another Warsaw native and Ficowski’s protégé (in addition to being a significant poet, translator, and editor in his own right). The challenges of cotranslating have been new to me; my previous translation work always consisted of working alone or with the author (who in this case is now deceased). But now that we’ve been at this for a good while, I can appreciate why there are so many examples of impressive translating duos, particularly when each member of the pair is “in charge” of his or her own native language. What we’ve been able to create — or negotiate — together seems quite clearly much more than either of us could have created singly. And given that translation is, if anything, a very sophisticated act of what George Steiner calls “total reading,” that work of understanding and interpretation has felt particularly dynamic when it has taken the form of vigorous conversation and debate.

For me, as the English partner of this enterprise, what I have found most challenging to reproduce is Ficowski’s idiosyncratic lack of punctuation often coupled with syntax that I find very hard to leave unparsed by line. Ficowski has taught me a lot about writing in English. And having thought so long about how his love of Schulz filters so clearly and productively into his own poems, I now, with wonder, grow increasingly aware of how my apprenticeship to his poems has begun to alter my own work.