matching tracksuits

I dislike my translation very much. There’s no child’s voice in it, no simplicity. But it gives you the idea of what the poem’s about…

On the bank of a sky-blue river
live many small sorrows.
The first is sad because
he can’t play in the garden.
The second — that water doesn’t want to be dry.
The third — that a fly flew into his ear.
And what’s more, that cats scratch,
That he can’t catch the hen,
That he can’t bite the neighbor’s leg,
and that it never rains sausages,
And the last sorrow is that
People travel by cars, and a pup has to go on foot.
But just give him a little milk,
and bye bye sorrows.

Na brzegu błękitnej rzeczki
Mieszkają małe smuteczki.
Ten pierwszy jest z tego powodu,
Że nie wolno wchodzić do ogrodu,
Drugi – że woda nie chce być sucha,
Trzeci – że mucha wleciała do ucha,
A jeszcze, że kot musi drapać,
Że kura nie daje się złapać,
Że nie można gryźć w nogę sąsiada
I że z nieba kiełbasa nie spada,
A ostatni smuteczek jest o to,
Że człowiek jedzie, a piesek musi biec piechotą.
Lecz wystarczy pieskowi dać mleczko
I już nie ma smuteczków nad rzeczką.

We’ve all seen the picture of the hooded executioners putting the noose around Saddam’s neck. The International Herald Tribune and the New York Times ran it on their main pages, as did al Jazeera‘s English website. The Washington Post didn’t.

What struck me about the photo was the lack of officialness about everything.

• The executioners are wearing street clothes.
• The room looks relatively small, and suspiciously like a randomly chosen room in a building’s basement.
• The executioners are wearing tattered ski masks.
• Not only are the executioners not wearing uniforms; not a single uniform is visible anywhere.

Of course, it’s difficult to tell much of anything about the room itself with such a closely cropped photo.

Still, what immediately came to mind when I first saw this was the obvious similarity to all the beheading videos released from Iraq. It hardly looks like an official state action.

Writing the translation for “Bajka iskierki” was a fairly easy task, but there were a few words that gave me pause.

To begin with, there’s the title: Bajka iskierki. A literal rendering would be “Fairy Tale of the Ember.” But that implies that it’s a fairy tale about some little ember.

Yet it’s not that straightforward, for equally possible is “Fairy Tale of an Ember.”

Ah, those article-less languages give us a fit sometimes when we’re translating them to German or English or Spanish or Greek–any language with “a/an” and “the.”

Is this a “bajka” that the ember told–the only cognitive, communicative ember in the whole ash pit (we’ll return to that later)? Or is it a “bajka” that one of many embers could have told?

“The” gives it more import than “an,” and so I went with the latter.

Next: the question of “bajka.” When to use “fairy tale”�? When to use “story”�? When to use “bedtime story”�? Indeed, when to use “cartoon,”� as in “Oglądamy bajkę?” “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Tom and Jerry” would both be called “bajka” in Polish. So all these would be acceptable translations in given circumstances, though the most strict translation is “fairy tale.” But “fairy tale” doesn’t capture the sense of this being something told when little Wojtuś is going to sleep, and so I changed it to “bedtime story.”

What about “zgasić“? In common usage, you “zgasić” a fire, or a cigerette. Literally, it’s “to die out”� or “to burn out”� or “to be put out”� or “to be extinguished,”� or, more actively, “to extinguish.” But none of these sound very poetic at all � not that “die”� sounds any better.

Finally, there’s “popielnik.” “Ash pit”? There’s got to be a better term, but I can’t find it in any dictionary, and I can’t find it on the internet, and I certainly can’t find it in my own head. So I took the liberty of changing it to “the fire’s ashes,”� even though that’s not really what it says.

To translate poetry, one must be a poet � it’s that simple. The translation of poetry is completely unlike the translation of a legal document. With legal translation, you want as nearly as possible to translate every word exactly as it is. There’s no taking license with a legal document.

With poetry, the idea seems to me to be entirely different: read the poem in the original language; then read it again, and again, and again � until you know it almost by heart. Then take a piece of paper and write the same poem in your target language.

I’ve put together a new video. For the music, I chose one of the most widely known Polish lullabies: “Bajka iskierka” (“An Ember’s Bedtime Story”). It’s a modern-ish version by Polish pop stars Grzegorz Turnau and Magda Umer.

An Ember’s Bedtime Story

Traditional Melody, Words by Janina Porazińska

From the fire’s ashes
an ember is winking at Wojtuś.
“Come! I’ll tell you a bedtime story,
A long fairy tale.

“There once was a princess
who fell in love with a minstrel
The king gave them a wedding,
And that’s the end of the story.

“Long ago lived Baba Jaga.
She lived in a hut made of butter.
And in this house all was enchantment.”
Psst! The ember’s died.

From the fire’s ashes
an ember is winking at Wojtuś.
“Come! I’ll tell you a bedtime story,
A long fairy tale.”

Hush! Wojtuś won’t believe you anymore,
little ember.
You flicker but for a moment,
then you die.

And that’s the whole fairy tale.

Z popielnika na Wojtusia
iskiereczka mruga:
Chod?, opowiem ci bajeczk?,
bajka b?dzie d?uga.

By?a sobie raz kr�lewna,
pokocha?a grajka,
Kr�l wyprawi? im wesele
i sko?czona bajka.

By?a sobie Baba Jaga
mia?a chatk? z mas?a,
a w tej chatce same dziwy!
Psst� Iskierka zgas?a.

Z popielnika na Wojtusia
iskiereczka mruga:
Chod?, opowiem ci bajeczk?,
bajka b?dzie d?uga.

Ju? ci Wojtu? nie uwierzy,
iskiereczko ma?a.
Chwilk? b?y?niesz,
potem zga?niesz.

Ot i bajka ca?a.

All my life, I’ve had an impossible, unlikely scenario in my head: driving my laboring wife to the hospital, I get pulled over by the police for speeding.

We’re about eight miles from the hospital. It’s early Saturday morning. There’ll be no traffic, so I decide we’ll forget the back routes (which are really a touch longer, but less traveled) and go the main way.

About a mile down the road, we realize K doesn’t have her wallet. We go back, get the wallet, and start again.

K is groaning and begging me to hurry; the road is deserted; I speed up and do between 65 and 70 mph on a quiet highway with a speed limit of 45 mph.

As I near the intersection with the main road in town, the highway curves gently to the right, slightly downhill.

On the left side of the street is an Ingles. In a small darkened access road to the left sits a car. I know what it is immediately.

We come to the stop light, and I look in the rear view mirror — there he sits, though his lights are not on. I decided I’ll go ahead and pull over preemptively, but when the light turns green, his lights turn on. I pull over.

Fortunately, the officer is reasonable and lets me go with a warning to drive carefully.

But no offer to escort me? Come on! That’s not how we all envision it!