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 46:3/4 Fall 2000
PIOTR SOMMER
2 poems & an interview
CR saluted the millennium with a doublestuffed Fall
2000 issue on "New Polish Writing" that presented a panoramic
protrait of Poland's dynamic literary culture. This 400-page anthology,
which remains the most comprehensive survey of Polish writing since the
end of Communist rule, translates seventy-five writers of poetry and
prose, beginning with two Nobel Prizewinners (Milosz and Szymborska)
and ending with the manic antics of the "[Frank] O'Haraists" (Sendecki,
Swietlicki, and co.). The anthology --- which is still in print --- has
been adopted as a textbook for college and university courses, and
several of the authors first translated here have had booklength
English translations of their work published in recent years.
In his introduction, guest editor (and CR’s fiction editor) W. Martin wrote:
As with other recent Chicago Review special issues, the
editorial approach of this one has been to combine
the closed form of the anthology with the more open, improvisational
form of
the quarterly; which is to say, when we began, we had a fair idea of
what was
out there, but have relied almost entirely on submissions by individual
contributors, whether translators or the authors themselves, for the
actual
content. From the outset, however, we have aimed not to limit the
content by
genre, generation, or school. And so we include not only poetry and
fiction,
but essays, feuilletons, reportage, and criticism. We have also been
concerned
to feature not only writers who already have followings among
English-language
readers, but especially, other, less-exposed writers of the older and
middle
generations, and younger writers who have never or rarely before
appeared in
English translation. Included as well are texts by several prominent
critics,
which not only provide significant perspectives and information on
recent
Polish literature, but are themselves representatives of a lively
contemporary
critical discourse; reviews of recently published books; materials
related to
the controversial journal bruLion; and two substantial interviews,
which may
function as "bridges," or rather, as maps for already-existing
bridges between Polish and Anglo-American cultures.
Here to represent the issue are two poems
and an interview with Piotr Sommer. A
longtime
translator of English-language poetry into Polish, Sommer lives outside
Warsaw
and edits Literatura na Swiecie [Literature in the
World]. His most recent book in
English translation is Continued
(Wesleyan, 2005). In his introduction to that volume, August
Kleinzahler writes:
[M]any of
Sommer's poems have a rather liminal feel about them, of poetic incident and impulse caught up in the act of being
translated into language, a language, but one that refracts and
interacts with a secondary or alternative language. [...] What at first
reading may seem straightforward is, in fact, rather craftily and
carefully assembled and held taut in a web of contingencies. Sommer is
very much the poet as double agent, working both sides of the border
and travelling incognito.
[ES, 2006]
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