Palm Sunday

I have been reading poetry, Mickiewicz and Zagajewski, in the original Polish—if by reading can be understood the serial looking up of words and puzzling over their order and meaning. It’s devilish slow work, and even when you’ve cobbled together a facsimile of seeming coherence, you’re never really sure. I managed a version of Zagajewski’s Niedziela Palmova, “Palm Sunday,” in which he imagines Christ crucified  a week early, ruining the Apostles’ plans for Holy Week: seven days of ascetism and penance, a kind of evangelistic Spring Break. How times have changed. At any rate, after blocking out the text roughly, I discovered I had a professional translation among the books I brought with me, so I cheated and checked. Not terrible. But it is curious to see how professionals handle things, their expertise and their liberties. My “at dawn” was rendered instead “at daybreak.” There are allusive and minor metrical differences to the specific word choice here, no doubt, interesting ones, but none that raises a serious question. A little later though, what I read as a fairly literal “expression of surprise” on the lean face of the victim becomes “a grimace of bewilderment.” Perfectly likely under the circumstances and certainly more specific, but it must proceed from a deeper knowledge of the languages or inside knowledge from the poet. The final line also includes a shift from the “joy of fires,” alluding I suppose to Pentecost, to the “triumph of fires.” I, personally, don’t equate “joy” and “triumph,” but you can. It communicates a bigger, bolder, more public achievement, even a catholic one. I could never scale up; whatever joys I’ve known have been personal, when not completely private.

But the most curious discrepancy of all comes at the beginning, and I notice it last. In Wiersze wybrane, Zagajewski dedicates the poem Dla M., “for M.” The translation dedicates “Palm Sunday” “For U.”