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FAQ: Halina Poświatowska (Poswiatowska) Translation Project
by Marek Lugowski on rec.arts.poems, Usenet,
24 October 1990 and ongoing: 2006.
Permission is granted to reproduce this FAQ in whole.
This file: http://mareklug.freeshell.org/HalinaFAQ/
POLSKA WERSJA TEGO DOKUMENTU (Polish-language version):
http://mareklug.freeshell.org/HalinaFAQ/pol.html
Content:
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i. The poem texts: HalinaFAQ Readme: The Starting Point
I. Reference Scheme
Ib. DZIELA 1-2: begun 1 Feb 2000. DRAFT2: Completed 18 Sep 1999.
II. Halina Poświatowska Publisher and HalinaFAQ Contact Information
III. The FAQ Questions and Answers
IV. How to Expand or Correct the HalinaFAQ
I. Reference Scheme
--------------------
Two reference schemes of my translations are maintained, reflecting
(1) the completed Selected Poems effort, DRAFT2, which is the
successor to DRAFT that took 9 years to complete, and (2) the
current DZIELA 1-2 ongoing effort, aimed to complete the process of
translating the entire canon of Halina Poświatowska's poetry, as
defined by her work published by Wydawnictwo Literackie of Krakow,
Poland, in 1997.
Please consider obtaining the Polish sources as they are the
definitive reference to the Polish texts. A selection of 100 poems
translated by Maya Peretz has been published by Wydawnicto Literackie
as well. As of January 2006, I am not aware of any plans on anyone's
part to publish more Halina Poświatowska's translations in English.
DZIELA 1-2 translations:
_Dziela_, Poezja 1 & 2_, (_Works, Poetry, vol. I & II_),
Wydawnictwo Literackie: Krakow, Poland, 1997. Annotation on Usenet
rec.arts.poems will be in the Subject header and will be of the form:
"Halina Poswiatowska canon in translation. Dziela II 238"
Here, "Dziela II" refers to the volume Poezja 2 of _Dziela_ and "238" is
the beginning page number for the poem. All poems are in either Dziela I
or Dziela II. Copyright Identification Data (CID) is cited with
each poem's translation. One poem is translated and made public at
a time.
For the DZIELA 1-2 already translated poems, see the URL above:
i. The poem texts: HalinaFAQ Readme: The Starting Point
DRAFT2 translations:
The earlier translations, all of which are included in _Dziela_,
have always been referenced with Zych page numbers, for example:
"p. 17", where "p. 17" stands for "page 17 in _Wiersze Wybrane_
(Selected Poems), edited by Jan Zych, Wydawnictwo Literackie:
Krakow, 1975 (1989)". All the poems in this source have been
translated. Appropriate CID accompanies each of these excerpts.
For texts of all DRAFT2 poems, see the URL above: i. The poem texts:
HalinaFAQ Readme: The Starting Point
DRAFT1 translations and the obsolete MarekTrans# numbering:
In DRAFT1, the first poem in MarekTrans translation project was indexed
as MarekTrans#1, keeping the sequence of translation. This numbering
was cross-indexed with page numbering (Jan Zych's _Wiersze Wybrane_).
Since DRAFT2 does not cite MarekTrans numbers as it proceeded in
page order, MarekTrans# numbering is now obsolete.
Ib. DZIELA 1-2: begun 1 Feb 2000. DRAFT2: Completed 18 Sep 1999.
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There appear to be 521 poems to be translated in _Dziela_ (Works).
Of those, there appear to be 324 poems comprising _Wiersze Wybrane_
(Selected Poems). One poem in _Wiersze Wybrane_ was set as two:
p. 378 and p.379. Thus, there were 195 poems awaiting translation in
the DZIELA 1-2 effort. Several of these are translations by Halina
Poświatowska of poems from other languages into Polish. The poems in
Zych (Selected Poems) have all been translated in two passes, DRAFT1
and DRAFT2. Corrections and improvements are made on an ongoing basis.
II. Halina Poświatowska Publisher and HalinaFAQ Contact Information:
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Author's Publisher: Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakow, Poland.
