Alright, I goofed. I mistranslated “iskra” as “ember” because, translating on the fly, I guessed from context and asked K whether it was “something from a fire…” Guess that covers ember and spark.
Nina corrected me, and I’ve been thinking about it since.
Not to be stubborn, I still prefer “ember.” Why?
“Spark” in my mind conjures images of particles floating, not sitting in a fire, as the “storyteller” in the lullaby is implied to be doing. It “winks” (mrugac); it doesn’t float; it doesn’t fly; it doesn’t soar. “Winking” is the perfect description of the what the small embers, buried under ash at the edge of the ash pit, do.
The only thing that “spark” has going for it (other than literalness) is the fact that in the verse it shines “for a moment” and then disappears. Embers tend to last longer than that.
Not content with all this, I went to a dictionary — an English-English dictionary, for there’s no question that “iskra” is literally “spark.” My only question was whether or not I was properly understanding “spark” in English, that all my connotations had been justifiable.
1. An incandescent particle, especially: a. One thrown off from a burning substance. b. One resulting from friction. c. One remaining in an otherwise extinguished fire; an ember. 2. A glistening particle, as of metal. 3a. A flash of light, especially a flash produced by electric discharge. b. A short pulse or flow of electric current.
And there it is: “an ember.”
The whole thing simply underlines what I was initially saying about translation: it can be very if-y. The original title of a biography of Singer I’ve been reading, literally translated, is Landscapes of the Memory. Madeline Levine, the translator, gave the title Lost Landscapes. Strictly speaking, this is incorrect — the word “lost” appears nowhere in the original Polish title — but I think it works better than the literal rendering.
Additionally, I’ve read English/Polish side-by-side editions of Czeslaw Milosz’s work and Wislawa Szymborska’s poems — often, so radically different from a literal rendering as to be shocking. But in each case, a literal rendering doesn’t capture nearly as much as the published translation.
I’ve never taken a course in translation, or read a book about it, so I can’t really say whether or not anyone would defend using “ember” instead of “spark” in the above example. But, bottom line, it works, underlining the slippery nature of language.