One of my favorite courses in my Antioch MFA program was “Translation Workshop.” Over ten weeks, we translated poetry and prose from Zapotec, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Russian, and Polish. Of the nine students in my cohort, some read or spoke one of these other languages. But none of us felt like experts. We relied on a glossary to translate each line word by word.
We nine students encountered the same words in the original language and used the same glossary to translate. Yet each poem or prose piece was uniquely ours. By the end of ten weeks, I could almost predict the tone a classmate’s translation would take, or how he or she would choose to structure a sentence.
This poem by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012) is titled “Photograph from September 11″ (“Fotografia z 11 września”). It was published in 2002 in the volume Monologue of a Dog. During her lifetime, Szymborska published 15 volumes of poetry and was well-known in her native Poland. She received international recognition when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.
The images from September 11 are seared into our collective memory. In simple language, Szymborska describes a photograph that captured a specific, devastating moment. I offer my translation to remember.
Photograph from September 11
By Wisława Szymborska
They jumped down from burning levels
One, two, many more
Higher, lower.
The photograph stopped them, alive
And now keeps them
Above ground, hurtling toward earth.
Each one with a particular face
Still whole
And blood well-hidden.
There is enough time
For hair to unloose itself
For keys and small change
To drop from pockets.
They are continuously within reach, held in space
Precisely where
They have opened themselves mid-air.
In their memory, I can do only two things—
Describe this flight
And not add a final sentence.
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