On 18 May 1998 I learned that Wydawnictwo Literackie had recently
published a 100-poem facing-edition of english translations by Maya
Peretz, and a two-volume _Dziela_ (Works) of Halina Poświatowska's
poetry in its newly edited entirety. Volumes 3 and 4 (prose and
letters) are also out -- and adding FAQ text in October'98, I would
like to acknowledge having access to the handsome _Dziela_ volumes,
which I now am using as my source. Prior to that, I translated all
of Zych source using a 1989 copy I received as a gift in 1989 from
Joanna Trzeciak, my Wislawa Szymborska co-translator. I feel that
Zych's work is important enough to deserve its own translation as a
book and I intend to have my translation cycles satisfy this
criterion, in scope and in poem order. This is why the DRAFT2
corpus is being preserved as an entity on the web site
http://mareklug.freeshell.org/HalinaFAQ/ .
I provide the above info and contact as a service to readers; I
especially do not wish to imply having Wydawnictwo Literackie's
approval, benediction, or acknowledgment of my educational, archival,
and, most of all, informal project.
I have not asked for rights to publish my translations as the
goal of this project is to complete and obtain peer review for
the translation task and to have this happen interactively on
rec.arts.poems and by involving other interested persons. The idea
is to produce a high quality corpus of the entire canon of Halina
Poświatowska's poetry as published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in
1997, including a complete translation of the 324 poems in Jan
Zych's edition of _Wiersze Wybrane_, all of them rendered in crisp
everyday American English idiom of the year 2006.
I consider publication to be a separate issue, to be considered later.
Translator/Maintainer: -- Marek W. Lugowski
5445 N. Sheridan #3003, Chicago IL 60640, USA
marek@enteract.com
HalinaFAQ and the
translations web archive: http://twice22.org/HalinaFAQ/ (English)
http://twice22.org/HalinaFAQ/pol.html
(po polsku)
mirrored at: http://mareklug.freeshell..org/HalinaFAQ/ (English)
http://mareklug.freeshell.org/HalinaFAQ/pol.html
(po polsku)
Translations Publisher: None at this time.
Translations are meant to be shared pro bono
in the internet.
III. The FAQ Questions:
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1. Who is Halina Poświatowska?
Halina Poświatowska (Poswiatowska), maiden name Myga, is a late
famous Polish poet. She was born May 9, 1935, in Czestochowa,
Poland, surviving the WWII occupation there, and went on to live in
Czestochowa, Warsaw, and Krakow, Poland, but most unusually, also
got her college schooling in the United States, in these unlikely
and admirable circumstances:
In 1958, too sick to fly by plane, she sailed to the United States on the
Polish passenger ship M/S Stefan Batory, writing poetry all along,
about to undergo risky and involved cardiosurgery in Philadelphia,
paid for by donations organized by persons in Poland, Polish
emigres in the USA and elsewhere, and communities of
Polish-Americans.
The procedure was a success; after a remarkable recovery, she
surprised everyone and dismayed many by stubbornly choosing to
pursue studies at an American college. She matriculated at Smith
College, even though not yet a speaker or reader of English; well,
not much of one. Halina completed her BA degree in just three
years, graduating in 1961, then turning down fully-funded graduate
admission to philosophy departments the likes of Stanford
University, chose to return to Poland to face an uncertain cardiac
and academic future, in, after all, a country ran by a totalitarian
government, in the palpable shadow of the USSR. But one could
guess that Halina was an apolitical poet -- she had bigger fish to
fry -- existence, and detecting and reporting on knowing, feeling.
She briefly travelled in Europe, visiting friends in Paris, the
Balkans and a few other countries. She enrolled at the Uniwersytet
Jagiellonski, Krakow, Poland, where she made advanced progress
towards a doctorate in analytical philosophy. All the while she
wrote lucid poetry. She was, physically, very beautiful and, I
surmise, much loved. At Smith her friends were the outsiders, the
international students, the ones without "a life" or dates on the
town. She had spent hours at the Metropolitan, encoding much of
what she saw into slender poems hugely questioning by minutest of
details, by articulate warmth. To click in with her words is to
receive enlightment on how to pour oneself into writing via
clarity.
