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Wesleyan University Press
$13.95 / 144
pp / paper / isbn 0-8195-6767-1
http://www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/
Review by Kim Hjelmgaard
If Anglo-American readers of poetry think
of Polish poetry at all, they likely think of Zbigniew
Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, or Wislawa Szymborska, the latter
two being the Polish Nobel laureates in literature who
have been poets. (There have been four Polish Nobel laureates
in literature in total, the other two recipients are the
novelists Henryk Sienkiewicz and Wladyslaw Reymon.) By
contrast, the distinctly unfamiliar achievements of Piotr
Sommer, for many the “real father
of Polish poetry written in the last twenty years,” have
played almost exclusively to a home crowd. Regarded in Poland
as both an important poet and a leading translator of English-language
poetry into Polish (he has translated Robert Lowell and Frank
O’Hara as well as John Berryman and Charles Reznikoff),
Sommer’s poetry is particularly notable for its unusually
tender affection for the flotsam and jetsam of the everyday.
Its prevailing modus operandi is to subtlety infuse “ordinary
incident, character, landscape, [and] object” with
a tangible aroma of the metaphysical. In this vein, seemingly “large
subjects”—questions to do with permanence, identity,
memory, history, etc.—are afforded novel and tender
(and some might even say easier) illustration and parsing
through the domestically tinted lens of “small events.” Sommer’s
method may not be an altogether straightforward or tidy inversion
of the proverbial journey through the glass, darkly, but
it’s probably an instructive way in which to approach
his work. Whereas if the fraught political and societal machinations
that have transformed Polish society from a fledgling communist
satellite state to accession to the European Union in 2004
can be said to substantively interact with Sommer’s
work at all, then it is a highly personal and private form
of interaction—more unkempt kitchen-sink drama, in
fact, than stirring public protest.
Continued, Sommer’s syntactically light, but ultimately
thematically dark collection, is an expansion of his 1991
poetry volume (which was also his first translated into English)
Things to Translate. A career-spanning ensemble work that
corrals selections from the poet’s output between the
years 1980 to 1999, Continued is both bracingly direct and
maddeningly oblique. The poetic strategy that is clearly
calibrated to wildly oscillate between quiet, domestic lucidity
and bewilderingly arcane parable does just that. Some of
this evident “schizophrenic” quality can, no
doubt, be put down to the familiar evergreen tonal complexities
associated with translation, although there’s no reason
to think, as a non-Polish reader, that the translations here
by a smorgasbord of distinguished British and American poets,
including John Ashbery, Douglas Dunn, and D.J. Enright, are
anything but judicious. This purposefully “dual” state
of affairs is, as it happens, very much in keeping with Sommer’s
predilection for “matter-of-factly” transforming
the “tiny” into the “huge.” Such
an operationally dispersed poetic directive poses problems
for the critic of a diagnostic bent in so far as the ends
are achieved by a vast multitude of means, but it’s
probably sufficient to say that Sommers’ is an investigator’s
ear. The act of poetic illumination occurs not in some final,
cumulative thematic reckoning, but with the very building
blocks of illumination itself—that is to say, with
the process, the clue gathering, the talking and thinking
out loud. Or to put it another way, with the journey, and
not the arrival. In “Don’t Sleep, Take Notes” this
type of transformation process is really quite apparent.
With a view to unravelling just one of the many sinister
contingencies of the so-called ordinary life Sommer casually
switches dramatic registers from one paragraph to the next,
and the result is both eerie and devastating:
At
four in the morning
the
milkwoman was knocking
in
plain clothes, threatening
she
wouldn’t leave us anything,
as
most remove the empties,
if
I didn’t produce the receipt.
It
was somewhere in my jacket,
but
in any case I knew
what
the outcome would be:
she’d
take away yesterday’s curds,
she’d
take away the cheese and eggs,
she’d
take our flat away,
she’d
take away the child.
The American poet August
Kleinzahler (who, incidentally, provides an excellent introduction
to Continued) has said of Sommer’s work that it is “not
allegorical, symbolist or parabolic, per se, but [that it]
bears inflections of those kinds of treatment of subject-matter
to which the reader of translations from the Eastern European
will be familiar.” This is an eminently apt assessment.
It’s
also one that’s difficult to better. Marlowe of the
East?
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