#RivetingReviews: Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese reviews CZERNOVITZ-CHARMOVITZ by Aneta Kamińska

W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie. This tongue-twister – sound-twister – resounded in my head at the sight/name of Aneta Kamińska’s birthplace: Szczebrzeszyn. Not coincidentally, perhaps, as linguistic shapes and sounds strongly co-relate in Czernovitz-Charmovitz, which introduces us to Kamińska’s use of the Polish language: her pliable and playful material for poetry-whittling (both writing her own verse and translating Ukrainian poetry) and bread-winning (she earns her living teaching Polish as a second language).

‘Wouldn’t it be great to have the audio version of Czernovitz-Charmovitz,’ I kept thinking, while reading – visually, therefore largely silently – this bilingual pamphlet, whose title previews the selection’s insistence on sound and sight affinities. Parsing the title’s minimal pair, I can see ‘czerno,’ which sends me back to ‘black’, and ‘charm’, which refers me to grace, magic (also black) and attraction. I reflect on the push and pull of borderlands, not only geographical (Kamińska grew up near the Polish eastern border; the closing poems concern the war in Ukraine), but also thematic and symbolic: the (female) body, sexuality, patriarchy, religion. Multiliteracies, contact zones and the translanguaging they require constitute the conceptual core of this language-insistent poetry and the sampler itself, which features sixteen poems from Kamińska’s seven volumes published between 2004 and 2022 – the rewards and challenges of the lives and work ‘in the space between words’.

The collaborative team of translators, Anna Blasiak and Bohdan Piasecki, are exceptionally well placed to challenge these challenges – to accept Kamińska’s invitation to play her language games. Both are poets who themselves translanguage (between Polish and English) in their own texts; moreover, Piasecki is a spoken-word artist. In their informative introduction and, more importantly, in the poems, they rightly dismiss the moot point of ‘translation’s fidelity’ to explore where language – individual words, their shapes and sounds – will take them and us as readers.  

Contemplating a few recordings that would turn readers into listeners who could more readily hear the sound games Kamińska devises (a couple of mp3s hosted on the Arc Publications website?), I tried to figure out what readers with no Polish background (and no memories of Polish childhood tongue-twisters) can appreciate in the translations Blasiak and Piasecki imaginatively create. (I have resisted saying ‘re-create’ to acknowledge their original word games.)

When I opened at random this bilingual pamphlet for the first time, I was intrigued by the italicised passage under the poem’s title I could see on the right-hand page. I took it for the poem’s motto, but curiously it was missing from the original on the left-hand page. The italics turned out to be an introductory note. Indeed, all the sixteen translations bear these epithets, which contextualise the originals as well as give insight into the translators’ choices and strategies. As a translator, I enjoy these peeks into my colleagues’ practice; however, as a reader, I would have preferred to first encounter the texts on their own/my own terms, without explanatory glosses (which at times streamline interpretation), even if I were to be gloriously defeated in the game the poem played with me.

Yet, intriguingly, these italicised notes introduce a welcome slippage into the visual reading of the pamphlet. The bilingual one-to-one correspondence is disrupted by the layout, where the corresponding lines are no longer corresponding – the arrangement that underscores Kamińska’s lineation inventiveness and expands her verbal spaces in translation.

                            take me
             
              in all the languages that you

show                                                       know

one poem encourages us. This encouragement relies on our willingness to believe Aneta Kamińska and her translators that we have trained ourselves in more languages than we at first can account for. With the necessary work of poets/translators, ‘sometimes hollerer[s] / sometimes healer[s]’ there’s room for ‘(preferrably overly sensitive) / expressitive / normally / insensitive’ in our ‘thinkosaurus talkosaurus homesaurus.’

Reviewed by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese

CZERNOVITZ-CHARMOVITZ

Written by Aneta Kamińska

Translated by Anna Blasiak and Bohdan Piasecki

Published by Arc Publications (2024)

September 2024 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

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Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese writes with/in English, Polish and Danish; she often uses site-specific botanical inks, alternative photographic processes, bookmaking. Her most recent poetry translation is Queen Cells by Małgorzata Lebda (Broken Sleep Books, Aug 2024). IG: @elzbietawojcikleese

Read Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese’s #‎RivetingReview of A LITTLE TOUR THROUGH EUROPEAN POETRY by John Taylor