All her life Halina had to live with a life-threatening congenital
heart defect, continually facing and defiantly dealing with painful
shortness of breath, the debilitating chest pains, for long
stretches confined to prolonged bed rest. Yet she would leap
stairs coming close to heart attacks. Often rebelling, she had no
suicidal tendencies whatsoever, and in no way shared the depressive
profile of famous American poets.
Halina craved life; pushed herself physically and intellectually,
did not appear to wallow in her many misfortunes to judge from
poems and letters and from what those who knew her say about her.
She married a terminally ill fellow heart patient whom she met at a
sanatorium, Adolf Poświatowski, who died only two years after they
met. She was resilient and original in her inventiveness of
language, and sparse in diction, favoring no punctuation and a
nearly exclusively lower case, as is the modern Polish poetic
sensibility. Her heritage looks good even against her countrymen,
eminent poets of her generation. We will never know how good she
could have gotten, but I think recognition as another Polish poetry
Nobelist is not an outrageous supposition. The Isolde poems alone
are among the sparsest yet most deserving works of Polish
literature, so are the poems of mourning, or the poems of elements
of red and gold and bee's fur and strands of sun.
Halina died of complications after open heart surgery in Warsaw, 11
October in 1967. She was born on 9 May 1935. The s in her name is
the soft s with an accent mark and is pronounced softer than sh in
hush, accent on the syllable before last: ha-LEE-na po-shviat-OV-ska.
2. Are there any books of Halina in English?
Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakow, Poland, published in 1997, the 30th
anniversary of Halina Poświatowska's death, a slim volume of 100
translations of Halina Poświatowska's mostly short love poems in
English translation, bilingually, in facing-page format, _wlasnie
kocham; Indeed I Love_, by Maya Peretz.
3. What is a good source of info on Halina? [redone in February 2002]
In Halina Poświatowska's own words, published posthumously in 1997,
are volumes 3 and 4 of _Dziela_ by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakow,
the original publishing house of Halina's. _Dziela_ (Works) volume
3 is prose, while volume 4 is her letters. As mentioned before,
the first two volumes collect her poetry which I hope to render in
English, all of it, on this website.
A new addition is a 2001 book by Grazyna Borkowska ("Nierozwazna i
nieromantyczna, o Halinie Poświatowskiej"), a good scholarly literary
analysis, which also contains considerable biographical detail and
pictures of Halina, including one taken by author Jerzy Kosinski,
in New York city. Borkowska has a lot to say about Poświatowska's
take on Kosinski, but the best portions of the book are her detailed
considerations of Poświatowska's more intricate and abstract poems.
Two biography authors are Malgorzata Szulczynska (_"nie popelnilam
zdrady", Rzecz o Halinie Poświatowskiej_) and Mariola Pryzwan (_"ja
mine, ty miniesz", O Halinie Poświatowskiej_). Of the two,
Sulczynska's treatment is more in depth and cohesive, and contains
many photographs of Halina Poświatowska as a child with her
parents, as well as a photocopy of her birth certificate and
photocopies of her transcripts from Smith College. Pryzwan's is
more of a compendium of articles and letters, with several
photographs, including a piece in the Metropolitan that is said to
figure in one of Poświatowska's poems.
4. What were the most remarkable traits of Halina?
Life force. Next, she was a poet and an analytically minded
philosopher as well as a consummate reader of just about
everything. Importantly, she was a true traveller. Make no
mistake -- under the relatively tame (for the 1990s USA) word
choice of her poems lies a surfeit of experience and a fineness of
language few actors ever get to deliver. Her sensibilities were
those of the compassionate international. She transcended and thus
obviated the schisms of feminism, secular humanism, nationalism,
modernism, postmodernism, and hip hop. :) She was down-home and
just folks and yet she could kick ass in anthropology, history,
literature, languages, and hardcore philosophy of science. She
held with those who came poor and from afar. She celebrated life.
She was an avatar; I like to think that this is why her stuff reads
so well in English.
[prepared by Marek Lugowski, mostly 19 January 1998, Chicago]
IV. How to Expand or Correct the HalinaFAQ:
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Send questions to Marek Lugowski
at marek@enteract.com or to:
5445 Sheridan Road 3003
Chicago, IL 60640
USA
Marek Lugowski's home page
Last modified: 2007/8/28 12:52 am CDT
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